Harriet Beecher Stowe Uncle Tom's Cabin; or, Life Among the Lowly.

Harriet Beecher Stowe

Uncle Tom's Cabin; or, Life Among the Lowly

I. Life and career

Born: 14 June 1811 Birthplace: Litchfield,

Connecticut Died: 1 July 1896 Best Known As:

Author of Uncle Tom's Cabin

Name at birth: Harriet Elizabeth Beecher

I. Life and career

Harriet Beecher Stowe (1811–1896) was a novelist and abolitionist， whose novel Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852) is a classic of 19th century anti-slavery literature. Stowe was the daughter of the famous Congregationalist minister Lyman Beecher (1775 – 1863) and the sister of Henry Ward Beecher and Catharine Esther Beecher.

I. Life and career

She taught school in Hartford and in Cincinnati, where she came into contact with fugitive slaves and learned about life in the South, and later settled in Maine with her husband, a professor of theology.While raising seven children, she began writing professionally.

I. Life and career

Her most Important work is Uncle Tom's Cabin. Credited with mobilizing antislavery sentiment in the North, Stowe was praised, honored, and respected among African Americans both during her lifetime and in the years following.

I. Life and career

It is said that President Lincoln met Stowe during the Civil War and said to her, "So you are the little woman who wrote the book that made this big war."

I. Life and career

Stowe wrote more than two dozen books, both fiction and non-fiction, including A Key to Uncle Tom's Cabin (1853), a fact-filled companion to her famous novel. Her other works include Dred: A Tale of the Great Dismal Swamp (1856), Pearl of Orr's Island (1862) and Pink and White Tyranny (1871).

II. Uncle Tom's Cabin; or, Life Among the Lowly

Perhaps the most important American novel of the nineteenth century, Stowe's masterpiece is published serially in the National Era in 1851-1852 and as a book in 1852. It became a bestseller in the United States and England and went on to sell three hundred thousand copies the first year. By 1900 it had been translated into forty-two languages.


1. Plot summary Stowe's novel tells the

stories of three slaves — Tom, Eliza, and George — who start out together in Kentucky, but whose lives take different turns. Eliza and George, who are married to each other but owned by different masters, manage to escape to free territory with their little boy, Harry.


Tom is not so lucky. He is taken away from his wife and children. Tom is sold first to a kind master, Augustine St. Clare, and then to the fiendish Simon Legree, at whose hands he meets his death.


Stowe relied upon images of domesticity, motherhood, and Christianity to capture her nineteenth century audience's hearts and imaginations.


2. Reactions to the novel Uncle Tom's Cabin was based on various slave

narratives. Stowe claimed to have been inspired by grief over her baby's death in 1849 and resistance to the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850.

Uncle Tom‘s Cabin has exerted an influence “equaled by few other novels in history.” Upon publication, the book elicited praise from abolitionists. But the novel was viciously attacked by proslavery readers, even after Stowe defended the research on which she based the novel in A Key to Uncle Tom's Cabin (1853).


A later generation also attacked the novel, arguing that Stowe's stereotyped characters revealed her own historically conditioned racism. Indeed, for the African American author James Baldwin and others the term "Uncle Tom" came to imply a black person who pandered to a racist white power structure. More recently, Stowe's novel sparked an interest in uncovering other nineteenth-century women writers. Readers also noted the novel's geographical sweep from New Orleans to Canada, Paris, and Liberia; its Christian radicalism; and its relationship to slave narratives.


In spite of the critical controversy surrounding the book, the characters of Uncle Tom, Little Eva, and Simon Legree have all achieved legendary status in American culture. Uncle Tom's Cabin endures as a powerful example of moral outrage over man's inhumanity to man. It continued to catalyze discussions about race in the United States in the twenty-first century.


3. Major themes 1) the evil and immorality of slavery Uncle Tom's Cabin is dominated by a single theme:

the evil and immorality of slavery. Stowe pushed home her theme of the immorality of slavery on almost every page of the novel, sometimes even changing the story's voice so she could give a "homily" on the destructive nature of slavery.


"The most dreadful part of slavery, to my mind, is its outrages of feelings and affections—the separating of families, for example.”

One way Stowe showed the evil of slavery was how this "peculiar institution" forcibly separated families from each other.


2) the moral power and sanctity （神圣 , 圣洁 ; 尊严） of women

Because Stowe saw motherhood as the "ethical and structural model for all of American life," and also believed that only women had the moral authority to save the United States from the demon of slavery, another major theme of Uncle Tom's Cabin is the moral power and sanctity of women.


Through characters like Eliza, who escapes from slavery to save her young son and eventually reunites her entire family, or Little Eva, who is seen as the "ideal Christian", Stowe shows how she believed women could save those around them from even the worst injustices. While later critics have noted that Stowe's female characters are often domestic cliches instead of realistic women, Stowe's novel "reaffirmed the importance of women's influence" and helped pave the way for the women's rights movement in the following decades.


3) the exploration of the nature of Christianity and its fundamental incompatibility （不两立 , 不相容） with slavery

Stowe's puritanical religious beliefs show up in the novel's final, over-arching theme, which is the exploration of the nature of Christianity and how she feels Christian theology is fundamentally incompatible with slavery. This theme is most evident when Tom urges St. Clare to "look away to Jesus" after the death of St. Clare's beloved daughter Eva.


After Tom dies, George Shelby eulogizes Tom by saying, "What a thing it is to be a Christian." Because Christian themes play such a large role in Uncle Tom's Cabin—and because of Stowe's frequent use of direct authorial interjections on religion and faith—the novel often takes the "form of a sermon."


4. Style Uncle Tom's Cabin is written in the sentimental and

melodramatic style common to 19th century sentimental novels and domestic fiction (also called women's fiction). These genres were the most popular novels of Stowe's time and tended to feature female main characters and a writing style which evoked a reader's sympathy and emotion.

Harriet Beecher Stowe Uncle Tom's Cabin; or, Life Among the Lowly.

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Transcript of Harriet Beecher Stowe Uncle Tom's Cabin; or, Life Among the Lowly.