Stowe Prompt

Uncle Tom's Cabin is a story unlike any we have read before. It is a story that elicites no hope, no happiness, and no "feel good" moments. It is a story about something real and hearbreaking and almost too intense for us to even get a full grasp on it. It is a story about slavery. Harriett Beecher Stowe takes us into the scary world of slavery, filled with harsh words and even harsher actions. She wrote this story not to show ever negative effect of slavery, but mainly to show just one: The seperation of families, mainly the separation of children from their mothers. Her target audience was upper-class white women, women who would shudder at the mere thought of having one of their children taken away from them, let alone all of them. Stowe used the typical character of a child, but showed them in an atypical way. Normally in 19th century literature, children were depicted along with thoughts of happiness and hope. However Stowe does not do this, in fact she does the exact opposite and depicts children along with thoughts of despair and surrender.

The story mainly follows a young mother, Eliza, who is running away from a slave trader in order to save and hold onto the life of her last living child. To Eliza this child, Harry, is her yesterday, today, and tomorrow. She feels that she cannot physically live if he is taken away from her, as she has lost her other children to death and her husband to the trade. Having this child experience this reality of running away from a slave trader complicates a theory of nineteenth century children's literature. This is because something as real and frightening as that is normally not exposed to the child, and only handled by the parent. For example in The Wide, Wide World, it is understood that Mrs. Montgomery is dying, she knows that and everyone else knows that. However Mrs. Montgomery will never reveal this to her daughter because something as real and scary such as the death of a parent should be a burden carried by the parents and not dealt onto the child. The complication again occurs when Uncle Tom is being taken away by Haley to go to the plantation. As much as Uncle Tom and Aunt Chloe do not want their children to know what is happening or that they will never see their father again, they must watch him be taken away in shackles and all they can do is simply weep into their mother's skirt. That is the harsh reality of slavery and when dealing with a topic such as this it is hard to depict children the way they normally are in literature.

In Chapter twelve, a black women and her ten month old child are brought aboard Haley's slave ship that Uncle Tom is on. The women is told by her master she is being brought to a tavern in Louisville where her husband works, when in reality she has been sold to Haley to work as a cook on his plantation. As soon as she is informed she squeezes her infant to her chest because she instictively knows what can happen now. When another slave owner comes across her child, he approaches Haley and quickly makes him an offer to buy the mere ten month old infant, and take him away from his mother. This goes against another image of children and that is the idea that children are gifts. When dealing with slavery, children are not gifts, they are objects or property, some good some bad, just waiting to be passed along or sold to the highest bidder. Their feelings or wants or desires are never taken into consideration and the idea that a child might actually need or want his mother is not even a mere thought in a slave owners mind. When the woman comes to realize her child, her own flesh, something she bore for seven months and cared for and loved and wanted to see grow up, had been taken away from her, all she could do was merely sit and calmly bask in her anguish. This despair and sadness that exuded off her had no effect on Haley for, "the trader only regarded the mortal anguish which he saw working in those dark features, those clenched hands, and suffocating breathings, as necessary incidents of the trade, and merely calculated whether she was going to scream, and get up a commotion on the boat; for, like other supporters of our peculiar institution, he decidedly disliked agitation."

Yes, Stowe's decpition of children in this story is very much distorted from the image that we are used to. However, it is one that has a more profound and lasting effect on myself as a reader.