I enjoyed reading this work. It was a story filled with characters that were moved and motivated either by a certain or a certain emotion. I must admit that I honestly became "wrapped" up in the story and the characters that I did not look for any figurative language. However, after reading the prompt, I can now think about the political connotation of the story.
In the first chapter read, it is suggested that Eliza and her child are of black decent. Stowe states that her apperance made "an unlikely supposition that she could be a fugitive. As she was also so white as not to be known as of colored lineage...it was so much easier for her to pass on unsuspected".
Though this story does have it's political connotations about the issue of slavery and the stand against it due to religious beliefs, Stowe does not use an "in your face approach"about how people treated slaves. In her story, the slave owners and the slaves do not even necessarily have "bad relationships". It is my personal opinion that this might have taken away from the impact of slavery. History says that this book was read during the time that Abraham Lincoln was president and fighting the Civil War and again during the civil rights movements. This story was very moving to its readers.
I just feel that due to the mildness of content in Stowe's story, it gave people the feeling of "pity" and not that of taking responsibilty. Even today, people like to believe that slavery never happened or it wasn't as bad as history makes it out to be. But it was that bad. Very few and far between were slave owners nice to their slaves. Eliza, if it being true that she is of black decent, would not have made it as far as she did. So I have to ask, did milding the content really give the issues expressed in the story due justice?
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I agree with the title of your post named "Stowe: Slavery Dipped in Mild Sauce." I think it rings very true. Stowe was never a slave, how would she know what it was like? The fact that she wrote this novel for other upper-middle class white women at the time really takes a big chunk of her legitimacy away. She writes it from her point of view, not a slave's. She's asking her readers to have pity for these slaves, but pity is not what they need. They need for people to start feeling guilt for what happened. They needed change. Though "Uncle Tom's Cabin" may have been regarded as extremely influential, I think that if the three slave narratives we read (Stowe, Douglass, and Jacobs) were written today, Stowe's wouldn't be nearly as influential as the other two because of its lack of true experience.
ReplyDeleteWhile Stowe's story may have been mild in content when compared to Jacob's story, it doesn't necessarily mean she was holding back or even purposely leaving something out. Being a white woman who was very removed from the situation may mean she simply had no idea the extent of the cruelty slaves endured. Her less offensive story was also able to reach a wider audience, making many people change their minds about slavery even without hearing the whole story. I do agree Jacob's narration was much more impacting, but it didn't make near the progress that Stowe's did towards ending slavery.
ReplyDeleteI agree with you both. Carson, I am not trying to discredit her work by any means. And even though her work was the most influential, that does not make it right. It just makes you think about society. We will take a false, watered down version, over the truth. America cannot handle the truth. Not only with slavery, but with all major occurences in America. I guess, I can only be offended because I am a Black woman, and althoguth Stowe's intentions were good....I cannot agree that she desreves the credit that was given to her story.
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