Uncle Tom's Cabin

Either they deny the Negro's humanity and feel no cause to measure his actions against civilized norms; or they protect themselves from their guilt in the Negro's condition and from their fear�by attributing to them a superhuman capacity for love, kindliness and forgiveness. Nor does this any way contradict their stereotyped conviction that all Negroes are given to the most animal behavior.

The above quote by Ralph Ellison, author of The Invisible Man, is a good starting point for an analysis on the characterization within Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin. For many modern critics and readers alike, both black and white, harshly criticize the author for her stereotypical depiction of a black man as only being noble if he possesses a "superhuman capacity for love, kindliness and forgiveness," like her most noble and humane character in the work, Uncle Tom. However, a deeper analysis of character will demonstrate that to Stowe's Christian framework, the sacrifices and nobility of Uncle Tom are not ones of defeat and subjugation, rather they are his only option from a moral point of view-and Tom is of the highest moral character possible, some would say a level that is unrealistic in the face of his real abuses. This analysis will show how Stowe uses such characterizations to depict the horrendous nature of slavery in an attempt to change public opinion regarding the once sacredly h

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and whites needed to modify their point of views so that true togetherness could progress. How? Through acts of love, kindness and compassion for others-the very methods of Little Eva and Uncle Tom. The character of Simon Legree represents the pure evil and devil-like nature of men who can go against all of God's teachings and intentionally bring pain, suffering, torture and bondage to other creatures. Legree is pictured by Stowe as the devil incarnate, as is evidenced from the time when he asks Tom to join his church. He is a sadist and cruel, a man who destroys the minds, bodies and souls of his slaves, purchasing black women for his sexual perversion and takes pleasure in the abuse of his slaves. He even trains other slaves in the art of brutality, "These two colored men were the two principal hands on the plantation. Legree had trained them in savageness and brutality as systematically as he had his bull-dogs; and, by long practice in hardness and cruelty, brought their whole nature to about the same range of capacities," (Stowe 386). Stowe is using this character to illustrate the hard and cruelly practiced men who abused slaves, basically linking their behavior to the level of an irrational animal like a dog. In

Category: Literature - U