"Cliff Notes - Uncle Tom's Cabin" - читать интересную книгу автора (Cliff Notes)

In Uncle Tom's Cabin, Stowe contrasts good homes--the Shelby plantation, the Birds', the Hallidays', the Harris' Montreal apartment--with bad homes like the St. Clares' (where the kitchen is in chaos and money is wasted), and Legree's crumbling plantation. For most of the novel, after they leave Kentucky, neither Tom nor George and Eliza have a real home. This is one of the evils of slavery--black people are never at home because they always dread being sold.

In another sense, home means heaven in Uncle Tom's Cabin. The dying St. Clare tells his doctor that his mind is coming home, at last, and the dying Tom lets George Shelby know that the Lord is taking him home, to a better place than Kentucky. Although blacks may be homeless on earth, heaven is their eternal home, just as it is for whites. (Stowe suggests they have a greater claim to heaven than whites.)

5. THE INDIVIDUAL AND SOCIETY

What responsibility do individuals have to the people around them? How can you live morally if your society is corrupt? For Stowe, slavery was an evil that poisoned personal relationships. Even in its mildest form, on the Shelby plantation or in the St. Clare home, slavery substituted money for love as the foundation of human relations. Because of slavery, good men like Mr. Shelby and Augustine St. Clare became responsible for the destruction of families and the sexual exploitation of young women. In its harsher forms, as on the Legree plantation, slavery was murderous and soul-destroying, a compact with the devil.

The characters in Uncle Tom's Cabin respond differently to the troublesome question of individual morality in a corrupt society. The purest characters, Uncle Tom and little Eva, transcend their society, applying a Christian morality of love and forgiveness to the people around them and turning the other cheek to evil. Both Tom and little Eva feel responsibility for the community of slaves. Eva simply treats slaves with affection and kindness, although in her society this isn't simple to do. Tom has a more serious responsibility. In allowing himself to be sold by Shelby rather than escaping, in refusing to join Cassy and Emmeline in their escape from Legree's plantation, and in concealing the women's whereabouts, Tom sacrifices his comfort and finally his life for the good of others.

Unlike Tom, Eva, and the Quakers, whose social conduct stems from their religious beliefs, another set of characters draw their morality from their emotions, treating the world as their family. Mrs. Shelby and Mrs. Bird extend their motherly goodness from their children to their communities. Mrs. Shelby treats her family's slaves kindly, and Mrs. Bird responds warmly to fugitive slaves. Ophelia, perhaps because she is not a mother, acts responsibly, but not warmly. Augustine St. Clare also attempts to care for the people around him. But he is not a good father, either to Eva or to his slave family. He is loving, but too indulgent. Thus, his slaves put on airs that will cause them trouble after his death. In addition, they are sold because he is not responsible enough to provide for them in his will.

Can one man or woman change society? Stowe doesn't think so. She urges her readers to behave morally--to help fugitive slaves, for example. At the end of the book, she tells them to always act so that they feel right. But she doesn't seem to have any idea of how to eliminate slavery, except through the actions of individuals like George Shelby.

Neither does Stowe seem interested in social movements or religious institutions. She doesn't think highly of abolitionists: the character of Ophelia and Augustine's story about his father's brother show that abolitionists don't like black people or treat them well in the North. She doesn't approve of the church, since her characters, especially Augustine, criticize it frequently for condoning slavery. It seems to Stowe that people can't act responsibly in groups. Individual morality (family feeling) and individual saintliness (sacrifice) are the only ways to live responsibly in society.

^^^^^^^^^^UNCLE TOM'S CABIN: STYLE

Many readers think Harriet Beecher Stowe's writing style is the greatest weakness of Uncle Tom's Cabin. You may sometimes find the long sentences a little hard to take. For example:

Mrs. Bird, looking the very picture of delight, was superintending the arrangements of the table, ever and anon mingling admonitory remarks to a number of frolicsome juveniles, who were effervescing in all those modes of untold gambol and mischief that have astonished mothers since the flood.

Readers also object to the stilted language:

An eternal, inexorable lapse of moments is ever hurrying the day of the evil to an eternal night, and the night of the just to an eternal day. We have walked with our humble friend thus far in the valley of slavery; first through flowery fields of ease and indulgence, then through heart-breaking separations from all that man holds dear. Again, we have waited with him in a sunny island, where generous hands concealed his chains with flowers....

Others are upset by frequent quotations from sentimental poetry:

It is a beautiful belief, / That ever round our head / Are hovering, on angel wings, / The spirits of the dead.

Still others are bothered by Stowe's sentimentality:

Ah, Legree! that golden tress was charmed; each hair had in it a spell of terror and remorse for thee, and was used by a mightier power to bind thy cruel hands from inflicting uttermost evil on the helpless!

Finally, frequent invocations of "Mother! Mother!" as characters are wounded or die, strike many readers as artificial.

Stowe's characters are always talking. Sometimes they give you information, as when George Harris tells Eliza that their marriage is not legally binding, which she must surely know. On other occasions, they argue the issue of slavery. Not only Augustine St. Clare and Ophelia do this, but also the steamboat passengers. Stowe makes some effort to distinguish the speech of her characters. The slaves speak in dialect--except for mulattoes like Eliza and George Harris--and characters like Tom Loker and Marks talk in a rough river slang.

The Quakers use slightly old-fashioned language, with many "thee's" and "thou's"; while most of the speech of the white characters is formal and flowery.

Few readers would claim that Uncle Tom's Cabin is beautifully written. The author's son, Charles Stowe, called the novel "an outburst of deep feeling" and explained that "the writer no more thought of style or literary excellence than the mother who rushes into the street and cries for help to save her children from a burning house...."

Yet the novel has enormous power. Uncle Tom's Cabin may be a tearjerker, but it succeeds. Many readers find their eyes filling up as Eliza climbs up the Ohio riverbank, or George Shelby pledges to do "what one man can" to fight slavery. Stowe wanted to convince people that slavery was wrong, to engage their emotions. Her overheated style accomplishes that, perhaps better than more controlled writing would have been able to. It is hard not to respond when Stowe asks you,

If it were your Harry, mother, or your Willie, that were going to be torn from you by a brutal trader, tomorrow morning... how fast could you walk? How many miles could you make in those few brief hours... the little sleepy head on your shoulder,--the small soft arms trustingly holding on to your neck?

Readers argue over the style of Uncle Tom's Cabin--is it simply awful, or is it crude but effective? Does Stowe write more feelingly about some subjects, or some characters, than about others?

^^^^^^^^^^UNCLE TOM'S CABIN: POINT OF VIEW