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Uncle Tom's Cabin Book Review

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One of the most influential books ever written, Uncle Tom’s Cabin was written by Harriet Beecher Stowe in order to advance the anti-slavery cause in the antebellum USA and to try to persuade her compatriots by appealing to their God-given sense of morality, thus interconnecting religious beliefs with abolitionist attitudes. In her preface to the 2003 edition of the book, Amanda Claybaugh points out to the fact that the novel is indebted to the many varied Beecher family projects, the background providing her with a firm foundation and faith in context of the social implications of Christianity. The father 's battle for the soul of the nation, the brothers ' Christian ministries, one sister 's advocacy for women and slaves, another 's celebration …show more content…

The abolitionists’ ideals of setting blacks free were mostly unaccepted by average white men whose economic interests depended on the submission of slaves. The romantic racialism, which proclaimed kindness for the humane treatment of slaves and sympathy to the antislavery argument (and seems to have influenced Stowe according to Claybaugh) strongly opposed the notions of the superiority of the white man who degraded African American race. There was also a contradicting conception of America as a democratic nation since the ideals of human equality and freedom were being censored by the practice of slavery. Published in 1852, mainly as a reaction to the Fugitive Slave Act, the novel brought even more controversy to the slavery issues within this contradictory manifestation. (Gomez R. 116)
Basing his analysis of Uncle Tom’s Cabin on the sociologist R.W. Connell’s theory of relations among masculinities, Luis Fernando Gómez R. offers in his article Relations among Masculinities: Controversy in Uncle Tom’s Cabin a complete image of the way in which Stowe perceived slavery, her novel clearly showing opposite relations of dominance, subordination, exploitation, and exclusion between black and white …show more content…

However, Veronica Margrave foregrounds the idea that taking into consideration the deep-rooted connection Stowe’s novel makes with the most popular book and source of her time - The Bible, one can recognize it as a carefully constructed call to Christianity. Most readers do not have the familiarity to The Bible nor use Christian imagery in everyday conversation as they did in Stowe’s day, and this leads the modern reader miss even the smallest religious imagery in the novel. (Margrave,

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