Harriet Beecher Stowe: Uncle Tom's Cabin

Reading Uncle Tom’s Cabin, by Harriet Beecher Stowe.   The copy that I’m reading was published in 1929, and has been poorly handled at some point of its 85 years of existence.

                                The story was hard to read at first, because of language use and content. Dialect is sometimes hard to follow, but I’m getting the hang of it, and it’s coming easier.

                As for content, the situations and perspective offered are hard to consume, knowing the offense it would cause, does cause, to the many people whose families were involved in  the participation, willing and unwilling, of slavery.

                The depictions of the characters, just as in many occurrences of fiction, are stereotyped and one dimensional, which is one of the problems or issues I have with fiction. The reader is presented with the sole perspective of the author, in its nature faulted.

                The illustrations or caricatures throughout this copy of the book are of the nature that are not necessarily banned but avoided in modern society because of their demeaning representation of the people they describe; essentially, stereotypical drawings of the time by white artists of black people.  

                I read Uncle Tom’s Cabin, now, as a method of bearing witness to the past, of acknowledging the cruelty of dispossession, of generational wrongs and the potential of man. I see how an entire social order can be so very wrong, and even more so how perspective defines right and wrong.

                My husband told me of how the author had no first-hand experience with slavery, and has written out of research and peripheral exposure.

                I can see how assumptions and presumptions fill the gaps of her story, and how it was necessary for this story to be written by an outsider, because a slave owner might justify their actions, as in Gone With the Wind (though written after the occurrence of slavery in the United States, the author was a child of privilege of the south and therefore biased), while a person with more slave experience would be writing with justifiable anger.

                This book is quite an eye-opener for someone with little insight into the details of early United States slave history, and I’m glad I’m finally reading it.