Uncle Tom’s Cabin Review

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stain on the stark canvas of America. The sad reality of slavery is forgotten and blurred into the history of the United States. In an effort to expose the truth, Stowe incorporated the words of illiterate slaves into her work. While her use of diction properly depicts the poor condition of uneducated slaves, readers have a hard time comprehending the text. With limited understanding of what is being discussed in the dialogue, readers can miss vital historical details. It has also been suggested that underlying prejudice surrounds the diction. While slaves were uneducated and illiterate, many southerners were as well. Stowe, however, portrays all white characters with perfect grammar and speech. This suggests that Stowe herself had prejudice rooted deep inside. Another negative aspect of the novel resides in the last few chapters. After the first few chapters, readers begin to become attached to Uncle Tom. He is a kind-hearted, honest, meek, trustworthy man. The readers are with Uncle Tom every treacherous step of the way and an ineffable desire for Tom to be safe soon grows in their heart. Towards the end of the book, Tom is brutally beaten. His malicious master questions him about the location of two female slaves that are missing, and when he doesn’t answer, he beats Tom almost until death. "He dies because he won’t reveal to [his master] Simon Legree the presence of two female slaves who have been sexually exploited by Legree," Dr. Turner says. "[He] would rather be whipped to death than give up the location of two women who’ve been sexually abused" (Lamb). This ending for many is much less than satisfactory; most expect a happy ending, but with Uncle Tom’s Cabin, that rarely happens. Despite the unfortunate ending and complicated diction, Uncle Tom’s Cabin still became one of the most influential books in American history.

Uncle Tom’s Cabin is certainly appropriate for the classroom. The book is a fictional novel, but Stowe includes factual details from the world she is living in to produce an accurate persona. Positive and negative aspects come together to portray a beautiful work of life, love, and death. While the ending is unfortunate, many do not realize that Tom’s death was his own way of finding freedom; in order to escape the system, you must either run away or die. Tom’s life stood for many things, but his death ensured that those things would be known by the world. While many students would never pick up this novel without suggestion, the book is an intricate and colorful work that enlightens anyone who reads it. Everyone should read this book.

Works Cited

Lamb, Gregory M. “What We’ve Made of Uncle Tom.” The Christian Science Monitor, 29 Oct.

2002, www.csmonitor.com/2002/1029/p17s02-legn.html.

Stowe, Harriet Beecher. Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Good Reads, Wordsworth Classics, 5 Aug. 1999.

www.goodreads.com/book/show/46787.Uncle_Tom_s_Cabin.

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