Uncle Toms Cabin Theme
The theme of uncle toms cabin then is the conflict between the evil of slavery and the good of christian love.
Uncle toms cabin theme. Enotes critical analyses help you gain a deeper understanding of uncle toms cabin so you can excel on your essay or test. Litcharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in uncle toms cabin which you can use to track the themes throughout the work. The evil and immorality of slavery. Themes in uncle toms cabin the theme of a novel is the general vision of life or the more explicit proposition about human experience that the literary work conveys.
There is a special variety of theme known as a moral an exhortation to good behavior that may take the form of a maxim a proverbial formula that tells us how to get along in life. Uncle toms cabin has an intriguing relationship to the theme of violence. If tom were willing to hate legree to deny him christian love still he would not necessarily be willing to kill the man as cassy asks or to allow. And yet this is a 19th century sentimental novel.
George shelby wishes to bring tom home and at the close of the book he points to toms cabin as a symbol of honest work and christian faith. The evil of slavery. Perfect for acing essays tests and quizzes as well as for writing lesson plans. The restraint of that genre and of victorian society doesnt.
Uncle toms cabin was written after the passage of the fugitive slave act of 1850 which made it illegal for anyone in the united states to offer aid or assistance to a runaway slave. As it shows slavery was frequently a brutal institution in which slaves were whipped beaten abused starved worked to death sexually violated and murdered. Uncle toms cabin described early in the novel represents the warmth and love of family life. A summary of themes in harriet beecher stowes uncle toms cabin.
Discussion of themes and motifs in harriet beecher stowes uncle toms cabin. Occasionally an author. Uncle toms cabin contains numerous strong female characters. Other homes are juxtaposed with the cabin.
It is a place tom hearkens back to over the course of his trials. Uncle toms cabin is dominated by a single theme. Uncle toms cabin tells the story of uncle tom depicted as a saintly dignified slavewhile being transported by boat to auction in new orleans tom saves the life of little eva whose grateful father then purchases tomeva and tom soon become great friends. While stowe weaves other subthemes throughout her text such as the moral authority of motherhood and the redeeming possibilities offered by christianity 5 she emphasizes the connections between these and the horrors of slavery.
Themes are the fundamental and often universal ideas explored in a literary work. Always frail evas health begins to decline rapidly and on her deathbed she asks her father to free all his slaves. The novel seeks to attack this law and the institution it protected ceaselessly advocating the immediate. Eva symbolic of this sort of love is killed mythically by slavery but like tom she triumphs over death and thus over evil.
There is a lot of violence in this novel.