Uncle Tom's Cabin question?

Question

Some complained that Uncle Tom’s Cabin is insufficient because it allows white readers to substitute feeling for action. Others argued that it seems to encourage whites to “rescue” inferiors rather that assist their equals. Respond to each of these criticisms.

Answer 1

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Both these charges seem to me true if not as damning as the makers of them think. Yes, _Uncle Tom's Cabin_ wallows in feeling and is therefore sentimental. However, without that sentimentality, the 19th century audience would not have responded to the tale as overwhelmingly as it did. This was a book that put abolition in the forefront of public consciousness, albeit in a way that may have been--probably was--deleterious. What would the right have been, though?

On the other hand, Leo Tolstoy thought _Uncle Tom's Cabin_ one of the great books of all time, better than _Hamlet_ for its moral sympathies. And every time I read it I see a more complex moral understanding than the book is given credit for.

It doesn't seem to me to deal with the race issue well. Its solution is to send blacks to Canada or back to Liberia; Stowe cannot imagine a society where blacks and whites intermarry; some of the horror of the slave trade as prostitution realized on Simon Legree's plantation derives from its interraciality. So yes, it sees blacks as inferiors. However, who in the 19th century came close to imaging real equality? Only Mark Twain in _Adventures of Huckleberry Finn_ and _Pudd'nhead Wilson_ and then only intermittently. Black writers like DuBois and Frederick Douglas are too caught up--understandably--in the circumstances of their cruel repression to project a world of real equality.

While finding these charges charges true, I'm sympathetic to Stowe. She was ahead of many others, even if, sadly, she unwittingly did more harm than good, as people like James Baldwin and a host of others assert. She was trying.

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Answer 2

If you're going to make Yahoo Answers do your homework, the least you could do is word your question in a way that disguises this fact.