1. Select a scene or group of scenes, of whatever combined length seems appropriate, given your time and resources, as the basis of a doll- or puppet-theater (or “claymation,” or other figure-animation) dramatic presentation based on Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Write a script, make or adapt figures of the characters, make […]

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1. Tom has been brought up on charges in the court of public opinion, and you have been part of his defense team. Write a summation to the jury, defending Tom against the charge that he is an “Uncle Tom” — that is, “fawning and servile in his behavior to […]

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arabesque a complex and elaborate decorative design of intertwined lines suggesting flowers, foliage, animals, etc. au fait acquainted with the facts; well-informed. bagging cloth for making bags; George’s factory apparently manufactured cloth made from hemp. bark a small sailing boat; figuratively, Eva’s life. barrens places that do not produce useful […]

Read more Study Help Full Glossary for Uncle Tom’s Cabin

Numerous critics (including Helen Waite Papashvily in 1956 and Philip Fisher in 1985) have discussed Uncle Tom’s Cabin as being in the tradition of fictional sentimentalism, a tradition that also includes many of the works of such nineteenth-century realists as Walter Scott and Maria Edgeworth, whom Stowe took as models. […]

Read more Critical Essays The Haunted Cabin: Uncle Tom and the Gothic

Much of the attention that readers and critics have given to Uncle Tom’s Cabin has been directed to its content — the development of its themes, the significance of its characters and incidents. Increasingly, however, there has been focus on the book’s structure, which is generally now recognized as strong […]

Read more Critical Essays A Mosaic of Movement and Conflict in Uncle Tom’s Cabin

In her work “Uncle Tom’s Cabin”: Evil, Affliction and Redemptive Love, critic Josephine Donovan says that the main theme of Uncle Tom’s Cabin is “the problem of evil [shown on] several levels: theological, moral, economic, political, and practical.” Almost certainly, Harriet Beecher Stowe, in writing the novel, set out to […]

Read more Critical Essays Themes in Uncle Tom’s Cabin

Early Years and Education Harriet Beecher was born in Litchfield, Connecticut, on June 13, 1811. She was the seventh of nine children born to Roxana Foote Beecher, the granddaughter of a Revolutionary general, and Lyman Beecher, a blacksmith’s son and Congregational minister. Her mother died when Harriet was five years […]

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Topsy shares the honors with Uncle Tom, Little Eva, and Eliza (crossing the ice) as one of the book’s headline characters, always pictured on early cover illustrations, pigeon-toed and googly-eyed, with her hair sticking up in a million pigtails, next to blonde and angelic Eva — the archetypal “pickaninny” standing […]

Read more Character Analysis Topsy

Augustine St. Clare, Tom’s third owner and the father of the novel’s saintly child, is an odd and interesting character, an amalgam of traits that we finally find coherent and human. He is a “Byronic” hero, a thoughtful spokesman against slavery, and a reluctant (and at last repentant) materialist. St. […]

Read more Character Analysis Augustine St. Clare

If Tom is the book’s Christ-figure and George Harris its revolutionary Romantic hero, Simon Legree is without a doubt its anti-Christ, its arch-villain, or — as Cassy describes him — its vampire. If Tom’s bearing and behavior show that he is among the elect, Legree’s show quite definitely that he […]

Read more Character Analysis Simon Legree