British and American Literature

PRESENTATION

Uncle Tom’s Cabin

Presenter: Ngô Thị Ngọc Phấn
Nguyễn Thị Trúc Phương
Thân Thị Nhi
Nguyễn Uyên Phương
 TABLE OF CONTENTS
01 03
02 04
Author and
‘ Uncle Tom’s Setting
Cabin'

Summary Point of view

 01.
Author and
‘ Uncle Tom’s
Cabin
 About the author
 A northern white America abolitionist and teacher.
 Published more than 30 books, including novels,
memoirs, and collections of letters and articles.
 Her best-selling anti-slavery novel was Uncle Tom’s
Cabin.
 Other works include the novels Dred (1856), also
against slavery, and The Minister’s
Wooing (1859).
 Became one of the most successful authors of 19th
Harriet Beecher Stowe
century America
(June 14, 1811 – July 1, 1896)
 HOW DID STOWE KNOW ABOUT SLAVERY?

 In 1832, she moved to Cincinnati, Ohio, where her father became

president of Lane Theological.

 There she visited a plantation which would serve as inspiration for the
Shelby Plantation in Uncle Tom’s Cabin.

 In Cincinnati, Harriet learned that even discussion of slavery could

divide a community: most students at her father’s school, Lane
Seminary, left in protest after anti-slavery debates and societies were
forbidden.
Lane Theological Seminary Lyman Beecher
WHY DID STOWE WRITE
UNCLE TOM'S CABIN?

 In 1836, she was married to Calvin Stowe, a

professor at the Lane Seminary, who shared her
antislavery views. The couple had seven
children, one of whom, Samuel Charles (known
as Charley) died from cholera in 1849.

 Understand the pain enslaved mothers felt

when their children were sold away from them.
 WHY DID STOWE WRITE
UNCLE TOM'S CABIN?
 On September 18, 1850, the U.S. Congress passed the Compromise of
1850. Among its provisions was creation of the Fugitive Slave Law.

 After the law’s passage, anyone could be taken from the street, accused of
being a fugitive from slavery, and taken before a federally appointed
commissioner.
 Stowe was furious. She believed slavery was unjust and immoral, and
bristled at a law requiring citizen — including her — complicity.
The buying and selling of humans was legal in
the US until the American Civil War.
About the book
Uncle Tom’s Cabin; or, Life among the
Lowly, published 9 years before the
outbreak of the Civil War.

First appeared in forty-one weekly

installments in the Washington, D. C.
newspaper the National Era from June
1851 to April 1852.
 It created a sensation when the Boston
publisher John P. Jewett published it as a book
in 1852.
Within a year:
Over 300,000 copies sold in America
1.5 million in Great Britain and translated
into 15 European languages.
Shared ideas about the injustices of slavery,
pushing back against dominant cultural beliefs
about the physical and emotional capacities of
black people.

Stowe became a leading voice in the anti-

slavery movement, and yet, her ideas about
race were complicated.
02. SUMMARY
 Tom and Eliza are both slaves to the
Shelby family of Kentucky.

The Shelby are indulgent masters and

treat their slaves well.
Tom is particularly well-liked by both the
family and his fellow slaves for his honest,
pious nature. Young George Shelby has a
deep fondness for him.
 Mr. Shelby runs up debts, and his mortgage passes into the
possession of Mr. Haley, a slave trader.

Shelby is obliged to sell Tom and Harry, the sons of

Eliza and George Harris.

Eliza catches wind of this and escapes with Harry,

agreeing to meet her husband in Canada, a free country.
At the table sat Uncle
Tom and Johnny.
Johnny was Master
Shelby’s son.
 Eliza came into Uncle Tom’s
cabin and annouced the
terrible new

 Eliza couldn’t wait. Then she

disapperared into the night.
 They avoid pursuit when Eliza crosses the
partially frozen Ohio River. Haley sends Tom
Loker and Marks, two headhunters, to look
for them.

She and Harry make their way to a Quaker

colony where runaway slaves are welcomed
and aided due to the Quakers’ generosity and
strong morality. Eliza is soon reunited with
George, and they plot their escape to Canada,
aided by their Quaker friends.
George, Eliza, and Harry make
their bid for freedom, aided by
other runaway slaves and the
Quakers. They are cornered by a
posse led by Tom Loker, but
George shoots Loker and the posse
disbands. George and Eliza make it
to Canada where they establish
themselves comfortably with the
help of sympathetic locals.
Mrs. Shelby is horrified at separating Tom from
his wife, Aunt Chloe, and his children. She vows
to save money to repurchase him.
Tom is soon sold to a New Orleans
man, Augustine St. Clare, after
endearing himself to Augustine’s
angelic young daughter, Eva.
Augustine is a kind, indulgent
master who objects to slavery on
moral terms but feels it is of little
use fighting the entire system.
 Tom and Eva grow very close. Eva is
deeply religious

She gradually falls ill, afflicted by

tuberculosis. On her deathbed, she
asks her father to free Tom. She gives
everyone a lock of her hair in
remembrance.
 Augustine dies in a freak accident
shortly after his daughter.

Tom and his fellow slaves are sent to the New

Orleans slave auction house. Tom is purchased by
Simon Legree, along with a beautiful, pious young
woman named Emmeline.
Legree is monstrous, providing his slaves
with only the minimum for survival; it is
his policy to work them until they die,
which usually does not take long. Legree
quickly begins to dislike Tom due to his
good nature. Tom is introduced to Cassy,
an imperious and slightly unstable
“quadroon” . who has lived with Legree
as a mistress for several years.
When Legree orders him to whip a fellow
slave, Tom refuses; Legree has him beaten
brutally. Cassy attends to Tom as he
convalesces.
Tom, meanwhile, suffers at the hands of Legree. Cassy and Emmeline make a bid for
freedom, pretending to run away and then hiding in the supposedly haunted garret of
Legree’s house. When Tom, who endorsed their plan, refuses to tell Legree their
location, Legree has him beaten just shy of death.
As Tom lays dying, Johnny Shelby, now a young man, comes to the plantation,
having received Ophelia’s letter late. He is too late. Tom is delighted to see
Johnny before he dies. He sends his love to his family and dies happy, looking
to the prospect of heaven. George buries his old friend’s body in a secluded
knoll outside the plantation before heading back to Kentucky to deliver the grim
news to Aunt Chloe and Mrs. Shelby.
Cassy and Emmeline, noting George’s sympathy
toward Tom, decide to travel with the young man
back up the river. On the steamboat, they are
introduced to Madame Emily de Thoux, who
turns out to be George Harris’s sister. Through
the course of conversation, Cassy deduces that
Eliza is her long-lost daughter. Cassy, Emily, and
Emmeline travel to Canada, where they are
reunited with their family. Due to wealth Emily
received from her late husband, the family is
able to relocate to France, and then Africa.
Johnny Shelby, meanwhile, returns to Kentucky
where he frees the family slaves, asking them to
remember Uncle Tom when they think of their
freedom.
03. SETTING
 Time

In the mid-19th century.

Around the early
1850s.
 PLACE
The American South ( Kentucky and
Louisiana) on the Shelby plantation on
Kentucky where Uncle Tom lives in a
cabin with his wife, children, and fellow
slave Eliza.
 Canada:
 As part of the British Commonwealth,
which had abolished slavery in all of its
territories by 1834.
 It could provide protection for refugee
slaves crossing its southern borders.
 The movement of George and Eliza from
Kentucky through Ohio to Canada with her
husband is, therefore, not only a
geographical trajectory, it also represets a
shift from danger into safety.
 The American North (New
Orleans)
Tom is bought by a kind family and
becomes good friends with the
daughter Eva in the lush and
beautiful St. Clare plantation.
=> He is treated very well and is
devoted to Eva and Augustine St.
Clare.
Ohio and several Northern Quaker settlements

Eliza and her husband George are

reunited in a Quaker camp. From there,
they escape to Canada successfully.
Louisiana : Tom move to the isolated
and desolate Deep South under the
power of Simon Legree, he work in the
cotton fields.
Þ Represents both a spatial and
narrative transition down into
darkness and danger.
Simon Legree decides that he will
harden Tom into a slave overseer
through beatings and harsh
punishment.
=> Tom only responds with kind words
and passages from the bible, he would
rather die to protect his moral life.
Historical
context
 The South support slavery and The North are against
slavery
The Northern states depended on free labor and all abolished slavery by 1805
(though not all Northern slaves were immediately freed). Although in 1852 the
northern states were "free states," thanks to the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, masters
could track down runaway slaves in the north, recapture them, and send them
south. Canada, as part of the British Commonwealth, which had abolished slavery
in all of its territories by 1834, could provide protection for refugee slaves crossing
its southern borders. The rapid expansion of the cotton industry in the
southernmost region after the invention of the cotton separator greatly increased
the need for slave labor to pick cotton when all ripened at once, and the Southern
states continued to is a slave society.
 ÞStowe tries to give a "fair and balanced" picture of
southern slavery, showing the comparatively good
conditions on St. Clare’s estate and the horrible ones on
Legree’s plantation.

Þ The context of the story shows how slavery deeply affects human
rights, they are sold from place to place, exploited, beaten,
yearning for freedom. Even though Uncle Tom was beaten, he
still refused to give up and decided to defend his reason for life
 04.
POINT OF
VIEW
 Mr. Shelby
Tom's first master, Mr. Shelby, is kind but careless. On his
Kentucky farm, Mr. Shelby treats his slaves relatively
humanely – but when his mismanagement of the
household finances causes him to fall into debt, he
breaks his word and his code of ethics and sells both
Tom and Eliza's son, Harry.

He considers himself above the low slave

trader, Haley, who buys them, but he doesn’t
fully reflect on the fact that his dealings
"...Mr. Shelby, had the with Haley implicate him in the entire slave-
appearance of a trade system.
gentleman;..."
 Although Mr. Shelby drops out of sight
relatively quickly in the novel, he is a foil
to the other major slaveholding characters
in the book – St. Clare, who thinks about
the moral problem of owning slaves all the
time but fails to do anything about it, and
Legree, who, like Shelby, wastes no time
thinking about the morality of owning
slaves, but unlike Shelby, is a cruel despot
who wields his power with impunity.
 Tom’s last earthly master Simon Legree
The brutal Louisiana plantation owner
Simon Legree is one of the four most
famous characters in Uncle Tom’s Cabin

There are things Legree cares about: profit,

for example, and dominating other people.
And he’s a sadist, so he enjoys tormenting
other people and swaggering around
inspiring fear. Legree and Tom are in
“…He was evidently, though short, of gigantic strength. His
conflict largely because Tom is Good and round, bullet head, large, light-gray eyes, with their shaggy,
Legree is Evil. sandy eyebrows, and stiff, wiry, sun-burned hair, …”
 “I am determined to prove a
villain,"
a.k.a. "Satan is my motor"
Whether we quote from Shakespeare or Cake, the point is
the same: "I’m gonna be one evil dude." Like the worst
villains in Shakespeare’s tragedies (such as Iago
in Othello or Edgar in King Lear), Simon Legree is what
English major people call a "motiveless malignancy”.
That’s a fancy way of saying that he’s devoted himself to
work evil without any real, solid reasons.
 Uncle Tom
Uncle Tom is notable for These are moments
his superhuman religious
where Stowe means us to
faith, his gentle nature,
and his unfailing see how Christ-like and
honesty. "I’d give ye my self-sacrificing Tom is,
heart’s blood; and, if but we also notice that
taking every drop of Tom goes to extreme
blood in this poor old
lengths to help the
body would save your
precious soul, I’d give people who are
them freely, as the Lord oppressing him and his
gave his for me"."A large, broad-chested powerfully-made man, of a full family.
glossy back, and a face...characterized by an expression of
grave and steady good sense...with much kindness and
benevolence."
Tom tries to follow the principles of the gospel:
"Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do
good to them that hate you, and pray for them which
despitefully use you, and persecute you".

Does all Does he

this
sometimes
Does he
sometimes
seem like a
racial
YES
often seem There’s no denying any of these things.
make Tom like a
stereotype –
the noble, But Tom is also an incredibly good
seem passive patient, person whose suffering illustrates the
disturbing sufferer? quiet, loyal, evils of slavery – and, in Harriet
ly childish Beecher Stowe’s opinion, he’s the
black man ideal Christian.
submissive who loves his
?
Lucky numbers
1 2 3

4 5
 1. Uncle Tom’s Cabin was a
respone to the passage of which
1850 law?
A. The Twenty B. The Three-Fifths
Negro Law Compromise

C. The Thirteenth D. The Fugitive Slave

Amendment Act
2. Where does the St. Clare
famlily live?

A. Ohio B. Louisiana

C. Canada D. New Orleans

3. When was the Uncle Tom’s cabin
published as book form?

A. In 1850 B. 1851

C. 1852 D. 1853
4. ” A large, broad-chested powerfully-made man, of a full
glossy back, and a face……. characterized by an
expression of grave and steady good sense…. “. To whom
is this sentence described?
A. Mr. Shelby B. Simon Legree

C. Uncle Tom D. Johnny

5. Uncle’s Tom Cabin is comprised of two
occasionally interesting plots following
………. and……
A. Uncle Tom - B. Uncle Tom -
Jonny Eliza

C. Uncle Tom- D. Uncle Tom-

Johnny Aunt Chloe
Thank you!!!