Uncle Tom’s Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe is a sprawling anti-slavery novel that was so controversial upon its publication that legend says President Lincoln claimed the book is what “started this great war,” upon meeting Stowe. While there were many factors that lead to the Civil War and how much influence the novel had in it is up for debate, Uncle Tom’s Cabin clearly struck a chord with the American people in 1853. The ensemble characters and widespread settings throughout the novel attempt to show the realism of the horrors of slavery, but has been debated and criticized for being oversaturated and dramatic with its portrayals and depictions. Whether the criticisms are warranted or not, there is no doubt that Stowe lathers her story with pathos and emotion to draw in readers with stories and reports of some reading through it all night long and weeping throughout it.
When understanding and analyzing Stowe’s text for moments of extreme emotionality, readers can begin to dissect how Stowe was able to tug on reader’s heartstrings. One of the biggest moments of this use of pathos is in Chapter III, The Husband and Father, when George has a moment of anger and frustration. His recounting of the pain and suffering he has gone through single handedly embodies all the examples and possible atrocities a slave may have gone through during his time. Harriet Beecher Stowe’s portrayal of George’s suffering and love for his family is her way of trying to emotionally persuade readers towards anti-slavery by using over sentimentality and melodrama in George’s backstory and his motivation to free his family.
One of the ways Stowe uses sentimentality in Chapter III is to create a snowball effect of things getting worse as George grows angrier with each story he tells. The first moment where Stowe sets us up for disappointment is when George surprises Eliza and her “bright smile lighted up her fine eyes” upon seeing him. She invites him inside, noticing that he is not smiling, but is still extremely happy to see him and proudly shows off their son, Harry, to him. The readers can pick up on clues that things are not good and George affirms this by dramatically proclaiming “I wish [Harry had] never been born! I wish I’d never been born myself!” which should grab any reader’s attention. He laments that they all “might have been happy” had they never met and claims “My life is bitter as wormwood; the very life is burning out of me. I’m a poor, miserable, forlorn drudge.” These are incredibly dramatic and morose words to exclaim and rightfully so since Stowe begins to have George recount equally dreadful stories of his suffering.
The first complaint George goes through is how his master is constantly putting him to the “hardest, meanest, and dirtiest work, on purpose” even though he can do better than the tasks given to him. George knows business, reading, writing, and managing better than his master and even knows that “I’m a man as much as he is,” but because he is a slave and his master is a sadist, he will never grow or achieve anything in life. This is not a horribly painful story to read about, but some readers may have been upset by the idea that a smart man was being hindered from potential possibilities. Some Southern slaveowner readers may have been put off by this idea that a slave might possess more intelligence than them and questioned the possibly overdramatized caricature of this smart slave. Stowe even addressed this with a book, The Key to Uncle Tom’s Cabin, which provided evidence for real life parallel people to the characters in her first novel. There were several examples of young, intelligent mulatto runaways who had invented several farming or factory devices. So while there were real life examples, Stowe still used extremely dramatized language in George’s dialogue to convey his pain.
The second story George tells Eliza starts with his master’s son, Tom, scaring a horse with his whip. When asked to stop by George, Tom kept going and eventually started striking George with the whip. When George tried to defend himself, Tom lied to his father and told him that George was fighting him. Naturally, George’s tyrant master came out “in a rage and said he’d teach me who was my master,” by having George tied to a tree and letting Tom whip him as long as he wanted to. Tom did so “till he was tired.” This story starts to become more gruesome and disturbing for readers since George has just been flogged for nearly entertainment purposes for a young boy. Even George starts to get heated up as his brow “grew dark and his eyes burned with an expression that made his young wife tremble.” This is an extremely disturbing story that should upset any reader who might not know about some of the atrocities of slavery. At this point, some readers should be just as heated as George is.
Finally, George tells one of the most upsetting stories in the novel. His master noticed him feeding a dog that was a gift from Eliza and ordered him to drown the dog by tying a stone around its neck because “he couldn’t afford to have every nigger keeping his dog.” When George refused to do so his master and Tom did it themselves and even threw rocks at the dog as his drowned. “Poor thing! He looked at me so mournful, as if he wondered why I didn’t save him,” recounts George. He even has to “take a flogging” after because he would not drown the dog himself. Dogs dying are always a sentimental tactic to pull on anyone’s heartstrings and the sadistic way in which this dog dies would get any reader upset.
However, while Stowe has overused pathos and crafted a series of extremely emotional events for George, the place where his heart and motivation truly lies is his wife and son. Thus, the chapter is titled, “The Husband and Father.” He finally notes that there will be no happy future for Eliza and little Harry:
“Don’t you know a slave can’t be married? There is no law in this country for that; I can’t hold you for my wife, if he chooses to part us. That’s why I wish I’d never seen you,—why I wish I’d never been born; it would have been better for us both,—it would have been better for this poor child if he had never been born. All this may happen to him yet! … Yes, but who knows?—he may die—and then he may be sold to nobody knows who. What pleasure is it that he is handsome, and smart, and bright? I tell you, Eliza, that a sword will pierce through your soul for every good and pleasant thing your child is or has; it will make him worth too much for you to keep.”
This seems to be where his true motives lie, because he then reveals the purpose of his visit: to run away and buy their freedom. After all the anger and frustration he has built up inside him from the previously recounted events, the true place of emotion that Stowe finds in George is through his family. As a mother who had lost one of her children and wrote the novel based on a vision of slave mother’s being separated from their children, Stowe personally knew where the heart was in these characters and how to use it to pull in readers.
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