h"ps://www.youtube.com/watch?
v=ezyQdqBETVs
TheA&erlivesand
MeaningofUncle
Tom’sCabin
English213–week9
Essays – arguments vs. observation
“It is startling to notice how much Simon Legree’s
plantation – Stowe’s very archetype of the Slave South
– looks like Lowell, Massachusetts, or any of the other
mill towns that ha sprung up in the industrializing
Northeast in the 1830s and 1840s. […Stowe fully
realizes the Slave South as the dark Satanic field of US
industrial modernity. In the decade before the Civil
War, the novel most definitively about and definitional
of the South actually obliterates it, as Stowe writes the
dystopic visions of the modernizing national center
over the imaginative terrain of its Southern other” –
Our South
“There stood the two children representatives of the
two extremes of society. The fair, high-bred child, with
her golden head, her deep eyes, her spiritual, noble brow,
and prince-like movements; and her black, keen, subtle,
cringing, yet acute neighbour. They stood the
representatives of their races. The Saxon, born of ages
of cultivation, command, education, physical and moral
eminence; the Africa, born of ages of oppression,
submission, ignorance, toil and vice!” (362)
Ethics of resistance:
Eva: “promise me, dear father, that Tom shall have his
freedom as soon as’ – she stopped, and said, in a
hesitating tone- ‘I am gone!’” (404)
Topsy: “Topsy was at first despised and contemned by
the upper servants. They soon found reason to alter
their opinion. It was very soon discovered that whoever
cast indignity on Topsy was sure to meet with some
inconvenient accident shortly after” (365)
“One morning, when the hands were mustered for the field, Tom noticed, with surprise, a new comer
among them, whose appearance excited his attention. It was a woman, tall and slenderly formed, with
remarkably delicate hands and feet, and dressed in neat and respectable garments. By the appearance of her
face, she might have been between thirty-five and forty; and it was a face that, once seen, could never be
forgotten, - one of those that, at a glance, seem to convey to us an idea of a wild, painful, and romantic
history. Her forehead was high, and her eyebrows marked with beautiful clearness. Her straight, well-formed
nose, her finely-cut mouth, and the graceful contour of her head and neck, showed that she must once have
been beautiful; but her face was deeply wrinkled with lines of pain, and of proud and bitter endurance. Her
complexion was sallow and unhealthy, her cheeks thin, her features sharp, and her whole form emaciated.
But her eye was the most remarkable feature,-so large, so heavily black, overshadowed by long lashes of qual
darkness, and so wildly, mournfully despairing. There was a fierce pride and defiance in every line of her
face, in ever y curve of the flexible lip, in every motion of her body; but in her eye was a deep, settled night
of anguish, - an expression so hopeless and unchanging as to contrast fearfully with the scorn and pride
expressed by her whole demeanor”
“Apeopletobefree,must
necessarilybetheirownrulers:that
is,eachindividualmust,inhimself,
embodytheessen7alingredient–so
tospeak–ofthesovereignprinciple
whichcomposesthetruebasisofhis
liberty[…]Noone,then,can
delegatetoanotherapowerhe
neverpossessed;thatis,hecannot
giveanagencyinthatwhichhe
neverhadaright”
-MarLnDelany
Minstrelsy
Miss Ophelia—Now I have a few questions to
ask you before we set to work. How old are you, Topsy?
Topsy (grinning)—Dunno, missis.
Miss Ophelia—Don't know how old you are! Did nobody
ever tell you? Who was your mother then, child?
Topsy (with another grin)—Never had none.
Miss Ophelia—Never had any mother! What do you
mean? Where were you born?
Topsy—Never was born.
Miss Ophelia (sternly)—You mustn't answer me like that,
child. I am not playing with you. Tell me where you were
born and who were your father and mother.
Topsy (emphatically)—Never was born, never had no
father, nor mother, nor nothin'!
Miss Ophelia—Topsy, how can you say such things! How
long have you lived with your master and mistress?
Topsy—Dunno, missis.
Miss Ophelia—Is it a year, or more, or less? Try to answer
properly, this time.
Topsy—Dunno missis.
Miss Ophelia—Worse and worse! Do you know nothing
at all, I wonder! Have you ever heard of God, Topsy?
(Topsy shakes her head.) Do you know who made you?
Topsy (laughing)—Nobody as I knows on: 'spect I
grow'd. Don't think nobody ever made me.
TheLegacyofUncleTom’sCabin?
Topsy from Uncle Tom’s Cabin
Crazy Eyes in Orange is the New Black
“JustasUncleTom’sCabinperformancesthatfeatureddances
like “Jumping Jim Crow” were purportedly observed among
real black people and then caricatured, Miley Cyrus,
surrounded by black women half-dressed as animals,
aQempted and perverted a form of black dancing called
twerking. Rather than aping aristocraLc pretensions, like
minstrelshowsdid,Cyrussentupherownpastasaninnocent
childbyembodyingthegoodgirlwhoneverthelessknowsshe
wantsit.Butitwasminstrelsyjustthesame.”
-HolyDerrTheAtlan7c
Miley Cyrus at the VMAs
“the ostentatious parading of excessive and
spurious emotion, is the mark of dishonesty,
the inability to feel; the wet eyes of the
sentimentalist betray his aversion to
experience, his fear of life, his arid heart; and
it is always, therefore, the signal of secret and
violent inhumanity, the mask of cruelty”
-James Baldwin
“Uncle Tom's Cabin was spectacularly persuasive
in conventional political terms: it helped
convince a nation to go to war and to free its
slaves [ . . .] The enterprise of sentimental
fiction, as Stowe's novel attests, is anything but
domestic. Its mission is global and its interests
identical with the interests of the race. If the
fiction written in the 19th-century by women
whose work sold in the hundreds of thousands
has seemed narrow and parochial to the critics
of the twentieth century, that narrowness and
parochialism belong not to these worlds nor to
the women who wrote them; they are the
beholders' share”
-Jane Tompkins