Tom Tigone Women, Men, and Term Paper

It is entirely through such efforts that the larger impact of the novel is made.

One scene in particular is meant as an especially compelling emotional allegory, and is very effective at making the undeniable and intimate nature of human feelings as a basis for moral decisions-making abundantly clear. When Mrs. Bird catches her two sons tormenting defenseless kittens, she berates them and ultimately succumbs to tears at the plight and pain of the cats and, perhaps even more so, at the cruelty of her own children. It seems to be in man's nature -- and specifically in man's nature as opposed to woman's -- to practice cruelty, yet even the practitioners can usually be made to recognize that their cruelty is wrong simply by dint of being cruel, and for no other logical or deduced reason. Their mother's tears more than her stern admonitions cause the boys to understand the error of their ways, to repent and to vow to refrain from such cruelty in the future; it is being confronted with the sheer horror of their actions -- the intimate, feeling, and most quintessentially human effects of the decisions made -- that causes understanding and change more than the angry yet reasoned explanation of why what they were doing was so wrong.

The book operates on the reader in the same fashion, not attempting to give economic justifications or rationales for an end to slavery nor showing the relationships between men and women as any sort of straightforward and rational mechanized set of movement but rather showing the entire mess as it truly impacts lives, which occurs at the emotional level. Husbands and wives arguing over the lives of people that they own (in the case of Mr. And Mrs. Shelby), or the lives of people that would enslave them (in the case of Eliza and George Harris), or the lives of those distant to but inordinately impacted by their own decisions (as with Mrs. Bird and her Senator husband) provide one set of intimacies in the novel, but they are not the only window by which the reader is beckoned into the world of Uncle Tom's Cabin.Every scene and each character is another opportunity for Stowe to exercise her craft in rendering with sharp precision the emotional and personal shifts of the human condition, all working towards a very explicit and ever-more compelling point: there are power imbalances in the world described, the world populated by Stowe's intended readers, and these imbalances were so extreme that the voice of moral authority had no legal or political power whatsoever while unmistakably wrong cruelties could continue to be practiced in the name of logic and reason. Women wield moral rectitude while men make decisions, and it is only through these females' powers of persuasion that anything of moral good is carried out until the novel's very terminus.

Conclusion

For modern readers, living in a society in which legal slavery has been abolished for generations and in which women share political power with men (albeit not yet equally, according to many measures), the explicit political concerns of the novel might seem distant. The humanity expressed is as fresh as the day Uncle Tom's Cabin was composed, however, and the overarching statements about cruelty, moral righteousness, and choice are as relevant today as they ever were. The intimate portrayal of various wives and husbands as well as a multitude of other characters and relationships continues to propel this towering work in the annals of criticism and the minds and hearts of readers.

References

Ammons, Elizabeth. "Heroines in Uncle Tom's Cabin." American Literature 49.2 (1977): 161-179.

Brown, Gillian. "Getting in the Kitchen with Dinah: Domestic Politics in Uncle Tom's Cabin." American Quarterly 36.4 (1984): 503-523.

Camfield, Gregg. "The Moral Aesthetics of Sentimentality: A Missing Key to Uncle Tom's Cabin." Nineteenth-Century Literature 43.3 (1988): 319-345.

Noble, Marianne. "The ecstasies of sentimental wounding in Uncle Tom's cabin." The….....