Uncle Tom's Cabin Essay

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The last critic I chose is considering whether Stowe’s novel, Uncle Tom’s Cabin contains feministic rhetoric or not. A part of Thornton’s critic I particularly disagreed with is, “Along with her refusal of power to women in the public sector, Stowe's linkage of women with the emotional and the sentimental can also be considered as opposing women's rights. Women who advocated the suffrage movement would have wanted to de-emphasize women as being driven by emotion so that they would be viewed as rational and stable enough to make judicious voting decisions. Despite the fact that Stowe equates this sentimentality to morality, this empowerment does not allow women to move beyond the private sphere into the public. In actuality, this view of women …show more content…
Eliza is unable to escape to freedom without dressing as a man. Not only that, but Eliza is not allowed to remain within society. She must retreat to another land -- Canada first, and finally Liberia. Neither is Rachel Halladay allowed to exist peacefully within the mainstream of society, but on the fringes. Not only this, but neither these women nor any other in the novel, are allowed to escape their domestic existence and produce change in the public sector” (Thornton). I believe that this critique is looking into the novel to hard. Uncle Tom’s Cabin purpose was to educate people about slaves and racism. The purpose, as far as I could tell was not about opposing women’s rights. It would not make sense if that was her purpose of the novel, because throughout the novel she was fighting for the female slaves, just as much as she was the males. Stowe was such an avid equal rights fighter, that it would be absurd to insinuate that she was anything else. Stowe does not empower women in her novel because it does fit with that time period. Her novel needed to be seen as along with the time period, so the facts of slavery would have been more worthy of being true and accurate. If she would of portrayed the women in her novel as independent and strong woman, it could have had the effect of making her novel seem like fiction, therefore taking away the credibility of her facts on
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