This week, I’m going to talk about another book I read in tenth grade, Uncle Tom’s Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe. In the first semester, I mentioned that The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn was one of the two books I read that year that I never finished. With that in mind, Uncle Tom’s Cabin is the second of those two books.
I may not have finished the novel, but that does not mean that it wasn’t any good. As I mentioned in a previous post, I was too neurotic in tenth grade to be able to deliberately not complete an assignment I was given. Uncle Tom’s Cabin was probably my second favorite book I read that year because I felt like it had a really good plot to the novel, which was surprising for me because I did not expect to like something that I had always heard history nerds rave about (I can’t stand history classes, for anyone who doesn’t know me).
The novel tells the story of Uncle Tom (in case the title didn’t make that obvious), who works as a slave along with his wife, Aunt Chloe, and kids on a Kentucky farm. They also work with a maid named Eliza and her son Harry, and their story is also told through the third person omniscient point of view.
What drives the plot of the novel is when the slave owners decide to sell the slaves in order to make money. When Eliza finds that she is at risk of being separated from her son, she takes her son to flee with her and her husband to the North.
On the other hand, Tom is forced into the slave market in Mississippi. At the slave market, he saves a young white child named Eva from a river, whose father, Augustine St. Clare, agrees to buy Tom in gratitude.
This novel has many characters, so bear with me as I try to describe them.
St. Clare insists to have nothing against black people, but he sees no need to change the rules concerning slavery, as he is under the impression that he has no power over the societal norm.
His cousin, Ophelia lives with him, and she claims that she believes slavery is disgusting, but she does not realize that she has her own prejudices against blacks. She is the type of character who really demonstrates the idea that it is easy to believe something in theory, but it is much harder to put those beliefs into practice.
Anyhow, these fundamentals of the story shape the way the plot turns out. Personally, I really liked what I had read of the book, so why didn’t I finish the book?
Well, I ran out of time to finish the story because I had three tests in one day, one of which was an essay exam about this novel.
While I didn’t retain much of the information from the Sparknotes I read, I still remembered enough to write a thorough essay about the novel in 50 minutes. I was happy to get a decent grade; although, I’m also pretty sure the teacher did not actually read the essays. This is more of a side story, but we, the students, noticed her give one student an A who wrote about a character from the wrong novel haha.
Anyway, aside from my teacher’s poor care for adequately grading material, this was one of the few books through which I felt like she effectively engaged the students in the class discussions to guide us into seeing the symbolism and allegories of the novel. Overall, I think would have to rate the novel as a 7/10. I’ll probably want to actually finish reading the book some time haha!
In my English class last year, we discussed Uncle Tom’s Cabin at length – but never actually read the book. We also referenced it a lot in my US History class, but once again did not actually read the book. Until reading your blog post, Uncle Tom’s Cabin was nothing more to me than a nebulous idea that had profound impact on society. I had never thought about actually reading the contents that caused such a profound impact. After reading your post, however, I am rethinking that idea, and considering adding Uncle Tom’s Cabin to my reading list!
As for your teacher’s grading skills, that sounds like something out of a movie! I wish my teachers had graded like that once in a while!