A review by chloefolmar
Uncle Tom's Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe

4.0

Personally, I wasn’t pulled in by Uncle Tom’s Cabin until the second half — it wasn’t particularly engaging prose, and the storyline was regularly interrupted by tangential conversations among the white characters that seemed unnecessary to the plot. It was clear, though, that the book was geared toward racist white people during the times of slavery, and it was certainly understandable how the narrative created such a powerful shift in white perception of slavery. Unexpectedly, Uncle Tom’s Cabin seemed to me less of a commentary on the institution of slavery and more of a commentary on Christianity during a time when that institution was upheld. Eva and Uncle Tom were both powerful examples of true Christian faith, and while their faith was illustrated as “childlike,” it was abundantly clear that slavery and the mistreatment of Black people were unthinkable and even nonsensical when viewed through that childlike lens. (Notably, “childlike faith” is a Biblical mandate, contrasted with the self-righteous, Pharisaical “faith” of many of the white characters in the book.) This contributed to a larger narrative exposing the way white “Christianity” served as a disgraceful facade for warped, intellectualized justifications of fundamentally anti-Christian ideas about race. The Black characters were Christian heroes who clung to their faith in the midst of tragedy and injustice, where the white “Christians” were basically indistinguishable from the explicitly immoral, anti-Christian white characters in the novel. The way that Christianity was horribly misused as a weapon of oppression was jarring and disturbing; at the same time, the fact that Stowe portrayed white Christianity as such hundreds of years ago further reveals the knowingly sinful behavior in which white Americans engaged during that period.