I'm all done with Uncle Tom.
I stayed up too late reading last night, and then got up early this morning and finished it off.
It is a very well written book in many ways.
Harriet, I'm just calling her Harriet now as I've just spent so much time with her, writes some really believable characters. I'd say she has great insight into human character and our frailties. In particular she draws out all the many ways people have of burying ourselves in self deception about our particular pet vices.
I even saw myself there in the description of Dinah the cook in the St. Clare home in New Orleans......or at least how I would have developed into Dinah had I not married the very organized and scientific Jon.
Dinah has hundreds of drawers and cupboards, but they are all crammed full of a crazy variety of unrelated stuff. Like every drawer is a junk drawer. She also sits on the kitchen floor smoking a pipe, orders the kids to do all the work and blames them when it doesn't turn out well.....anyway, she's not major, but she was familiar!
I also really loved that Harriet doesn't have any patience at all with people who see a problem and are too lazy to fix it. She does seem to prefer individuals who are not just "flopping around" as we like to call it around here.
I have an issue with Harriet though. And this is it:
All through the book, she shows us that most of the characters in the book are in error, and are forging ahead in their erroneous beliefs and practices, all the while being convicted that they are in the right (slave owners, slave traders, those who separate children from parents, those who torture their slaves etc).
So we see from this that there is a way that will seem right to a man, and it can be a way that leads to destruction. In that part she is right....
But she is all the while appealing to the emotion and sentimentality of the reader to see the errors of her character and judge them based upon emotion and sentiment, not on a higher platform of law. I think she could have used scripture to back up her points, and she sure did have a broad understanding of the Bible. Almost all her background was in religious training. But it seemed that her highest authority was in fact sort of a Romantic era appeal to common sentiment. She's continually asking the reader how he would feel in the same situation that is being described. Of course it's good that we gain sympathy with the ones who are suffering, but a better appeal could have been added.
She's a skilled writer with some errors in her theology.
One more little bit about this book that I found enlightening. I was reading it both in Canada, and in the Southern US. So my British neighbors, and other Canadians who know I was reading this book were very interested and asked informed questions about it, and it's now being considered for book club later.
But when I told people in NC, and others from Georgia and South Carolina that I was reading it.....the response was generally something like "Don't tell me about that book...I don't even want to know." or "Why are you reading THAT?" Nobody wanted to hear anything about it, except for my brother, Yaay Roy.
That being said, I love the South, and I am
from the South, and I know that every place has it's own favorite subjects about which the communal head is in the sand. I can even see a few in Canada, but am being a polite guest.....on occassion.
Anyhoo, a good book, to be read with your eyes wide open.
