Uncle Toms Cabin Argument

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Harriet Beecher Stowe’s novel Uncle Toms Cabin changed the way the slavery was viewed in the United States of America. The novel went into very colorful, and harsh details about how slaves were treated as property. Stowe’s novel incited one of the deadliest, but crucial wars in the history of the United States, the civil war. The main audience was northern white women because the majority of northern people did not know the severity of slavery and the women were the most likely to persuade the men in society. However not everyone was fond of Stowe’s novel, James Baldwin’s “Everybody’s Protest Novel”, argued against Uncle Toms Cabin. In Baldwin’s essay he critiques Stowe’s novel quite harshly stating that it is a very bad novel, and it’s a catalogue of violence and emotion. “Everybody’s Protest Novel” was too harsh on Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Toms Cabin because Baldwin attacks the author not the actual piece of literature, was not sympathetic to her emotions, and was biased on the subject.…show more content…
For example, Baldwin states she was not so much a novelist as an impassioned pamphleteer; her book was not intended to do anything more than prove that slavery was wrong; was, in fact, perfectly horrible (Baldwin 13). Baldwin thinks that Stowe’s novel did not accomplish what a novel should accomplish and that was one of the main reasons he disagreed with the novel. Baldwin also speculates that Stowe’s information was not credible because she used sentimentality, and emotion. However, in Baldwin’s essay, he does not directly discredit any of the information stated in Uncle Toms

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