preview

Why Is Harriet Beecher Stoowe Considered To Be Dehumanized

Better Essays

Harriet Beecher Stowe Paper Harriet Beecher Stowe’s depiction of slavery in the novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin is an accurate portrayal of slavery. She depicts slavery as an evil rather than a blessing, as many of the Southerners believed when she was publishing the novel. Stowe is accurate in representing how slaves were treated by their masters, how slaves responded to this treatment (whether it be terrible or good in comparison to the others), and finally the slaves’ cultural beliefs in response to their poor situation. Most masters treated slaves very poorly because they were seen as pieces of property and not people. This view of slaves not only caused their owners to treat them with disrespect but it also caused the slaves themselves to treat each other and their own bodies with disregard because they had been dehumanized by their enslavement. …show more content…

Legree’s. Mr. Legree’s overseers were two Negro slaves whom were brutal to all of the other Negro slaves because that was how their overseers had treated them. Stowe stated in her novel that “the Negro overseer is always more tyrannical and cruel than the white one. This is simply saying that the Negro mind has been more crushed and debased than the white” (Stowe, 392). Stowe also made the point in her novel that the idea of a “good slaveholder”, as his peers and even the slaves themselves often referred to Shelby, is a hypocritical notion. Stowe establishes that even a relatively kind slaveholder doesn’t make the system any different, as there weren’t many of them and they were willing to sell their slaves at any moment. She shows how quickly a slave can be transferred from a superficially “good” slaveholder to an evil one in a matter of minutes by using Henry and Uncle Tom as her examples. When Mr.

Get Access