Rhetorical Strategies and Biblical
Hypertextuality in Uncle Tom’s Cabin
Retoriska strategier och biblisk hypertextualitet i Uncle Tom’s Cabin
David Ryrberg
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Abstract
This essay will examine the rhetorical aspect of the novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin - or, Life Among the Lowly to show how biblical references are used to affect the audience by using Lloyd Bitzer’s concept of the rhetorical situation and Gérard Genette’s concept of
hypertextuality as analytic tools. The essay will focus on three examples where Stowe uses allegories, metaphors and parables from the Bible to create realistic scenes infused with a moralistic dimension to greatly impact the readers. During this time many people knew their Bible, and Stowe used this familiarity to make them understand the errors of slavery. She also makes them see that love, compassion and family are the cornerstones upon which society is built. Through hypertextuality, where the Bible is the hypotext, Stowe appeals to the audience to consider their opinions versus black people and slavery. Furthermore, one can also apply Bitzer’s concept of the rhetorical situation to explain the success of Uncle Tom’s Cabin.
According to Bitzer, a rhetorical situation needs an exigence, a responsive audience and constraints to be affective. In the novel, slavery is the exigence, Christian white Americans the audience united by prejudices against black people and their Christian faith and the constraints are attitudes, traditions and beliefs towards black people.
Sammanfattning
Denna uppsats kommer att undersöka den retoriska aspekten av romanen Uncle Tom's Cabin - or Life Among the Lowly för att visa hur bibliska referenser används för att påverka publiken,
genom att använda Lloyd Bitzers koncept om den retoriska situationen och Gérard Genettes begrepp hypertextualitet som analytiska verktyg. Uppsatsen kommer att fokusera på tre exempel där Stowe använder allegorier, metaforer och liknelser från Bibeln för att skapa realistiska scener med en moralistisk dimension för att påverka läsarna. Under den här tiden kunde många människor sin bibel, och Stowe använde detta för att få dem att förstå att slaveri var fel. Hon får dem även att inse att kärlek, medkänsla och familj är de byggstenar som samhället vilar på. Genom hypertextualitet, där Bibeln är hypotext, vädjar Stowe till publiken att överväga sina åsikter om svarta och slaveri. Dessutom kan man tillämpa Bitzers koncept om den retoriska situationen för att förklara framgången med Uncle Toms Cabin. Enligt Bitzer behöver en retorisk situation ett problem, en lyhörd publik och begränsningar för att beröra. I romanen är slaveri problemet, kristna vita amerikaner publiken, förenade av
fördomar mot svarta människor och deras kristna tro och begränsningarna är attityder, traditioner och åsikter om svarta.
During the 19th century in America, slavery was an important issue which divided the country into two different sides, North and South, where the North was anti-slavery and the South was pro-slavery. In 1852, a novel with a strong anti-slavery position was published: Uncle Tom’s Cabin - or, Life Among the Lowly, by Harriet Beecher Stowe. In this novel Stowe describes the moral failures of the slave trade, and argues that it opposes the Christian way of life and that freedom is a right everybody should have. Since she had close contact with her servants, she was able to create characters based on real people from stories she had heard (Reynolds xiii). Another event in Stowe’s life that critics have argued affected the pathos of the novel is when she herself experienced the tragedy of losing her son Charley in cholera only eighteen months old (Reynolds xiii). The novel was an immense success, and during the first week it sold ten thousand copies. After a year it had reached over the Atlantic and was translated into other languages. Stowe had become one of the most famous writers in the world by the end of 1860 (Carabine 7). Because of this success, Stowe was able to affect many people through Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Literary critic David S. Reynolds claims that it even intensified the conflict between the North and South (Preface) and Howard Ray White states that “[i]t was a propaganda masterpiece that became larger than life” (4). The exact reasons for the immense success of the novel in affecting a nation could of course be discussed and explained in many different ways, but this essay will focus on two of them: Stowe’s use of rhetorical strategies and the use of the Bible. Comparisons between Tom and Jesus have already been made, but I want to show the connections in a wider perspective, with scenes not obviously taken from the Bible, where the connection is implicit rather than explicit. I will explore this rhetorical aspect of the novel by using Lloyd Bitzer’s concept of the rhetorical situation and Gérard Genette’s concept of hypertextuality as analytic tools. The essay will focus on three examples where Stowe uses allegories, metaphors and parables from the Bible to create realistic scenes infused with a moralistic dimension to greatly impact the readers. These rhetorical strategies are used to show that slaves are capable of motherly love, understanding the Christian gospel, and that all slaves, in their suffering, can be seen as a figure of Christ. I will use three
examples from the novel to clarify how Stowe tries to overcome these prejudices. On an abstract level, Stowe’s rhetorical strategies are devised to expose prejudice and racialism in order to bring people together.
In his famous article “The Rhetorical Situation”, Bitzer defines the rhetorical situation as “a complex of persons, events, objects, and relations presenting an actual or potential exigence which can be completely or partially removed if discourse, introduced into
the situation, can so constrain human decision or action as to bring about the significant modification of the exigence” (Bitzer 3). As noted by Bitzer, one important part of a rhetorical situation is the exigence, or the problem. The situation is rhetorical if the exigence can be changed by the use of rhetoric, in this case in writing. The exigence in Uncle Tom’s Cabin, I argue, is slavery. To make it a rhetorical situation Bitzer argues further that you need an audience with some measure of potential to change the problem. “In short, rhetoric is a mode of altering reality, not by the direct application of energy to objects, but by the creation of discourse which changes reality through the mediation of thought and action” (Bitzer 4).
Every rhetorical situation needs, besides exigence and audience, constraints that “have the power to constrain decision and action needed to modify the exigence” (Bitzer 8). The constraints in Uncle Tom’s Cabin are deeply rooted prejudices against black people, parts in the Bible where slavery is normalised, and traditions where it is normal to oppress people considered inferior. In other words, the constraints are the beliefs of the rhetorical audience Stowe directed her work at. To convince this audience that slavery was wrong, Stowe needed to show that slavery was sinful, a notion that was not self-evident at the time. She did this by, for example, showing that slaves are capable of motherly love and understanding the
Christian gospel, and by showing that slaves, in their suffering, can be seen as a figure of Christ.
This is where Genette’s notion of the hypotext becomes helpful. Genette speaks about the relationship between different texts and their effects on each other in Palimpsests.
One of these relationships is called hypertextuality and could be applied on Stowe’s use of biblical elements in Uncle Tom’s Cabin. He explains hypertextuality as “any relationship uniting a text B (which I shall call the hypertext) to an earlier text A (I shall, of course, call it the hypotext), upon which it is grafted in a manner that is not that of commentary” (Genette 5). According to this, Uncle Tom’s Cabin is the hypertext and the Bible the hypotext. There are two different ways in which a hypertext can be related to a hypotext. These are through transformation or through imitation (Genette 7). Transformation means that you use events from another text, but transform them and make them a part of the new text instead. Imitation, on the other hand, means to simply take parts from another text and put them in your own text. You might do this by quoting, for example (Genette 7). Stowe uses the Bible as a hypotext both through transformation, using events from the Bible in a revised way, and imitation, quoting the Bible. Genette states that all literary works may be hypertextual since
“there is no literary work that does not evoke (to some extent and according to how it is read)
some other literary work” (9). As will be seen below, in Uncle Tom’s Cabin there are different examples of the hypertextual relationship between the novel and the Bible.
To Stowe it was obvious to connect her novel to the Bible since she was born into a religious family, where the father and her seven brothers were all ministers. She later married theologian Calvin Stowe. In other words, both in her married life and in her youth she was influenced by religion, and she later used this spirituality to attack the evils of slavery with her novel. She even claimed once that “God wrote it” when she was asked to explain how she came to write her most famous novel (Fields 377). During this time the spiritual presence of religion permeated society and two of the most important corner stones of a the correct way of living in the American lifestyle were the Bible and the sanctity of the family (Lauter 1035). Stowe states that religious influence is greater in America than in any other country in the world during the 19th century, by saying “[t]here is no country in the world where the religious influence has a greater ascendency than in America.” (A Key to 193) In other words, when Uncle Tom’s Cabin was published, religion was very important in America. The Second Great Awakening was spreading through the country, and by using rhetorical strategies connected to biblical references in books, authors could easily reach the public. In Stowe’s opinion, the Bible does not preach a political and violent revolution to free the slaves, instead, what it enables is a revolution of the soul and spirit through love; and through this spiritual revolution people would begin to see the errors in their lives (A Key to 198). What she meant by this was that it is more effective to try to change people’s minds about a matter through the use of love, than to force them to give up their values and beliefs with hate. Stowe connects slavery to the Bible to create a spiritual revolution based on the importance of love and human relations. The Bible is not only a book, for some people it has been, and still is, a handbook on how to live your life and therefore using it to affect people is presumably an effective rhetorical device.
In Uncle Tom’s Cabin, the story is formed around the middle-aged, Christian man Tom, a black faithful slave. The readers follow him through his adult life and moral dilemmas. He experiences both the good and evil of three different plantation owners, but throughout the novel he stands strong in his faith, his deep belief in God and trust in the Bible.
The novel is about slaves and slave owners who in different ways are connected to Uncle Tom. It contains examples of oppression of, and cruelty versus, the slaves. In the beginning of the novel Tom is sold because his owner, despite being very fond of Tom, has to sell him to save his plantation because he is deeply in debt (Stowe 14). His next owner is St. Clare, a
kind man with an angel-like daughter. After the death of St. Clare, Tom is sold again, this time to the evil Legree (Stowe 417). On this plantation he is beaten to death (Stowe 524). In the novel Stowe manages to bring different life stories and opinions regarding slavery to life.
She does so by including conversations between characters with different opinions regarding slavery, referring to the Bible, creating exciting events and touching the readers’ sentiments towards the family. These are rhetorical strategies used to overcome the prevailing paradigm where whites regarded themselves as superior to blacks, racism.
The constraints and the exigence in Uncle Tom’s Cabin are partly based on racism. Racism, is the social system where blacks are looked upon as inferior to the whites, is well rooted in some societies even today. When Stowe wrote Uncle Tom’s Cabin, the
situation in the USA was like that, allowing a group of people, the blacks, being badly treated.
The reason for this has its origin in prejudices. In Prejudice, Attitudes about Race, Class, and Gender, Von Bakanic explains prejudice as “a negative attitude about a person, group, issue, or thing” (6). She also states that “[p]rejudices are part of the ideology that justifies and supports systems of social inequality” (Bakanic 17). Through Uncle Tom’s Cabin Stowe tries to open the eyes of those who support a system where there are groups of people who use their power to oppress other groups. One way in which she does this is that she tries to make them understand that they are a part of a bigger group than the ones of blacks and whites.
Group dynamics works within groups as a glue and different factors affect the interaction in the group. Von Bakanic mentions four such factors. They are: cohesion, polarization,
ethnocentrism, xenocentrism (154). Of these, ethnocentrism plays a big role in understanding racism, for example, since it is described as “the belief that one’s group is superior and all other groups are inferior” (Bakanic 156). This factor in group dynamics has significance in the process of influencing people within Uncle Tom’s Cabin since she both wants people to understand that the belief that black people are inferior to white people is wrong, and make them understand that we all are part of different groups. In this case, the group Stowe focuses on is the Christians, though blacks and whites are different they may have unifying factors such as a belief in God and Christian values.
Another aspect of regarding racial differences appeared during the mid- nineteenth century, when thoughts about differences between people were seen in a non- hierarchic way. The term racialism today is explained as “the belief in racial superiority, inferiority, and purity based on the conviction that moral and intellectual characteristics, just like physical characteristics, are biological properties that differentiate the races.” (Tyson
360). George M Fredrickson used the term romantic racialism when talking about differences in a positive way: “there was in fact some tendency to celebrate diversity, as showing the richness and plentitude of the human spirit” (97). Romantic racialism did not approve of slavery since “it took unfair advantage of the Negro’s innocence and good nature”
(Fredrickson 102). Fredrickson implies that some stereotypic features of black people are connected with children. In Uncle Tom’s Cabin Stowe too supports romantic racialism, which is shown quite clearly when she characterizes Tom. He is this innocent good natured person, sometimes compared to a child. Tom and Eva are together and Stowe refers to them as “the old child and the young one” (326). The compassion the reader might feel towards Tom, this innocent, childlike, Christian, good hearted man, is an important element in the novel. These opinions and feelings are still based upon prejudices against black people, but they can still be used as rhetorical strategies to unite people.
According to Bitzer the audience is an important part of the rhetorical situation (4), in Stowe’s attempt to affect her audience, a group of white men and women, which she is in fact a part of herself, to change their mind about the exigence, slavery, she uses a specific rhetorical strategy. When trying to address the issue of slavery, she uses allegories from the Bible. As a literary device, an allegory is an extended metaphor which is used mainly to readily illustrate complex ideas and concepts in ways that are comprehensible or striking to its readers. Writers typically use allegories when they wish to convey hidden meanings of moral, spiritual or political meaning through symbolic figures, actions, imagery and/or events. This narrative strategy has been used since ancient times and many myths, for example, the use of allegories to explain different phenomena through resemblance. Allegories are also closely related to, for example, parables, which are common in the Bible, and can be used for
moralistic purposes. “An allegory is a story or image with several layers of meaning: behind the literal or surface meaning lie one or more secondary meanings, of varying degrees of complexity”(Cuddon). In Uncle Tom’s Cabin there are a lot of both obvious and subtle references to the Bible, were Stowe uses allegories as a rhetorical strategy to connect the moralistic dimension with biblical scenes.
The novel quite clearly argues against slavery and by using hypertextuality where the Bible is the hypotext Stowe manages to connect her novel to the Bible and religion.
Since the question of slavery was controversial and not everybody agreed that it should be abolished, Stowe used this literary device to make people see the connection between
something they agreed with, religion, and the moral failure of slavery. Peck & Coyle explain
that “[i]n allegory we can state confidently what the precise meaning is that lies behind the surface, because we are meant to see through the text to its underlying significance.” (143).
Since the Bible at the time was a read and well-known piece of literature, Stowe could use symbolism and parables from it to make the reader both consciously and unconsciously affected. A parable is a short story which involves a moral dilemma and the unintended consequences one might suffer because of it. This means a parable has some sort of meaning or lesson it wants the reader to understand. The meaning, however, is often not explicitly stated, though it is not meant to be hidden or difficult to understand (Townsend preface). In the Bible, Jesus often uses parables to tell stories of good and bad behavior. He explains why he does this by saying: “Therefore I speak to them in parables, because seeing they do not see, and hearing they do not hear, nor do they understand.’” (New King James Version, Matthew 13:13). Stowe uses parables in the same way as Jesus, to make people see and understand the errors of slavery. Stowe translates biblical scenes into realistic scenes infused with a
moralistic dimension and by doing this she wants people to understand that slaves are not things but human beings with a soul, and that “[...] the question of slavery is a question of practical morals, and not of dogmatic theology” (Stowe, A Key to 205). Even though Stowe, in A Key to Uncle Tom’s Cabin (2005), states that religious influence is greater in America than in any other country in the world, the religious influence itself becomes meaningless in the fight against slavery since the church both defends and condemns slavery due to different interpretations (193). However, by focusing on the interpretation which supports the
abolishment of slavery, Stowe can use this connection to the known and trusted as a rhetorical strategy to help her cause.
An important and exciting part of Uncle Tom’s Cabin is the part where Stowe wants to show that slaves are capable of motherly love and thus trying to overcome the prejudice, or in rhetorical terms, constraint that slaves are things without feelings or family ties. She does this by the use of hypertextuality, referring to the Exodus in the Bible when Moses helps the Israelites escape from the slavery in Egypt across the Red Sea. He does so, according to the Bible, since they can only be free on the other side and by dividing the sea and closing it, he makes sure they are not followed. The Bible describes the situation like this:
“Then Moses stretched out his hand over the sea; and the Lord caused the sea to go back by a strong east wind all that night, and made the sea into dry land, and the waters were divided.
So the children of Israel went into the midst of the sea on the dry ground, and the waters were a wall to them on their right hand and on their left” (Exodus, 14:21-22). In a similar way, in
Uncle Tom’s Cabin, the slave Eliza Harris and her son escape from the Shelby planation when she finds out that her son has been sold to Mr Haley, the slave trader (Stowe 22). On their escape they reach the Ohio River and the novel, just like the Bible, shows an example of how faith can help you across waters. “It was now early spring, and the river was swollen and turbulent; great cakes of floating ice were swinging heavily to and fro in the turbid waters”
(Stowe 76). Eliza had no other choice than to try to get to the other side of the river. “In that dizzy moment her feet to her scarce seemed to touch the ground, and a moment brought her to the water’s edge. Right on behind they came; and, nerved with strength such as God gives only to the desperate, with one wild cry and flying leap, she vaulted sheer over the turbid current by the shore, on to the raft of ice beyond.” (Stowe 86). Stowe refers to a Godly interference in the sense of strength, but she also makes the connection to crossing water in a way which will make it difficult for others to follow. Just like Moses and the Israelites, Eliza manages to reach the other side. Later on, when meeting Mr and Mrs Bird she tells them “The Lord helped me; nobody knows how much the Lord can help ‘em, till they try” (Stowe 114).
In other words, she states that God helped her cross the river. Eliza’s struggle to save herself and her son also awakens warm feelings towards her and it is obvious that the reader is meant to be on her side in this struggle. The fugitive slave law from 1850 made it illegal to help slaves on the run.
This is an example of where you can apply Bitzer’s concept of a rhetorical situation to explain the effect of the novel and how Stowe tries to affect her audience. She uses Eliza’s emotions towards her son to show that slaves have strong family ties and should not be regarded as things. This is also a way to overcome one of the constraints in the
rhetorical situation, the prejudice against black people as things without feelings that can be bought and sold without caring about family ties.
One way to affect the exigence is by the power of God or Christian acts. For example, according to the Bible you will have eternal life if you live according to this law:
“you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your strength, and with all your mind,’ and ‘your neighbour as yourself’” (Luke 10:27). In the parable of the Good Samaritan, Jesus explains who your neighbour is by letting a wounded man get unexpected help and support from a stranger. The meaning of this is to show that your neighbour is “he who showed mercy on him” (Luke 10:37). In Uncle Tom’s Cabin Mr Bird is portrayed as the Good Samaritan. He is a politician who has contributed to the Fugitive Slave Law, and despite this he helps Eliza and her son, Harry, to escape. Mrs Bird
says to her husband, “[y]our heart is better than your head, in this case, John” (Stowe 118).
There are in Uncle Tom’s Cabin other examples of this theme of unexpected help. For example, Tom saves Eva St. Clare, the daughter of his second owner Augustine St. Clare, from drowning even though the boat was crowded with free men that more likely should save a white girl, but Tom did it without any doubts. “He saw her strike the water, and sink, and was after her in a moment” (Stowe 192). The friendship between Tom and Eva grows after this episode, since Eva’s father buys Tom and they spend a lot of time together. By
befriending a slave, Eva shows that she understands something that Stowe uses a reference to The New Testament in the Bible to explain. She uses the phrase: “Masters, give unto your servants that which is just and equal” (Stowe, A Key to 241) to point out the unjust and unequal way the slaves are being treated and emphasizes the importance of the Golden Rule,
“All things whatsoever ye would that men should do to you do ye even so to them” (Stowe, A Key to 242).
Stowe uses the time Tom spends with Augustine St. Clare to try to show the reader that slaves are capable of understanding the Christian gospel and by doing this she tries to overcome the constraint that slaves are inferior and do not understand the holy message of the Bible. St. Clare is convinced that to slaves, honesty does not exist, because to slaves,
“cunning and deception become necessary, inevitable habits” (Stowe 270) when they themselves are property. After St. Clare buys Tom, he also buys the young slave girl Topsy for his cousin Ophelia. Ophelia, however, does not want the slave for the same reasons as others. She wants to raise and educate Topsy since Ophelia thinks slaves ought to be given possibilities to learn and develop. St. Clare says to Ophelia he got Topsy: “[f]or you to
educate – didn’t I tell you? You’re always preaching about educating. I thought I would make you a present of a fresh-caught specimen, and let you try your hand on her, and bring her up in the way she should go” (Stowe 300). Topsy has been raised by slave traders and has been very badly treated before she came to St. Clare. When Ophelia is trying to find out who she is and where she comes from by asking questions, she gets answers showing the misery from which Topsy comes. For example, she does not know anything about her family and roots, something which is a given for a young white girl to know. Further, when Ophelia asks her about God with the question, “[d]o you know who made you?”, Topsy answers “[n]obody, as I knows on, […] I spect I grow’d. Don’t think nobody never made me” (Stowe 304). This clearly shows the child’s lack of education both in speech and knowledge about God and the Bible. Topsy plays an important role when Stowe wants to show the readers the power of
love. It is obvious that her transformation from badly behaved to well behaved is because of love. In the beginning of Topsy’s appearance in the St. Clare family, only Eva can love and care for her, since Topsy has a hard time settling down and causes some mischief. Eva encourages Topsy to behave and be good to get love from Ophelia and God. When Eva dies Ophelia promises to love Topsy with the words: “I can love you; I do, and I’ll try to help you to grow up a good Christian girl” (Stowe 375). It is not difficult to connect this to the Bible, since there are various stories and parables regarding the importance and power of love. Love is the fundament of Christianity and therefore it plays an important part in the majority of the parables in the Bible. However, one possible parable Stowe could have had in mind regarding Topsy is the Parable of the Barren Fig Tree in which a man has a fig tree without fruit and wants to cut it down. Instead, he gets the advice to take care of it. They say “[s]ir, let it alone this year also, until I dig around it and fertilize it. And if it bears fruit, well. But if not, after you can cut it down“ (Luke 13:6-9). The manure in this case is a symbol for the love and care finally given to Topsy, making her blossom.
Stowe was not only influenced by the Bible, though, when writing Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Stowe herself has stated that the characters and events in the novel are taken from her own world. They are people and events experienced by her either in real life or heard about.
In A Key to Uncle Tom’s Cabin, she explains and clarifies that her novel about slavery is not taken from her imagination but paraphrases of real people. One of the characters who Stowe has not met in real life is the character of Eva St. Clare. She is described as “an impersonation in childish form of the love of Christ” (Stowe 2005 30). Eva is portrayed as an angel full of love and described as almost “divine” (Stowe 191). However, even though she is not based on a specific person, she is by no means unrealistic to Stowe or many of her readers, since they believed children like this existed. Tom and Eva both are preachers of the Golden Rule
“whatever you want men to do to you, do also to them” (Matthew 7:12). The character of Eva has an enormous impact on some of the readers since she is a child and is characterised as almost flawless. Her divinity is emphasized in the beginning of Tom’s and Eva’s friendship when Tom describes her. “To him she seemed something almost divine; and whenever her golden head and deep-blue eyes peered out upon him from behind some dusky cotton bale, or looked down upon him over some ridge of packages, he half believed that he saw one of the angels stepped out of his New Testament” (Stowe 191). Eva’s full name is Evangeline, which was probably deliberately chosen by the author, since it is related to the word “evangelist”.
“Evangelist” is, according to Oxford Advanced Learner’s Dictionary of Current English
(1974), explained as follows; “[a] preacher of the gospel, esp. one who travels and holds religious meetings wherever he goes, preaching to any who are willing to listen” (297). This description suits Eva well, since she, in her short life, spreads the Christian love to everyone she meets.
When Eva is dying, she cuts off her hair to give everyone on the farm a curl of it: “I’m going to give all of you a curl of my hair; and, when you look at it, think that I loved you and am gone to heaven, and that I want to see you all there” (Stowe 364). This angel-like, loving person who never could harm anyone gives her curls to her friends to give them
strength and remind them of her, her love and the love of God. The symbolic act when Eva is distributing her curls of strength has connections to the Bible as well. The ritual has
similarities with the Lord’s Supper in the Bible. The evangelist Matthew describes the last supper like this, Jesus gave pieces of bread to the disciples and said “[t]ake, eat; this is My body” (Matthew 26:26). Eva, just like Jesus, knows that her last moment has come; she tries to offer hope and give strength to the people in her surroundings. Even in this last moment Eva preaches the love of God and Christianity, “I have prayed for you; and I know Jesus will help you, even if you can’t read. Try all to do the best you can; pray every day; ask him to help you, and get the Bible read to you whenever you can; and I think I shall see you all in heaven” (Stowe 363).
Aside from the preaching of love and the biblical characters, there are also bad acts. These are used to emphasise the suffering of the slaves and to try to show that they can be seen as a figure of Christ. In Uncle Tom’s Cabin, there is an antagonist to the divine character of Eva; the evil personified in Tom’s third owner Legree. Stowe uses these bad characters in a way which further emphasizes the goodness of Tom. When Tom and Legree meet for the first time, Tom “felt an immediate and revolting horror at him, that increased as he came nearer” (Stowe 417). When good and evil meet in the form of the characters Tom and Legree the novel reaches a sort of climax and you can sense the blind alley where the good cannot defeat the evil at least not in the literary world. At this point Stowe has lead the white Christian American readers to the edge of their prejudices were their previous beliefs are questioned. By using the extreme opposites it is not strange that your sympathy is with the black slave rather than with the white slave owner, and thus overcome the constraints of attitude and prejudice. Legree hates Tom as “the native antipathy of bad to good” (Stowe 440), and tries to subdue him with hard work, violence and hard words. Legree has a “round bullet head, large, light-gray eyes,” and “his large, coarse mouth was distended with tobacco,
the juice of which, from time to time, he ejected from him with great decision and explosive force; his hands were immensely large, hairy, sunburnt, freckled, and very dirty, and
garnished with long nails, in a very foul condition” (Stowe 417). This description of Legree shows an unpleasant and hard man. Unlike St. Clare and Shelby, Legree has no love for God and religion, when he finds Tom’s Methodist hymn book he steals it and tells him that “I’m your church now! You understand, - you’ve got to be as I say” (Stowe 422). Legree’s
plantation is also described in negative words as to show and strengthen the opinion that this man is evil and brutal. The road leading to the plantation is “wild, forsaken” (Stowe 428), the garden “was now all grown over with weeds,” (Stowe 431) and the house “looked desolate and uncomfortable; some windows stopped up with boards, some with shattered panes, and shutters hanging by a single hinge, - all telling of coarse neglect and discomfort” (Stowe, 431).
During his stay on this neglected plantation Tom however seeks comfort in the Bible and in his firm belief in God: “Mas’r Legree, I an’t a grain afeard to die. I’d as soon die as not. Ye may whip me, starve me, burn me, -it’ll only send me sooner where I want to go.”
In the Bible the evil is sometimes referred to as the devil “Be sober, be vigilant; because your adversary the devil walks about like a roaring lion, seeking whom he may devour.” (1 Peter 5:8). Legree is referred to as “The old Satan!” by George in the end of the novel when Tom is dying (Stowe 523). The slave woman Cassy who attends to Tom’s wounds after he has been whipped says “you are in the devil’s hands; -he is the strongest, and you must give up!”
(Stowe 450) implying Legree is the devil.
Tom’s life has similarities with the one of Jesus. The two outstanding events are one in the beginning and one in the end of the novel, the first, in the beginning referring to the betrayal of Jesus and the second, in the end to the crucifixion. In the first chapter Tom is sold to a slave trader in spite of the fact that he is very close to his owner, Mr Shelby. Due to economic difficulties Mr Shelby has to sell Tom to a slave trader, Mr Haley. “You ought to let him cover the whole balance of the debt” (Stowe 15) says Mr Shelby. The trade has
similarities with the episode in the Bible when Jesus is betrayed by Judas Iscariot. ”What are you willing to give me if I deliver Him to you?” (Matthew 26:15) Judas asks the chief priests who offer him thirty pieces of silver. Just like Mr Shelby is to Tom, Judas is close to Jesus since he is one of the disciples. Both are betrayed because of money. The connection to the Bible seems obvious, Judas’s betrayal is a well-known part of the bible and the reader unconsciously sees the parallel. In the end when Tom is being whipped by Legree he says “I
forgive ye, with all my soul!” (Stowe 516). When Jesus is dying on the cross he says “Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they do” (Luke 23:34).
To conclude, through Uncle Tom’s Cabin Stowe managed to influence a great deal of people by using rhetorical strategies as biblical scenes infused with a moralistic dimension and group dynamic processes to unite the audience around an exigence, the
slavery. By doing this she attempted to reach the public, because during this time most people knew their Bible, and make them understand the errors of slavery and see that love,
compassion and family are the cornerstones that society is built upon and that these
cornerstones also apply to black people. Stowe made this possible by decoding the rhetorical situation using the Bible as a hypotext. The references to the Bible function as a hypotext to Stowe’s novel, which frame the exciting and interesting events recounted in the story. By using rhetorical strategies as allegories and parables she was able to overcome the constraints connected to the exigence. Stowe consciously used the Bible to get through to her audience showing them the value of love, and the errors of slavery. What is more, by depicting Tom as a latter-day Christ, she was able to turn the often racialist, if not racist, views constraining the sympathies of her contemporary audience into a conviction that slavery was wrong. Thus, she manged to use rhetorical strategies as means of persuasion. She attempted to touch the
readers’ sentiments by using stories about real people in situations that reminded them of the message of love in the Bible and in many cases, she succeeded.
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