Textual Background and Context:

The piece that I read for this portion of the project was Harriet Beecher Stowe: Letter to the Abolitionist Eliza Cabot Follen found on pages 444-446.

In this letter to Eliza, Harriet talks of the kind of woman she is and a little bit about her life. Her life consisted of her getting married at twenty-five and having children. She then talks about what her “wealth” really was—her twin girls. When he husband was on his death bed she said that she pictured what it would be like for a slave mother to have her “wealth” ripped away from her and that that was something she could never live with. She could never watch her seven children be taken away. Harriet then goes on to say what her part as a mother is: being in the kitchen and nursery. We then learn about her faithful friend who watched the children as Harriet became an authoress. With becoming an authoress is where she came out of her poverty life at which she thought she would never leave. The letter then goes on to tell us about why she wrote Uncle Tom’s Cabin and what it did to her. She said that writing this was a challenge and she looked to God to help her through it.

“To begin then, I am a little bit of a woman… (page 444).” This drew my attention because I have never heard someone talk in such a way that they call themselves ‘a little bit of a woman.’ This she used to describe her age and her appearance I believe because if you keep reading in her letter she then says, “But then I was abundantly furnished with wealth of another sort (page 444).” Here she talked about her children that God gave to her. This I could relate to because when my family and I would go to church on Sunday’s they would say, ‘Go enjoy your wealth today, as if they were just born today!’ This brought much joy and happiness to the rest of the day because we had more to celebrate—family.

“Having been poor all my life, and expecting to be poor to the end of it, the idea of making anything by a book, which I wrote just because I could not help it never occurred to me (page 445).” When reading this it was almost like Uncle Tom’s Cabin was her diary. She didn’t really expect anyone to read it, but now that it was out there, she now made a future for herself that she never pictured. This is very interesting and realistic because it happens even in our society today.

“I suffer exquisitely in writing these things (page 445).” This is when she explaining what is all in Uncle Tom’s Cabin. With her suffering it was almost as if when reading this book I could feel the other people suffering as well, which made some parts hard to read and a bit emotional.

This text adds to our understanding of Uncle Tom’s Cabin because of the way that she looked to God. As a mother herself, she put herself into the female characters and that’s why we see Christianity through most of the females in this story. Throughout the story I was cheering for the females because they made the choices to help the mothers and their children along the route of slavery through this novel of sentimental fiction that steers people into what Harriet Beecher Stowe wanted them to believe—slavery is a bad thing.