In other words, Uncle Tom was anything but an “Uncle Tom.” Today, of course, the book has a decidedly different reputation, thanks to the popular image of its titular character, Uncle Tom - a name that has become a byword for a spineless sell-out, a black man who betrays his race.īut this view is egregiously inaccurate: Uncle Tom was physically strong and morally courageous, an inspiration for blacks and other oppressed people worldwide. And yet, driven by a passionate hatred of slavery, she found time to write Uncle Tom’s Cabin, which became the most influential novel in American history and a catalyst for radical change both at home and abroad. Diminutive and dreamy-eyed, she was a harried housewife with six children who suffered various obscure illnesses, worsened by her persistent hypochondria. The novelist Harriet Beecher Stowe, born 200 years ago, was an unlikely fomenter of wars. His article explores how Stowe’s Uncle Tom evolved into our contemporary image of Uncle Tom. David Reynolds, an English professor in the Graduate School of the City University of New York (CUNY), returns to the original “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” to revel that the character Harriet Beecher Stowe described in her 1852 novel is wholly opposite of the caricature we now imagine. It depicts a weak, subservient, cringing black man who betrays his race and its struggle for liberation.
Today the phrase “Uncle Tom” evokes a powerfully negative image in American society.
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