e Uncle Tom’s Cabin was published, many scholars have reflected on the various ways one can read and understanding this complex text, and how Uncle Tom’s Cabin has been interpreted differently over the years, both before and after the Civil War. Cultural studies, such as Thomas F. Gossett’s “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” and American Culture and Moria Davison Reynolds’ “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” and Mid-Nineteenth Century United States provide the historical frame of reference needed to understand the religious, political, and racial issues addressed in the novel. Though early biographies of Stowe focus on the dramatic irony of a shy housewife making a massive impact on American history, more recent biographies, such as Joan D. Hedrick’s Harriet Beecher Stowe: A life place the facts of her career in the framework of the century and give the reader a history of an era in addition to a history of a life.Once the historical frame is understood, however, the most central avenue of approach to Uncle Tom’s Cabin is that which address its primarily theme of sin and redemption. When the reader considers that Harriet Beecher Stowe was from a family of preachers, it becomes clear that she is a preacher in her novel as a minister in his pulpit. The character of Uncle Tom is unmistakably modeled on Jesus Christ, and everything that happens to him is designed to demonstrate how evil can be transformed into good by love. Little Eva is another model of saintly behavior, designed to prompt all who know her to change, like Topsy, from being bad to being good. Stowe intended the reader, including the southern slave owner, to read Uncle Tom’s Cabin and “turn from sin and be saved.”The theme of sin and redemption can be expressed in more general terms as the struggle between good and evil, with slavery as the metaphor for all that is evil in the world. This is the approach taken...
