Violence

= = = = = = = Uncle Tom's Cabin Theme of Violence = // Uncle Tom’s Cabin // has an intriguing relationship to the theme of violence. There is a lot of violence in this novel; as it shows, slavery was frequently a brutal institution, in which slaves were whipped, beaten, abused, starved, worked to death, sexually violated, and murdered. And yet this is a 19th century sentimental novel. The restraint of that genre, and of Victorian society, doesn’t force Stowe to whitewash the evils of slavery, but it does encourage her to lower the curtain sometimes, figuratively speaking, and take the reader away from the most intense scenes of violence.