From Maine to Japan

All right, I've gotten further into "Uncle Tom's Cabin," and one of the major reasons people dislike it has become clear to me. It can be summed up in three small words:

Eva St. Clair.

"Little Eva" is the daughter of the man Tom is eventually sold to. She's a little girl whose golden curls frame a perfectly seraphic face. She's adorable and sweet-tempered, and treats everyone, white or black, with perfect respect and dignity. The slaves all adore her and gather around to watch her pretty little face and hear her beautiful, angelic voice as she speaks of forgiveness and mercy.

I remember the story well enough to know she dies later, and a mean-spirited part of me is rather looking forward to it.

Her father, on the other hand, I rather like! He's a wastrel and cultivates a deliberate air of carelessness and frivolity, but it's framed as a man who loathes slavery and yet isn't quite strong-willed enough to actually struggle against the whole system he's so deeply implicated in. It torments him, but he just doesn't have the spirit to rebel, either, so he just hates it quietly and is cynical and ironic. When his Northern cousin says she doesn't feel his slaves are "strictly honest," he starts laughing: "O, cousin, that's too good--honest!--as if that's a thing to be expected! Honest!--why, of course, they arn'. Why should they be? What on earth is to make them so?" I like him much more than his perfect little daughter, I am forced to admit.

One passage struck me based on what I was talking about with Joss Whedon. St. Clair was in love with a Northern woman, but her family spread rumors that she was cheating on him and in a fit of pique he married a woman totally unsuited for him, only to find that his first love was true to him. But of course it was too late and his life was ruined. Stowe notes wryly:

"Of course, in a novel, people's hearts break, and they die, and that is the end of it; and in a story this is very convenient. But in real life we do not die when all that makes life bright dies to us. There is a most busy and important round of eating, drinking, dressing, walking, visiting, buying, selling, talking, reading, and all that makes up what is commonly called living, yet to be gone though."