Uncle Tom's Cabin Rhetoric

With the theme of human rights, Stowe targeted an anticipated audience of white women-- particularly mothers. She maneuvered the typical devotion of this group to family and home by emphasizing the destructive effects of slavery on families (“Uncle”). Her writing style and use of rhetoric served as a source of appeal for her novel’s varying audiences (Bracher). The themes present in Uncle Tom’s Cabin were meant to be debatable and to spark discussion over the issue of slavery. More specifically, they asked the prominent question of whether human slavery is right or wrong. Stowe provides multiple varying perspectives on this from different characters in her novel, making her novel more realistic, as real people during the time period often did …show more content…
Donovan believes a quilt analogy, for example, does not adequately represent the careful organization and use of rhetoric to increase influence on potential readers. Stowe’s choice of style and diction, specifically, was referred to as unpolished and made the novel more accessible for the common reader and more open to its purpose: persuasion (Donovan). Additionally, Uncle Tom’s Cabin experiences occasional shifts to second person, which are not without reason. The author’s intrusive commentary bridges the fictional world with that of the reader and allows for the audience to engage and relate more (Harvard). Heavily opinionated remarks accompanying harsh truths, such as the clear questioning of the meaning of liberty, may be seen as condescending, but Stowe acknowledges that “Facts too shocking to be contemplated occasionally force their way to the public ear” (Beecher Stowe 434). Many people of this time period were truly unaware of slave practices and the brutality of them, so she aimed to bring that to the public eye, even if some of the information was indeed almost too hard to swallow. New knowledge birthed outrage in the North. However, logic played a minimal part in the evocation of sympathy