Topic + Source Exploration: Group 3 - Idealism and Social Change

Members: Noe, Taylor, Susie

St. Domingo Revolution
Hungarian Revolution


Idealism and Social Change in The Key to Uncle Tom's Cabin (1853):

"The Men Better than their Laws" 

"In some slave States it seems as if there was very little that the benevolent owner could do which should permanently benefit his slave, unless he should seek to alter the laws. Here it is that the highest obligation of the Southern Christian lies. Nor will the world or God hold them guiltless who, with the elective franchise in their hands, and the full power to speak, write, and discuss, suffer this monstrous system of legalised cruelty to go on from age to age."

The Quakers

Miss Ophelia

Topsy

From Jane Tompkins's "Sentimental Power"

"Embedded in the world of Uncle Tom's Cabin, which is the fallen world of slavery, there appears an idyllic picture, both utopian and Arcadian, of the form human life would assume if Stowe's readers were to heed her moral lesson. In this vision, described in the chapter entitled "The Quaker Settlement," Christian love fulfills itself not in war, but in daily living, and the principle of sacrifice is revealed not in crucifixion, but in motherhood. The form that Stowe's utopian society takes bears no resemblance to the current social order. Man-made institutions—the church, the courts of law, the legislatures, the economic system—are nowhere in sight. The home is the center of all meaningful activity; women perform the most important tasks; work is carried on in a spirit of mutual cooperation; and the whole is guided by a Christian woman who, through the influence of her "loving words," "gentle moralities," and "motherly loving kindness," rules the world from her rocking-chair." 

Overlaps: Group 2 - religious and philosophical responses (broadly) to social evils, Group 7 - Christianity and Stowe's Sectional Rhetoric