Social Protest Novels
There is a single problem common to Uncle Tom's Cabin and All Quiet onthe Western Front, despite the works' having been created in differentcenturies on different continents and nominally about different subjects.The single, common problem is this: the valuation of one group of humanbeings by another, with that valuation coming in lower for the group being In Uncle Tom's Cabin, the group being valued as less worthy thanothers is the population of slaves. In All Quiet on the Western Front, thegroup being valued at less-devalued-is the group of young men sent to thetrenches in World War I to fight for the old order's continued existence in Each novel uses different means to achieve its end, but the end isthe same: sacrificing one group of people for the good of another-in short, Each novel also uses the language and the metaphors of its time; ituses, as well, situations calculated to make the reader's blood boil. In the 1850s, when Uncle Tom's Cabin was written, graphicrepresentations of gore, of the kind commonplace by the 1920s-andespecially in the vanguard of art, Europe-would have alienated more readers
I thought of your hand- grenades, of your bayonet, of your rifle; now I see your wife and your face and our fellowship. And hustling the dead out of their beds beforetheir tears dry, so others can have the spot to die in, helps Remarquepaint large the alienation of virtually all the men in the novel. Remarque's work, on the other hand, deals with something common tovirtually every nation on earth in virtually every era: war. This was not lost on author David Halberstam a generation or two ago,when he wrote The Best and the Brightest (first published in 1973), abouthow the brilliant minds of the Kennedy administration managed to get theU. Shelby puts the clincher to it, precisely echoing what Stowebelieves should happen. One can open Uncle Tom's Cabin toalmost any page, stick a pin into it, and come up with a passage or scenethat is as expository as this one, and as persuasive. Shelby after she hears of her husband sellingfaithful Tom: This is God's curse on slavery!-a bitter, bitter, most accursed thing!-a curse to the master and a curse to the slave! I was a fool to think I could make anything good out of such a deadly evil. But canit be said of Remarque' Amazingly, yes. Perhaps Remarque would say that the way to stop wars is tocease allowing the wholesale killing of other people. To build to thatanguish, he pits one group of people against another. It is a sin to hold a slave under laws like ours,-I always felt it was,-I always thought so when I was a girl,-I thought so still more after I joined the church; but I thought I could gild it over,-I thought, by kindness, and care, and instruction, I could make the condition of mine better than freedom-fool that I was! Mr. The Best and the Brightest in every nation seem still to make decisionsleading to wars. Stowe wrote: Cassy drew back; and, clasping her hands, looked upward, and said, "O,great Almighty God! we are _all_ sinners; but what have _we_ done, morethan all the rest of the world, that we should be treated so'" What Stowe suggests as a cure for the problem is, of course, theabolition of slavery. SaysPaul: Comrade, I did not want to kill you. Some would argue ending wars is assimple as not fighting, and some nations and peoples have been fairly goodat staying out of modern wars (Switzerland, the Republic of Ireland).
Common topics in this essay:
World War,
Tom's Cabin,
Cassy Emmeline,
Tom God's,
Stowe Remarque,
Paul Comrade,
Legree Legree,
Almighty God,
Lord Mas'r,
Western Front,
tom's cabin,
uncle tom's cabin,
uncle tom's,
stowe wrote,
world war,
quiet western front,
western front,
quiet western,
cease allowing,
single common,
cassy emmeline,
dead man's,
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Acceptance Essays
