The Cruelest Separation By Harriet Beacher Stowe Essay

The cruelest separation is that of a mother from her child. Not only does it destroy the emotional stability of the child, but it removes the God-given purpose of the mother. Unfortunately, this was a common practice used by slave owners in the United States. Several authors in the American Literary tradition have written about this subject in an attempt to prevent the horrific practice. Some such authors are, Harriet Beacher Stowe, Harriet Jacobs, and Frederick Douglass. In their writings, Stowe, Jacobs, and Douglass endeavor to portray the mental and emotional wounds created by separating a mother and child in order to combat the dispassionate destruction of human lives. While each author discusses this topic of mother-child separation, they argue for the removal of the practice in different ways. Influenced by their race, gender, and chosen genre, each author tackles this broad subject through a limited focus on the damages of it. In order to show the successes of their separate a pproaches, each text must be discussed independently. Harriet Beacher Stowe is known for her novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin. In Uncle Tom’s Cabin the reader follows several different stories of female slaves who are either threatened with separation from their child or who are separated. Through this variety of perspectives, Stowe argues the emotional damages of this practice. She uses pathos to convince the reader of her argument through specific descriptions of the women who loose their children. One