Who is topsy

Stowe shows us that whites must learn to love blacks as their Christian brothers and sisters if they want to bring out the best in them.

Thus, Topsy also functions as a contrast to the obedient, saintly Uncle Tom, who seems too submissive and well behaved to be real, given the evils of slavery. Parents Home Homeschool College Resources. Study Guide. By Harriet Beecher Stowe. Previous Next. Clare Senator and Mrs. Wilson Henrique St. Tired of ads? Join today and never see them again. And Topsy is a very real child, terribly abused but with enough resiliency to be good-natured despite her "depravity" as Ophelia terms it; she lies, steals, gets out of tasks by throwing the materials for performing them away, leads the other children — except of course for Eva — into creative mischief , and with enough innate intelligence to be a very quick study when she wants to be.

She is what our age would call a "survivor" — a little girl who will manage, with any luck at all, to land on her feet at all times. Topsy is also an example of what happens when human beings are treated as commodities. Her parents were breeding stock, no more or less, and she was raised on a farm like a herd animal, not knowing who her mother was or, probably, that she even had a mother, taught absolutely nothing that she could not learn from her own observation.

Her only use since she is not light-skinned and thus potentially "beautiful" to white men, and since she is not yet old enough to be worth much as breeding stock herself is as physical labor.

The couple from whom St. Clare got her obtained her, no doubt, at a bargain price, and had he not bought her to teach Ophelia a lesson and, to be fair to St.

Clare, to rescue Topsy from being beaten with a stove poker , she would have grown up knowing nothing but what she could find out in their service.

Since children are more energetic and stronger than adults, she would probably have been resold at puberty or traded in for a younger model. By 25 or 30, on a sugar or cotton plantation like Legree's, she would have been used up, broken down and toothless and utterly worthless, and finally but probably not quickly enough for Topsy dead.

Physical and psychological resiliency is of value in people used as things; brains are not, especially in females who will never be expected to carry on a cultivated conversation or add a column of figures.

He manages the Shelby farm , is the companion to Eva in the St. Clare household, and works in the cotton fields at Simon Legree's plantation. In the book, Eva, whose real name is Evangeline St. Clare, is the daughter of Augustine St.

She enters the narrative when Uncle Tom is traveling via steamship to New Orleans to be sold, and he rescues the 5 or 6 year-old girl from drowning.

Eva speaks once to her father; then, as she is dying, he asks her what she sees, and she answers, "O! Clare corrects this, and Topsy throws herself weeping on the floor beside the bed. Written by white female abolitionist Harriet Beecher Stowe and published in , Uncle Tom's Cabin tells the story of Uncle Tom, a noble and dignified Christian slave. Uncle Tom's Cabin sought to garner sympathy for slaves and support for abolition, by expressing the depravity of slavery, which it did successfully.

To "grow like Topsy originally meant to grow without planning or design. Today, observes "The Word Detective, an online reference work, "grow like Topsy' is most often heard in criticism of bureaucratic institutions or government budgets for whose bloated sprawl and inefficiency no one is eager to take credit.

Stowe's depiction of slavery in her novel was informed by her Christianity and by her immersion in abolitionist writings. In Uncle Tom's Cabin she made her case against slavery by cataloging the suffering experienced by enslaved people and by showing that their owners were morally broken.

The character was seen by many readers as a ground-breaking humanistic portrayal of a slave, one who uses nonresistance and gives his life to protect others who have escaped from slavery. Maryland attorney Jim Henson outside the cabin where his relative, Josiah Henson, lived as a slave. Eva's death isn't a martyrdom; she dies of natural causes , and Stowe gives us the sense that she's gently being taken up to Heaven.

Nevertheless, she's so much of a Christ figure that we can't help feeling her death foreshadows Tom's.