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We mentioned in class on Tuesday that perhaps Stowe puts herself into "Uncle Tom's Cabin" in the character of Miss Ophelia. After yesterday's class I can believe this even more. One of the quotes we considered while trying to locate the "real" was St. Clare describing Miss Ophelia: "...you have a kind of eternal now, always in your mind" (450). She convinces St. Clare to write Topsy over to her, and pressures him to provide for the other slaves in his will, because she fears what would happen to them if he suddenly died (which he proceeds to do).

Stowe is concerned with the same "eternal now." She's not so much interested in huge systematic changes, but in immediate individual changes of heart. This attitude is evidenced by her sentimentality and her emphasis on the guilt of Northers for condoning slavery with their complacency. I think she was probably gratified that her "little book" started a "big war" to end slavery, but her aim was to convince a couple more sinners like St. Clare to change his/her ways and take action in a personal way. Miss Ophelia and Stowe's focus on the "eternal now" is a side effect of their belief in the spiritual as the ultimate "real." What matters to both of them are spiritual transformations; if those take place, changes in the "real" world will follow--and I would say that this is what happened, if "Uncle Tom's Cabin" really did have a hand in prompting the war.

Like Stowe, Miss Ophelia is always personally making an effort to intercede for the well-being of individual people--she tries to save Rosa from a whipping, and she writes (very much like Stowe) a letter to Mr. Shelby aksing him to save Tom. The fact that she usually fails--St. Clare does die and his slaves are sold, Rosa is whipped, Mr. Shelby doesn't reply before Tom is sold--is an interesting reflection on how Stowe felt about her work, if Miss Ophelia is her counterpart. Why is Miss Ophelia always thwarted in her attempts to help the slaves? Maybe to make the book more dramatic and the violence done to the slaves more shocking, and maybe because Stowe felt the same frustration in the face of the apathy and hatred of people around her.