Loading Likes... I found the scene in which Eliza tells Tom that Mr. Shelby has sold him and Harry particularly moving, especially the apostrophe to the reader, as the narrator says:

“Sobs, heavy, hoarse and loud, shook the chair, and great tears fell through his fingers on the floor; just such tears, sir, as you dropped into the coffin where lay your first-born son; such tears, woman, as you shed when you heard the cries of your dying babe. For, sir, he was a man,—and you are but another man. And, woman, though dressed in silk and jewels, you are but a woman, and, in life’s great straits and mighty griefs, ye feel but one sorrow!” (Stowe 44)

The insertion of “sir” and “woman” serves as a stark address to the reader in an effort to appeal to their sympathy regarding the gut-wrenching sorrow felt by Tom upon discovering that his entire world has become uprooted as he has been sold to the trader. I found this approach to pathos interesting as Stowe has already developed the appeal to saving one’s child through Eliza’s actions in more subtle ways; both Mrs. Shelby and Eliza acknowledge the horror of the notion of Harry being stripped from his mother’s arms. However, Stowe refrains from drawing the reader in until she presents the pain felt by Uncle Tom upon discovering his fate. I wonder if this signifies Stowe’s recognition that a white reader might already understand the sorrows of losing a child, but could not fathom the inhumanity of discovering that one’s own flesh has been sold to another human. Stowe’s reference to the “silk and jewels” of a wealthier reader also subverts the idea of differences based on wealth in addition to race, revealing that central to humanity is a shared understanding of pain.