Uncle Tom's Cabin and Surfacing - Book Report/Review Example

Set in the wilderness of Canadian islands, it is a hauntingly evocative mystery story. Although the stories of both the novels are separated by a century and a half, and take place in different countries, they both leave an indelible impression on the reader's mind. While Eliza in Uncle Tom's Cabin faces many hardships before she attains freedom, the narrator of Surfacing deals with the internal upheavals in her mind to attain emotional freedom. Both the women refuse to think that they are weak and powerless .. Surfacing is the contemporary story of an unnamed young woman, who goes to a remote island in northern Canada with her friends, a married couple David and Anna, and her lover Joe.

The narrator is a white Canadian who had spent a large part of her childhood in the island. She wants to look for her missing father, a botanist there. She is fleeing from the gross materialization of her land. Uncle Tom's Cabin, on the other hand is set in the American South of the nineteenth century when slavery was widespread and socially sanctioned there. Eliza who is a slave in Mr. Shelby's household, is running to save her little son from being taken away forcibly from her. The narrator in Surfacing is sexually emancipated. . For both the characters, Eliza and the narrator in Surfacing, the loss of children is a traumatic experience.

Eliza lost two infants "whom she mourned with a grief so intense as to call for gentle remonstrance from her mistress, who sought, with maternal anxiety, to direct her naturally passionate feelings within the bounds of reason and religion" (Stowe 20) Thus while Eliza finds solace for her grief in religion, the narrator of Surfacing represses her emotions Both the young women are running away from something- Eliza from slavery and oppression, and the narrator of Surfacing from Americanization and materialization of her country.

One of them is running to the beloved place of her childhood and to freedom of the soul, while the other is leaving behind the safe haven of her childhood and running away to freedom and imagined safety. When she sets out on her journey with her friends, the narrator of Surfacing exclaims, , "I can't believe I'm on this road again."(Atwood 1) She is reliving her past, recollecting familiar sights and landmarks from her childhood, and trying to find herself. She is fleeing to the place she had grown up in, to the loved sights and sounds of her childhood.

Eliza, on the other hand, is fleeing from the only home she knew, from all that she loved and from a kind and loving mistress. Eliza is fleeing to save her little son from being taken away from her by the slave trader. In Stowe's words, "It is impossible to conceive of a human creature more wholly desolate and forlorn than Eliza."(Stowe 71) She was going away never to return from the place she had grown up in. Eliza's maternal love which had been "Wrought into a paroxysm of frenzy by