Uncle Tom's Cabin Lesson Plan

Discuss Miss Ophelia's contradictory beliefs about black people. Why might she feel as she does?

Miss Ophelia is against slavery and claims to believe in full legal equality for black people, but she cannot show actual affection to black people the way Eva does. She believes that every person is simply responsible for their own behavior, an ethic that Stowe implies was instilled in her by the culture of New England; however, she seems to have had very few interactions with actual black people in the course of her life, and does see white and black people as separate—not in exactly the way Marie does, but in a way that maintains a distance between her and anyone who is not a...