The merchant of Venice is a play written in the Elizabeth period by famous English playwriter Shakespeare. Uncle Tom's Cabin, a fiction, was written by little American woman right before the civil war. Seemingly, the two world's classic literary works are not likely to share any particular commons. However, we can find interesting commons between them which is very intriguing; the Discrimination between races.
For one, let's focus on discrimination depicted in the works. It is not very exacting to find racism in Uncle Tom's Cabin written in order to straighten the slavery. The discrimination between the black and white is not only an indispensable element of the fiction but leads the fiction's theme. In Uncle Tom's Cabin, the black are considered to be inferior to the white and subordinate to them. The bad white people have contemptuous attitude to the black while good behave based on a sense of superiority. Even more, the black are suffering tremendously as the white's slaves. Compared to that of Uncle Tom's Cabin, the discrimination in The Merchant of Venice is somewhat indirect. However, If you can be a little more careful, you might find prevailing the racism between Latinos and Jews in the play which is sometimes thought very offensive. For example, the Jews are supposed to lie in the ghettos. Shylock was thrown the rocks in the middle of the streets only because he is jewish. Not only that, the attitude of Italian towards Jessica vividly reveals the contemptuous feeling towards Jews. Considering that we cannot say that the racism is completely eradicated even in now, the fact that the two literatures written in centuries ago both contain a discriminating element is very interesting.
However, the bottom line is that the discrimination in the works are substantially different from the other. In other words, the attitude and purpose of discrimination are extremely disparate. Although it is not directly related with the theme of play, The Merchant of Venice is very discriminating by itself. To be more specific, around the play, Shakespeare depicts Jew to be inferior, nasty and avaricious. It is more likely to be a denunciation and outrage to Jew than a description of the character of Shylock. This culminates in the end of the play when Antonio forces Shylock to be a Christian which based on the thought that Christianity is superior to Judaism. In this perspective, Uncle Tom's Cabin is on the contrary of the merchant of Venice. Uncle Tom's Cabin which provoked the civil war actually raises a question about discrimination itself. Despite some sense of superiority of the white found in the fiction, it focuses on the cruelty of the slavery by depicting the sufferings of the black, strongly insisting that the black also are a human being must be esteemed. That means, the direction between two discriminations is completely different. The gap between the time the works were written is about 200 years. However, it seems that the gap between the attitude of the racism of the two works far outweight the former gap.
We have focused on the brief summary and the disposition of the discrimination in the Uncle Tom's Cabin and The Merchant of Venice. Even though both are considered to be classic works, they are like a nightmare to every Jew and African-American in the world. It is very interesting that despite the extremely different perspective of the works, both literatures are targets of hatred. After deep consideration, it is not that strange, though. Let's think about it. Every race would be humiliated and offended when they were written in the literary work by a person who not only drew distinctions to them but knows only little part of them. I could feel that emotion too when the contention of "Yoko Story" was raised. Regardless of what a purpose is, it is impossible for every person in every races to ignore a denial of itself.
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