Motifs are recurring structures, contrasts, and literary
devices that can help to develop and inform the text’s major themes.
Christ Figures
As befits its religious preoccupation, the novel presents
two instances of a sacrificial death linked to Christ’s. Eva and
Tom, the two most morally perfect characters in the novel, both
die in atmospheres of charged religious belief, and both die, in
a sense, to achieve salvation for others. Eva’s death leads
to St. Clare’s deathbed conversion to Christianity and to Ophelia’s
recognition and denunciation of her own racial prejudice. Tom’s
death leads to Emmeline and Cassy’s escape and to the freedom of
all the slaves on the Shelby farm in Kentucky. Both Tom and Eva
are explicitly compared to Christ: Ophelia says that Eva resembles
Jesus, and the narrator depicts Tom carrying his cross behind Jesus.
This motif of Christ-like sacrifice and death enables Stowe to underscore
her basic point about Christian goodness while holding up models
of moral perfection for her reader to emulate. It also enables her
to create the emotionally charged, sentimental death scenes popular
in nineteenth-century literature.
The Supernatural
Several supernatural instances of divine intervention
in the novel suggest that a higher order exists to oppose slavery.
For instance, when Eliza leaps over the Ohio river, jumping rapidly
between blocks of ice without fear or pain, the text tells us that
she has been endowed with a “strength such as God gives only to
the desperate,” facilitating her escape from oppression. Similarly,
when Tom’s faith begins to lapse at the Legree plantation, he is
visited by religious visions that restore it, thus sustaining him
in his passive resistance of Legree. Before Eva dies, she glimpses
a view of heaven and experiences a miraculous presentiment of her
own death; these occurrences reinforce Eva’s purity and add moral
authority to her anti-slavery stance.
Instances of supernaturalism thus support various characters
in their efforts to resist or fight slavery. But they also serve
to thwart other characters in their efforts to practice slavery.
Thus, as Legree pursues his oppression of Tom, he has an upsetting
vision of his dead mother and becomes temporarily paralyzed by an
apparition of a ghost in the fog. The fear caused by this
apparition weakens Legree to the point that Cassy and Emmeline can
trick him into believing that ghosts haunt the garret. This ploy
enables them to escape.
