Romantic love also comes to play a role in fighting slavery
as both Aunt Chloe and Mrs. Shelby demonstrate through their paralleled
devotion to their respective husbands. Chloe resolves to work to
help buy Tom out of slavery, while Mrs. Shelby endeavors to help her
husband with his money matters. Both women try to free their husbands
with their love—to free Uncle Tom on a literal level, and to free
Mr. Shelby from his financial straights. In portraying the redemptive
power of love as embodied in these two women, Stowe mixes love and
her feminist theme, once again giving power to her female characters
and depicting them as wiser than their male counterparts. Moreover,
Stowe’s feminism here may extend beyond a mere indication of the
insight and virtue of women to a directly political observation.
As the reader sees in this section, although Mrs. Shelby enjoys
much freedom relative to her slave, she remains in a similarly subjected
state. Like Mrs. Bird in Chapter IX, she must appear to stand behind
her husband and pursue her own causes through him, even if she does
not support his opinions and actions. Stowe seems to suggest the
folly in such a convention.
Yet while Stowe may hint at the oppression of women, she focuses
primarily on the oppression of blacks, and the argument between
St. Clare and Alfred in Chapter XXIII contains one of the most honest
discussions of slavery in the book. Alfred openly admits his desire
to keep slaves, as well as their own desire not to be slaves. Logical
and upfront about the issue, he does not try to make excuses for
himself. Both brothers seem to regard the enslavement of others as
a natural human tendency. Stowe suggests that people possess an innate
greed and an innate love of power and that the system of slavery
results directly from these human failings. Accordingly, Stowe implies
that, to abolish slavery, people should not resort to complicated
political maneuverings; instead, they must learn to curb innate human
impulses on a fundamental level. And in this section she strongly
intimates that the agent of that change will be love—the kind of
love Eva exhibits toward Dodo in this chapter.
A simple but important instance of foreshadowing occurs
in Chapter XXII, when Eva and Tom read the Bible, and Eva says that she
will soon be going to heaven to join the angels. Tom notices that Eva
does not look well, but the text does not explore the matter further.
Stowe uses this scene to foreshadow Eva’s eventual death in Chapter
XXVI. The young girl’s apparent foreknowledge of her own death introduces
a perhaps unfortunate piece of nineteenth-century melodrama, but
it does serve to underscore Eva’s basic saintliness and goodness.
The little girl is so pure that she is already in touch with heaven.
The fact of Eva’s moral perfection adds authority to her loving
actions and puts extra force behind her innocent but political observations.
