Themes are the fundamental and often universal ideas
explored in a literary work.
The Evil of Slavery
Uncle Tom’s Cabin was written after the
passage of the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850,
which made it illegal for anyone in the United States to offer aid
or assistance to a runaway slave. The novel seeks to attack this
law and the institution it protected, ceaselessly advocating the
immediate emancipation of the slaves and freedom for all people.
Each of Stowe’s scenes, while serving to further character and plot,
also serves, without exception, to persuade the reader—especially
the Northern reader of Stowe’s time—that slavery is evil, un-Christian,
and intolerable in a civil society.
For most of the novel, Stowe explores the question of
slavery in a fairly mild setting, in which slaves and masters have
seemingly positive relationships. At the Shelbys’ house, and again
at the St. Clares’, the slaves have kindly masters who do not abuse
or mistreat them. Stowe does not offer these settings in order to
show slavery’s evil as conditional. She seeks to expose the vices
of slavery even in its best-case scenario. Though Shelby and St.
Clare possess kindness and intelligence, their ability to tolerate
slavery renders them hypocritical and morally weak. Even under kind
masters, slaves suffer, as we see when a financially struggling
Shelby guiltily destroys Tom’s family by selling Tom, and when the
fiercely selfish Marie, by demanding attention be given to herself,
prevents the St. Clare slaves from mourning the death of her own
angelic daughter, Eva. A common contemporary defense of slavery
claimed that the institution benefited the slaves because most masters
acted in their slaves’ best interest. Stowe refutes this
argument with her biting portrayals, insisting that the slave’s
best interest can lie only in obtaining freedom.
In the final third of the book, Stowe leaves behind the
pleasant veneer of life at the Shelby and St. Clare houses and takes
her reader into the Legree plantation, where the evil of slavery
appears in its most naked and hideous form. This harsh and barbaric
setting, in which slaves suffer beatings, sexual abuse, and even
murder, introduces the power of shock into Stowe’s argument. If
slavery is wrong in the best of cases, in the worst of cases it
is nightmarish and inhuman. In the book’s structural progression
between “pleasant” and hellish plantations, we can detect Stowe’s
rhetorical methods. First she deflates the defense of the pro-slavery
reader by showing the evil of the “best” kind of slavery. She then
presents her own case against slavery by showing the shocking wickedness
of slavery at its worst.
The Incompatibility of
Slavery & Christian Values
Writing for a predominantly religious, predominantly Protestant audience,
Stowe takes great pains to illustrate the fact that the system of
slavery and the moral code of Christianity oppose each other. No
Christian, she insists, should be able to tolerate slavery. Throughout
the novel, the more religious a character is, the more he or she
objects to slavery. Eva, the most morally perfect white character
in the novel, fails to understand why anyone would see a difference
between blacks and whites. In contrast, the morally revolting, nonreligious
Legree practices slavery almost as a policy of deliberate blasphemy
and evil. Christianity, in Stowe’s novel, rests on a principle of
universal love. If all people were to put this principle into practice,
Stowe insists, it would be impossible for one segment of humanity
to oppress and enslave another. Thus, not only are Christianity
and slavery incompatible, but Christianity can actually be used
to fight slavery.
The slave hunter Tom Loker learns this lesson after his
life is spared by the slaves he tried to capture, and after being
healed by the generous-hearted and deeply religious Quakers. He
becomes a changed man. Moreover, Uncle Tom ultimately triumphs over
slavery in his adherence to Christ’s command to “love thine enemy.” He
refuses to compromise his Christian faith in the face of the many trials
he undergoes at Legree’s plantation. When he is beaten to death
by Legree and his men, he dies forgiving them. In this way, Tom
becomes a Christian martyr, a model for the behavior of both whites
and blacks. The story of his life both exposes the evil of slavery—its
incompatibility with Christian virtue—and points the way to its
transformation through Christian love.
The Moral Power of Women
Although Stowe wrote Uncle Tom’s Cabin before
the widespread growth of the women’s rights movement of the late 1800s,
the reader can nevertheless regard the book as a specimen of early
feminism. The text portrays women as morally conscientious,
committed, and courageous—indeed, often as more morally
conscientious, committed, and courageous than men. Stowe implies
a parallel between the oppression of blacks and the oppression of
women, yet she expresses hope for the oppressed in her presentation
of women as effectively influencing their husbands. Moreover, she
shows how this show of strength by one oppressed group can help
to alleviate the oppression of the other. White women can use their
influence to convince their husbands—the people with voting rights—of
the evil of slavery.
