The Martyrdom of Uncle Tom

The Martyrdom of Uncle Tom

A Close Reading and Interpretation

            Uncle Tom’s Cabin, the best selling book of the entire nineteenth century, held a unique position as one of the most influential critiques of slavery during the 1850’s. Its archetypal characters, use of irony, and allegorical employment of iconography all made this novel a compelling vehicle for Harriet Beecher Stowe’s condemnation of the chattel slavery system in America. One of the more challenging passages of the novel is the martyrdom of Uncle Tom at the hands of the evil slave master, Simon Legree. In this scene Stowe paints an allegory of the passion narrative of Jesus Christ as Tom is interrogated, threatened and, ultimately, killed. This imagery is intended to be utilized as a means to communicate an equally difficult message: that the dominating master is, himself, a slave to his own passions and the pious and faithful slave is set free in the midst of his suffering and death.

            Tom’s death, placed within the aptly named chapter “The Martyr,” is the culmination of a string of literary references to Tom’s position in the story as a modern-day Apostle or Christ. In a series of scenes Tom is presented to the reader as pious, submissive, selfless, and evangelistic. Tom’s unfortunate journey through the institution of slavery is intended to represent the apostolic journey through heathen lands and Stowe’s audience would have been able to recognize these allusions easily. Tom, unwilling to rebel or flee from captivity, places his life in what he believes to be the benevolent and ultimately providential hands of God. To the highly literate and devout audience Stowe was intending to reach, these intentional Biblical parallels would, again, not have gone unnoticed.

This is certainly the case with the martyrdom of Tom. In this scene Stowe presents a contrast between Tom and Legree and, through the description of body language, vocal inflection, and the vocabulary of each character’s speech. Legree is enraged and ready to commit murder while Tom is calm, in control, at peace, and resigned to his fate. The contrast is wide in this passage and the reader is led to a set of character archetypes that they would have recognized: the cruel and evil tyrant, bloodthirsty and full of intoxicating rage and the serene, faithful, and composed saint full of compassion and forgiveness. The conversation between Tom and Legree (358) communicates all of this, yet Stowe feels obliged to interrupt the building climax, via the narrator, in order to point out to the reader that there is a “spirit of evil,” “rage,” and “vehemence” in Legree about to be unleashed upon Tom (358). Stowe does not immediately return the reader to the cultivated sympathy of Tom’s suffering but, instead, chooses to inject the theological lesson of the crucifixion to the passage. Here she suggests that Tom’s execution is a vehicle by which slavery can be exposed and transformed from “an instrument of torture, degradation, and shame, into a symbol of glory, honor, and immortal life,” (358) in the same way that the Cross of Calvary transformed an instrument of Roman brutality. The analogy here is not satisfied to rest solely on the means, but also incorporates the ends. Just as Christ’s brutal execution brought to salvation the thief on the cross alongside him (and, not to mention, the salvation of all the world and the reunification of God’s “family”), so too does Tom’s execution facilitate the salvation of Sambo and Quimbo and the reunification of Cassy’s and George Harris’ families, a related and alternative theme within the novel that will not be discussed here.

These allegorical scenes do not only contain criticisms, but are also full of ironies and archtypal role-reversals that go to Stowe’s central theme and over-arching message. The first irony to explore is the social faux pas of an antebellum writer creating a fictional Christ-figure out of an African slave. While Stowe’s personal feelings regarding the idea of racial egalitarianism are vague and poorly defined within the novel, we can be sure that her audience – both northerners and southerners – existed in a highly “racialistic” (a term used by George M. Fredrickson in his essay entitled “Romantic Racialism of the North”, 429-438) society that embraced the overly-defined and rigid racial hierarchy which characterized Victorian-era social relations. In short, Stowe fully understood the shock-value of presenting to her audience a black enslaved Christ, and one could surmise that she did so for precisely the reason that it was so potentially outrageous. Another important device provided here is the role-reversal of Simon Legree and Uncle Tom. These two characters represent the furthest extremes of social conditions: one free and one a slave. In the martyrdom scene, however, Stowe attempts – and mostly succeeds – to illuminate the “truth” of the matter: that Simon Legree is the true slave and Tom is truly free. Establishing Simon Legree as a “superstitious man” earlier in the text (347), Stowe provides a psychological profile of fear and mental instability and contrasts it – both throughout the Legree plantation story arc and the martyrdom scene in particular – to the confidence and inner-serenity of the God-fearing Tom. At the climax of Tom and Legree’s confrontation Stowe shows us an out-of-control master, enslaved by his own unbridled passions and a coolly in-control slave, freed from fear and death by an unshakable faith in a benevolent and “wise, all-ruling Father, whose presence fills the void unknown with light and order” (347). The irony of this reversal is inescapable.

It is by playing on this intentional satire that Stowe intends to “preach” her most provocative message: that the vessel of Christ’s gospel – made not of words, but of love and compassion – cannot be defeated by the cruelty and domination of the “kingdom of man.” Her interjection about the natural proclivity of the African race towards the “Christian nature” on page 156, in conjunction with Tom’s own suffering and death, points to the message that, just as Christ’s body was shattered like a vessel to release the power of God’s spirit into the ancient world, so too are the bodies of these Christian slaves shattered in order to release God’s redemptive power into America for the transformation of all humankind. Even in the face of human cruelty and domination, the power of the Christian gospel is not only unrestrained but also propelled forward, touching and transforming the planet one human soul at a time. This scene in Uncle Tom’s Cabin is intended to communicate the superiority of the Christian gospel over all forms of oppression and domination.