Cassy, of course, has been used sexually since her early teens. Like all the African and African-American slave girls and women sold for such use, she was not only less able to resist but was thought to be more sexually passionate than white women — sexual passion being, in sentimental / Gothic tradition, a "masculine" attribute which, in a woman, calls for punishment. Ironically, the use to which Cassy has been put has indeed driven her nearly mad (the same is true of Rhys's Antoinette), and Tom's first glimpse of her through a window in Legree's house is of that stereotypical "madwoman." But by the time she "haunts" the attic with Emmeline, Cassy has recovered her sanity with Tom's help, and her appearance as a Gothic figure now is only a parody of the stereotype.
The Gothic typically divides the sentimental heroine into two parts — one, the "dark woman" whose passions make her dangerous; the other, the "fair" woman (although of course these physical characteristics are not always adhered to) who is often portrayed as nearly sexless and whose attractions (to the hero, but also to the villain or monster) are those of a victim, arousing sadistic interest in the villain, the urge to protect in the hero (but these two are often more closely related to each other than either would like to admit). This "fair" Gothic woman is an exaggeration of the helpless, fluttery, and fainting sentimental heroine so fashionable in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and her death (or her near-death, if the sentimental plot is stronger than the Gothic) is an almost obligatory scene in Gothic novels from The Castle of Otranto to Dracula. There is, of course, such a character in Uncle Tom's Cabin: it is Eva, the little girl whose death dominated early dramatic productions based (often very loosely) on the novel.
