Eva is certainly not a standard Gothic "fair" heroine, nor is her death brought about (as it ought typically to be) by the Gothic villain of the book, Simon Legree, who does not even appear until after Eva has died. But Eva's presence here, and her dying, are unmistakable signs of the Gothic nature of the book. Critics have noted Eva's resemblance to the frail, oddly sexless, Gothic "fair woman," and readers have questioned the meaning of her death, which is obviously a central incident in the novel. Eva dies of tuberculosis (although the name of the disease is never mentioned), but mythically, it is slavery itself that kills her. For slavery itself is the monster, created by materialism and the profit motive, that towers over everything in Uncle Tom's Cabin.
Simon Legree is one of slavery's embodiments (as, to a lesser degree, are Shelby, Haley, St. Clare, and indeed every white person who refuses or declines to oppose slavery). Legree is, metaphorically and mythically at least, a vampire: Cassy tells Tom that Legree will dog him and have his blood, as indeed Legree eventually does, through the agency of his two overseers. The other slaveowners are vampires as well, achieving their own "life" ("making their living") through slaves whose lives they use. The vampire in literature — from John Polidori's malicious and thinly disguised portrait of Byron in "The Vampyre" to the mysterious monster of Stephen King's 'Salem's Lot — has long been associated with the power of money and class oppression. The most famous of all literary vampires, Bram Stoker's Dracula, is a nobleman who drinks the blood of his own feudal serfs and uses wealth to gain entrance to England. Stowe's novel was published almost 50 years before Stoker's, and she probably had not read Karl Marx on capitalism, but Cassy's metaphor of the profiteer as bloodsucker seems to have been in the nineteenth-century air.
If Uncle Tom's Cabin is a sentimentalist novel, it is certainly also reflective of that inevitable sentimental reflection, the Gothic. In its characters, incidents, themes, and various "trappings," Harriet Beecher Stowe's famous book displays dark Gothic features whose examination may shed new light on this American classic.
