In her work "Uncle Tom's Cabin": Evil, Affliction and Redemptive Love, critic Josephine Donovan says that the main theme of Uncle Tom's Cabin is "the problem of evil [shown on] several levels: theological, moral, economic, political, and practical." Almost certainly, Harriet Beecher Stowe, in writing the novel, set out to show not "the problem of evil" but the problem of a specific evil: the enslavement and use of human beings as the property of other human beings. In order to accomplish this goal in an effectively dramatic fashion, she could not merely present slavery as a monstrous wrong, chewing people up and spitting out what remained of them, physically and spiritually; she had to show it in conflict with a force that she knew to be more than equally powerful: the love of Christ. The theme of the novel then (not a simple theme, either, because of the levels Donovan enumerates) is this conflict.
Slavery is a powerful wrong. It is said to be wrong — in all cases, notwithstanding fair individual treatment of slaves — throughout the novel, first by George Harris, later and at length by Augustine St. Clare, and always by the narrator, directly as well as indirectly through the use of irony. It is shown to be wrong from the beginning of the book, despite the relatively benign setting of Shelby's Kentucky farm; again, individual slaves in individual cases may be well treated and even happy in their situations (as Eliza apparently has been), but the institution not only allows but is entirely based on the objectification of all slaves as commodities. Such objectification is evil, in the kind of actions it permits and supports and in the spiritual damage it does to individuals.
