The Gothic aspect of this book has been apparent during the last large group of chapters (from XXXII — "Dark Places" — forward), present in a number of details: the labyrinthine road through cypress swamps and pine forests; the ruined mansion; the mysterious, sexually powerful, and apparently mad "dark lady" (Cassy); and especially the monstrous Simon Legree, whom Cassy identifies metaphorically, at the end of Chapter 36, as a vampire. Even Eva's death, in an earlier chapter, may be seen as an element typically Gothic in its nature (the wasting death of a fair virgin) if not in its character. Now, after Tom's "victory" (over Legree's attempted objectification, and over his own struggle not to allow himself to hate Legree) and his holy death, the Gothic aspect is indeed turned on its head (as critics Gilbert and Gubar have suggested). The "madwoman in the attic" becomes one of the chief "ghosts" haunting this house, and her success in frightening Legree — into allowing her and Emmeline's escape and into drinking himself to death — is grimly comic, especially in the tongue-in-cheek telling of it by Stowe's narrator.
But the deeper irony is that Legree's house is "haunted" — by the ghosts of all Legree's victims, by the ghosts of Cassy's children and Emmeline's mother, by Cassy herself as the ghost of the hopeful, trusting young girl she was long ago. These ghosts will remain in the house after Cassy and Emmeline have glided away in their sheets, and Legree's ghost, after the man's dreadful death, will join them. For these are all the spirits of slavery, rooted in greed, manifest in the use and objectification of human beings by other human beings and antithetical to Christian love. And Legree's decaying mansion, set among cotton fields and swamps, fallen down by now but not yet disappeared, is symbolic of the civilization these spirits will continue to haunt.
