St.

Clare’s cousin Miss Ophelia is a pious, hard-working, abolitionist from the

North. She's also unmarried, and beyond marrying age. When St. Clare brings her back
to his Louisiana home to care for Eva while Marie St. Clare is "ill," we can tell she’ll
have things whipped into shape with a disgusted sniff in no time.

Even though she’s an abolitionist, however, Miss Ophelia is prejudiced against

blacks. Stowe uses her to satirize the subtle racism of the North. Many northerners
are happy to tell the South what to do about slavery and to condemn southern
practices, but those same northerners are often unwilling to interact personally with
blacks.

In a strange experiment, St. Clare teaches Ophelia about slavery by giving her a slave
of her own: Topsy. St. Clare lets Ophelia educate and treat Topsy according to her
own philosophy without any interference. Miss Ophelia quickly discovers two things:

1. her own secret racism

2. the difficulties involved in teaching slaves who have been brutalized and subjugated
their entire lives.

She tries to do her best with Topsy, teaching her household skills and the catechism,
but actually she’s disgusted by the little girl and hates touching her. All her strict
discipline and even whipping fails to tame Topsy’s wild and crazy ways. Only when
Eva gives Topsy unconditional love does the child begin to change.

Fortunately, Miss Ophelia is an honest woman. When she recognizes her faults, she
rolls up her sleeves and dives in to scrub them away. She immediately understands that
Eva’s innocent love has succeeded where all her stern discipline failed. She goes to St.
Clare and insists that he immediately make out a document that confirms Topsy is
legally hers – an important step that protects Topsy from being sold after St. Clare’s
tragic demise.

After Eva’s death, Ophelia has an open conversation with Topsy, in which she admits
that she doesn’t love the girl yet, but she’ll work hard to change that. As a result, she
wins Topsy over. Topsy becomes a pious, dedicated member of a Christian community
in the North, and eventually a missionary.
Miss Ophelia functions in the story to demonstrate that the problem with slavery
cannot be blamed on the South alone. The northern states play a part through
prejudice, as well as by extraditing slaves through the Fugitive Slave Act. Ophelia also
represents one form of religious practice – although she’s genuinely faithful, there’s
too much strictness and not enough love in her philosophy.

Miss Ophelia’s character also functions in the story in another important way, by
demonstrating how slavery threatens women’s household concerns. For Ophelia,
kitchens become a metaphor for social conditions in the North and South. Northern
kitchens, in Ophelia’s mind, are pictures of economy and cleanliness – just like the
North’s moral stance on slavery. In the South, however, kitchens are disorganized and
wasteful – just like slavery, which is ultimately destructive for all who are involved in
it. In the character of Miss Ophelia, then, Stowe links the political sphere with the
domestic sphere. If only government were more like housekeeping – not just doing
chores, but managing household finances and an entire staff – the world would be a
better place.

Tom’s last earthly master, the brutal Louisiana plantation owner Simon Legree, is one
of the four most famous characters in Uncle Tom’s Cabin – but he doesn’t appear until
two-thirds of the way through the novel. Legree’s fame isn’t based on his complexity

Legree is evil, thoroughly and remorselessly evil. He has no redeeming features. He’s
got a conscience, but he’s trampled it under and decided to behave with utterly
inhuman cruelty. Once Legree appears, as savvy readers, we know that Tom is
doomed.

Like the worst villains in Shakespeare’s tragedies, Simon Legree is what English
major-y people call a "motiveless malignancy." That’s a fancy way of saying that he’s
devoted himself to work evil without any real, solid reasons.

There are things Legree cares about: profit, for example, and dominating other people.
And he’s a sadist, so he enjoys tormenting other people and swaggering around
inspiring fear. But Legree’s abuse of Tom goes beyond any of these motivations. He
hates Tom, as the novel says. Legree and Tom are in conflict largely because Tom is
Good and Legree is Evil. Once again, Uncle Tom’s Cabin uses archetypes so much
that it’s almost, but not quite, an allegory.
One of the problems with having Tom’s final antagonist be a "motiveless malignancy"
is that it makes him a pretty unrealistic character.

The point, however, is that men like Simon Legree could and did exist, and they were
largely immune from punishment under American laws. Legree can torture and murder
his slaves. He can refuse to let them practice their religion. He can keep them half-
starved. He can buy fifteen-year-old Emmeline and use her as a sex slave if he wants.

Stowe wants her reader to feel alarmed at even the possibility that someone like
Legree could rule men, women, and children with impunity. She shows how the
institution of slavery itself could cause even the best of men, like Mr. Shelby and
Augustine St. Clare, to slip into sin. And when you have men whose moral nature is
coarse, unrefined, and unresponsive to conscience, who are kept unchecked by the law,
the cruelty they can perpetuate is terrifying to contemplate

Legree represents what happens when you give one man total power over another.
That man inevitably grows corrupt, perhaps not as corrupt as Legree, but who cares?
There are no degrees of corruptness when it comes to owning another person’s body.
Legree illustrates that, because genteel society protects the more gentlemanly, kinder
forms of slavery, it also protects and allows this kind of slavery.

And Legree serves as a reminder, in Stowe’s words, "that no Southern law requires
any test of CHARACTER from the man to whom the absolute power of master is
granted" (source). Thus, the answer is to abolish all forms of slavery – not to try to
"reform" it. There is no "reforming" a system that allows and perpetuates Legree’s
treatment of the men and women he buys.