As befits its religious preoccupation, the novel presents two instances of a sacrificial death linked to Christ’s. Eva and Tom, the two most morally perfect characters in the novel, both die in atmospheres of charged religious belief, and both die, in a sense, to achieve salvation for others. Eva’s death leads to St. Clare’s deathbed conversion to Christianity and to Ophelia’s recognition and denunciation of her own racial prejudice. Tom’s death leads to Emmeline and Cassy’s escape and to the freedom of all the slaves on the Shelby farm in Kentucky. Both Tom and Eva are explicitly compared to Christ: Ophelia says that Eva resembles Jesus, and the narrator depicts Tom carrying his cross behind Jesus. This motif of Christ-like sacrifice and death enables Stowe to underscore her basic point about Christian goodness while holding up models of moral perfection for her reader to emulate. It also enables her to create the emotionally charged, sentimental death scenes popular in nineteenth-century literature.
