by Maria K.

Created on: September 15, 2011   Last Updated: September 18, 2011

"Uncle Tom's Cabin" is full or archetypes, and Simon Legree is one of them. He is, simply put, the essence of evil, the worst of the worst of the slave owners and traders described in the book. It is no accident that he makes his appearance late in the narrative. Tom's enemy in the final battle of his life must be someone utterly and profoundly bad, and Simon Legree is just such a person.

Nothing about him is attractive. He is a man of mean and unforgiving temper, no manners, propensity for every sort of vice and inhuman cruelty. His outward appearance conceals none of his inner ugliness. Legree's deplorable character, however, is not the worst thing about him - rather, it is his impact on his surroundings and people, his insatiable appetite for corruption and destruction of all things: be it his own home or the spirit of those near him.

Legree's house, purchased from a bankrupt plantation owner and once appointed with taste and sophistication is but a falling-down shell of its former self. And just like the house, the people in Legree's power are broken down physically and morally. The overseers Sambo and Quimbo are not much above the bloodhounds used to chase down the runaway slaves. Cassy - well-educated and intelligent, once a beautiful "almost wife" to a wealthy man - subsists on little more than anger and a desire for revenge. Even Tom, whose faith is unshaken through most of his trials, begins to lose hope when faced with his owner's viciousness and, most of all, with failed attempts to bring some light to other slaves.

Simon Legree builds around himself a wall of hopelessness and darkness, which he considers impenetrable. ...That is, until Tom's death, the clever "ghost" charade played upon him by Cassy, and by his own sick mind, stirred by the encounter with Tom's amulets: the silver dollar given to him by George Shelby and the lock of golden hair from Eva. The latter, in particular, stirs in Legree the memory and guilt of many years past, when he refused to come to the deathbed of his mother and burned her letter and a lock of blond hair, which he is convinced has returned to haunt him.

While other less sympathetic characters are given by the author a chance at redemption (Quimbo and Sambo, the slave hunter Tom Loker), Legree is allowed no such chance. He meets a fittingly dismal end - drinking himself to death and never truly realizing what had happened in his life.

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