[On March 20, 1852,
Harriet Beecher Stowe’s titanic novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin was published
in book form for the first time. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy a handful
of Stowe contexts, leading up to a special post on the wonderful Stowe Center
in Hartford!]
On how and why
to link Stowe to the popular 19th
century literary movement.
I haven’t been
able to find too much information about it, but Harriet
Beecher Stowe’s first published literary work (after 1833’s ground-breaking
educational textbook Primary
Geography for Children) was an 1835 short story collection entitled New England Sketches. Published while
Stowe was living in Cincinnati, the collection nonetheless reflects her deep
and abiding literary and personal interest in New England, one that she would extend
across her career with works in multiple genres: other short story collections
like The
Mayflower; or, Sketches of Scenes and Characters among the Descendants of the
Pilgrims (1843); novels like The
Pearl of Orr’s Island: A Story of the Coast of Maine (1862) and Oldtown
Folks (1869); and nonfiction like Poganuc
People: Their Loves and Lives (1878). Stowe was born and died in
Connecticut, and lived for many years in Maine (where the family moved from
Ohio when Calvin got a job at Bowdoin College), but it was through these and
other literary works that she most fully and influentially contributed to New
England culture.
Better
remembering that central through-line to her literary career helps us challenge
a couple of overarching narratives in important ways. Obviously it complicates
any narrative of Stowe’s writing and her literary interests that focuses only
on UTC, or even on UTC and Dred; but I would also say the opposite: that linking these
different sides to her writing and career reminds us of the deep
interconnections between New England and the South, between the “free” and “slave”
states (as of the immediate antebellum moment), between seemingly divided and
opposed American communities. Stowe was frequently criticized by Southerners
for not being familiar with the Southern communities about which she wrote in
those anti-slavery novels; but among the many problems with that narrative is
that assumption that either Cincinnati or Connecticut were fundamentally divorced
from the world of the antebellum slave South. Nothing could be further from the
truth, as these distinct yet interconnected threads of Stowe’s work and career
illustrate quite effectively.
Engaging with Stowe’s
New England local color writing also helps us (and by us I mean me, as usual)
complicate our general sense of that literary movement’s timing and influences.
I’ve been writing about New England local color since my
dissertation/first book, and there as elsewhere I’ve thought about it (as
many scholars do) as principally a post-Civil War/late 19th century
movement, connected to best-selling writers like Sarah
Orne Jewett, Mary
E. Wilkins Freeman, Rose Terry Cooke,
and many more. Yet if we consider Stowe one of the movement’s originating
voices, and one who began exploring that literary landscape decades before the
Civil War, that could have a couple particularly striking effects: helping us
identify a first wave of New England local color authors in the early 19th
century (a group which would certainly also include Catherine Maria
Sedgwick, from her debut book A
New-England Tale; or Sketches of New-England Character and Manners
[1822] on); and, in the case of Stowe most especially, linking this literary
movement’s origins to social reform generally and abolition specifically in a
way that offers one more argument for seeing New England local color writing as
anything but provincial or limited.
Next
StoweStudying tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you
think?
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