For Travis

Preface

**Are there any lives of women?"

"No, my dear," said Mr. Sewell; "in the old times, women did not get their lives written, though 1 don't doubt many of them were much better worth writing than the men's."

Harriet Beecher Stowe, Tlie Pearl of Orr's Island

Few in the nineteenth century could have doubted that Harriet Beecher Stowe's life was worth writing. When she met Abraham Lincoln at the White House in 1862, the lanky, angular president is said to have greeted Stowe, who stood less than five feet high, with the words, "So you're the little woman who wrote the book that started this great war!" Catapulted to international fame with the publication of Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852), Harriet Beecher Stowe became one of America's best-paid and most-sought-after writers. At the World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893 Stowe's works were accorded a position of honor in the library of the Woman's Building. Displayed in an elliptical mahogany case with glass all around were first editions of Uncle Tom's Cabin and A Key to Uncle Tom's Cabin, a special edition of twenty volumes of her works bound in calf, translations of Uncle Tom^'s Cabin into forty-two languages, including Armenian, Illyrian, Servian, Russian, and Welsh, and a letter announcing two editions of Uncle Tom's Cabin in the Island of Java.'

Stowe's very success has made it difficult to evaluate her role in our cultural history. In a life that spanned all but fifteen years of the nineteenth century Stowe spoke to a nation deeply divided by race, sex, region, and class. Speaking to the masses meant negotiating diverse and even contradictory cultures. How successfully she accomplished this, and with what cost to various subcultures, continues to be a subject of fierce debate. In her time southern readers objected to her portrayal of slavery in Uncle Tom's Cabin. In our time African Americans have objected to Stowe's racial stereotypes. To engage her life is to engage the plurality and contradiction of American culture.

It is also to challenge twentieth-century notions of art and excellence. Uncle Tom's Cabin was not only translated into foreign tongues, it was transmuted into song, theater, statuary, toys, games, handkerchiefs, wallpapers.

plates, spoons, candlesticks, and every form of kitsch that the commercial mind could imagine—a phenomenon that puts it on the level of the Davy Crockett fad of the 1950s or the Ninja Turtle craze of the 1980s. Can anything so popular be considered "art?" By the canons of academic scholarship, "popular" writers cannot pretend to the status of "artists." Yet Stowe's nineteenth-century popularity was not framed by such notions of cultural hierarchy.^

Stowe began her career in the parlor, writing stories for a Cincinnati literary club. Writing during the transition of literature from an amateur pastime to a business, Stowe's career marks both the flowering and the passing of what I call "parlor literature." Written for entertainment, instruction, and amusement, meant to be read aloud, these domestic literary productions were an integral part of polite society in antebellum America and were as accessible to women as to men. Before literature split into "high" and "low" forms in the 1850s and 60s, best-selling novels were extensions of parlor literature.

At a time when literature was not a particularly respected or lucrative occupation, Harriet Beecher was one of many women who began writing sketches and stories for magazines. Speaking in the conversational voice of a parlor letter writer, she addressed a nation in the throes of a vast transformation: the creation of a national culture. It is not incidental that her first book was a geography. Her 1830s sketches of regional types introduced the American West and the American East to one another, pioneering the use of dialect. Although she wrote a volume of religious poetry, Stowe's "hankering for slang" and delight in the rhythms of everyday speech made prose her natural element. "Did you ever think of the rythmical power of prose," she wrote to George Eliot, "how every writer when they get warm fall into a certain swing & rhythm peculiar to themselves the words all having their place and sentences their cadances."^ In 1839 her stories began appearing in Godey's Lady's Book, the only periodical that, by soliciting and paying for original material, supported the development of American authors and American literature.

As the national culture and the publishing business reached the takeoff stage in the 1850s, women were strategically placed to profit from a sphere of activity that had been inadvertently left to their busy hands. Precisely because literature had not been professionalized, because it was only just beginning to be recognized as an occupation that might honorably support an independent life, women were allowed to practice what became for many a highly lucrative and influential career. "The ninth wave of the nineteenth century is the Destiny of Woman," concluded Sarah Joscpha Hale, editor of Godey's Lady's Book, as she surveyed at midcentury the extraordinary burst of literary activity: "Within the last fifty years more books have been written by women and about women than all that had been issued during the preceding five thousand years."^ Writing women were both a symptom of the social history of the nineteenth century and a powerful force in shaping it.

With the emergence of best-sellers like Susan Warner's The Wide, Wide World (1851) and Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin, women showed how much could be achieved. "It is women who read," wrote Nathaniel Willis in 1859. "It is women who give or withhold a literary reputation. It is the women who regulate the style of living. ... It is the women who exercise the ultimate control over the Press."^

Just as Stowe's rise had to do with her apprenticeship in the parlor, so her decline resulted from the removal of literature from the parlor to institutions to which women had limited access: men's clubs, high-culture journals, and prestigious universities. As literature became professionalized, the voice of the novelist became depersonalized and the standards of art became matters for aesthetic consideration rather than political passion. Influencing public opinion became less important than creating a beautiful product. As the standards for judging literature changed and the voice of the novelist became more formal and distanced, Stowe's writing was judged to be amateur, unprofessional, and *'bad art."

This did not happen, however, without a political struggle. It is revealing to read in the pages of the Nation reviews so hostile to women writers that one contemporary observer suggested the magazine should have been called the **Stag-Nation." In savage reviews of Rebecca Harding Davis and other literary realists, the young Henry James, cutting his literary teeth in the Nation, articulated the agenda of what became known in the twentieth century as the ''new criticism," a formalistic approach to literature that focused on the internal, aesthetic properties of the work and eschewed biography, politics, and cultural analysis. Anyone who harbors the belief that this approach to literature has no political implications will be surprised to see the overtness of the struggle in the 1860s between the dominant women writers and the rising literary establishment of men who were determined to displace them.

This struggle was well underway when Florine Thayer McCray wrote the first full-length biography of Stowe in 1889. Raising the question of Uncle Tom's Cabins artistic merits, McCray contrasted a Jamesian notion of the ''rules of art" to Stowe's shoot-from-the-hip attack on the reader's sensibilities. "It must be a technical mind which can learnedly discuss the work as tested by the criteria of modern art criticism," she wrote. Contrasting Stowe's strongly marked moral and social types with the "emasculated" characters of modern fiction whose virtues and faults were elaborated with "finical anxiety," McCray observed, "[s]he had no inclination to reduce her strong points to the polished level obtained by many writers. Their indecision (which they mistake for liberality) prevents them from making an enduring impress upon the age."^ Making an "impress upon the age" was what all of the Beechers aimed to do.

When Stowe learned of McCray's intent to publish a biography of herself, she reacted with alarm. This had nothing to do with McCray's interpretation, which was not unbalanced, nor McCray's unreliability with dates, which

matched that of her subject. It had rather to do with the question of who could claim her life as literary property. All of the Beechers had made a good deal of literary capital out of their daily doings and sayings; from pulpit pronouncements to travel letters to tips on gardening or memorials for the dead, they regularly transformed the material of their everyday lives into magazine copy, and they were as careful stewards of their lives as they were of American culture. After the success of Uncle Tom's Cabin, Stowe's life was much in demand. In 1868 a literary promoter had urged the Rev. E. P. Parker of South Church in Hartford to write Stowe's biography. The promoter let it be known that if Stowe would not cooperate with Parker, there was another party prepared to write her biography without her consent. Calvin Stowe, suspecting that this other party was Leonard Bacon, editor of the Independenty advised Harriet to choose Parker as the lesser of two evils: "Parker, with your consent & aid, would do it faithfully, delicately & well; and if it must be done, would n't that be better than to be paved over with Bacon fat?"" Stowe managed to limit Parker's incursions into her life to a brief sketch compiled from published materials.^

Stowe had understood that Florine McCray, an occasional visitor in her Hartford home, had intended to do a similar short sketch, and she sent her a two-sentence letter acknowledging her project. When she learned that McCray's intent was considerably more ambitious, she denounced this putative "authorized biography" by placing the following notice in the newspaper: "Permit me to say, that all reports with regard to any authorised edition of my life, are without foundation. I have placed all the letters & documents for this purpose in the hands of my son & neither he nor I have authorised any one to circulate such reports as have appeared of late in various papers.'"^ She sent out an alert to European friends to retrieve her letters so that she could place them in her son's hands.'"They complied, and in 1889 Houghton Mifflin published Charles Stowe's Life of Harriet Beecher Stou^e, Compiled from Her Letters and Journals. A European visitor who called on her during these final years described her as "a wonderfully agile old lady, as fresh as a squirrel still, but with the face and air of a lion.""

After her death in 1896 friends and family closed ranks around her literary remains. Annie Fields, her close friend and wife of her publisher, issued her Life and Letters of Harriet Beecher Stowe (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1897) the following year. "The moment has at last arrived when the story of Mrs. Stowe's life can be given in full," she announced in her preface, yet her portrait of "one who led the vanguard" in the "great sacrifice" of the Civil War continued the hagiographical mode of Charles Stowe's account of his mother's life. Nor was it interrupted when Charles Stowe coauthored, with Stowe's grandson, Lyman Beecher Stowe, The Life of Harriet Beecher Stowe (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1911). There has since been only one attempt at a definitive biography, Forrest Wilson's Crusader in Crinoline (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1941), now over fifty years old. Since then a wealth of new material has come to light. These include many new letters from

Harriet Beecher Stowe, the letters of Calviij Stowe to Harriet, the "circular letters" the Beecher family wrote to one another in the 1830s and 40s, the diary Charles Beecher kept of Stowe's 1853 European tour, and many more items. In addition, the civil rights and women's movements have created new constituencies to contend Stowe's reputation and significance. It is time for a new biography of Stowe.

A deeply reserved woman, Harriet Beecher Stowe did not reveal herself easily. Her brother Charles remarked that her letters were not "the artless expression of spontaneous emotions. She is not in her letter pouring forth feeling merely because she feels it but planning by the combination of such and such feelings and thoughts to produce a given effect."'^ Like her father, Harriet was energetic, optimistic, an inveterate believer and a natural preacher. She believed not only in the Christianity of her heritage, but in almost every fad of the nineteenth century. She dabbled in mesmerism and spiritualism and became an avid devotee of the water cure, electricity treatments, and the movement cure. Her uncritical appetite for whatever was in the air led her to mix the profoundest currents of American democracy and religion—such as abolition and perfectionism—with the snake oil of popular culture. Her ready response to currents in her culture enabled her to intervene in that culture and shape it.

Thought of as a "genius" in a family of eccentrics, Stowe was an odd and whimsical woman. Daguerreotypes and photographs of her show a heavy-lidded woman with large cheekbones and full, sensuous lips; those who knew her said that she looked owlish or beautiful, depending on whether she was withdrawn or animated. An irrepressible sense of humor often compressed her lips into a wry expression. She was driven by the Beecher family sense of mission, but she pursued it with a more tolerant and open temperament than Lyman and Catharine, even though she often fell into family and class chauvinisms. She prized individuality and difference though she freely generalized about classes and races. Her approach is well summarized by her conclusion to her sermon on "Intolerance": "Every human being has some handle by which he may be lifted, some groove in which he was meant to run; and the great work of life, as far as our relations with each other are concerned, is to lift each one by his own proper handle, and run each one in his own proper groove."'^ By placing Stowe's life in the context of her times, I have tried to lift her by her own proper handle, and run her in her own proper groove. At the same time I have tried to place her in frameworks that illuminate the literary history of America during the century in which American literature came into being.

Middletoum, Conn. J. H.

April i993

r

Acknowledgments

I am very grateful to the institutions that provided me the time to work on this book. A fellowship from the Rockefeller Foundation provided a crucial year in which I began inching my way through the mountain of archival material left behind by the Beechers, who knew they were famous and saved abundant documentation of their strenuous efforts to reform the world through Beecherism. A National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship enabled me to write the first half of the book. For a sabbatical and research leave that enabled me to write the second half, I am grateful to the trustees of Trinity College.

The cooperation of many libraries has made this project possible. I wish to thank the staffs at the American Antiquarian Society, Worcester, Massachusetts; the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University; the Boston Public Library, Department of Rare Books and Manuscripts; the Cincinnati Historical Society; the Clements Library, University of Michigan; the Connecticut Historical Society; Dr. Williams's Library, London; the Houghton Library, Harvard University; the Henry E. Huntington Library, San Marino, California; the Library of Congress; the Middlesex County Historical Society, Middletown, Connecticut; the New York Public Library; the Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe College; the Smith College Library; Sterling Memorial Library, Yale University; Trinity College Interlibrary Loan; the Clifton Waller Barrett Library, University of Virginia; and the Watkinson Library, Trinity College.

I am grateful to the Stowe-Day Foundation, Hartford, Connecticut, for permission to quote from the papers of Harriet Beecher Stowe and other Beecher family members. I thank James Parton for permission to quote from Ethel Parton, "Fanny Fern: An Informal Biography." For permission to quote from the Mark Twain Papers I thank the Mark Twain Memorial and the University of California, Berkeley. I am grateful to the Boston Public Library for permission to quote from letters in the Anti-Slavery Collection and to the Clements Library for permission to quote from the Weld-Grimke Papers.

Much of the research for this book was conducted at the Stowe-Day

Library, Hartford, Connecticut, and I wish to give special thanks to their staff, particularly to Roberta Bradford and Tom Harkins, who were there in 1983 when I began my research, to Joseph Van Why, the former director, to Earl French, and to Beverly Zell, Diana Royce and Suzanne Zack, who provided efficient, professional, and extremely knowledgeable support.

Several chapters have been published in slightly different form: chapter 8 in Signs (Winter 1992), chapter 14 in Women's Studies (1991), and chapter 22 in American Quarterly (September 1988). I am grateful to the editors of those journals for their assistance and for permission to use these materials.

I am fortunate to have a wonderful set of colleagues whose support has been consistent and sustaining. Barbara Sicherman's help and encouragement were key in the early stages of this biography and she has remained a steady advisor, counselor, and friend, ready to read a chapter at the drop of a hat. Joseph W. Reed's high standards of narrative biography shaped my initial view of the book. He also read the first half of the manuscript and made helpful suggestions, as did Robert L. Edwards, Paul Lauter, and Margaret Randall. I am grateful to the late Carol B. Ohmann for teaching me about the importance of voice to nineteenth-century women writers. The Feminist Writers Group—Ann duCille, Farah Griffin, Gertrude Hughes, Barbara Sicherman, Indira Karamcheti, and Laura Wexler—read several chapters and many drafts of"the preface; their spirited responses were clarifying and encouraging. J. Ronald Spencer read the entire manuscript with a care and thoughtfulness for which I am extremely grateful. Maurine Green-wald and Gertrude Hughes provided suggestions that improved chapter 9. I am grateful to Mary De Jong for her helpful suggestions on chapter 14 and to Ann duCille for her perceptive comments on chapters 17 and 18. Many people have generously shared their knowledge: Lynette Carpenter, H. Bruce Franklin, Patricia Hill, Daniel Hurley, Carolyn Karcher, E. Bruce Kirkham, Peggy Mcintosh, Marianne L. Novy, Cynthia Reik, Lyde Cullen Sizer, and William Stowe. John Gilchrist, a descendant of John Pierce Brace, generously made available a list of books from Brace's library.

Tammy Banks-Spooner and Ann Morrissey provided wonderful research assistance. In the final stages of this project, Ann tracked down undocumented quotations and bits of arcane information with unrelenting zeal. I am truly in her debt. At Oxford University Press, my editor, Liz Maguire, and her assistant, T. Susan Chang, gave me steady support, while Paul Schlotthauer and Phillip Holthaus read the manuscript with a care and engagement that inspired me to persevere through the minutiae involved in the final preparation of the book for press.

Friends and family have sustained me over the ten years of this project. Jane and David Ruhmkorff provided hospitality on a trip to the Cincinnati Historical Society. Neighbors Anna Salafia and Virginia Keene have been unflagging in their support and encouragement. Mar\ Simunich's eagerness to read this book was a spur to finish. My daughters, Jessica and Rachel,

have buoyed me by their respect for and interest in my work, as have my brother, Michael Doran, and sister, Patricia Doran Wombacher. For twenty-five years of companionship and support I am grateful to Travis Hedrick, to whom this book is dedicated. More pages than I can count bear the imprint of his reference books, his fund of general infornjation, and his sense of style.