Table of Contents
THE MINISTER’S WOOING
Title Page
Copyright Page
Introduction
CHAPTER I - Pre-Railroad Times
CHAPTER II - The Kitchen
CHAPTER III - The Interview
CHAPTER IV - Theological Tea
CHAPTER V - The Letter
CHAPTER VI - The Doctor
CHAPTER VII - The Friends and Relations of James
CHAPTER VIII - Which Treats of Romance
CHAPTER IX - Which Treats of Things Seen
CHAPTER X - The Test of Theology
CHAPTER XI - The Practical Test
CHAPTER XII - Miss Prissy
CHAPTER XIII - The Party
CHAPTER XIV - Aaron Burr
CHAPTER XV - The Sermon
CHAPTER XVI - The Garret-Boudoir
CHAPTER XVII - Polemics in the Kitchen
CHAPTER XVIII - Evidences
CHAPTER XIX - Madame de Frontignac
CHAPTER XX - Tidings from Over Sea
CHAPTER XXI - The Bruised Flax-Flower
CHAPTER XXII - The House of Mourning
CHAPTER XXIII - Views of Divine Government
CHAPTER XXIV - Mysteries
CHAPTER XXV - A Guest at the Cottage
CHAPTER XXVI - The Declaration
CHAPTER XXVII - Surprises
CHAPTER XXVIII - The Betrothed
CHAPTER XXIX - Bustle in the Parish
CHAPTER XXX - The Quilting
CHAPTER XXXI - An Adventure
CHAPTER XXXII - Plain Talk
CHAPTER XXXIII - New England in French Eyes
CHAPTER XXXIV - Consultations and Confidences
CHAPTER XXXV - Old Love and New Duty
CHAPTER XXXVI - Jacob’s Vow
CHAPTER XXXVII - The Question of Duty
CHAPTER XXXVIII - The Transfigured
CHAPTER XXXIX - The Ice Broken
CHAPTER XL - The Sacrifice
CHAPTER XLI - The Wedding
CHAPTER XLII - Last Words
EXPLANATORY NOTES
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THE MINISTER’S WOOING
HARRIET BEECHER was born in Litchfield, Connecticut, on June 14, 1811, the seventh child of the Congregationalist minister Lyman Beecher and his sensitive and intellectual first wife, Roxanna Foote. Among her siblings were Catharine, who would become an advocate for higher education for women, and Henry Ward, who would become one of America’s foremost Congregationalist preachers. Most of the other Beecher children also made substantial contributions to the religious, social, and intellectual life of nineteenth-century America. Harriet Beecher spent eight years in Catharine’s Hartford Female Seminary, both as student and as teacher. In 1832 she left the school to accompany her family to Cincinnati, where her father assumed the presidency of Lane Theological Seminary. The eighteen years that she lived in Cincinnati saw her marriage to Calvin Stowe, professor of biblical literature at Lane, and the birth of six of her seven children. Most important for posterity, her years in Cincinnati nourished her writing career, largely through her participation in the Semi-Colons, a literary club that met weekly, and that encouraged her to write and to publish sketches and short stories. By the early 1850s Harriet Beecher Stowe and her husband were back in New England, where Stowe began producing the books that would make her famous, among them Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852), Dred (1856), The Minister’s Wooing (1859), The Pearl of Orr’s Island (1862), Household Papers and Stories (1865-67), Oldtown Folks (1869), and Poganuc People (1878). Stowe was always tolerant of human foibles, and in her best works tempers moral zeal by humor and wit. Although she is best remembered for Uncle Tom’s Cabin, because its attack on slavery is believed to be one of the factors precipitating the Civil War, in her own time her regionalist and domestic works were celebrated as well. She died on July 1, 1896.
SUSAN K. HARRIS, professor of English at the Pennsylvania State University, is the author of Mark Twain’s Escape from Time: A Study of Patterns and Images (1982), 19th-Century American Women Writers: Interpretive Conventions (1990), and The Courtship of Olivia Landon and Mark Twain (1996), in addition to articles on Harriet Beecher Stowe and other American writers.
DANIELLE CONGER is currently a doctoral candidate in English at the Pennsylvania State University.
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First published in the United States of America by Derby and Jackson, 1859.
This edition with an introduction and notes by Susan K. Harris
published in Penguin Books, 1999.
Introduction and notes copyright © Susan K. Harris, 1999
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LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Stowe, Harriet Beecher, 1811-1896.
The minister’s wooing / Harriet Beecher Stowe ; edited with an
introduction by Susan K. Harris and notes by Susan K. Harris
and Danielle Conger.
p. cm.—(Penguin classics)
Includes bibliographical references (p. ).
eISBN : 978-1-440-67224-8
I. Harris, Susan K., 1945- . II. Conger, Danielle. III. Title.
IV. Series.
PS2954.M5S76 1999
813’.3—dc21 99-19095
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INTRODUCTION
In 1858, the year she began writing The Minister’s Wooing, Harriet Beecher Stowe was forty-seven years old, married to a well-known theologian, Calvin Stowe, and mother of six children. For half a decade she had been world-famous as the author of Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852), the novel that catalyzed the spread of Northern anti-slavery sentiment. The year before she began writing The Minister’s Wooing her son Henry had drowned while swimming in the Connecticut River with his friends. Henry’s death marked the second time Stowe had buried one of her children; another son, one-year-old Charlie, had died of cholera in 1849. Additionally, Stowe remembered her sister Catharine’s grief when Catharine’s fiancé, Alexander Metcalf Fisher, was drowned at sea in 1822. These deaths were especially painful for Stowe and her Calvinist family because none of the victims had indicated signs of “saving grace,” redemption from sin, before they died, and the survivors were haunted by the fear that their loved ones had gone to hell. That fear, and the re-assessment of Calvinist doctrine that it inspired, was the precipitating factor for the writing of The Minister’s Wooing.
The profound Christian impulse at the core of Stowe’s world-view links The Minister’s Wooing both to Uncle Tom’s Cabin and to Dred, her second antislavery novel, published in 1856. As her contemporaries understood, nineteenth-century conceptions of Christian benevolence were the driving force behind Stowe’s opposition to slavery, and theological and moral issues, defined in moderate Christian terms, remained at the center of her concerns throughout her life, whether she was examining American history, contemporary moral issues, or domestic politics. In The Minister’s Wooing she conflates regional history—which she sees as the history of Calvinist Protestants—with everyday life, focusing on the psychological effects of Calvinism as they
were played out on a domestic scale. Set in Newport, Rhode Island, the novel re-creates the experience of living in Calvinist society at the end of the eighteenth century; at the same time, it critiques that society’s key assumptions.
Generically, The Minister’s Wooing is a historical novel, like Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter or Catharine Sedgwick’s Hope Leslie and A New-England Tale—an attempt, through fiction, to create a moral, intellectual, and affective history for New England. Morally, it is most directly concerned with highlighting, yet again, the issue of slavery in the United States, this time examining the way the practice was debated in a self-consciously God-fearing community. Intellectually, the novel seeks to teach a generation that has lost touch with its religious roots about the intellectual discipline imparted by Calvinism’s culture and theology. Affectively, it seeks to show how Calvinist theology, especially the doctrines of predestination and disinterested benevolence, played out on the level of individual psychology and gave rise to an emotionally more accessible idea of the relationship between God and humankind than the Calvinist ideal permitted. To fulfill these goals, the novel’s cast of characters includes historical figures, such as Aaron Burr and Samuel Hopkins, and such historical documents as letters from Stowe’s family, worked into correspondence between characters in the tale. Like other historical novelists, Stowe mixes history and fiction to reflect her temporal setting and to establish authority for her reading of the national experience.
The antebellum period saw a rash of novels, short stories, and documentary narratives that sought to create a history for the by-then-not-so-new nation. As early as the 1820s, as the United States neared its fiftieth birthday, artists of all types, from such painters as Washington Allston and Thomas Cole to such writers as James Fenimore Cooper and Catharine Sedgwick, were busy reconstructing the past. By the 1840s this had become a national pastime, giving rise to the “Romantic historians” John Motley, George Ban-croft, William Prescott, and Francis Parkman, and adding impetus to the nostalgic impulse behind the burgeoning local color movement. With this, a new kind of narrative voice began to emerge—colloquial, ebullient, self-consciously American. By the 1850s that voice had matured into a distinct narrative presence: a narrator who is conscious of being a citizen of a powerful nation, and is simultaneously proud, critical, and intensely interested in transcribing the look and sound of the Republic. These traits mark The Minister’s Wooing: it is one of the last of the antebellum attempts to provide a history for the new country; its narrator speaks from an intensely personal engagement with the historical debates she records, and its philosophy arises from meditations on the juxtaposition of the material and spiritual worlds.
Much of the authority assumed by Stowe’s narrator comes from the author’s own familiarity with the historical issues she engages. In The Minister’s Wooing the segment of America’s past about which Stowe most concerned herself was the religious history of New England, especially the theological debates within the Calvinist sect known as Congregationalists. Many of these debates concerned competing versions of the relationship between God and humankind, especially as regarded the possibilities for salvation, and Stowe engages this aspect of regional history by focusing on the psychological consequences of Calvinist belief. She is, in other words, less concerned with the specifics of the debates—the principles involved—than with the effect of Calvinist doctrines on ordinary people, an interest springing from her own responses to her children’s deaths and from her observations of the responses of family and friends who had been similarly bereaved. This personal interest does not make The Minister’s Wooing an autobiographical novel, however. Rather, Stowe uses her personal and familial history as a springboard for analyzing Calvinist culture in general and the doctrine of disinterested benevolence in particular. As a fiction writer she conducts this exploration through the study of character; one of her strategies is to examine how particular personality types respond when they are subjected to the pressures of Calvinist principles, especially in such psychologically fraught matters as love and death. The debate over predestination, one of Calvinism’s central tenets, provided her with near-laboratory conditions for conducting her investigation.
As articulated by Jonathan Edwards, his disciple Samuel Hopkins, and the other “New Divinity” Calvinists of the eighteenth century, subscription to the doctrine of predestination meant believing that before the beginning of time God had determined which individuals among the generations would be saved (become “elect”) and which damned, a determination unrelated to earthly deeds (“works”) and fixed through time. The fact that God’s decision was irrevocable and that one could not “earn” salvation through works made Calvinism one of the most psychologically demanding of all religions. The constant quibbling about works by the novel’s characters reflects the dispute within Calvinism over whether good deeds might be considered evidence of election, and if so, what actually constituted a work. Even those Calvinists who rejected the idea that works could indicate election, however, held that one must continue doing good deeds in spite of the absence of evidence. First, there was always a chance that works could be a sign that the instrument (that is, the person doing them) was saved even though he or she might not know it. More important, good deeds were considered to contribute to the community (that is, the covenanted, or elect, community) and to the greater glory of God even if the instrument was damned. Samuel Hopkins’s particular refinement of this principle, known as the doctrine of disinterested benevolence, equated self-love with sin and therefore concluded that true virtue consisted of absolute selflessness. Though one could not engage in programmatic selflessness to prove virtue (that would be a sign of self-love, since to be deliberately selfless in order to attain salvation is to think about oneself, therefore to demonstrate self-love), the more one acted out of disinterested benevolence the more likely one was to be saved. In Hopkins’s system, disinterested benevolence ultimately meant that one must be willing to be damned for the greater good and for the glory of God.
The doctrine of predestination may have been the most painful of Calvinist principles because of its apparent irrationality and its devastating effect on individuals who did not feel they had received a sign, and that is why Stowe focuses on it in The Minister’s Wooing. Largely superseded by the time she was writing the novel, predestinarian ideas nevertheless lived both in the tensions of her own family and in the legacy of New England’s dark and gloomy mentality. As a scion of the Beecher dynasty, Stowe saw herself as part of regional history. Her father, Lyman Beecher (1775-1863), had been one of the most important Congregationalist ministers of his generation, and her parents’ courtship and marriage, on which portions of The Minister’s Wooing are based, were legendary in both familial and regional annals. Jonathan Edwards, his daughter Esther, and Esther’s son Aaron Burr, as well as Samuel Hopkins and Ezra Stiles, were all familiar names in the Beecher household, part of the extended New England “family” to which the Beechers belonged. Growing up in a household where Calvinist tenets were a backdrop to family dynamics, Harriet Beecher had the right to see herself at the center of New England history, especially as that history was defined as the evolution of religious doctrines. Like Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter and Sedgwick’s A New-England Tale, her novel is in many ways a record of her generation’s struggle with its religious legacies.
Stowe launches her assault on those legacies through plot rather than through abstract polemics. When her young hero, James Marvyn, is believed lost at sea, his agonized parents cannot honestly say that he had received a sign that he might be among the elect before he died, and the suspicion that her beloved son might be not only physically dead but spiritually damned—actually in the fiery pit—drives his mother to the brink of insanity and apostasy. Even the heroine, Mary Scudder, too saintly to flirt with apostasy, grows pale and thin with dread as she realizes the full import of the creed that she fervently professes. Only the servant Candace, at best a marginal Calvinist, can intervene
here. Traditional Calvinists tended to give more weight to the threats of the Old Testament God than to the promises of the New Testament Savior, and it is the specter of this unsparing deity that plunges Mrs. Marvyn into despair. Candace, however, preaches “Gospel”—Jesus as redeemer—over the doctrine of predestination, and consequently saves Mrs. Marvyn by convincing her that the Son would show mercy even where the Father would not. In effect, Candace displaces the Old Testament God, relocating him in the shadow of Jesus.
This is the pivotal point in the theological plot of The Minister’s Wooing; as many readers have noted, Stowe sets her novel at the historical moment when American Calvinists shifted from a sect cathected on the Father to one cathected on the Son. Certainly Stowe’s own past provided the emotional immediacy for these scenes. Stowe’s text, however, moves beyond the autobiographical in locating its central issues at crucial moments in American religious history. For Calvinists, the transference from Father to Son was accompanied by transfers in the locuses of spiritual authority, from textual rationalism to experiential piety and, to a lesser extent, from men to women. Prior to this shift, “truth” in the text-centered Calvinist community was determined through tortuous interpretation and argumentation—as Hopkins’s System of Theology, pending publication during the course of the novel’s plot, demonstrates. Additionally, religious personnel and practices—the godheads, their mortal interpreters, and the priests who conduct the rites of worship—were projected as male. In The Minister’s Wooing Stowe portrays the Calvinist God as rigid and harsh, demanding faith in the absence of evidence and love in the absence of mercy. By the end of the novel, however, the text-based, male-centered creed has been modified by a new authority, emanating from the women’s community with Mary Scudder at its center: this authority is intuited rather than learned, premised on love rather than logic, achieved through community rather than in isolation.