The Minister's Wooing

by Harriet Beecher Stowe

  These theological disputes are the framework within which Stowe positions other aspects of New England history that particularly concerned her and the mid-nineteenth-century audience for whom she wrote. In The Minister’s Wooing African slavery, American domestic life, and women’s authority in both home and church become focal points for Stowe’s examination of how religious ideologies affected individual and community life at the close of the eighteenth century.

  Stowe had won her fame as a writer from Uncle Tom’s Cabin and, to a lesser extent, from Dred, and she would have been unlikely to abandon the issue of slavery as she wrote The Minister’s Wooing in the explosive later years of the 1850s. But in this third novel she does not foreground the subject, partly because the novel is set in the North, partly because in it her focus is on religious culture rather than slaveholding culture. However, she does use slavery as both object and vehicle of her interests. For Stowe slavery was absolutely wrong, and her novel argues against the institution unequivocally. At the same time, Stowe uses slavery as a vehicle to show how New England Calvinists negotiated one of the most pressing of moral issues.

  At the end of the eighteenth century, Newport, Rhode Island, was a thriving seaport, sending ships on three-years’ journeys to the far ends of the globe in pursuit of earthly goods. One of the most lucrative of these commodities was the bodies of black Africans, who were bought with the rum made in New England from sugar purchased in the Caribbean, then brought to the United States for domestic sale. Staunch New Englanders, pious members of their respective churches, engaged in these transactions, and, as Stowe points out in her novel, many of the oldest and finest of the Newport mansions were built on the proceeds of the slave trade. Systematic calls for the abolition of slavery and of the slave trade did not develop among religious institutions until the 1830s and 1840s; nevertheless, not all religious figures condoned slavery. Some New England ministers vigorously denounced the buying and selling of human beings. With many of their compatriots, they read both the Gospels and eighteenth-century discourses on natural rights to include people of color, and held that the new nation’s Bill of Rights, which explicitly articulates the principle of freedom for all men, laid the foundation for abolishing slavery.

  Stowe positions the major moral issue of her novel within these disputes. The historical minister Samuel Hopkins was staunchly antislavery, basing his opposition to the institution in part on the doctrine of disinterested benevolence, and in her novel Stowe uses Hopkins to argue the antislavery case. Both the historical Hopkins and Stowe’s fictionalized character are known for the hours spent trying to help the slaves as they arrived in this terrifying new world, and the historical and fictional characters both preached against the slave trade. Moreover, Stowe sets up another historical figure, Ezra Stiles, as pro-slavery, even though the real Ezra Stiles was known as a religious liberal and a social moderate, a staunch supporter of human freedom. In the novel, the strategy of dividing the Newport community between the two ministers over the issue of slavery enables Stowe to demonstrate some of the ways that religious doctrines could be used to negotiate important moral issues in daily life.

  Harriet Beecher Stowe’s opposition to chattel slavery motivated her to portray people of African descent in as sympathetic a manner as her culture permitted, but it did not provide her with the power of writing beyond her culture’s stereotypes. In fact Stowe’s portraits of African Americans are good illustrations of the mind-set that permitted many of her contemporaries to protest chattel slavery without necessarily believing that African Americans could (or should) be granted full cultural and personal equality. At any given time, a society will have a limited number of ways of portraying subgroups that, to members of the dominant group, seem to be marked by a set of common characteristics. For instance, most American writings of the 1850s characterized Irish immigrants as fast-talking, priest-ridden “Paddies” and “Bridgets,” speaking in the thickest of brogues. Similarly, white cultural narratives about Africans and African Americans generally painted them as exotic, morally superficial, and either intellectually simple or else cunning and deceptive. How these assumptions were handled generally depended on whether the writer was pro-slavery or antislavery, and even writers who were adamantly antislavery often projected people of color within distinctly stereotypical frames.

  In The Minister’s Wooing this is especially evident in the portrayal of Candace, one of the novel’s major figures. When the novel opens Candace is owned by Zebedee Marvyn, but she is freed after the Reverend Hopkins challenges Marvyn to ask his slaves if they prefer freedom to benevolent bondage. Born in Africa, Candace is portrayed both as a Mammy figure—wide, rolling, mothering, and loving—and as an exotic, a gorgeously colored spectacle from a foreign and pagan land. In a novel in which spectacle plays a major role generally—the narrator contantly draws our attention to visual detail, from clothing to interior decoration to landscape—the narrator establishes Candace as literally and figuratively the most colorful, exotic object of contemplation.

  The focus on Candace as spectacle gives Stowe the opportunity to portray her as the ideological alien, a critical position in this story. Because she was not born into Calvinist society, but rather was slowly persuaded to accept Calvinist principles, Candace is the “Other” to this tightly knit and obsessive group of believers in original sin, predestination, and joyful acceptance of personal damnation for the greater glory of God. Candace has accepted Calvinist principles largely out of loyalty to Samuel Hopkins, but she is at heart an Evangelical—a believer in divine forgiveness—and “reverts” to evangelical principles as soon as the specter of damnation arises for people about whom she cares. Love—both her own love for James and his mother and her appreciation of Mary Scudder’s love for her young suitor—takes precedence over doctrine for Candace, enabling her to become Stowe’s mouthpiece for Gospel—a religion of love and comfort—over Calvinism’s cold and succorless creed. Consequently, although she is presented through cultural narratives that limit her possibilities to become as intellectually sophisticated as the other women in the novel, Candace plays a crucial role. She is the only character in the novel to fully and adamantly articulate belief in a God of mercy, and the only Christian to be certain that the doctrine of predestination was invented by fallible human beings rather than by God.

  It is on Candace, then, that the turn in the novel’s theological plot depends. One of the reasons that stereotypes are so pernicious is that they tend to work in more than one way. Here, Candace’s status illustrates how dependent cultural narratives are on the writer’s point of view: on the one hand Candace is a strategically important, extremely positive figure because she articulates the author’s own beliefs on the most salient moral and theological issues in the story—slavery and salvation. On the other hand Stowe can use Candace as she does precisely because the nineteenth-century racial narratives assumed that black people would be more likely than whites to experience holiness through feeling rather than through thought. The bottom lines here are first, that Stowe values emotion over rationalism in religion, and second, that she assumes that African Americans are better at feeling than at thinking. Because she is working with two binaries (emotion/intellect; experiential piety/rationalist piety) and a set of essentialist syllogisms (blacks are more emotional than rational; Candace is black; therefore ...), she manages to create a thoroughly positive character from a set of assumptions that later generations have rejected.

  While Candace is to our eyes the most obvious character framed by glaring cultural assumptions, other characters are framed by them as well. In large part this is because The Minister’s Wooing is a comedy, having as its goal the resolution of plot conflicts and restoration of community harmony. Hence characters are built on types, in order to facilitate their movement through a series of plot devices. The devout and gentle heroine, Mary Scudder, is a variation on the standard nineteenth-century fair-haired lady; Virginie de Frontagnac, Mary’s French foil, is a variation
on the dark. Similarly, James is the curly-haired hero, while Aaron Burr is the nineteenth-century’s favorite tortured villain, straight from Byron and Milton. And Stowe’s comic tea parties are premised on a series of minor female types.

  None of which is to say that The Minister’s Wooing is either trivial or wooden. Rather, Stowe’s gift is to make these characters come alive, each in his or her own setting, from the vernacular-speaking farmhand to the gentlewoman from the haute-monde. One way she does this is by continually moving between the abstractions of Calvinist theology on the one hand, and meditations, both commonsense and comic, on the practices of everyday life on the other. Her characters exist to serve this binary structure, and so the fact that they are essentially stereotypes—providing a kind of narrative shorthand—Is rationalized by their function as means to the author’s larger goal of representing the life of New England Congregationalists just before classical Calvinism gave way to other, gentler forms of Protestantism.

  The everyday life that Stowe depicts in The Minister’s Wooing revolves around New England domesticity. She stages the novel in the homes of her predominantly rural middle class, picturing their farmhouses as the spotlessly clean, wonderfully organized residences of an American yeomanry. Stowe is fascinated by the spatial arrangements of group and private lives, and she sets her scenes in the kitchen (always a site for comfort and community in her fiction), the parlor (a room reserved for more formal community gatherings), or the private rooms (bedrooms, studies) occupied by individuals in their solitary moments. Through these domestic spaces Stowe illustrates the paradox of Calvinist life, which demands that its followers think of themselves simultaneously as isolated individuals, alone with their God, and as members of a community whose salvation as an elect nation depends on the sanctity of each individual. Stowe concentrates on the minutiae of daily living within these houses, especially through Mary and Katy Scudder: we are treated to lessons on butter- and bread-making, on floral arrangements, on the conduct of a high tea, on spinning and weaving, on the reading of the intellectual elite, especially its women, and on the ways that women with “faculty”—housewifely skills—schedule their work and leisure time. Most of all, we are treated to discourse on clothing in turn-of-the-century Newport—to styles and uses of clothes.

  Stowe uses clothes as an index to the materiality of New England life in the face of the community’s claim to special holiness. Although the sin of luxury, especially luxury of apparel, was the subject of many a Calvinist sermon, in The Minister’s Wooing Stowe does not condemn materiality. Rather, her narrator treats the community’s love of finery with humorous irony; it’s not exactly hypocrisy, but it does point to a disparity between professed ideals and actual practice. Not only do some of the staunchest churchgoers in Newport traffic in human bodies, virtually everyone dresses in styles that speak far more to class distinction than to general godliness. Or, as Katy Scudder remarks somewhat apologetically as she reaches into her trunk for some fine old brocades, “ ‘Dress... is of some importance, after all.... I have always told Mary ... that, though our hearts ought not to be set on these things, yet they had their importance’ ” (114). An early chapter of the novel deals with preparing Mary for a ball to be held at one of the richest mansions in the town; the girl, her mother, and the dressmaker hold a conference over a trunk of shawls and brocades that testify to the women’s affinity for the good things of life. Stowe carefully explains this as a sign of late-eighteenth-century class consciousness, but she is also explicit about the love of material objects that it demonstrates. Later, Mary’s wedding dress comes in for the same kind of attention.

  Clothes are also the vehicle Stowe uses to gently satirize Samuel Hopkins’s self-absorption and to display the comic possibilities of some of her minor characters. In her discourse on clothing the narrator notes the amount of concern the Scudder women give to the minister’s clothes, informing her readers that although Hopkins imagines himself without interest in earthly goods (meaning that he never thinks about his clothes, food, or housing) in fact he only can be so because a bevy of women clothes, feeds, and cleans for him. The juxtaposition of the manly ideal, as exemplified by Hopkins, and the real, as exemplified by the women’s fussing over his sartorial affairs, gives Stowe material for some of her best comedy. On one occasion, for instance, Stowe slyly plays on her readers’ own experiences of men oblivious to women’s domestic routines by describing first the bustle of “sewing day,” when the local seamstress arrives to overhaul the family’s wardrobes, and then bringing Hopkins onto the stage. Heedless of household turmoil, the minister pontificates through the dinner hour. “What should he know of dress-makers, good soul?” Stowe’s narrator ruefully asks her readers. “Encouraged by the respectful silence of his auditors, he calmly expanded and soliloquized on his favorite topic, the last golden age of Time, [and] the Marriage-Supper of the Lamb ... ” (119). Hopkins’s saintliness earns him due respect from his listeners, including the irrepressible seamstress, Miss Prissy, whose response epitomizes the view from the material world: “ ‘Sakes alive!’ said little Miss Prissy, after dinner, ‘did I ever hear any one go on like that blessed man?—such a spiritual mind! ... Why, I could just sit and hear him talk all day. Miss Scudder, I wish sometimes you’d just let me make a ruffled shirt for him, and do it all up myself.... I should like to hemstitch the Doctor’s ruffles; he is so spiritually-minded, it really makes me love him’ ” (119-20). Richly aware of all the ironies of a community that celebrates cerebral holiness at the same time that it values material goods and class distinctions, Stowe sums up this disparity as integral to the human condition: “So we go, dear reader,—so long as we have a body and a soul. Two worlds must mingle,—the great and the little, the solemn and the trivial, wreathing in and out, like the grotesque carvings on a Gothic shrine;—only, did we know it rightly, nothing is trivial; since the human soul, with its awful shadow, makes all things sacred” (120). In all human communities, Stowe senses, the sacred and the secular, the trivial and the august exist in tandem, and our lives are full only when we understand the significance each holds for the other.

  Stowe’s penchant for the everyday, in this novel represented through the familiar domestic world, is the gateway into her exploration of women’s lives, a subject about which she is as vocal—and to our eyes as ambivalent—as slavery. While never quite aligned with the militant wings of the women’s rights movement, in the course of her long life she became progressively more open to the idea that women should have rights and opportunities equal to those of men. Her reservations were motivated by her sense of decorum and her worries about biblical justification—for her as for others of her generation, it was not easy to reconcile a women’s rights platform with a pious reading of Saint Paul.

  More important than her gender politics may be Stowe’s implicit attitudes toward women, especially as evidenced in her characters. Stowe likes women, she understands them, and she is richly conscious of the constant negotiations of status and authority both within women’s groups and between women and men. In The Minister’s Wooing her engagement in gender issues is manifested in the novel’s structure; in a world where men are responsible for providing the theory and women the practice, and where theory is valued over practice, Stowe’s interest is in how women, often intellectually as capable as men, attain and maintain authority in their private and communal lives.

  Although its title suggests that this novel is about a man, in fact The Minister’s Wooing is all about women, a domestic drama in which men are at the margins of the stage. Nearly all of the action of the romance plot takes place within households, mid-nineteenth-century women’s domains, and women are the major movers and shakers of both the theological and romance plots. Even though the Minister works at home, his study is marginal to most of the novel’s scenes, and other male “actions”—such as sailing ships or importing slaves or even preaching sermons—take place offstage. As in a Greek play, we hear about what men do only through the repo
rts of other characters, and even these are rarely firsthand. Moreover, despite the novel’s focus on religion and slavery, both institutions controlled by men, its central characters are all female and, even more important, the story is narrated from a woman’s point of view. From this perspective, The Minister’s Wooing is about marginality, alternative viewpoints, destabilizing dominant ideas. Framed comically (a traditional way of presenting difference in Western fiction), The Minister’s Wooing posits the theological plot as androcentric—that is, male-centered—and argues against it through a series of female speakers.

  Chief among these speakers are Candace and Miss Prissy. Like Candace’s, Miss Prissy’s function is to articulate the unspoken in a community where open dissent can be divisive and where women are not expected to challenge the “truths” arrived at by men. Both characters are marked by speech forms differing from characters who are, like Katy Scudder or Mrs. Marvyn, closely associated with the male centers of power by virtue of class and race. While Candace, the character most marginal to the power structure, utters her heresies in dialect, Miss Prissy articulates hers in an apparently stream-of-consciousness chatter. Chatter, of course, is associated with small children and silly women; Stowe uses it here to mark Miss Prissy as a woman who can say what no one else can say simply because people of consequence pay little attention to her. Like Candace’s dialect, her chatter masks her dissent from the community’s most commonly held points of view. As marginal and comic characters, then, Candace and Miss Prissy can suggest other ways of thinking about religious issues without threatening community harmony. Together, they constitute the critical voice to the Calvinist community.