Suffering, Healing, and Relationship: Innovations in Harriet Beecher Stowe Scholarship

Editing this special issue of Women’s Studies An Interdisciplinary Journal dedicated to Harriet Beecher Stowe has been sheer delight. The Harriet Beecher Stowe Society is an active scholarly organization that frequently organizes panels at the American Literature Association, the Society for the Study of American Women Writers, and the Transatlantic Women Writers’ conferences. We also host online book forums, most recently with the Nathaniel Hawthorne Society. The work of Harriet Beecher Stowe, throughout her life, was collaborative, just as this special issue has been throughout its entire creation, writing, and editing process.

In July 2021, the American Literature Association met in Boston. Significantly, that conference was in person. For most of us in attendance, it was our first in-person conference since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic shutdowns: the feeling there was different than any conference I have attended. The Stowe Society hosted a session titled Stowe’s “Sympathy and Domesticity.” That panel, and the plentiful conversations held after it – in hallways, via Zooms, through e-mails, at receptions, and over dinners – culminated in this special issue. This issue is special, one might say, then, in myriad ways. It was imagined and created during a time when connecting was a little different than it ever had been for conference goers and academics. Discovering old friendships. Creating new ones. Figuring out how to live in a world where the pandemic was simply a way of life yet yearning for academic discourse – and wondering what that might mean now: this was the ALA 2021 conference.

On the Stowe panel, one of our speakers zoomed in; the rest of us were in person. All of us felt tangibly connected in a way that feels almost indescribable. Readers now who have attended in-person academic conferences after the start of the pandemic likely know that feeling of academic joy being rekindled, of sharing and simply being with others. Other readers may still be waiting for that experience. Some readers may never have it happen again. Those who read this introduction in the future may need to pause at this juncture and imagine an academic life where conferences were put on hold for a year and a half because of a global pandemic, put on hold because of shared trauma. The American Literature Association in July 2021 was both virtual and in person, one of the first conferences trying to figure out how to navigate and foster both potential realms of human connection.

One of Stowe’s most famous quotes is about friendship, and you’ll find that some of the papers herein are focused on friendship, too. I consider this no accident. Miss Van Arsdel in My Wife and I (1872) determines that “friends are discovered, rather than made. There are people who are in their own nature friends, only they don’t know each other; but certain things like poetry, music, and painting, are like the free-mason’s signs – they reveal the initiated to each other.” Does this quote not describe the conference experience perfectly? Does it not describe the experience of reading a special issue of a journal about an author whom one admires perfectly? In revealing who the “initiated” are to each other, or those who share the same interests, we find our friends. We find our values. We find our joy. I hope that those who have decided to read this issue, whether it is still in the days of the COVID-19 pandemic or well after it, know that you have “discovered” your friends.

When speaking of the connections we find within Stowe’s writing and the COVID-19 pandemic, those familiar with Stowe’s writing may recall that the inspiration for Uncle Tom’s Cabin was also connected to a disease outbreak. In 1849, Stowe’s eighteen-month-old son Samuel Charles, lovingly referred to as “Charley,” died during the cholera epidemic. Stowe wrote to her sister-in-law words that may feel resonant with readers in the COVID-19 moment:

The last three weeks to me have been full of anxiety and sorrow … . I have been too weary—too hurried too anxious and too much employed as yet to feel the bitterness of my loss—Every thing has seemed for the last fortnight like a troubled dream—tho at times visitations of peace from above have been given me— (“Harriet Beecher Stowe to Sarah Beecher”)

The COVID-19 pandemic has felt like a “troubled dream” for many of us, has felt, too, filled with “bitterness.” Academics, indeed much of the whole world, have experienced “anxiety and sorrow.” I suspect many of us, too, have often felt “too hurried” in our burdens to even realize all that we have lost in the past few years.¹

In suffering, however, new truths are often revealed. “It was at his dying bed, and at his grave,” Stowe writes of Charley’s death, “that I learnt what a poor slave mother may feel when her child is torn away from her” (qtd. in Hedrick 193). In losing her son during an epidemic, Stowe finds human connection in a new way. Her overwrought feelings reveal new truths to her, and she writes what she discovers. Now, 170 years after the publication of Uncle Tom’s Cabin and roughly two years after a pandemic came to the United States, Women’s Studies is publishing a special issue about Harriet Beecher Stowe. Today, scholars still find inspiration in suffering, yet we also find it, like Stowe, in community – in rebuilding and in healing. Pandemic. Community. Suffering. Healing. These are the themes that tie together the essays in this special issue.

The first essay, “Sick Sympathies: Pathological Affect in Stowe’s Dred,” by Kathleen Downes, perhaps most directly speaks to the COVID-19 pandemic and its potential for contemporary social justice via rhetorical and literary writing. Downes argues that in her abolitionist writing Stowe uses medical rhetoric on purpose, comparing slavery to a disease like cholera. Downes asks readers to recall the appeal at the end of Uncle Tom’s Cabin where Stowe inquires, “But what can any individual do? … [T]hey can see that they feel right” (449). Slavery, Downes suggests, makes readers feel “wrong,” or ill. That is, slavery can be described as a contagious disease of morals. Downes provides a close reading of Dred: A Tale of the Great Dismal Swamp (1856), where Stowe shows that the cholera epidemic in Dred destroys relationships. She provides the representative example of the deterioration of Nina and Clayton’s relationship. Just as slavery tears apart family relationships in tragic, terrible, and repeated ways, so does cholera. In Downes’s reading, cholera and slavery are both spread “atmospherically.” That is, they cannot be contained to one area of the country alone. The way they travel from place to place, unseen, in the air, has the potential to destroy the entire country. Downes argues that in Uncle Tom’s Cabin Stowe shows that a person who “feel[s] right” is also described as a “healthy” person (449). Once one is infected with slavery, though, that person still can experience healing through sympathy. This is the question that Dred asks of its readers’ hearts, according to Downes. Can you experience sympathy or are you infected to the point that you can no longer heal?

Andrew Donnelly’s article, “Stowe’s Slavery and Stowe’s Capitalism: Forced Reproductive Labor in Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” takes up a question of slavery again, but he interrogates how historians of economics, especially sexual economics, have interpreted the novel. Donnelly points out that Stowe is an “actor within one of the central debates of American historiography: the relationship between slavery and capitalism.” Stowe, Donelly contends, helps to shape these debates from the nineteenth century to now, even though she is rarely given her full due, if she is brought up at all in them. Often, historians identify Stowe as someone who depicts slavery as market driven, yet Uncle Tom’s Cabin portrays the stories and people within that economic market as complex. Donnelly gives the example in the novel of Prue, an enslaved woman who is said to be sold for reproductive labor. Prue cries out at one point about her plight, “Oh Lord! I wish’t I’s dead!” (238). It is not because the children she produced in slavery have been sold that she cries out, though. It is because they have died from malnourishment. It is power over women’s bodies, Donelly points out, that matters in Stowe’s vision of what makes slavery evil, absent of an economic driver. Prue’s children die not for economics, but because of power and malignity. Proslavery advocates during the nineteenth century would claim slavery was flourishing because they were creating a beneficent system with families in place. Stowe, according to Donnelly, works against this argument time and time again throughout her novel, showing individually enslaved women as victims of merciless abusers who sexually assault them and kill their children. Historians ought to take note of the way Stowe individuates slavery and realize that this has shaped the way slavery has been discussed at large, often obfuscating the issue of forced reproductive labor even into the present day. Consciousness of both parts of the historiographic argument, and Stowe’s power as a rhetorician, provides clearer context into enslaved women’s lives holistically.

LuElla D’Amico also offers an argument about a more comprehensive lens via which to view Uncle Tom’s Cabin and its historical resonance. In “Visions, Saints, and Sacraments: Uncle Tom’s Cabin and Catholicism,” she argues that Stowe invokes Catholic hagiography and the sacramental imagination to make her novel more emotionally palpable. Although Stowe is known for her Calvinist upbringing, D’Amico suggests that like other New Englanders in the mid nineteenth century Stowe was attracted to the sentiment, art, and culture of Catholicism. The theological stage of Uncle Tom’s Cabin is purposefully ecumenical in scope, drawing from both Protestantism and Catholicism. Stowe alludes throughout Uncle Tom’s Cabin to the idea of sainthood, creating in Evangeline St. Clare a child saint and in Tom an adult saint. In their characterization, Stowe invokes a hagiographic tradition that is imagistic and supernatural. Moreover, the characters' sainthood leads to a biblical pattern in the book that is hard to deny, another characteristic of hagiography. When Eva and Tom are together, they also illustrate to Stowe’s readers how to have a sacramental worldview – or to look for visible signs of God working in the world. These signs can be people, objects, or texts. It is in this way that Eva and Tom better understand God’s vision (and accept and live out divine mystery), modeling it for the other characters in the book. Stowe believes her readers can use Eva and Tom – their friendship, their saintliness, and their sacramental imaginations – as divinely inspired templates to create a better world based on self-sacrificial love for the other.

Finally, Amber Shaw’s essay, “there are two views often”: The Epistolary Friendship of Harriet Beecher Stowe and Elizabeth Gaskell” likewise focuses on friendship, or as D’Amico might have termed it, on communion. In her essay, Shaw details how Stowe and Gaskell formed a transatlantic literary friendship that can be touted as one of the first representations of a networking, business relationship between women built on shared mutual interests. Shaw elucidates that the two women met in person at least three times during Stowe’s European tours and that they wrote to each other throughout the 1850s and early 1860s – “the height of their respective careers.” Stowe and Gaskell are both known as fiction writers predominantly, ones who elicited public sympathy in their respective countries and abroad. However, they also had private correspondence via numerous letters that has rarely been studied either by Victorianists or by nineteenth-century Americanists. Among other revelations, the letters indicate that Stowe requested that Gaskell assist a famous abolitionist orator, Mary Webb, who was going to Britain – an appeal Stowe initiated because it would help her own career. The letters also reveal that the two considered coauthoring a book and that they planned to do so via written correspondence. Thus, their friendship was one of shared mutual interest, even across the Atlantic, and they thought of it as a means to boost both their careers. From these letters, we learn not only about Stowe and Gaskell but also about the entirety of nineteenth-century epistolary relationships between women, their complicated friendships, and their professional networking.

This special issue begins within an essay about epidemic and ends with one about the power of friendship and professional networking among women in the nineteenth century. Within the scope of this issue are discussions of suffering, sexual abuse, economic strain, religious hope, and the friendship that can bring, too. With these varied topics in mind, Women’s Studies is an ideal place for an exciting foray into new innovations in Stowe scholarship. Every one of the topics explored in this issue were part of Stowe’s world, as they are all part of our world now. Indeed, 170 years after the publication of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Stowe’s life and work still matters and the cultural work of her writing persists. Harriet Beecher Stowe once wrote that “The past, the present and the future are really one: they are today” (qtd. in Ackerly et al.). We see this in the scholarship in this issue – echoes of the past resonate today – and we must reconsider them as we begin to frame our future. Recovery in Stowe’s writing and life needs to continue, yet as we pursue further recovery, we need to look forward. The essays in this special issue accomplish just that. As the current Harriet Beecher Stowe Society President, I have hopes that this special issue will not only add to the breadth of fresh, critical work on Stowe’s vast oeuvre but also that it will spark new ideas and open up avenues for others. To reiterate: “The past, the present and the future are really one: they are today.”

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

¹ In a July 2020 blog post, Wesley Raabe detailed connections he began within Uncle Tom’s Cabin and the Covid-19 pandemic. Like numerous academics, including those in this special issue, he writes, “I had not previously been arrested by the mentions of yellow fever or cholera in the Uncle Tom’s Cabin, but the systematic work at annotating (and our COVID-19 moment) has changed me as a reader.” His blog post, titled “Epidemics in Uncle Tom’s Cabin: cholera, yellow fever, tuberculosis” serves as a good starting point for teachers and scholars interested in pursuing further work in the field of medical humanism. Kathleen Downes’s essay in this special issue discusses cholera in Dred, and I suggest this in particular is a burgeoning field in Stowe Studies that deserves further attention.