Visions, Saints, and Sacraments: Uncle Tom’s Cabin and Catholicism

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size

Disclosure statement

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

Notes

¹ For more information on the publication history and immediate success of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, see Stephen; Railton‘s excellent “Introduction to Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” which includes that the book “redefined what ‘best-seller’ could mean” and adds that it “became a world-wide phenomenon” (5).:

² Stowe’s brother, Edward, another minister (a profession shared by all seven of her brothers, in fact) penned an even longer anti-Catholic tract akin to his father’s thirty years later titled The Papal Conspiracy Exposed, and Protestantism Defended, in the Light of Reason, History, and Scripture (1855).

³ See Hedrick‘s excellent chapter “Parlor Literature” in Harriet Beecher Stowe: A Life to learn more about the impact of this club on Stowe’s writing and overall career. The chapter also provides historical context about parlor literary clubs in general.

⁴ For more information about the Ecumenical Movement at the beginning of the twentieth century, see; Cope and Kinnamon.

⁵ See my chapter “The Archetypal Girl Savior and the Girl Theologian: Harriet; Beecher Stowe’s Little Eva and Martha Finley’s Elsie Dinsmore.” The Elsie Dinsmore series, though overtly anti-Catholic, was read by Catholics and Protestants in the United States. In April 1908, Catholic World magazine mentions in passing that Martha Finley is one the most “famous authoresses” known at the time (Reppelier 38).

⁶ This argument can also be located in my book chapter, “The Archetypal Girl Savior and the Girl Theologian.”

⁷ For more information on Saint Clare of Assisi, see De Robeck.

⁸ Additionally, like Saint Clare, Saint Aquinas was Italian, was depicted in numerous paintings throughout Italy in the nineteenth century, and was known for his veneration of the Eucharist, especially for his writing and creation of devotional Eucharistic hymns still sung during liturgies today. For a biography of, Aquinas, see Torrell.

⁹ For a biography of Augustine, see Wills.

¹⁰ All biblical references and quotations come from the; New American Bible.

¹¹ The passage about Tom and Eva’s reading practices ends with the idea of Eva moving beyond “the veil,” too, which can be taken as another metaphor for seeing into the next world or for imbuing the sacramental imagination in reading and everyday interpretation of the outside world. According to; Stokes, “[t]he veil,” in the nineteenth century, also “was marked by sectarian connotations. An apparel traditionally worn by Catholic women who have entered a convent – this garment became a nineteenth-century metonym for Catholicism, one that denoted in particular the disquieting opacity and inscrutability of Catholicism… . The veil connoted a worrisome and problematic secretiveness in sharp contrast with the Protestant self-identification with transparency and enlightenment” (124).Therefore, Eva, like Tom, is not scared of death or of suffering. Nor, it can be argued, is she scared of the idea of being associated with Catholicism because she is working toward true communion and relationship, as is Tom because of Eva’s influence.