"jollitude"

11 March 2024:I think I could sit and think about this letter from Harriet Beecher Stowe to George Eliot for the rest of spring break. Stowe is teasing Eliot abotu Middlemarch's seriousness: "My love, what I miss in this story is just what we would have if youcwould come to our tumble-down, jolly, improper, but joyous country,--namely, 'jollitude.' You write and live on so high a plane! It is all self-abnegation. We want to get you over here, and into this house, where, with closed doors, we sometimes make the rafters ring with fun, and say anything and everything, no matter what, and won't be any properer than we's a mind to be" (qtd. in Silvey 61). Silvey adds that the "house" that Stowe want Eliot to visit is Annie Fields' home in Boston. Just an amazing quotation that makes clear how small the writing world was in the nineteenth century. Moreover, Stowe pretty accurately describes what Eliot does in Middlemarch and it is just very funny to think that she believes some good old American "jollitude" can help a bit. 

Work Cited

Silvey, Jane. “It All Began with Jane Eyre: The Complex Transatlantic Web of Women Writers.” Gaskell Journal, vol. 19, 2005, pp. 52–68.

"Are there any lives of women?"

25 November 2022: Just a little excerpt from Stowe's The Pearl of Orr's Island: Mara asks Mr. Sewell about Plutarch's Lives, "Are there any lives of women?" He answers, "No, my dear...in the old times, women did not get their lives written, though I don't doubt many of them were much better worth writing than the men's."

Joan D. Hedrick uses this passage and the epigraph to Harriet Beecher Stowe: A Life, which is a pretty terrific choice in so many ways.

Pages and pages...

7 July 2022: Certainly got back on track with the Uncle Tom's Cabin entry today, writing nearly 2500 words, most of them (I hope?) pretty decent. I'll give it a careful read-through and some revision tomorrow, but then it's onto the next one. Whew!

"The chapter titles are revealing here..."

 30 June 2022: Had one of those very cool "oh, I never thought of that before! that's so smart!" moments while reading criticism this morning. Here's John C. Havard in a piece about realism (and typology) in Uncle Tom's Cabin: 

“The chapter titles are revealing here: whereas early titles tend to be descriptive, such as ‘An Evening in Uncle Tom’s Cabin,’ ‘Select Incident of a Lawful Trade,’ and ‘Tom’s Mistress and Her Opinions,’ the chapters after the book’s midpoint take on increasingly figurative, typological titles, such as ‘The Grass Withereth—The Flower Fadeth,’ ‘The Little Evangelist,’ and ‘The Martyr.’ Through this narrative structure, the novel forces the reader to consider the concluding typological passages in the context of the imagined national community that Stowe had evoked in the earlier, more realist sections” (258).

I really love some of Stowe's chapter titles (and get nerdy about chapter titles in general), so this hit my sweet spot. 

Work Cited

Havard, John C. “Fighting Slavery by ‘Presenting Facts in Detail’: Realism, Typology, and Temporality in Uncle Tom’s Cabin.” American Literary Realism, vol. 44, no. 3, 2012, pp. 249–66. EBSCOhost.

"the twenty-first-century critic in a bind..."

29 June 2022:  Really struck by this passage about reading Uncle Tom's Cabin: "The novel puts the twenty-first-century critic in a bind: read it the way professional literary critics have been trained to read and make yourself unable to understand why it exerted the power it did, or read it as it wants to be read and lose your credibility as a critic" (Halpern 636). Halpern's whole piece is really smart and interesting. It's also relatively informal in its tone (with personal anecdotes and jokes!), which makes it refreshing and seems kind of meta--she's a person writing about responding to a text as a person, so it makes sense to appeal to readers this way. 

Work Cited

Halpern, Faye. “Beyond Contempt: Ways to Read Uncle Tom’s Cabin.” PMLA, vol. 133, no. 3, May 2018, pp. 633–39. EBSCOhost.

Pondering a big one...

28 June 2022: It's a heck of a thing to take Uncle Tom's Cabin and wrestle it into the entry I need for my book. We're talking maybe 2000 words (maybe a bit longer) about one of the most sprawling, controversial, messy, and important books (with a complicated critical legacy) in American literary history. There is some breathing room in knowing there will be a separate entry on Stowe, her life, and her other works, but now, in the early stages of deep dive into criticism that I do for every one of these, I am reminding myself that in an ocean this deep (to sustain a metaphor), that dive is going to be more limited. 

Peak Heidi Podcast Content...

4 February 2020: Hard to imagine a podcast better tailored to yours truly than this latest episode of Decoder Ring. Here's the intro:

"One hundred and fifty years ago, Lord Byron and Harriet Beecher Stowe collided in the pages of the Atlantic. The resulting smash up endangered an August American publication altered the reputations of two of the most famous in their time authors that have ever lived and most lastingly besmirched the less famous woman at the story’s center. At issue were so many of the topics that are still consuming us today civility, celebrity, feminism, fairness, fake news and bad literary men. Also, it’s hella juicy. So today, undercoating. What did Cancel culture look like in the 1860s?"

Give it a listen!

Harriet Beecher Stowe House

[Catch-up post]

23 March 2018: Day Two of the convention had plenty of highlights, but I am going to go with visiting the Stowe House. We learned so much on our visit, including the fact that when the house was a boarding house (in the early twentieth century) it was in the Green Book. That took my breath away.

About last night...

No matter your party affiliation, you can't deny that a bit of history was made last night (despite Senator Clinton's destructive delusions that this thing isn't over yet). Over at Andrew Sullivan's Daily Dish, readers have been sending in their responses. Here are two that I found particularly moving:

1) "Tomorrow I will go to the African American cemetery outside of Chicago where my great-grandparents, grandparents, aunts, uncles, friends, neighbors, and my mother and father are buried. And I will tell them that they were right -- that if we studied hard, worked hard, kept the faith, fought for justice, prayed, that this day would come.

And it has."

2) "My grandfather, 86 years old and a veteran of WWII, just gave me a call. He was calling all of his grandchildren to let them know what an important night this was in the history of our country.

Grandpa drove a truck for over 50 years, and he told the story of how he drove with a team of drivers, 2 white (including him), and 4 black. When they stopped at the truck stops, the black drivers had to use separate restrooms and showers, and had to eat in a small room in the back of the kitchen. Grandpa and his co-driver would eat in the back with the rest of the team, and while they didn't speak of it at the time, they knew it was wrong yet felt powerless to change it, and believed that it would never change.

Tonight, he told me, we have come full-circle. Many people, especially the younger generation who supported Obama, will never fully realize the historical import of what happened tonight. But he wanted his grandchildren to know this story that he had never told us, and it was the second time in my 33 years that I have heard my grandpa cry."

Yesterday, I taught The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass and selections from Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin in English 204. What would they--especially Douglass--have to say about how far we've come in American politics? Today in class, we discussed that great American poet, Walt Whitman. How perfect, right? Consider what Whitman writes in the Preface to Leaves of Grass:

"The Americans of all nations at any time upon the earth have probably the fullest poetical nature. The United States themselves are essentially the greatest poem. In the history of the earth hitherto the largest and most stirring appear tame and orderly to their ampler largeness and stir. Here at last is something in the doings of man that corresponds with the broadcast doings of the day and night. Here is not merely a nation but a teeming nation of nations. Here is action untied from strings necessarily blind to particulars and details magnificently moving in vast masses. Here is the hospitality which forever indicates heroes . . ."

Again, Republican, Democrat, whatever you are--you have reason to smile today and be extra proud to be an American.

The Most Famous Man in America

I’ve recently finished reading Debby Applegate’s The Most Famous Man in America: A Biography of Henry Ward Beecher. I first heard about the book when it came out and received really excellent reviews. So I picked up a gently used copy online (actually, I don’t think it had even been read!) and it sat on my night stand for about eight months. This summer, though, I’ve started work on an essay on Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter and Harriet Beecher Stowe’s* Uncle Tom’s Cabin for the SAMLA conference in Atlanta in November. There isn’t all that much out there specifically and explicitly connecting Hawthorne and Stowe, so I found myself doing more general reading on both and looking for interesting connections there. This led to me to another excellent biography, Joan D. Hedrick’s Harriet Beecher Stowe: A Life. After reading Hedrick’s book and learning just a bit more about the fascinating Beecher clan, I couldn’t resist diving into Applegate’s text.

And I am so glad I did. When this book first came out, I remember people making a lot out of what was probably the most sensational part of Beecher’s life: his very public trial for adultery. (See here and here). It was, to use a cliché, a trial of the century, with all the bells and whistles: sex, religion, secrets, scandals…no murders, so maybe it wouldn’t find its way into a Law and Order: 19^th Century America series, but you get my point. The trial business was incredibly interesting, but the book as a whole is quite good. It has a less academic voice than most biographies I read these days, but honestly, I found that just a bit refreshing.

Simply put, Beecher is a fascinating man: smart, compassionate, passionate, deeply flawed, but (and I think I can say I really believe this) a good man who ultimately wanted to do good work in the world. I found myself very interested in Beecher’s own religious struggles. Raised by Lyman Beecher, the last of the great New England Calvinist preachers, he inwardly struggled with and eventually rejected Calvinism, embracing instead an explicitly evangelical religion that stressed Christ’s loving redemption of men—as well as man’s potential to do and be good. The sections in which Applegate addresses Beecher’s agony over perfectionism are especially moving, I think. (Hedrick, incidentally, also discusses Stowe’s battle with perfectionism with equal skill). It makes sense, of course, that great minds of the nineteenth-century—people like Beecher, Stowe, Hawthorne, Emerson—would lose sleep over their spiritual states. Nineteenth-century America was a place of great promise and trouble—a nation growing and changing, but also marked by great national sins (the way I describe it to my students): slavery, unequal rights for women, and the continuing genocide of the Native Americans. Beyond the scope of the nineteenth-century, though, Beecher’s spiritual journey still resonates today for Christians who wonder about the big questions: what is the nature of man? What is my role in this world? How should I live my life as a Christian? What role should evangelism play in my everyday life?

Anyway, Applegate’s book gives great insights on nineteenth-century America and the amazing Beecher clan. It also reinforces a point that continues to impress me the more I learn about this time period—how very connected all the big names were. For instance, Walt Whitman admired Beecher very much, as did Twain*. I am reminded of a moment in researching my dissertation when I discovered that Sarah Winnemucca had possibly met Henry James on one of her trips east. It’s hard to think of two figures in nineteenth-century American less alike than these two (both of whom figure into my dissertation), yet even they seem to have crossed paths.

Next on my list of pseudo-fun reading: Reinventing The Peabody Sisters, a collection of essays on these amazing women. Well, I suppose that’s more “work” reading than fun, but I do need to get to this book, which I’ve had since January. Maybe I ought to pick up this one for fun…

*I've linked to both the Harriet Beecher Stowe House and the Mark Twain House in part because I have very nice memories of visiting both homes during a snowstorm a few years ago while visiting my sister in Hartford, CT. She lived right behind the Twain house, which is right next to the Stowe House. Don't ask her about it though--she'll just talk about how all we did in Stowe's house was visit the gift shop. "Some scholar of women's writing you are," she laughed. In my defense, the snow was really coming down by the time we got there! Plus I didn't even know the Stowe House was there until we saw it, which says a lot about her reputation these days versus Twains'.