As a life story of the four youthful characters it does not linger vividly in mind. One does not recall them and their subjective experiences half so clearly as one does their intellectual and social and material surroundings. Yet the shape of their life experience was determined by just these external influences; and how clearly they belonged to a bygone period appears at a glance of comparison with any similar twentieth-century story.[26]
Margaret Deland’s “The Iron Woman,” for example, is a companion picture of four young people, but with how great a difference! The new industrialism, the decline of a theology which is only a relic in the iron woman, Mrs. Maitland, the post-Victorian attitude toward sex and the family, suggest the vast change in the fashions of human thought in a half century; and this is no less convincing because the conclusions of Mrs. Deland’s characters are practically identical with those of Mrs. Stowe’s. With Mrs. Stowe marriage is a finality and sexual sin a damnation in the sight of God. With Mrs. Deland marriage is an expedient and a protection for the woman who may otherwise be abandoned, and sin is punished in remorse and loss of reputation. Mrs. Stowe is moved by the thought of hell; Mrs. Deland, by the possibility of Promethean tortures from within. And in the later book capital and labor loom up to afford the background supplied in the earlier story by the church and its communicants.
In the quarter century remaining to her after the writing of “Oldtown Folks,” Mrs. Stowe’s life was a quiet fulfillment of her earlier career. From a Florida plantation on which she spent her winters she worked for the welfare of the negro and the upbuilding of the South. She labored as before in coöperation with the church, but her repugnance for the grimness of Calvinism had led her to become an Episcopalian. As a novelist she kept on in the exposition of New England and Northern life to the mild gratification of the reading public which she had already won—a reading public who enjoyed what Lowell almost too cleverly called “water gruel of fiction, thinned with sentiment and thickened with morality.” Her enduring fame will doubtless rest on the fact that she was a story-writer of moderate talent who in one memorable instance devoted her gift to the making of American history.
BOOK LIST
Harriet Beecher Stowe. Works. The writings of Harriet Beecher Stowe, with biographical introductions. 1899. 16 vols. These appeared in book form originally as follows: Mayflower, 1843; Uncle Tom’s Cabin, 1852; A Key to Uncle Tom’s Cabin, 1853; Sunny Memories of Foreign Lands, 1854; Dred, 1856; The Minister’s Wooing, 1859; The Pearl of Orr’s Island, 1862; Agnes of Sorrento, 1862; House and Home Papers, 1864; Little Foxes, 1865; Religious Poems, 1867; Queer Little People, 1867; The Chimney Corner, 1868; Oldtown Folks, 1869; Pink and White Tyranny, 1871; Oldtown Fireside Stories, 1871; My Wife and I, 1871; We and Our Neighbors, 1875; Poganuc People, 1878; A Dog’s Mission, 1881.
Biography and Criticism
The standard life is by Charles E. Stowe. 1890. The biographical introductions in the standard set are valuable.
Crowe, Martha Foote. Harriet Beecher Stowe. 1913.
Erskine, John. Leading American Novelists. 1910.
Fields, Mrs. Annie. Life and Letters of Harriet Beecher Stowe. 1897.