Harriet Beecher Stowe's Conversation with the Atlantic Monthly : The Construction of The Minister's Wooing

Abstract

HARRIET BEECHER STOWE'S CONVERSATION WITH THE ATLANTIC MONTHLY : THE CONSTRUCTION OF THE MINISTER'S WOOING Dorothy Z. Baker The University of Houston The opening paragraphs ofHarriet Beecher Stowe's The Minister's Wooing begin the novel in an unconventional fashion. Stowe first issues a blunt statement of fact that reads much like a formulaic social announcement placed in a local newspaper: "Mrs. Katy Scudder had invited Mrs. Brown, and Mrs. Jones and Deacon Twitchel's wife to take tea with her on the afternoon of June second, A.D. 17—."' The author then abruptly aborts her dry,journalistic opening to puzzle about the difficulty of narrative construction, and to assert that her method of writing is akin to "patchwork." Stowe concludes that the small "piece" that she has offered the reader is sufficient to begin the pattern of her larger quilt because it will provoke questions, and thus initiate a conversation of sorts with the reader. Within her metaphorical scheme, the cyclical process of assertion, question, and response is analogous to piecing varied scraps of cotton to form a unified and pleasing quilt. Author and reader share in the construction of the narrative just as the participants in a quilting bee share in the construction of the larger quilt. Many critics have noted this aspect of Stowe's approach to the structure of fiction, and they identify her mode of writing as an early expression of écritureféminin.2 At the same time, there is a complementary , contextual way in which we can read Stowe's commentary on the communal aspect of the art of fiction. In these opening paragraphs , Stowe is also laying bare her authorial method of engaging in pointed dialogue with the larger culture and its contemporary debates, this too constituting her narrative "patchwork." The Minister's Wooing , which was serialized in the Atlantic Monthly from December 1858 to January 1860, directly responds to other pieces—both fiction and non-fiction—that also ran in the Atlantic in the same period.3 In each case, Stowe "pieces" her literary text—much like the notice concerning Katy Scudder' s tea—into the larger discussion of the Atlantic Monthly, and uses her fiction to engage her reader in a dialogue with the full complement of contemporary writing concerning the political, religious, and social issues that were foremost among her concerns. 28Dorothy Z. Baker This essay argues that her serialized novel, The Minister's Wooing, constitutes Mrs. Stowe's "conversation" with the authors and readers of the Atlantic Monthly. The first eight of thirteen installments of The Minister's Wooing were placed in the magazine immediately before or immediately after Oliver Wendell Holmes's column entitled "The Professor at the Breakfast -Table." The physical proximity ofthese pieces signal their complementary thematic concerns. Holmes's unsigned essays, which ran for many years in the magazine, presented the conversations of a university professor with the otherresidents ofa boarding house as they convened at the breakfast table. Lively and interesting conversations, these pieces were always topical, often philosophical, and sometimes comical , the most frequent interlocutors being the professor and a young divinity student. Within the larger context of the Atlantic Monthly, Stowe, too, "converses" with "The Professor at the Breakfast-Table" in that they take up each other's causes within the magazine, Stowe responding in her fiction to those issues that the "Professor" espouses in earlier non-fiction columns, and the "Professor" expounding on matters that Stowe introduces in her serialized novel.4 In January of 1859, the "Professor" broaches the subject of a lay ministry with his fellow boarder, the divinity student, the "Professor" arguing that "it is the people that makes the clergy, and not the clergy that makes the people." While not entirely dismissing the ministry, he observes that its preoccupation with polarized doctrine and canonical thought can lead to a "vis inertiae" that could be redressed by what he terms the "parallax view" of lay-preachers.5 Stowe takes up this very issue in subsequent installments of her novel, and moves beyond the "Professor's" theoretical assertions to identify specific Newport women among the lay ministry in her fiction. Mary Scudder leads a gathering of woman in...