"Our Country Neighbors": Harriet Beecher Stowe's Domestication of Nature

Abstract

Abstract: Any examination of Stowe's children's literature must complicate the nineteenth century's domestic ethic of kindness by analyzing how the building of her mansion Oakholm in 1864 mirrors the tension between domestication and environmental destruction. Stowe attempts to tame a wild landscape by imposing a grand domestic structure, but disciplining the wild implies that an animal's original savage nature should no longer express itself. The theory of recapitulation meant that the atavistic does occasionally emerge, but instead of tolerating a dog for being a dog, Stowe blames it. She tries to domesticate the natural world, but when it does not conform, she punishes it for refusing to adhere to her concept of obedience. This condemnation of the natural world ignites a tension in which sentimentalism is at odds with the reality of a burgeoning scientific reading of nature that sees it as fully engaged with the Darwinian sense of the survival of the fittest.