Tempests and Teapots: Harriet Beecher Stowe's The Minister's Wooing

Abstract

FEW works of fiction seem to animate so confidently the religious and political spirit of the mid-nineteenth-century American cult of domesticity as Harriet Beecher Stowe's third novel, The Minister's Wooing (1859). At the core of Stowe's historical romance, set within a diminishing Puritan circle in slave-trading Newport at the close of the eighteenth century, are the trials of the pious maiden Mary Scudder, whose intuitive, feminine influence counterbalances, and ultimately outperforms, the stoical and all-too-logical doctrine of postEdwardsean Calvinism. Mary's faith is first tested by the reported drowning of her beloved, the unregenerate James Marvyn, and then by her vow of betrothal to an unworldly minister when James miraculously reappears, converted and