The Word Made Exhibition: Protestant Reading Meets Catholic Worship in Uncle Tom's Cabin and The Gates Ajar

When Uncle Tom's Cabin was translated and published in Italy in 1852, it was read widely and enthusiastically, but some Catholic observers took exception to its theology, according to Joseph Rossi. One newspaper, La Civiltà Cattolica, objected to Harriet Beecher Stowe's portrayal "of sentiments so noble and virtues so marvelous [being acquired] by the sole reading of the sole Bible, which seems to be the predominant fixation of the author" (qtd. in Rossi 422-23). This judgment is no mistake. The scene of Little Eva and Uncle Tom reading the Bible next to Lake Pontchartrain, for instance, represents an ideal of reading for and feeling the presence of God, and it consecrates in advance their upcoming deaths. The Italian newspaper reminds its readers that the Catholic Church has "little faith in this means" of accessing God through the printed page and warns them not to be "impressed by" images of scriptural salvation in Stowe's novel. But the paper also faults Stowe for taking inspiration from "the immense treasures of Catholic hagiography" to feed "a fervid imagination" embodied "in a sentimental novel" (qtd. in Rossi 423). My essay argues that the religious hybrid identified by the review—Stowe's attempt to wed the treasures of Catholicism with a Protestant faith in reading—shapes her fiction. Along with Elizabeth Stuart Phelps's The Gates Ajar, another best-seller that puts outsize pressure on the question of how to read and how to access the sacred, Uncle Tom's Cabin shows how Christian doctrinal differences influenced the imagination of reading in the sentimental novel and decisively shaped its style. It is by balancing the appeals of Catholic and Protestant faith that Stowe and Phelps develop a novelistic strategy I will call the exhibitional style.

Certainly both Stowe and Phelps are possessed of impeccable Protestant credentials. Stowe was daughter and sister, respectively, to prominent clergymen Lyman and Henry Ward Beecher; Phelps was raised in a family of two generations of Andover seminarians. Stowe's Protestant influences have been persuasively and extensively tracked, as have Phelps's.¹ But Stowe developed a robust, if vexed, relationship with Catholicism. Jenny Franchot argues that in writing Agnes of Sorrento ten years after Uncle Tom's Cabin, Stowe "Catholicize[s] her narrative" on the rhetorical level "by imitating the liturgical practices celebrated by the plot" (250). Anthony E. Szczesiul finds that in her religious poetry "Stowe openly expresses a desire for the 'imagistic' tradition of Catholicism—the sights, smells, and sounds of Catholic ritual," and he argues that Stowe portrays Eva and Tom according to specifically Catholic conventions of sainthood (par. 13). Little Eva is an evangelist, certainly, but a Catholic one. In Phelps's novel, characters openly voice appreciation for Catholicism. The hero of The Gates Ajar, Winifred Forceythe, worries, "In our recoil from the materialism of the Romish Church, we have, it seems to me, nearly stranded ourselves on the opposite shore" (110). Winifred's daughter Faith kisses a portrait of her dead father nightly, as if it were an icon, an act of devotion that startles the narrator Mary when she first sees it.

Wanting to win their readers to the abolitionist cause or to console them for the losses of the Civil War, Stowe and Phelps act as both novelists and practical theologians. They take it that reading can save the soul, a foundational Protestant view that inspires their projects as authors. But the reading they imagine goes against the grain of Protestant injunctions to sit alone and pore over the pages. Reading is instead a communal and emotional, a visual and almost tactile, experience.² In this way, Uncle Tom's Cabin and The Gates Ajar attempt to find a middle ground between competing models of human contact with God: private reading that goes deep between the lines, or a public sacrament that relies on the sharable, visual, and material. The interpretation of texts that is key to Protestant devotion begins, in their hands, to resemble Catholic worship. This holds both for the kind of reading...