Puritan Providences in Stowe's The Pearl of Orr's Island: The Legacy of Cotton Mather
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Notes
1. The Writings of Harriet Beecher Stowe, 16 vols. (New York: AMS, 1967), Vol. 11, pp. 122-23. All subsequent reference to the novels and short fiction of Stowe are from this edition, and will be cited parenthetically.
2. For studies of Stowe's commentary on Calvinism within her fiction, see Lawrence Buell, "Calvinism Romanticized: Harriet Beecher Stowe, Samuel Hopkins, and The Minister's Wooing," ESQ, 24 (1978), 119-32; Alice C. Crozier, The Novels of Harriet Beecher Stowe (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1969), esp. pp. 91-93; Joan D. Hedrick, "'Peaceable Fruits': The Ministry of Harriet Beecher Stowe," AQ, 40 (1988), 307-22; Parrington, "Harriet Beecher Stowe: A Daughter of Puritanism," in Main Currents in American Thought, 2 vols. (New York: Harcourt, Brace Jovanovich, 1930), I:371-78; and especially Charles H. Foster, The Rungless Ladder: Harriet Beecher Stowe and New England Puritanism (1954; repr. New York: Cooper Square, 1970), an excellent analysis of theology and religious practice in Stowe's novels.
3. Although Stowe acknowledges the Magnalia as a historical document, she also recognizes its value at the level of narrative. In Poganuc People, she describes the collection as "wonderful stories" (Writings 11:122), and in Oldtown Folks, Stowe describes Mather as a "beloved gossip" and "delightful old New England grandmother" who wrote "nursery tales" of colonial America (9:195).
4. My understanding of the Magnalia as a self-conscious literary text derives largely from the work of Susan Cherry Bell, "History and Artistry in Cotton Mather's Magnalia Christi Americana," diss., SUNY Binghamton, 1991; Jane Donahue Eberwein, "'Indistinct Lustre': Biographical Miniatures in the Magnalia Christi Americana," Biography: An Interdisciplinary Quarterly, 4 (1981), 195-207; Parker H. Johnson, "Humiliation Followed by Deliverance: Metaphor and Plot in Cotton Mather's Magnalia," EAL, 15 (1980/81), 237-46; and Alfred Weber, "Die Anfaenge des Kurzen Erzaehlens im Amerika des 17. und 18. Jahrhunderts: Die 'Providences' der Amerikanischen Puritaner," in Mythos und Aufklaerung in der Amerikanischen Literatur, ed. Dieter Meindl and Friedrich W. Horlacher (Erlangen: Erlanger Forschungen, 1985), pp. 55-70. Although John F. Berens, in Providence and Patriotism in Early America 1640-1815 (Charlottesville: Univ. Press of Virginia, 1978), focuses on the Puritan providence as an historical phenomenon and as a method of articulating social unity, his thorough study also treats rhetorical features of this literary form; see especially pp. 14-31.
5. Magnalia Christi Americana; or, The Ecclesiastical History of New-England; From its First Planting, in the Year 1620, unto the Year of Our Lord 1689 (1702; repr. New York: Russell and Russell, 1967), 2 vols., Vol. 1, p. 25. All subsequent references to the Magnalia are from this edition, and will be cited in the text.
6. Eberwein, p. 25.
7. Lazar Ziff, Puritanism in America: New Culture in a New World (New York: Viking, 1973), p. 217.
8. Stowe, "Earthly Care A Heavenly Discipline" (Writings 15:199, 200).
9. The similarity of these tales was first noted by Foster, p. 262.
10. For discussions of the theme of the spirituality and domesticity in Stowe's novels, see Dorothy Berkson, "Millennial Politics and the Feminine Fiction of Harriet Beecher Stowe," in Critical Essays on Harriet Beecher Stowe, ed. Elizabeth Ammons (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1980), pp. 244-58; Joan Hedrick; Laurie Crumpacker, "Four Novels of Harriet Beecher Stowe: A Study in Nineteenth-Century Androgeny," in American Novelists Revisited: Essays in Feminist Criticism, ed. Fritz Fleischmann (Boston: G.K. Hall, 1982); Mary Kelley, Private Woman, Public Stage: Literary Domesticity in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1984), esp. p. 294. Stowe herself addressed these issues in a nonfiction work, The American Woman's Home or, Principles of Domes tic Science (1869; repr. Hartford: Stowe-Day Foundation, 1991) in which she and her co-author, Catherine Beecher, write, "The family state then, is the aptest earthly illustration of the heavenly kingdom, and in it woman is its chief minister" (p. 19).
11. The translation of Claudian is by Lucius F. Robinson, and is offered as a footnote in Magnalia 2...
