Harriet Beecher Stowe: A Life (review)

REVIEWS Hedrick, Joan D. Harriet Beecher Stowe: A Life. New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1994. 522 pp. Cloth: $35.00. Joan Hedrick's biography of Harriet Beecher Stowe is a rich blend of personal, professional, and cultural information and interpretation. A meticulous researcher, Hedrick has culled data from a vast body of letters, journals , published writings, and public documents. At the same time, she has used her talents as analyst to put together a balanced and fascinating portrait of a woman, a writer, and an age. Hedrick identifies the "parlor" as the origin of women's realistic fiction. Nineteenth-century American women, separated by the movement westward, wrote long letters to each other, detailing daily events and painting graphic pictures of everyday life. Read aloud to family and friends gathered in the parlor, these letters often "crossed the border between letter and epistolary novel, between the private and the public realms of discourse" (p. 79). Stowe began using the conversational voice of the letter writer in her early magazine sketches in the 1 830s, and the success of her writing derived primarily from her ability to paint graphic pictures of people and events. When she made the decision to speak out publicly against slavery in Uncle Tom's Cabin, she deliberately chose these "women's weapons": she would portray slavery, she said, "in the most lifelike and graphic manner," which was the way that women portrayed events in their letters. "There is no arguing with pictures," Stowe wrote (p. 209). As Hedrick notes, the sketches mat "made women's letters come alive with distant people and events were to be employed in the highly political arena of sectional strife" (p. 208). Stowe's talent for creating dialogue and recording regional speech, her ability to let people speak for themselves, took on political significance in Uncle Tom 's Cabin when she portrayed "property" as speaking subjects. In fact, Stowe's "political achievement was to make a national audience see the subjectivity of black people" (p. 210). Ironically, the status of parlor literature that helped catapult Stowe to international fame in the 1 850s was also responsible for the decline of her reputation later in the century: "her decline resulted from the removal of literature from the parlor to institutions to which women had limited access: men's clubs, high-culture journals, and prestigious universities" (p. ix). Misogynistic reviews of women's books in the newly formed Nation, which led the backlash against women writers in the late 1860s, focused on aesthetic appeal, denigrating women writers like Stowe, Rebecca Harding Davis, Anna Dickinson, and Elizabeth Stuart Phelps for their "earnestness" and their 124Reviews focus on social problems (p. 351). Anticipating the agenda of midtwentiethcentury New Criticism, the Nation wrote that a work should appeal to the "reader's sense ofbeauty, his idea ofform andproportion" (p. 35 1). As Hedrick makes clear, such criticism was political although it masqueraded as aesthetic ; in order to displace and silence women writers, whose popularity and power constituted a threat to male hegemony, the all-male staff of the Nation heaped "hostility, vitriol, and contempt on women's writings" (p. 350) in a deliberate attempt to counter women's dominance in the field of letters. Ultimately , "The masculinization of literature . . . brought down not only Stowe but a whole generation of women writers who used literature to advance political issues" (p. 370). A professional writer for 44 years, Stowe was also at the center of a large household, struggling to balance her role as professional writer with her role as wife and mother as defined by the nineteenth-century cult of true womanhood . Married in 1836 to an inveterate pessimist and hypochondriac, and the mother of seven children, Stowe, motivated perhaps by the ill health that was brought on by overwork and too-frequent childbearing, was determined not to be a "domestic slave" (p. 119). Although Calvin Stowe encouraged her writing and was glad of her ability to earn money, he was hypercritical of her housekeeping and volatile in his criticism. And, as he complained to his wife after the publication of Uncle Tom's Cabin made her an international figure, he found it difficult to deal with...