Harriet Beecher Stowe: The Known and the Unknown (review)

BOOK REVIEWS295 While differing interpretations of the Compromise and the ensuing events of the decade will persist, they should not be made without reference to the facts and data presented in Prologue to Conflict. Professor Hamilton's purpose was to review and reconstruct the Compromise of 1850; in this hehas succeededwellenough. Stanley I. Kutler University of Wisconsin Harriet Beecher Stowe: The Known and the Unknown. By Edward Wagenknecht. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1965. Pp. 267. $6.00.) Edward Wagenknecht has written just the kind of biography one would expect Harriet Beecher Stowe to have written about herself. Drawing upon a great deal of previously unpublished material—notably the Stowe Papers now at Radcliffe—Wagenknecht has included substantial extracts from Mrs. Stowe's letters in his study. As it turns out, this is the unkindest thing a biographer of Harriet Beecher Stowe could do, for the distance between the Beecher milieu of mid-nineteenth century America and the intellectual climate today is far greater than years alone. Like all good Calvinists, Mrs. Stowe is constantly reflecting upon her own experiences, but these reflections are as stylized as a liturgical confession. Mrs. Stowe's writings, both fictional and personal, need to be read sympathetically , assessed critically, and reinterpreted in such a way that the surface sentimentality may be broken through. This is precisely where Professor Wagenknecht has failed as a biographer. He has entered into Mrs. Stowe's world of moral earnestness without ever coming out again. Indeed, it is sometimes difficult to realize that one is not reading a Stowe quotation when coming across such Wagenknecht comments as these: She [Mrs. Stowe] knew very well that on the domestic front women are more than a match for men and always have been, that if a man loves a woman she has a hold over him which no legal privileges that he may hold can possibly counterbalance, and that if he does not wish to kill her or discard her, he must please her. And: "though she does not tell us, I think we may be equally sure that she enjoyed slapping down the eternal wanton . . . and that she must have welcomed the opportunity to enjoy with a clear conscience the sadistic pleasure which such an act gives to all 'good' women." Mrs. Stowe's life was not just the insipid affair that it appears in Harriet Beecher Stowe: The Known and the Unknown. Tragedy stalked it from the death of her mother at five, through the estrangement of her half-sister, the adultery trial of her adored brother, Henry Ward Beecher, and the death of four of her own seven children, two of whose lives can be described as truly heart-breaking. But none of these events are given more than passing comment. The task of penetrating the sentimentality that veils Mrs. Stowe is indeed formidable. Professor Wagenknecht eschews it altogether. His reasons for 296CI VIL W AB HISTOBT writing the kind of biography he did are perhaps best summed up in one of his descriptions of a Stowe heroine, Angélique Van Arsdel of We and Our Neighbors: Angie has no particular faults to overcome; she has simply been brought up in a fashionable home; and she matures spiritually as well as physically, without ever becoming, even in the slightest degree, fanatical about it until she falls in love with a man who is worthy of her, if any man could be, and embarks upon a useful way of life which gives every promise of being happy and successful for both of them. It is all exactly the way life should be—and seldom is. Joyce Appleby Claremont Graduate School Mr. Lincoln's Proclamation: The Story of the Emancipation Proclamation . By Frank Donovan. (New York: Dodd, Mead and Company, 1964. Pp. vi, 142. $4.00.) This book is not indispensable. Frank Donovan, newspaperman, ad writer, Pathe News scriptwriter, movie producer, and author, has put together a "history of slavery" in the United States from its inception to its ultimate extinction. Although the volume is well-organized and well-written, it simply refuses to tell us anything fresh or new. It is a sketchy, routine, superficial review of a story...