Religion and the Culture of Print in Modern America

Quakers in American Print Culture, 1800–1950

One of the more memorable scenes from Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852) occurs during Eliza Harris’s flight from slavery, after she arrives at the safe domestic haven of Rachel and Simeon Halliday, members of a devout Quaker household who have offered her temporary lodging on behalf of the Underground Railroad. It is in this orderly place of cleanliness, courtesy, thrift, goodwill, and piety that the fugitive slave Eliza finally is enabled to sleep soundly, and subsequently to dream “of a beautiful country,—a land, it seemed to her, of rest,— green shores, pleasant islands, and beautifully glittering water; and there, in a house which kind voices told her was a home, she saw her boy playing , a free and happy child.” And, indeed, upon waking the next morning , Eliza finds herself reunited with son and husband in the antebellum social oasis that is the Quaker settlement. If Uncle Tom’s Cabin may be understood, in part, as promoting an idealized form of American family life, then surely the Quaker Halliday family is one of the preeminent examples of that domestic sphere.1 Temperate and serene, the men, women, and children in Stowe’s Quaker settlement exude Christian virtue, moral gravity, robust health,2 41 > Quakers in American Print Culture, 1800–1950    and personal strength; for them, social justice begins at home, and the Quaker doctrine of an “Inner Light” for each believer manifests itself in an environment of mutuality, candor, and dignity. Here, age is respected and venerated, especially among the women, whose beauty seems to ripen with the years rather than fade. No youthful beauty, the carefully coiffed and plainly dressed3 Rachel Halliday possesses “one of those faces that time seems to touch only to brighten and adorn.” Here, too, the authority of patriarchy largely gives way to the guiding genius of cheerful and industrious women. Simeon Halliday, “a tall, straight, muscular man,” speaks few words and stands clear of the moreimportant kitchen labors of the household’s women, who bustle about creating “an atmosphere of mutual confidence and good fellowship.” A rare moral exemplar among Stowe’s male characters in the novel, however , Simeon chastens his young son for hating the slaveholders who would have prevented George and Eliza from living in peace. Instead, the fictional Quaker patriarch serenely insists upon unconditional love and benevolence, and that he “would do even the same for the slaveholder as for the slave, if the Lord brought him to my door in affliction.”4 However, despite all their admirable morality—which extended to the all-important notion of equality for women—Stowe’s novel does not linger long among these Friends of the Quaker settlement. For all the optimism expressed about these believers in the “Inner Light” of Quakerism , Uncle Tom’s Cabin does not directly advocate a turn to Quakerism as a solution for the problem of American social ills. As one critic has noted, while highlighting the otherness of Quaker clothing and dialect, Stowe’s novel also clearly indicates her admiration for the humanitarianism of Quakers. There are limits to her representations, however, for “No Quaker refers to the Inner Light, no Quaker discusses or even alludes to an inner awareness of spirituality, no Quaker refers to Christ.”5 Quakers in the novel are fashioned as exemplary figures of Christian virtue but do not dominate the narrative as a whole; they are presented as model Americans, but just as clearly their religious world seems to be little more than a fantasy, or an impossibility on the larger scale that interests Stowe. In this way, Stowe followed a formula that would become familiar over the course of the nineteenth century, as the American popular novel increasingly displaced other printed genres like the sermon and the religious tract to become a leading print forum for moral and religious debates. Quakerism’s representation in fiction as a set of exemplary American religious and social practices appears alongside its 42    failure to attract large numbers of followers. Consistently in the socially progressive vanguard, and commonly used in fiction as one of the highest expressions of Christianity, Quakers in early American fiction are deployed for our admiration, but they also enlist our recognition of their broader failure to capture American religious enthusiasm in any significant way. Notable in early American fiction for their moral superiority, Quakers6 are equally notable as angelic representations of an unrealizable social ideal...