Abstract
Harriet Beecher Stowe and the novel form have both long been associated with the secular. But scholars often conflate two definitions of “secular,” one being the sense of “earthly,” the other the sense of “antireligious.” This causes them to misread Stowe as moving away from religion. In The Minister’s Wooing, Stowe criticizes a type of Calvinism by emphasizing earthly experience as a source of religious knowledge. Both the theologians she examines and many modern critics assume a binary between the secular and the religious that Stowe dismantles. The novel form, far from inherently irreligious, was ideal for her theological purposes.
Keywords
There is a ladder to heaven, whose base God has placed in human affections, tender instincts, symbolic feelings, sacraments of love, through which the soul rises higher and higher.
The Minister’s Wooing, 53
Since 1916, when Georg Lukács defined the novel as “the epic of a world that has been abandoned by God,” secularism and the novel have come to seem like natural partners. 1 In the 1950s, Ian Watt claimed that realism, the hallmark of the modern novel, was a result of secularization. Formal realism, he argued, included only what could be explained empirically; it thereby excluded divine intervention. Watt concluded that for this shift to occur the culture must have moved away from religious belief. 2 Many current scholars follow Lukács and Watt in connecting realism and the secular. Fredric Jameson, for example, views “secular” realist novels as reinventing “empty” religious forms such as Providence and salvation in material terms. 3 To the average reader, the novel can indeed seem to be a secular genre, with its realistic representation and its focus on the everyday life of an ordinary individual. For the scholars mentioned above, however, the novel is necessarily secular. For them, the novel is the characteristic literary form of modernity. And modernity, for historical reasons, proceeds without reference to a divinity. The novel apparently proceeds in the same way.
Built in to this reasoning is the assumption that religion will naturally fade away as modernity progresses. Twentieth-century sociologists named this long-standing assumption the secularization thesis. In the mid-nineteenth century that thesis had already led to Matthew Arnold’s belief that literature would replace religion as that which interprets life and transmits cultural values. This “replacement theory” continues to shape literary studies, 4 especially studies of the novel. 5 Yet it is no longer clear that secularization is the dominant or even correct story of modernity. 6 And if the secularization thesis is wrong, or at least over-simplified, then the novel’s role as assistant to or symptom of secularization demands rethinking. We can ask again: Do the novel and the secular go hand-in-hand?
A few scholars have questioned the supposed secularity of realism. In early responses to Watt, G. A Starr and J. Paul Hunter each pointed out the influence of spiritual autobiography on the novel form. Hunter argued that “the novel as an art form owes a great deal to Puritan modes of thought.” 7 On the American side, Daniel Shea demonstrated the prevalence of spiritual autobiography in early American literary forms. 8 More recently, Gregory Jackson has demonstrated that American literary realism, though usually understood as secular and empiricist, actually has roots in homiletics. 9 His work is part of a new wave of scholarship that establishes how thoroughly evangelicalism shaped the literary scene in early America. 10
I would like to use a case study to contribute to our understanding of the novel by exploring The Minister’s Wooing by Harriet Beecher Stowe (1859). Stowe is often viewed as a secularizing force in the nineteenth century, itself considered an era of secularization. In The Minister’s Wooing, Stowe wrestles with Puritan theology, especially doctrines about salvation and damnation. She depicts characters modifying their ideas about God based on their experiences. In particular, the primary characters conclude that human love—romantic and familial—is the way God draws people to salvation, and also that a loving God would not eternally separate loved ones.
Stowe is often interpreted as a writer moving away from orthodox Christianity and toward a “secular” worldview, but this is largely due to confusion in the terminology. Critics often conflate two definitions of the secular: the original sense of “earthly” and the more recent sense of “antireligious.” The term is derived from “saeculum,” a century or age, and in the Middle Ages it referred to clergy who worked in the world, rather than focusing on eternity in monastic seclusion. 11 Only in the nineteenth century did this division between religious and worldly begin to denote a division between religious and irreligious or anti-religious. The term “secular” was first used this way in 1851, when George Holyoake founded a movement called “Secularism” that was based on “new reasons for morality … which pertain to this life alone” as opposed to “spiritual considerations.” 12 We must keep these different definitions in mind when studying Stowe.
By focusing on the experience of human love, Stowe was not rejecting Christianity. Quite the opposite: she emphasized earthly experience as a source of religious knowledge—a ladder one could ascend toward God. She promoted the worldly because she wrote in response to theologians who stressed revelation and doctrine. Like the modern critics mentioned above, those theologians assume a binary between the secular and the religious. Stowe is intent on dismantling this binary, and the novel form is the ideal medium for her purposes. Far from being implicitly post-Christian, the novel form is actually well suited to articulate the intersection of religious and experiential knowledge. Stowe’s novels are secular, but they are also profoundly Christian.
Defining the Secular
The term “secular” seems unavoidable in scholarship on The Minister’s Wooing. Critics have contended that the book has a “secular orientation,” 13 promotes the “secularization of Edwardseanism,” 14 takes part in “the secularization of religious novels,” 15 uses a “secular guise” 16 and “semisecular aesthetics,” 17 and links the “sacred and secular.” 18 Another critic describes Stowe’s novels in general as “secular and gynocentric.” 19
But what, exactly, does “the secular” mean in these accounts? As we saw from a brief look at its etymology, the definition has shifted over time. In his entry on “Secularism” for Keywords in American Cultural Studies, Michael Warner notes that the word “secular” currently has a range of meanings:
earthly, worldly, mundane unspiritual, non-religious (as in secular art) embracing an alternative to religion, such as atheism or free thought actively antireligious a type of society in which church and government are differentiated
20
The term “secular” could therefore describe someone who actively opposes religion, someone who follows no religion, or, in Stowe’s case, one who celebrates the mundane for a religious purpose. The fifth and newest definition, which focuses on the differentiation of social structures, is the domain of secularization theory: here the religious and the secular are not structurally opposed but rather occupy different domains.
The earliest association between Stowe and the secular is Alice Crozier’s Novels of Harriet Beecher Stowe (1969). Crozier asserts that Stowe’s “orientation was secular rather than ecclesiastical. Instead of doctrinal subtleties, instead even of salvation in the sense that Edwards used the word, Mrs. Stowe’s piety led her to concern herself with the redemption of drunkards, with Christian love rather than selfish hate between black and white, and with the lifting of the burdens of the oppressed everywhere.” 21 In this passage, Crozier contrasts the secular with the churchly. She claims that Stowe’s religious practice involved loving and redeeming the marginalized rather than preaching doctrine. Here Stowe is still motivated by Christianity—by “piety” and “Christian love”—but she lives them out in the world, on the streets, rather than inside the church. In a later passage, however, Crozier uses the term “secular” differently. She describes Stowe as shifting the basis for morality: “The first step in the process which eventually led to the aesthetic or secular morality was the substitution of sentiment for dogma as the essence of Christian belief.” 22 In other words, by replacing doctrine with an experience of love, Stowe took a step towards secularization—the secular here defined as the opposite of Christianity, or perhaps of religion itself. Whereas Crozier first uses “secular” to denote religiously motivated action outside the bounds of the church, in the second passage she uses it to mean something outside the bounds of religion.
A decade later, Lawrence Buell also used the term “secular” ambiguously in his otherwise excellent analysis of The Minister’s Wooing. He argued that the novel demonstrated “the gradual secularization of Edwardseanism.” 23 A later description clarifies what he means by secularization: “New England theology … modified in the direction of the religion of the heart.” 24 Like Crozier, Buell sees Stowe moving Calvinist theology toward romanticism and secularity by moving toward emotion. Whether Buell means that Stowe steps away from Christianity or simply makes it more earthly is impossible to tell. But in a later essay he specifies the way in which Stowe modified theology: “The Minister’s Wooing argues that Hopkinsian disinterested benevolence and the traditional conception of conversion experience need translation into more humanistic terms.” 25 “Humanistic” is the key term here, but again it is difficult to tell whether Buell means a Christian humanism or an irreligious humanism. Buell’s work demonstrates the general critical association among the secular, the emotional, and the human, which could easily imply a separation between Christianity and doctrine on one side and humanism and emotion on the other.
David Reynolds, the most influential proponent of Stowe’s secularity, also uses the term “secular” in multiple senses. His thesis in Faith in Fiction (1981) is that from 1785 to 1850 American religious fiction of all genres moved from a doctrinal to a secular emphasis. Reynolds uses Stowe to exemplify the completion of the process he analyzes; her work provides his prime example of secularized Calvinist fiction.
26
Of her precursors, he writes, “the early fiction does reveal the Calvinist imagination escaping its doctrinal shackles and moving toward more secular forms of religious expression,” a process that Stowe then perfected.
27
The last phrase indicates that Reynolds is not using “secular” to mean irreligious or antireligious. He also writes that “Calvinist fiction went through a long and rather tortured process of secularization, passing from modified doctrine to social reform to individual activism.”
28
Here, to move toward the secular is to move away from doctrine, though not necessarily away from Christianity. In the last sentence of his book, however, Reynolds places the secular and the religious in opposition. He explains that the title, Faith in Fiction, has three meanings: It points to the widespread treatment of religious faith in fiction, … [it] signifies popular authors’ and clergymen’s deepening faith in fiction as the most appropriate literary mode in an increasingly secular and antitheological age … [and] it suggests the painful suspicion, underlying much of these Americans’ surface cheer, that the otherworldly religion in which they ostensibly had faith was a fiction.
29
Reynolds apparently presupposes what Charles Taylor has called a “subtraction story,” those “stories of modernity in general, and secularity in particular, which explain them by human beings having lost, or sloughed off, or liberated themselves from certain earlier, confining horizons, or illusions, or limitations of knowledge.” 30 In Reynolds’s work, the subtraction story takes a literary form: orthodox doctrine “shackles” the artist’s imagination; in order to move forward, writers must “escape” from it. Orthodoxy is static, liberalism is progressive; doctrine is the opposite of imagination. Though Reynolds describes the third meaning of his title as the opinion of nineteenth-century Americans rather than his own, his assumptions are perhaps manifest in his word choice: he portrays orthodoxy as a “surface cheer” that people were coming to view with “suspicion.”
Though Buell and Reynolds wrote these analyses in the 1980s, their work still sets the terms of the debate about Stowe’s relationship with Christianity. What is it about Stowe’s writing that so consistently earns the label “secular,” but in such an inconsistent way? For an answer, we can examine both the circumstances preceding the writing of The Minister’s Wooing and the text itself.
Love Wins
In July 1857, a year before Stowe wrote The Minister’s Wooing, her nineteen-year-old son Henry drowned. Henry did not call himself a Christian, and in the Calvinism in which Stowe was raised, he was therefore damned. Thirty-five years earlier, in a parallel situation, her sister Catharine had lost her unbelieving fiancé in a shipwreck. In anguish over the state of her beloved’s soul, Catharine even travelled to his home to search for evidence that he had converted to Christianity. She could find none. 31 This devastating experience, and the tension it caused with her Calvinist father, was the main reason Catharine eventually rejected Calvinism. 32
Hell was clearly on Stowe’s mind when she wrote The Minister’s Wooing. In the summer of 1858, immediately before beginning the novel, Stowe wrote to her friend Lady Byron about eternal punishment: The spirit of Christianity has produced in the human spirit a tenderness of love which wholly revolts from the old doctrine on the subject … [yet] the most appalling language on this subject is that of Christ himself …. Is there any fair way of disposing of the current of assertion, and the still deeper undercurrent of implication, on this subject, without one which loosens all faith in revelation, and throws us on pure naturalism?
33
The novel was serialized in the new journal Atlantic Monthly from December 1858 to December 1859 and published in book form in 1859. A historical novel set in Rhode Island in the 1790s, The Minister’s Wooing is constructed around a love triangle. A widow and her daughter, Mrs. Scudder and Mary, provide room and board for Samuel Hopkins, a Puritan minister. Hopkins loves Mary, but Mary loves her cousin, the unsaved but likable sailor James Marvyn. With James presumed dead after a shipwreck, Mrs. Scudder persuades Mary to become engaged to the estimable Hopkins. But James returns a week before the wedding. Hopkins breaks the engagement when he discovers that Mary loves James, and the young lovers are united.
Stowe likely chose the historical Samuel Hopkins as a main character in order to comment on certain Calvinist doctrines. Hopkins was a student of Jonathan Edwards, and Stowe was drawn to Hopkins as a moral reformer—specifically, an early abolitionist. In 1776 he published A Dialogue Concerning the Slavery of the Africans, subtitled “shewing it to be the duty and interest of the American states to emancipate all their African slaves.” Stowe has the fictional Hopkins quote from this work and his other anti-slavery texts. Hopkins’s abolitionism derived from his view of true holiness, which he called “disinterested benevolence”—love devoid of any self-love. Slavery was evil because it violated the commandment to love one’s neighbor. In the novel, Hopkins is most heroic when demonstrating selfless love: giving of his meager income to free slaves, preaching abolition even though it will drive away his wealthiest parishioners, and relinquishing a marriage with his beloved Mary. As much as she admired Hopkins for his abolitionism, though, Stowe was deeply concerned about his theology.
Stowe was mainly worried about the effect of Hopkinsian theology on people’s views of God’s love and the afterlife. One foundation of Calvinist theology is election, the idea that God elected before time to save certain people. Some extended this idea into double predestination, which includes the belief that God therefore also chose to damn some people (the “unregenerate”). Hopkins developed the concept of disinterested benevolence within this framework. In An Inquiry into the Nature of True Holiness (1791), Hopkins writes that the most virtuous people will set aside even their desire for eternal life and say, “Let God reign, and dispose of me and all creatures, so as shall be most for his own glory.” 35 In other words, the way to truly love God is to demonstrate what came to be called “willingness to be damned.” Anyone who can come to this place of self-denial is actually assured of salvation: “He who has such disinterested, benevolent exercises [or thoughts] … may be sure of his own eternal salvation.” 36 When Hopkins takes disinterested benevolence to its furthest logical extension, therefore, willingness to be damned becomes a marker of election. This is the idea Stowe most closely examines and rejects in The Minister’s Wooing, largely by representing its damage on characters who wrestle with it.
The Minister’s Wooing may be set in the eighteenth century, but it spoke to theological controversies of Stowe’s day, particularly at the seminary where Stowe’s husband taught. According to Kimberly VanElsveld Adams, The Minister’s Wooing was Stowe’s response to an institutional controversy at Andover Seminary, where Charles Stowe was a professor. Andover was a conservative seminary founded in response to Harvard’s liberalization, and it promoted a Calvinism alternately called “New England theology” and “Edwardsean Calvinism.” Edwards A. Park, who was considered “the last of the consistent Calvinists” and taught Hopkinsian theology, was an influential professor there. 37 Some of the professors, including Park, were worried by the increasing liberalism of their students. These professors mandated that students must accept their teachers’ theology by the end of their second year or leave the seminary.
The Stowes, however, sided with the students. Harriet Beecher Stowe published an article denouncing Andover for emphasizing the intellect over the emotions. 38 She also cleverly used Park’s biography of his hero, Hopkins, to fashion The Minister’s Wooing—her novelistic critique of Hopkinsian theology. The narrator comments that Hopkins wrongfully supposed “that the elaboration of theology was preaching the gospel. The gospel he was preaching constantly, by his pure, unworldly living.” 39 A letter Stowe wrote to her brother just after finishing the novel reveals its connection with the seminary controversy. Railing against Park’s teaching, she bemoans “the Hopkinsian method of disposing of the great majority of the human race up to our day … together with the dry heartless unfeeling cold manner in which the discussion … is conducted. All this has affected [Andover students] with the feeling that they cannot preach that.” 40 In this context, The Minister’s Wooing can be read as an articulation of a Christianity that could be preached. Incidentally, according to Adams, Stowe’s attack on Hopkinsian theology probably contributed to her husband losing his job at Andover.
A central image in The Minister’s Wooing is the ladder to heaven, which Stowe borrows from Plato’s Symposium. In Stowe’s version, a person moves upward from natural, earthly loves to selfless love of God: “There is a ladder to heaven, whose base God has placed in human affections, tender instincts, symbolic feelings, sacraments of love, through which the soul rises higher and higher, refining as she goes.” 41 At the very top of the ladder is the threshold of heaven, where “the soul knows self no more” and loses herself in Eternal Love. 42 Journeying through loving relationships in life is the way to attain union with God: “The Eternal Father organized every relation of human existence and strung every cord of human love” in order to raise the soul to himself. 43
Stowe powerfully uses the ladder image to argue against disinterested benevolence. She writes that the highest step, self-abnegation, “has been seized upon by our sage [Hopkins] as the all of religion. He knocked out every round of the ladder but the highest, and then, pointing to its hopeless splendor, said to the world, ‘Go up thither and be saved!’” 44 She maintains that Hopkins destroyed the pathway to God by insisting that love void of self-interest is the only true holiness. He preached “an ideality so high as quite to discourage ordinary virtue.” 45 Rather than being able to gradually learn to love God by practicing love in families, in marriage, by loving one’s neighbor, in Hopkins’s system people were either utterly debased or perfectly virtuous. They were either at the bottom of the ladder or at the top, and there was little they could do about it. In The Minister’s Wooing, Stowe was trying to repair the ladder to heaven, to give readers a path toward God. She presents romantic and familial love as rungs that can be ascended toward a loving God.
Stowe revisits the ladder image later in the text to address another aspect of disinterested benevolence, the necessity of loving God apart from any blessings God bestows. James is converted partly by his love for Mary and partly by experiencing God’s help. The turning point occurs when James reads about Jacob’s vision of a ladder to heaven with angels ascending and descending: Jacob “saw that there was a way between him and God, and that there were those above who did care for him, and who could come to him to help him.” 46 James vows that if God will meet his needs from then on, he will believe in him. James acknowledges that Hopkins “would have called that all selfishness,” but it was the beginning of his faith. 47 Instead of a remote God who demands utter self-sacrifice, James finds a loving God interested in helping him thrive.
The ladder passages focus on salvation, but the most dramatic portions of The Minister’s Wooing focus on damnation. In addition to criticizing disinterested benevolence, the novel goes so far as to argue against the existence of hell. The critique is presented as inconspicuously as possible—in the form of private questions. Sitting in her room, Mary wonders about James: “Could Christ’s own loved ones be happy, when those with whom they have exchanged being, in whom they live and feel, are as wandering stars, for whom is reserved the mist of darkness forever?” 48 Mary begins with the premise that heaven is a place of happiness. She then reasons that since she could never be happy in heaven if James were damned, he must not be damned.
Beyond simply being unhappy without James, Mary’s reasoning suggests that she would not even be complete without him. As Marianne Noble points out, intersubjectivity, or shared identity, is the foundation of Stowe’s strongest criticism of the doctrine of hell. 49 This idea appears early in the novel. When Mary hears of James’s death, she begins to value her own salvation less: “she felt how idle is the mere hope or promise of personal salvation made to one who has passed beyond the life of the self, and struck deep roots of [her] existence in others.” 50 Even if Mary herself is saved, this passage notes, the boundaries of her self have increased to include James—she has “passed beyond” herself. Mary’s love for James makes them one; she has “exchanged being” with him. That Mary and James share a “selfness” is the guarantee that their love will not be thwarted. 51 Using the image of intertwining in a discussion of hell has profound theological import, since it suggests that people who are connected in life remain so after death and therefore must share the same eternal fate. It is even suggested that Mary’s love is salvific; she thinks, “Is there not some provision by which those roots of deathless love, which Christ’s betrothed ones strike into other hearts shall have a divine, redeeming power?” 52 In short, love wins.
The second novelistic blow to hell occurs through Mrs. Marvyn’s anguish over her lost son. The narrator prepares the ground in the first half of chapter 23, explaining the consequences not only of Hopkins’s doctrines but all of “New England Calvinism.” As she describes it, these theologians believed that God chooses to damn and eternally torment most of the human race, that this is somehow the exercise of God’s love, and that people are expected to “truly and heartily accept all the ways of God thus declared right and lovely, and from the heart submit to Him as the only just and good.” 53 Not surprisingly, this theology created internal conflict. It “had, on minds of a certain class, the effect of a slow poison, producing life-habits of morbid action very different from any which followed the simple reading of the Bible.” 54 Stowe is able to honor the theologians while challenging their ideas by dividing the human race into strong and weak. A few saints, Hopkins included, were able to rise above their natural reactions and accept God’s will. But not most: “while strong spirits walked … along these sublime paths, feebler and more sensitive ones lay along the track, bleeding away in life-long despair.” 55 For the average soul, then, this doctrine kills—whether through poison or bleeding. The narrator focuses on the death of a loved one: “when the stroke of death came, … who can say what silent anguish of loving hearts sounded the dread depths of eternity with the awful question, Where?” 56
The second half of the chapter dramatizes the effects of the doctrines in question through Mrs. Marvyn. The mother’s mental breakdown over James’ death suggests that it is psychologically impossible to love this kind of God. On a pastoral visit to the grieving mother, Hopkins paraphrases his Inquiry and offers no real help: “The Lord reigneth, and will at last bring infinite good out of evil, whether our small portion of existence be included or not.” 57 Mrs. Marvyn can only respond with what she believes is heresy: “They say our salvation depends on our loving God … better than our dearest friends.—It is impossible!—it is contrary to the laws of my nature! I can never love God! I can never praise him!—I am lost! lost! lost!” 58 Up against a doctrine that demands she not only accept her son’s damnation but even declare it beautiful and good, Mrs. Marvyn recoils and calls it “contrary to the laws of [her] nature,” which compel her to love her son. Forced to choose between love of James and love of God, she chooses to face damnation herself. The scene bears traces of the Gospel writers’ descriptions of the demon possessed. Mrs. Marvyn’s speech is accompanied by physical frenzy, in which her eyes grow wild and “her words, mingled with shrieks and moans, became whirling and confused.” 59 Looking on, Mary fears Mrs. Marvyn is losing her mind. The scene judges New England Calvinism not as abstruse or unbiblical but rather as destructive to those who believe it. Moreover, it places it at odds with motherhood, which many of Stowe’s readers would have viewed as sacred. Mrs. Marvyn only regains sanity when her servant, Candace, tells her to forget about doctrine and meditate on Jesus’ love.
Through Mrs. Marvyn, the novel suggests the shortcomings of systematic theology and charts another path. Referring to the idea that God wills some to suffer, Mrs. Marvyn tells Mary that she cannot disbelieve the doctrine because the Bible and nature support it. But she can refuse to infer from this that God is unloving and instead choose to focus on God’s love demonstrated in the crucifixion. She says, “I have thought, in desperate moments, of giving up the Bible itself. But … do I not see the same difficulty in Nature? … If there is a fathomless mystery of sin and sorrow, there is a deeper mystery of God’s love. So, Mary, I try Candace’s way,—I look at Christ,—I pray to him …. I rest there,—I wait.” 60 Though Mrs. Marvyn is given to logic, she learns to use another part of herself in response to God. Like a mystic, she looks at Christ on the cross; she prays; she waits.
Mark Noll, describing the theological battles among Calvinists of Stowe’s day, describes her contribution as “novelistic theology,” which involved “an almost complete rejection … of the overwhelming compulsion of America’s Reformed theologians … to figure everything out.” 61 Noll’s phrase “novelistic theology” offers an opportunity to specify why the novel is a good medium for describing the complexities of lived religion. He seems to mean that any literary text, because it is not tasked with the same logical rigor as systematic theology, allows for the complications that make up human life—and perhaps is even suited to convey the mysteries of God.
But there is also something specific to the novel as a form that makes it an appropriate vehicle for the kind of investigation Stowe undertakes. The marriage plot dominates the text, but it does more than provide a narrative framework. When James goes off to sea and is presumed dead, the reader is left to struggle with Mary over his eternal destiny. The whole force of this romance novel is toward the consummation of their love, and the doctrines of election and hell seem to block them from being together in the afterlife. A lengthy article in the American Theological Review identifies exactly what is at stake: “The story places the interesting and beloved James in a position where either his soul or the standard New-England theology on this point must be sacrificed.” 62 The reviewer assumes that if readers are forced to choose between saving a sympathetic character and saving a doctrine, they will choose the character. The marriage plot of The Minister’s Wooing thus undermines the doctrine of hell structurally; it encourages readers to desire eternal life for James even though he is unregenerate.
Stowe drew from personal experience in depicting Mrs. Marvyn’s anguished questions and hard-earned peace. A month after her son Henry died, she wrote to Catharine about it. Her language prefigures Mrs. Marvyn’s agony about her son’s destiny: “Distressing doubts as to Henry’s spiritual state were rudely thrust upon my soul. It was as if a voice had said to me: ‘You trusted in God, did you? You believed that He loved you! … Now He has hurried [Henry] into eternity without a moment’s warning, without preparation, and where is he?’” 63 The same letter also shows Stowe arriving at the conclusion she provides for Mrs. Marvyn, of trusting God’s love as the model and source of her own love and being content to rest in mystery: “No such slander as this shall the Devil ever fix in my mind against my Lord and my God! … He invented mothers’ hearts, and He certainly has the pattern in his own …. The mysteries of God’s ways must be swallowed up by the greater mystery of the love of Christ.” 64 Mrs. Marvyn speaks for Stowe both in her doubts about hell and her faith in God’s love. Once again, love wins.
As she wrestled with orthodox doctrine, Stowe also worried about the reception of her ideas in The Minister’s Wooing. Apparently she knew from the start that some would view it as unorthodox and voiced her concerns in a letter to her editor, James Russell Lowell. Lowell replied: “As for ‘orthodoxy,’ be at ease. Whatever is well done the world finds orthodox at last …. If, with your heart and brain, you are not orthodox, in Heaven’s name who is?” 65 Lowell brushes aside her fears of being considered unorthodox by praising her compassion, intelligence, and certain success. A similar exchange occurs in a letter from John Ruskin, who wrote to Stowe after the book was published in England: “I do not understand why you should apprehend (or rather anticipate without apprehension) any absurd criticism on it. It is sure to be a popular book.” 66 Popular it was, but without criticism it was not.
Theology of the Bones
Stowe was correct to foresee controversy; debates about The Minister’s Wooing raged in contemporary periodicals. The reviews shed light on the theological climate of the day and where Stowe fit (or did not fit). They also speak to the role of literature in forming theology. We see in these reviews that the novel form can be an active participant in religious thinking.
The Minister’s Wooing added fuel to a fire already burning in antebellum Calvinism. Between 1820 and 1860 Calvinism fragmented into nine factions, with Unitarians on the liberal side and New and Old School Presbyterians on the conservative side. 67 In this environment, The Minister’s Wooing was a shibboleth. Religious writers used reactions to the novel to determine who was inside and outside the fold of orthodoxy. A Unitarian paper lauded The Minister’s Wooing as subversive, claiming it “will do more to break down Orthodoxy, than all the direct efforts of our Unitarian pulpits and press could possibly accomplish.” 68 Meanwhile, the New York Evangelist, a Presbyterian weekly, initially praised the novel as a skillful love story but eventually renounced it under pressure from the New York Observer, another Presbyterian weekly. It is possible that this struggle reflected or even added to the newly formed rivalry between Old and New School Presbyterians.
The Evangelist and the Observer waged a war over The Minister’s Wooing that lasted five months. In October 1859, the Evangelist defended the novel against the religious press by arguing that Mrs. Marvyn’s doubts of future punishment should not be read as Stowe’s, nor should the novel be read as a theological work. The words of a character are not “deliberate opinion, avowed and defended in a Theological Treatise. It is not at all in that light that we look upon this book, but as a simple tale of religious faith, and tender, trembling love.” 69 Three months later, the Observer harassed its rival by publishing this very defense alongside two devastating critiques of the novel that appeared in other Presbyterian papers. It concludes: “In its endorsement of Mrs. Stowe’s attack upon New England theology and morals, the N. Y. Evangelist does not speak the sentiments of its own ecclesiastical connection.” 70 The following week, the Evangelist editor responded that he had never endorsed the theology of the book, only praised the story. He added that he had since heard that Stowe was unsettled in her views on eternal punishment, and therefore she may have intentionally used Mrs. Marvyn’s dialogue to undermine the orthodox belief in hell. The editor distances himself from Stowe: “If there were such a design, certainly it was very reprehensible, and … had we been informed of any such reason for suspecting the intention of the author, we should of course have warned our readers about it.” 71
The battle of reviewers is informative for what it says about the theological possibilities of a romance novel. The Evangelist defended The Minister’s Wooing on two counts: (1) that it was a love story and not a theological treatise, and (2) that Mrs. Marvyn’s doubts about hell did not reflect Stowe’s opinion. These claims rest on the assumptions that narration differs from exposition and that the opinions of characters do not always match those of the implied author. When the reviewer finds out that Stowe might be less than orthodox, however, he jettisons both these arguments and insists, “We have not endorsed the theology of
Most reviewers were concerned about the novel’s threat to the doctrine of eternal punishment, but the most insightful review looked beyond the novel’s theology to its epistemology. This was the long American Theological Review piece previously mentioned. That a theological journal would devote twenty-two pages to discussing a novel is striking. Most worrisome to this reviewer is that the novel performs theological analysis starting from the emotions rather than a rational interpretation of Scripture. It interprets life “from the heart without a Bible, rather than from the understanding with the Bible open before it.” 74 Though the idea of hell might not make sense in human terms, the reviewer argues, God is a better judge than humans are. Therefore, to draw conclusions about hell by pointing to the suffering love of a woman, like Mrs. Marvyn or Mary, is inappropriate. The reviewer highlights Stowe’s scorn for abstractions in favor of truths fitted to particular people in particular circumstances, like the comfort the servant Candace offers Mrs. Marvyn. Quoting Candace’s assertion that she feels “in her bones” that James is not really dead, the reviewer labels the novel’s perspective a “theology of the bones”—theology that reasons about eternal matters from one’s own visceral experience rather than from revelation. 75 He worries that this tendency will spread because of the book’s popularity and laments that Stowe “had some part in helping [the Atlantic] fulfill its mission of evil,” namely to undermine “Puritan Theology.” 76
Conclusion: The Secular Christian Novel
Some critics believe it was the novel itself that caused Stowe to cross the line out of orthodoxy—that the novel form is intrinsically anti-orthodox. Buell, for example, argues that Unitarianism lends itself better than orthodox Calvinism to writing fiction. Even novels written by orthodox writers, he notes, end up being more liberal than the writers themselves. He gives two potential reasons for this dynamic: “Either the conventions of romance prevented conservative authors from speaking their convictions … or else the creative process triggered in the sensibility of these writers a partial liberation from creedal restraints. In any case, when orthodox writers ventured into the charmed world of romance, they did so at peril to their orthodoxy.” 77 Buell claims that either generic conventions overshadowed the authors’ beliefs, or the authors temporarily suspended their beliefs as they wrote. As with Reynolds, the subtraction story underlies Buell’s formulation of a “liberation from creedal restraints.”
A slightly different claim is that religious themes incorporated into a novel are necessarily loosened or relativized. To put it another way, the novel form exerts liberalizing theological pressure. For instance, Alison O’Harae notes that The Minister’s Wooing substitutes marriage for salvation as the end goal. She concludes, “It is difficult to determine whether this is Stowe’s deliberate revisionism of Calvinist theology, or simply an implicit consequence of seeking to deal with such complex theological issues through the medium of the historical romance novel.” 78 For O’Harae, there are two possible explanations for the novel’s theology: either Stowe deliberately placed marriage above salvation in order to rework Hopkins’s system, or the conventions of the romance novel—because marriage is its end goal—inevitably created this outcome. The Minister’s Wooing makes for a provocative study of the novel because both options O’Harae suggests are partially correct: Stowe does employ the conventions of the romance novel, and she does so self-consciously, in order to modify Hopkins’s theology.
The Minister’s Wooing and Stowe’s other novels likely did have a liberalizing effect on American theology. By presenting experience as a source of theological truth, Stowe may have taken a step away from revelation and toward secularism that others took much further. But on the other hand, she remained squarely in Christian orthodoxy. Many Christian traditions—Wesleyanism, for example—regard experience as a source of truth. Others, such as Episcopalianism and Catholicism, tend to be more comfortable than Protestantism with mystery. 79 To criticize Edwardsean Calvinism is not the same as to jettison Christianity, much less religion.
The novel form did not create Stowe’s theology, nor did it pressure her into rejecting hell. Rather, her theology—her belief that God brings people to faith through blessings and human love—made the novel an ideal medium for her. Stowe was convinced that the earthly and the emotional (that is, the secular, in one of its definitions) are the ways God teaches us. In this specific sense, secular and sacred are one. Stowe writes novels, writes about families and marriages, because she believes the earthly and the religious are of one piece: “the Eternal Father organized every relation of human existence and strung every cord of human love” to raise the soul to heaven. 80 Earthly life is not a distraction from God but a direct outpouring from God.
We must read Stowe in her historical context. When she maintained the importance of the earthly, the emotional, and the human, she did so in opposition to those who thought God was indifferent to those things. Particularly through Hopkins, she argues against the divide she sees in Edwardsean Calvinism between doctrine and experience, God and life. One passage describes Mary as horrified that Hopkins’s doctrine threatens to drive “the point of a wedge between her life and her life’s life, between her and her God.” 81 On a lighter note, the novel gently chides Hopkins for his ignorance of the work that sustains his life. After describing in detail the sewing, cleaning, and cooking that Mrs. Scudder and Mary do for him, the narrator comments wryly, “The Doctor little thought, while he … gently traduced the Scriptural Martha and insisted on the duty of heavenly abstractedness, how much of his own leisure for spiritual contemplation was due to the Martha-like talents of his hostess.” 82 Critics have typically read passages like this as a feminist argument for the importance of the work women do; it is equally an argument for the value of the material over against disembodied “spiritual contemplation.”
Can a novel be both secular and Christian? The Minister’s Wooing indicates that the answer is yes, as long as we define our terms. Returning to Warner’s five definitions of “secular,” we can see that Stowe’s work is deeply secular in the first sense—earthly, worldly, mundane. Some may describe it using the second definition—unspiritual—because of its focus on daily life, but Stowe had a spiritual purpose in choosing this focus. She is far from the last three definitions—she does not embrace an alternative to religion, she is not antireligious, and she is not interested in how church and government are structured.
In its time, The Minister’s Wooing challenged the binary between the secular (earthly) and the religious; it corrected a tendency to divorce daily experience from one’s religious beliefs. Today it challenges the same binary; it corrects a critical tendency to assume that celebrating the worldly means moving away from religion. Though literary history makes it difficult to perceive, it is possible for a novel to be both fully secular and fully religious. Attending to our definitions of the secular will give greater clarity in studies of Stowe. It will also help us re-examine the history of the novel and nineteenth-century American literary history. The novel is not necessarily a secularizing force. In fact, it can be an especially good form for portraying religious experience. Stowe did not believe in a ladder to heaven because she wrote novels; she wrote novels that creatively instantiated her belief in a ladder to heaven. The Minister’s Wooing itself functions as a rung in that ladder, seeking to draw readers in with romance and then up toward God.