John Gatta (Essay Date 1995-96)

SOURCE: Gatta, John. "Calvinism Feminized: Divine Matriarchy in Harriet Beecher Stowe." Connotations 5, nos. 2-3 (1995-96): 147-66.

In the following essay, Gatta explores Stowe's use of the image of the Madonna as the paradigmatic Mother, representing the Catholic symbol in Calvinist terms.

I

Confronting her New England religious heritage with more personal credulity than Hawthorne ever did his, the seventh child of Lyman and Roxana Beecher found herself engaged in a lifelong struggle to assimilate—and to remake—her ancestral Calvinism. The fruit of this engagement is evident in the subject matter of later novels such as The Minister's Wooing, Oldtown Folks, and Pogunuc People, as well as in the apocalyptic urgency and evangelical fervor of Uncle Tom's Cabin. Deficient in several crafts of the belletristic novelist, Stowe yet knew how to infuse her writing with the powerful rhetoric of conversion preaching...