 Herman Melville, Moby Dick and "Benito Cereno" Herman Melville was a New Yorker who went to sea, and Harriet Beecher Stowe was a New Englander who spent eighteen important years in Cincinnati. It’s unlikely that Harriet read Melville’s books, and Melville may have read Uncle Tom’s Cabin but only after writing Moby-Dick. Still, these two authors have more in common than you might think. Both were raised in Calvinist households, Melville in the Dutch Reformed Church and Harriet in her father’s Presbyterianism. Both also later switched to churches with more optimistic theologies, Melville to Unitarianism and Harriet to the Episcopal Church. Scholar David Reynolds suggests that the gloomy Calvinist background and the spiritual questioning that followed account for the surprising number of characters who question their faith in Uncle Tom’s Cabin: “Push Uncle Tom’s Cabin a bit more toward the dark side and we’re in the doubt-riddled world of Melville, Hawthorne, and Dickinson.” The year 1851 was central to the writing lives of both Harriet and Melville. She began serial publication of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, and he published Moby-Dick. Both authors followed these works with important fictional treatments of slavery in the mid-1850s: Melville with his novella “Benito Cereno” in 1855 and Harriet with her novel Dred: A Tale of the Great Dismal Swamp the next year. The two authors’ very different approaches to writing made both their critical and popular reputations as volatile as today’s stock market. Harriet’s direct condemnation of slavery in Uncle Tom’s Cabin made it the bestselling book in the world other than the Bible in the nineteenth century, while Melville’s dense language, irony, and ambiguous symbolism in Moby-Dick attracted few readers in his lifetime. His contemporaries also were not ready for the close crosscultural friendship of Ishmael and Queequeg or Melville’s implicit critique of American white supremacy when Ishmael says: “It was the whiteness of the whale that above all things appalled me.” Even when Melville dealt explicitly with slavery in “Benito Cereno,” his irony and complex character development were too indirect to interest abolitionists or many other readers. When Melville and Harriet died in the 1890s, she was by far the more famous of the two. By the 1920s, literary tastes were changing. Critics began to celebrate Melville’s psychological analysis and thematic ambiguities and turned away from what they considered the propaganda and sentimentality of Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Then, starting in the early 1980s, feminist criticism and cultural studies brought Uncle Tom’s Cabin back into the literary canon, where it stands today alongside Moby-Dick as one of the central works of mid-nineteenth century American literature. About the author:
Dr. John Getz, Professor Emeritus, Xavier University, retired in 2017 after teaching English there for 45 years. He specializes in American literature, especially nineteenth century, as well as the intersections of literature and peace studies. He has written articles on a variety of authors including Edith Wharton, Sherwood Anderson, and Ursula Le Guin. He appears in the documentary film Becoming Harriet Beecher Stowe, scheduled for release in 2020 by Fourth Wall Films.
2 Comments
 detail image from HBHS exhibit To Give It All to This Cause Frederick William Stowe was Harriet Beecher Stowe and Calvin Stowe’s fourth of seven children. Born in 1840, Frederick was twelve years old by the time Harriet published Uncle Tom’s Cabin in 1852. Frederick was often separated from Harriet and Calvin, due to Calvin’s frequent business trips to Europe and several family tragedies.
Cholera was common in the nineteenth century, and especially in Cincinnati. Harriet herself even caught cholera. When Frederick was nine years old, Harriet’s third son, Samuel Charles, died as an infant due to Cholera. Frederick often suffered from a lack of attention from his mother, and by the time he was sixteen, Frederick had already become an alcoholic. While Harriet was off on a European tour in the 1850s, Frederick was sent to his uncle, Rev. Thomas Beecher, who had experience helping people with addictions recover. Frederick was a patient of the “water cure”, a popular method at the time. By drinking large amounts of water and taking frequent baths, patients would purify their bodies of all harmful substances. Frederick made a lot of progress and was reaching the point of becoming fully sober. Frederick at age seventeen had a setback, when his oldest brother Henry Ellis drowned in the Connecticut River. Joining Harriet and some other siblings on another European tour in 1859 and 1860, Frederick expressed positivity and hope for the future in letters to Calvin. With his return to the United States, Frederick decided to become a doctor and enrolled at Harvard medical school. After less than a semester at Harvard, Frederick’s life, along with thousands of others, suddenly changed. Frederick, at the age of twenty-one, became a part of the 1st Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry and was one of the initial 75,000 volunteers called for by Abraham Lincoln. While Harriet was worried about “the temptations of the camp” (meaning alcohol), she visited him before he marched off, describing him as “in high spirits.” Serving in the Union army was certainly the high point of Frederick’s life. After a skirmish, Frederick participated in the First Battle of Bull Run. After Bull Run, Frederick’s spirits dropped for two years, as he transferred from the 1st Massachusetts Infantry to the Heavy Artillery regiment, spending the majority of his time in Union camps and forts. Harriet later received a letter from Frederick describing how boring and repetitive camp life was. She decided to act. After a letter to Harriet’s friend, Brig. Gen. Adolph von Steinwehr, Frederick was moved and promoted to Captain within the XI Corps of the Army of the Potomac. Frederick was a part of the general’s staff, and as such was exempt from combat (A sneaky move from Harriet). This changed at the battle of Gettysburg. As Frederick went into combat again, he was wounded by a fragment from a shell. Frederick’s luck, bad as it always was, failed him yet again. Frederick did recover, slowly and over several months. He was later discharged from the army, as it was clear he was in no shape to go back to fighting. Frederick returned to his parents, but he soon relapsed into alcoholism. Harriet had not given up and sent him to manage a citrus farm in Florida. Frederick did not do well and was later sent to another alcoholism treatment center, but to no avail. Frederick decided to sail to San Francisco. He arrived but then disappeared. He did mention becoming a sailor, but what happened to him is unknown. Despite several investigations by the Stowes, his fate remains unknown. Given the incredible loss of siblings and the time with his parents, one may understand why he turned to alcohol as an effort to escape. With his mother becoming one of the most famous women of the nineteenth century, he must have felt that she was on a plane at an unreachable height above him. I’m sure that this was part of the reason he joined the army, to make her proud. About the author: Emmett Looman is a Youth Docent at the Harriet Beecher Stowe House in Cincinnati. He enjoys history and is always happy to learn new interesting facts about the past. Sources: https://www.historynet.com/frederick-stowe-in-the-shadow-of-uncle-toms-cabin-january-99-americas-civil-war-feature.htm https://www.geni.com/people/Lt-Frederick-Stowe-USA/6000000000699446385 http://hd.housedivided.dickinson.edu/node/35123 http://www.mainelegacy.com/8.html https://www.andoverlestweforget.com/faces-of-andover/stowe-tyer/frederick-stowe/ https://www.harrietbeecherstowecenter.org/harriet-beecher-stowe/family/ With the Hamilton musical coming to TV today, have you remembered the connection between this famous duel and Lyman Beecher? His sermon "The Remedy for Duelling" (his spelling) met the country in a moment of moral upheaval over the practice of dueling and the support of those who participated in it. The entire Beecher family would become known for their leadership and opinions on national moral conversations, from dueling to slavery, temperance, women's suffrage, and more. You can see the full historical document here: https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=uc2.ark:/13960/t2p55q46j&view=1up&seq=8  image source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:TheRemedyForDuelingSermonLymanBeecherPamphlet1809.jpg |
Archives
November 2024
Categories
All
|
RSS Feed