5 - Frances E. W. Harper and Harriet Beecher Stowe: Preaching, Poetry, and Pedagogy

Summary

Harriet Beecher Stowe is rarely remembered as a poet: even those who recall that her body of fictional work extended well beyond Uncle Tom's Cabin tend to forget that she was also the author of the antislavery poem “Caste and Christ,” as well as a volume of devotional verse. Frances E. W. Harper is more frequently remembered as a poet, as she established her career as a writer of verse long before she published what is now her best-known novel, Iola Leroy. in this chapter I consider an interracial pairing of two eloquent female abolitionists, exploring how both work within and expand the conventions of women's poetic production in the nineteenth-century United States as they blend sentiment and satire in their critique of slavery. Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin is the most frequently cited and taught work of antislavery fiction in American literature, and her novel Dred is also among the more frequently studied and taught antislavery works. As a poet, however, Stowe is a relatively minor figure when compared with Harper, who has a reasonable claim, perhaps along with John Greenleaf Whittier, to being the most ambitious and varied in her production of antislavery poems. Stowe's only substantial antislavery poem, “Caste and Christ,” offers a premonition of sorts of major strands that Harper developed much more fully, particularly its emphasis on biblical and theological themes within a more orthodox context than many earlier antislavery poets. What links Stowe and Harper most closely is the profoundly theological quality of their antislavery poetry, a trait that is shared to some degree by Whittier, but which is much more consistently evident in Stowe's and Harper's work than in that of their contemporaries. As Dawn Coleman has observed in her work on Uncle Tom's Cabin, both of these women, denied a pastoral role in nineteenth-century American Christianity because of their gender, function as preachers and biblical exegetes through their poetry (Coleman, 156–73).

Incarnational Theology in Harriet Beecher Stowe's “Caste and Christ”

Stowe's “Caste and Christ” is more significant than has often been acknowledged, and Stowe is a better and more compelling poet than many scholars of American literature realize. Part of the reason that Stowe's poetry has been acknowledged less frequently than is warranted is that scholars who have studied Stowe have been primarily concerned with the novel as a genre.