Visions, Saints, and Sacraments: Uncle Tom's Cabin and Catholicism

• Published in: Women's studies Vol. 51; no. 6; pp. 661 - 681
• Main Author: D'Amico, LuElla
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: New York Routledge 18.08.2022; Taylor & Francis Ltd
• Subjects: 19th century; Calvinism; Catholic churches; Catholicism; Catholics; Ecumenism; Hagiography; Imagination; Novels; Protestantism; Rites & ceremonies; Stowe, Harriet Beecher (1811-1896); Supernatural
• DOI: 10.1080/00497878.2022.2093878
• ISSN: 0049-7878

D'Amico offers an argument about a more comprehensive lens via which to view Uncle Tom's Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe and its historical resonance. She argues that Stowe invokes Catholic hagiography and the sacramental imagination to make her novel more emotionally palpable. Although Stowe is known for her Calvinist upbringing, she suggests that like other New Englanders in the mid nineteenth century Stowe was attracted to the sentiment, art, and culture of Catholicism. The theological stage of Uncle Tom's Cabin is purposefully ecumenical in scope, drawing from both Protestantism and Catholicism. Stowe alludes throughout Uncle Tom's Cabin to the idea of sainthood, creating in Evangeline St. Clare a child saint and in Tom an adult saint. In their characterization, Stowe invokes a hagiographic tradition that is imagistic and supernatural. Moreover, the characters' sainthood leads to a biblical pattern in the book that is hard to deny, another characteristic of hagiography.