Right Feelings: On Sentimentality, Philosophy, and Religion in Harriet Beecher Stowe The Harvard community has made this article openly available. Please share how this access benefits you. Your story matters Citation Howe, Amy Rae. 2018. Right Feelings: On Sentimentality, Philosophy, and Religion in Harriet Beecher Stowe. Doctoral dissertation, Harvard University, Graduate School of Arts & Sciences. Citable link http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.InstRepos:41129157 Terms of Use This article was downloaded from Harvard University’s DASH repository, and is made available under the terms and conditions applicable to Other Posted Material, as set forth at http:// nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.InstRepos:dash.current.terms-of- use#LAA Right Feelings: On Sentimentality, Philosophy, and Religion in Harriet Beecher Stowe A dissertation presented by Amy Rae Howe to The Committee on the Study of Religion In partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the subject of The Study of Religion Harvard University Cambridge, Massachusetts May 2018 !2018 Amy Rae Howe All rights reserved. Dissertation Advisor: Professor Amy Hollywood Amy Rae Howe Right Feelings: On Sentimentality, Philosophy, and Religion in Harriet Beecher Stowe Abstract Harriet Beecher Stowe provides one of antebellum American culture’s most significant lettered intellectual accounts of the development of morally persuasive literature in the cause of anti-slavery. This dissertation explores the philosophical and religious resources that shape Stowe’s literary aim of cultivating the “right feelings” among her readers. By looking to the moral contours of Stowe’s published and unpublished writing, I argue that feelings are not exercised merely for the pathos of experience in Stowe’s novels and correspondence, but are understood as dynamic and cultivable, central to the formation of moral judgment, and intended to lead to humanitarian action. Here, Stowe follows in a Scottish Enlightenment and faculty psychology tradition that aims to cultivate the moral sensibilities of the modern, liberal subject. However, as this dissertation argues, Stowe’s invocation of “right feelings” cannot be understood apart from racial and imperial structures of power. The affective terrain of sentimentality and the cultivation of sympathy and “right feelings,” for Stowe, is the cultivation of Anglo-American sympathy that will hopefully remediate the problem of slavery and liberty. In the spaces of character sketch, family correspondence, and transatlantic literary gift exchange, this dissertation traces the contexts and limits for the cultivation of sympathy and “right feelings,” as told through Harriet Beecher Stowe’s fictive and nonfictive moral universe. In scope, this dissertation attends iii to the Stowe corpus of correspondence and literature at the height of her career and literary acclaim between 1851 and 1859, including Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852), Sunny Memories in Foreign Lands (1854), Dred (1856), and The Minister’s Wooing (1859). The dissertation contributes to scholarship on the role of religion and sentimentality in nineteenth-century American culture. iv Table of Contents Acknowledgments …………………………………………………………………… vi List of Figures ……...………………………………………………………………... vii 1. Introduction: Affective Returns ……………………………………………………... 1 2. Uncle Tom’s Cabin: What is One to Do? ……………………………….…………… 31 3. Anglo-American Sympathy: Stowe in Europe ...……………...………….………….. 68 4. Dredful Sentiments: On the Limits of Moral Persuasion …………………….……… 117 5. The Minister’s Wooing: On Ministers and Mothers …………………………….…... 172 6. Conclusion: A Genealogy of Humanitarian Sensibility .………... .………... .……… 208 Appendix 1: Key Dates ………………………………………….…………….......... 223 Appendix 2: Transcription of “An Affectionate Address” ……….……………......... 225 Bibliography ……………………………………………………………………......... 227 v Acknowledgments I am grateful for a wide range of scholarly resources that allowed for the work of this dissertation to be endlessly rewarding. The Harriet Beecher Stowe Center in Hartford, Connecticut served as my home base for many months as I carefully worked through the true treasure trove of Stowe’s transcribed and annotated correspondence, the E. Bruce Kirkham Collection. The Stowe Center’s Collections Manager, Beth Burgess, provided valuable insight and assistance with the available material and was always a kind office presence during many hot summer days in Hartford. Moreover, I appreciate the Stowe Center’s warm welcome to other researchers and myself during a significant time in the Center’s history when we were able to witness with admiration the successful renovation of Stowe’s home for historical preservation and contemporary education. I am also grateful for the time spent with the Beecher-Stowe papers, and their process of digitization, at Harvard University’s Schlesinger Library. Librarians at Harvard University’s Houghton Library and Andover Library were also rich sources of expertise and guidance in the available materials surrounding Stowe’s literary life and the religious sources of anti-slavery activism in the nineteenth-century. Finally, I am also grateful for the available collections and resources at the American Antiquarian Society, Yale University, the University of Virginia, and the Huntington Library in San Marino, California. At Harvard, the North American Religions Colloquium read early versions of chapters three and five and was a continued space for lively intellectual exchange among faculty and doctoral students. Versions of chapters three and five were also presented as accepted papers to the Canadian Comparative Literature Association (2016) and the Twentieth Anniversary Harriet Beech Stowe Society Conference (2016), where they received the generous intellectual engagement with scholars of Stowe and nineteenth-century British and American literature. My deepest appreciation extends to my advisor, Amy Hollywood, for her guidance, support, wit, and always thoughtful questions that have deepened and extended both this dissertation and my intellectual life. I am also grateful for David Holland and Catherine Brekus, my dissertation committee members, for their careful engagement and advise on the development of the ideas within and extending out of this dissertation. Many friends and family members provided endless forms of support during the last several years as I navigated life, my doctoral program, and completed my dissertation. Thank you, Mara, Margaret, Henry, Charlotte, my family at Revolution Trapeze, Marlene, Pearl, Travis, and Taylor. And thank you, especially, Mark (and Alfie and Tucker) for your tireless support, companionship, and our peaceful little Vermont life. Finally, without the relentless shared love, care, and humor of my family, I am certain this would have been impossible. Thank you, Mom; Dad and Teri; Courtney, Braxton, Kanyen, and Emery; Jordan, Preston, Bayley, and Olivia. As a first generation college student with a newly earned Ph.D. from Harvard University, I am honored to dedicate this dissertation to my dad, Ray Howe, and mom, Debbie Howe, for their love, pride, work ethic, and unparalleled wisdom. vi List of Figures Figure 3.1. “An Affectionate and Christian Address” petition page ..……………… 87 Figure 3.2. “An Affectionate and Christian Address” petition folio ……………….. 87 Figure 3.3. Gifted bracelet from Duchess of Sutherland to Stowe …………………. 103 vii Chapter 1 Introduction: Affective Returns From these elements, however, genealogy retrieves an indispensable restraint: it must record the singularity of events outside of any monotonous finality; it must seek them in the most unpromising places, in what we tend to feel is without history—in sentiments, love, conscience, instincts; it must be sensitive to their recurrence, not in order to trace the gradual curve of their evolution, but to isolate the different scenes where they engaged in different roles. -Michel Foucault, “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History,” 1977.1 Across disciplines in the social sciences and humanities in the early twenty-first century, the “affective turn” is receiving a great deal of attention, prominence, and scholarly investment. A host of scholarly works, edited volumes, and conferences attend to the tracking and understanding of affect, emotion, and sentimentality in the fields of cultural and literary studies, anthropology, history and American studies, race and ethnic studies, and the study of religion. Broadly these studies ask about the cultural contingency of emotion, the human and nonhuman transmission of affect, and the politics of sensibility. Bringing new, or different, attention to the role of emotions and sensations of material worlds, the “affective turn” generally characterizes 1 Michel Foucault, “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History,” Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews, ed., D. F. Bouchard (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1977), 76. 1 itself through its focused attention on charting the felt, energy-rich (and energy-depleted) landscapes and languages (verbal and otherwise) used to interact with, describe, shape, and understand the engagements in the world by humans and other sentient beings. In so doing, it challenges modern philosophical categories of will, cognition, rationality, reason, agency, and belief. The affective turn insists on the visceral, the corporeal, and the intermediary not only as a way to interpolate one’s world, but also as a way to grasp the mediating forces that signal what it means to act and