176 Inventing Americas: 1800–18651852 novel. Then, in 1856, she published Dred: A Tale of the Dismal Swamp. This, her
second story of slave society, takes a different approach from the first. It tends to
concentrate on the demoralizing effects of slavery on whites. And this time the char-
acter who gives the novel its title is a fugitive and a revolutionary. Modeled on Nat
Turner, Dred is said to be the son of another black insurrectionary, Denmark Vesey.
He invokes both the Declaration of Independence and the Bible and he preaches
defiance, violence: “I am a free man!” he declares, “ ‘Free by this!’ holding out his
rifle.” However, even here Stowe does not ignore the destructive consequences of
slavery for the slaves themselves. More to the point, she does not allow Dred the last
word. He preaches vengeance against the white oppressor. But he is bested in argu-
ment by another character, Milly, based on Sojourner Truth, who preaches patience.
“O brethren, dere’s a better way,” she tells her fellow sufferers, imploring them to
pray to “de Lord” to give the whites repentance: “Leave de vengeance to him.
Vengeance is mine – I will repay, saith de Lord.”
After Dred, Stowe steered away from the subject of slavery. The Minister’s Wooing
(1859), set in New England, uses a romantic plot to explore the limitations of the
“gloomy” doctrine of Calvinism and promote belief in a redemptive Christ and a God
of love and mercy. Similar themes, together with an emphasis on the power of female
purity, are at work in Agnes of Sorrento (1862), set in the Catholic Italy of Savonarola,
and The Pearl of Orr’s Island (1862), another book set in New England which Sarah
Orne Jewett credited with inspiring her own career. The local color element, which
had always been there in Stowe’s work, grew stronger in her later fiction. Oldtown
Folks (1869) is set in New England in the post-Revolutionary period and has a narrator
modeled on Stowe’s own husband. Oldtown Fireside Stories (1871) draws on her
husband’s childhood memories; and Poganuc People (1878), her last novel, draws on
her own. Stowe remained a prolific writer throughout most of her life. She wrote
children’s books, travelogues, temperance tracts, practical articles about housekeeping,
theological works such as Bible Heroines (1878), journalistic sketches on a wide variety
of subjects, poems, and hymns. And she always remained a writer with a stern moral
purpose. Several of her novels, for instance, resemble novels of manners more than
anything else, including one called Pink and White Tyranny (1871). Even here,
however, she was keen to announce her intention to instruct and uplift. “This story is
not to be a novel as the world understands the word,” she wrote in her preface to Pink
and White Tyranny, “it is ... a story with a moral.” That fierce didactic intention has
meant that Stowe has often been granted less than her due as a writer. She is a didactic
writer, certainly, but she is also a writer capable of combining adroit use of popular
literary models with raw emotional power. Consistently, in much of her fiction and
many of her sketches, she is a very good writer indeed; at her best, in Uncle Tom’s
Cabin, she is surely a great one.
“Only this is such a strange and incomprehensible world!” a character called
Holgrave declares in The House of the Seven Gables (1851), the second full-length
fiction of Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804–1864). “The more I look at it, the more it
puzzles me; and I begin to suspect that a man’s bewilderment is the measure of his
wisdom!” Hawthorne was notoriously mistrustful of all speculative schools ofGGray_c02.indd 176ray_c 02 .indd 176 8 8/1/2011 7:54:42 AM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 54 : 42 AM