Harriet Beecher Stowe Analysis

801 Words4 Pages
Harriet Beecher Stowe was part of the numerous offspring of the Reverend Lyman Beecher, militant evangelist and defender of Puritan orthodoxy in the Jonathan Edwards tradition. Formed in an atmosphere of severe puritanism, the Old Testament and the texts of the Puritan theologians were the readings of her childhood, which the girl assimilated with the same passionate joy with which she admired the natural beauties of New England. His exuberant temperament, which in another medium he had tried to vent on stage or among high society, was deployed instead in the double form of expression spoiled by its social environment and its time: on the one hand, a rich inner life inclined to analysis spiritual, intensely dramatic or even melodramatic, and very similar (except in its concrete forms) to that of the contemporary poet Emily Dickinson; on the other hand, a diligent interest towards the building and improvement of humanity. In 1832 the Reverend Beecher moved to Cincinnati, near the Ohio border, to found a theological seminary there; his children accompanied him. Harriet, saddened by the nostalgia of the native land, found, between domestic chores and teaching work, the time necessary to write the Pietist sketches of "scenes and types of the descendants of the pilgrims", later published under the title…show more content…
Beecher Stowe believed that the true author of the book was God, of whom she would have been just faithful amanuensis; Whatever the case, the work showed his talent for melodramatic writing, and reached such an international fame that few are the possible paragons in this regard in the field of literary history. At first, however, it was not well received; even the author of the death of numerous soldiers of the Confederation was
Open Document