The Minister's Wooing by Harriet Beecher Stowe

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The Minister's Wooing by Harriet Beecher Stowe

One of the greatest thinkers and reformers in this nation’s history, Stowe often follows the trend of bringing her characters to breaking point emotionally, spiritually and physically in order to allow her readers to consider the deeper points of human nature and question the moral authenticity of society’s status quo. We see this quite blatantly in Uncle Tom’s Cabin but another work proves no less profound and searching into the human mind and heart.

The Minister’s Wooing opens in the Northern States and remains in the tranquil New England area throughout, introducing and discussing such common threads of life as gossip, flirtation and the dictates of religion in human life. Stowe nearly immediately introduces the subjects of “disinterested benevolence” or the pure love that induces a good, morally upstanding person to render up even their own hopes of heaven to an undeserving human who otherwise would hardly make the cut. Enter Mary and James, the two cousins whose story enlivens and creates the novel and the Minister who teaches such doctrine and falls in love with pure Mary, unknowing that James loves her too and she loves him.

Stowe creates in this novel a masterfully designed plot of suspense, supposed death, an engagement between the Minister and Mary and then the knowledge that James survived against overwhelming odds to come home to meet his beloved, set for marriage the next day. The subject of disinterested benevolence reaches its apex near the end with Mary subjecting herself to her second choice of husband, James standing aside unwilling to compromise the honor of the woman he loves and the Minister, upon learning the truth of Mary’s heart determines in his own to become the ultimate Christ figure and gain the love of every human heart capable of feeling as he comes to the tortured decision in a scene so chokingly touching that Stowe closes the door of his study to our eyes to allow him solitary repose, to break the engagement to the woman he cherishes that his shoulders might bear the pain and misery that hers would have necessarily born had he acted to his own desires.

The compelling effect therefore is to excite the reader to internal speculation and reflection, gauging one’s own behavior and thoughts by the characters in the novel. The three levels of religious devotion stand quite clear, with James at the bottom of the trio, initially immoral but eventually repentant and valiant, much resembling the brother of Jesus in the Bible of the same name who converted to Christianity sometime after the passion, Mary, who stands as the mother of Jesus and willing to forego her salvation that James might enjoy heaven in her stead, and the Minister at the top, acting as a Savior to them both.

Entwined in the pages however Stowe exquisitely keeps the reader’s attention by the heartfelt description of beautiful scenery, genteel mannerisms, and the ever constant gossip mill, grinding away the coarse texture of people until after they survive the constant threshing thereof, they emerge as pure and polished treasures.