The Mild Apocalypse: Domestic Millennialism in the Novels of Harriet Beecher Stowe.

I analyze Stowe's transformation of the sentimental narrative conventions of domestic fiction and the prophetic and homiletic genres of Puritan typological literature. Each is simultaneously constricting and liberating for her literary expression and her social ideology; each implies social conformity and at the same time personal liberty. Stowe underst and s the subtle paradoxes of both her religious inheritance and her domestic expectations; their contradictions result in the dynamism and instability of her agenda for social reform. She is neither a subversive whose radicalism has not been clearly understood, nor an apologist for conservatism; rather, she is herself ambivalent, torn by conflicting loyalties and alternatives which all seem to threaten individual freedom and community stability. The paradox of millennial expectations scaled to domestic spaces is what I call the mild apocalypse: Stowe simultaneously challenges subversively and supports powerfully the culture out of which she wrote. In the introduction, I review briefly Stowe criticism and the fields from which my assumptions draw: feminist criticism, women's history, religious history, and cultural history. Chapter one provides a view of the ideological and literary implications of the traditions out of which Stowe writes. She reworks the conventions of women's domestic writing by reading into them the principles of her religious inheritance. Chapter two examines Uncle Tom's Cabin. In analyzing the novel's complex interactions of space and character, I explore Stowe's pessimistic vision of the prospects for racial harmony in America; she celebrates, however, human efforts to create communities in which a temporary peace can be negotiated. Chapter three discusses some of the contradictions that pervade even the idealized communities of Stowe's New Engl and novels: The Minister's Wooing, The Pearl of Orr's Isl and , and Oldtown Folks. My analysis of Stowe's balance between what she perceives as women's natural rights and women's biological needs reveals her ambivalence towards both. Chapter four centers on Stowe's New York novels, My Wife and I and We and Our Neighbors. The contradictions of the New Engl and novels no longer prove generative when Stowe takes as her subject contemporary America. In the conclusion, I discuss the broader implications of Stowe's vision of a domesticated and recovenanted nation.PhDAmerican studiesAmerican literatureUniversity of Michiganhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/161568/1/8720310.pd