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How Freedom Becomes Free: Religious Conversion in Rose Terry Cooke's "Freedom Wheeler's Controversy with Providence"

How Freedom Becomes Free: Religious Conversion in Rose Terry Cooke's "Freedom Wheeler's... C AROL Harriet Beecher Stowe claims in TheMinister'sWooing that the Calvinist belief in the necessity of total submission to God's sovereignty gave rise in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries to "tremendous internal conflict and agitation" in the souls of the New England faithful. "Almost all the histories of religious experience of those times," she writes, "relate paroxysms of opposition to God and fierce rebellion, expressed in language that appalls the very soul."1 Not only were these struggles recorded in the diaries, letters, and family papers of the men and women who experienced them, as Philip Greven demonstrates in TheProtestantTemperment, but they eventually became salient material for the fiction of Stowe and other nineteenthcentury New England women writers who sought to portray the life of old New England and, in many cases, to offer a critique of Calvinist culture. In PoganucPeople, Stowe offers the example of a crusty old man whose will rises "in rebellion" against God--"a rebellion useless and miserable"--when his wife suddenly sickens and dies.2 In TheCountryofthePointedFirs, Jewett recounts the history of a tormented young woman who, in the wake of being jilted, believes herself to have been too angry at God to merit forgiveness. In one http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png American Literary Realism University of Illinois Press

How Freedom Becomes Free: Religious Conversion in Rose Terry Cooke's "Freedom Wheeler's Controversy with Providence"

Holly, Carol
American Literary Realism , Volume 40 (3) – Apr 4, 2008
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Publisher
University of Illinois Press
Copyright
Copyright © 2008 American Literary Realism. All rights reserved.
ISSN
1940-5103
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Abstract

C AROL Harriet Beecher Stowe claims in TheMinister'sWooing that the Calvinist belief in the necessity of total submission to God's sovereignty gave rise in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries to "tremendous internal conflict and agitation" in the souls of the New England faithful. "Almost all the histories of religious experience of those times," she writes, "relate paroxysms of opposition to God and fierce rebellion, expressed in language that appalls the very soul."1 Not only were these struggles recorded in the diaries, letters, and family papers of the men and women who experienced them, as Philip Greven demonstrates in TheProtestantTemperment, but they eventually became salient material for the fiction of Stowe and other nineteenthcentury New England women writers who sought to portray the life of old New England and, in many cases, to offer a critique of Calvinist culture. In PoganucPeople, Stowe offers the example of a crusty old man whose will rises "in rebellion" against God--"a rebellion useless and miserable"--when his wife suddenly sickens and dies.2 In TheCountryofthePointedFirs, Jewett recounts the history of a tormented young woman who, in the wake of being jilted, believes herself to have been too angry at God to merit forgiveness. In one

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American Literary Realism – University of Illinois Press

Published: Apr 4, 2008

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