Mightier than the Sword by David S. Reynolds

Author:David S. Reynolds
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Published: 2011-05-16T05:00:00+00:00

The cakewalk

What seems like a distinctly conservative element in the Tom shows, the plantation myth, is thus not quite as conventional as it at first may seem. The same can be said of another prime ingredient of the plays: religion. Stowe’s visionary gospel of love was an essential part of the great majority of the shows, which presented Tom and Eva reading the Bible, having a mutual vision of “spirits bright,” and sharing the destiny of a sorrowful death followed by an ecstatic entrance into heaven. The shows would never have become as popular as they did without the religious element, which before the Civil War had turned theatergoing into a respectable pastime and after it made the far-traveling Tom shows acceptable almost everywhere they went. Today, the religious scenes seem sentimentally pious—even campy, as Ann Douglas describes Eva’s tear-soaked departure to heaven. But in the nineteenth century, when many were still escaping the twin shadows of Calvinism and skepticism, the pious message of the Tom shows could seem both comforting and contemporary.

Stowe was hardly the only one caught up in spiritualism, which attracted some 11 million adherents worldwide and intrigued the philosopher William James so much that in 1886 he founded the American Institute for Psychic Research with the help of many of America’s top scientists and philosophers. Stowe’s young friend Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, who had studied with Calvin Stowe at Andover and was in the Stowe home often, wrote a best-selling trilogy about the afterlife—The Gates Ajar (1868), Beyond the Gates (1883), and The Gates Between (1887)—that revealed concrete details about heaven, where children, for example, enjoy gingersnaps and toys. The Gates Ajar spawned similar spiritualist novels, such as George Wood’s The Gates Wide Open; or, Scenes in Another World (1870), which gave even more precise pictures of heaven, such as a personal meeting with Michelangelo and a description of Beethoven, Mozart, Haydn, and Handel teaming up and writing a new oratorio for God, in whose presence they were basking.

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