ABSTRACT
Published within ten years of each other, Harriet Beecher Stowe’s The Minister’s Wooing (1859) and Elizabeth Stuart Phelps’ The Gates Ajar (1868) delve into what it means to live an earthly life concurrent to the belief in eternal life. Although raised in the Calvinistic tradition of predestination—the belief that God’s grace alone can save, and God chooses to apply this grace and salvation to a predetermined elect and not others—Stowe and Phelps found the experiences of their personal lives at odds with these teachings.
With the grief of loss very present in their families, Stowe rewrites the process of salvation and how to attain the afterlife, while Phelps rewrites the dead as alive and present in a very realistic earthly afterlife, offering more than forever praising God. This chapter explores the effects of Stowe and Phelps’ writing as rejection of traditional Calvinism and its ministers (at least in part) to provide a livable everyday theology and healing to those suffering from loss, which the formality of conventional church responses did not. Their main purpose in writing of faith was to bring people closer to God in a way relevant to what it means to be human. This chapter also argues against critics who claim that sentimental writings did not/do not have a profound effect on readers or the canon as a whole.
