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The Artist's Craftiness: Miss Prissy in The Minister's Wooing

1992; Johns Hopkins University Press; Volume: 20; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/saf.1992.0022

2158-5806

Nancy Lusignan Schultz,

Historical Art and Culture Studies

THE ARTIST'S CRAFTINESS: MISS PRISSY IN THE MINISTER'S WOOING Nancy Lusignan Schultz Salem State College "We suppose the heroine of a novel, among other privileges and immunities," muses Harriet Beecher Stowe, in a moment of narrative self-consciousness, "has a prescriptive right to her own private boudoir ," where, as a French writer has it, "she appears like a lovely picture in its frame."1 This playful supposition about a heroine's "prescriptive right" to a Room of Her Own is just one example of the way Stowe, in The Minister's Wooing, reflects on the position of women and, specifically, of female artists in nineteenth-century America. The "private boudoir" alluded to is, in fact, only the dusty attic of a modest bungalow where Stowe's heroine Mary Scudder lives with her widowed mother. Mary, though she makes a "lovely picture," is not the primary focus of attention in The Minister's Wooing. Instead, despite Lawrence Buell's assertion that "for much of the book, the narrative line clearly interests Stowe less in itself than as an occasion for limning representative characters, scenes, activities , and views,"2 Stowe seems deeply interested in the narrative "frame" of the book. She also shows herself to be absorbed in the plight of female framers of narrative, women writers, and their counterparts in both the fine and domestic arts. The narrator correctly observes that a novelist may give her heroine rights that, as Virginia Woolf points out almost three quarters of a century later, the writer herself and the metaphorical painter to whom she compares herself would have often been denied.3 It is not surprising that the heroine of The Minister's Wooing is bestowed with her own attic complete with a painting of a madwoman à la Gilbert and Gubar. Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, in their comprehensive study The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination, argue that women writers during this period frequently created maddened doubles for the decorous and conservative selves they presented in their writing.4 Of Mary's "Garret-Boudoir," Stowe's narrator asks, "and was there not a dusky picture, in an old tarnished frame, of a woman of whose tragic end strange stories were whispered,—one of the sufferers in the time when witches were unceremoniously helped out of the world, instead of being, as now-a-days, helped to make their fortune in it by table-turning?" (p. 677). A painting of a witch as the presiding goddess of Mary Scudder's garret-boudoir makes for a very 34Nancy Lusignan Schultz Strange and radical depiction from the seemingly decorous Stowe: a "lovely picture" of the pious Mary in a subversive setting or "frame." This subversive doubling pervades Stowe's first domestic novel, in which all sorts of intriguing connections are made between writing , painting, and music, the "fine" arts, and the "useful" domestic arts, particularly sewing. Stowe notes that by the mid-nineteenth century , witch-burning is out and "table-turning" is in. The contemporaryminded Stowe includes her own table-turner in The Minister's Wooing, this time not a witch in the attic but the dressmaker Miss Prissy Diamond, who, functioning much like the proverbial madwomanartist figure, turns the tables on the voices of authority in the novel. In her introduction to Harriet Beecher Stowe's The Minister's Wooing, Sandra Duguid notes of Miss Prissy: "She is the type familiar to comedy, the type of the 'tricky slave,' the 'scheming valet,' the 'female confidante'. . . ."5 But viewing Miss Prissy only as an archetypal comic figure, the "marriage arranger," oversimplifies her function in the novel. Stowe exploits the paradigm of the female confidante to subtly comment on her own role as a female artist in patriarchal nineteenth-century America. In The Minister's Wooing, Stowe employs an authorial voice that claims to support the authoritarian, anti-comic forces represented primarily by two characters, the Widow Scudder and the minister Dr. Hopkins. The proper comic outcome, the marriage for love, is ensured not by the narrator but by the dressmaker , whose dual crafts of sewing and storytelling unravel the forces that threaten the happiness of the...