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Florida History Palmetto Leaves by Harriet Beecher Stowe In this research we are going to examine the issue of Florida history presented by the well known writer of the 19 th century, Harriet Beecher Stowe, in her book Palmetto leaves. One of the core issues addressed in the book was the issue of the education for the ethnic identities in Florida. The author was one of the activists pushing forward the idea of the necessity of the education for all the people including the blacks and other national and racial identities. In Palmetto leaves she was offering the ideas of how this issue can be improved. The author was actually presenting many Florida nature views as well. One of the other writings by the author was the Uncle Toms Cabin where she discovers the issue of the lives of black people in America.
Therefore we can see that Stowe was definitely one of the people supporting the national welfare and the well being of the national identities. Now let us briefly discover the life of the author and what events of it pushed her to write the book and to present, and support the ideas she did in the book. She was a member of family with clearly expressed puritanical strictness. She had one sister and six brothers. Her father, Lyman Beecher, was a controversial Calvinist preacher. Her mother, Roxana Foote, died at 41 - Stowe was four at that time.
Her aunt, Harriet Foote, influenced deeply Stowe's thinking, especially with her strong belief in culture. Samuel Foote, her uncle, encouraged her to read works of Lord Byron and Sir Walter Scott. When Stowe was eleven years old, she entered the seminary at Hartford, Connecticut, kept by her elder sister Catherine. The school had advanced curriculum and she learned languages, natural and mechanical science, composition, ethics, logic, mathematics, subjects that were generally taught to male students.
Four years later she was employed as an assistant teacher. Her father married again - he became the president of lane Theological Seminary. In the 1860 s, the Stowe's purchased property in Mandarin, Florida, on the St. Johns River (near Jacksonville).
They began to travel south each winter. The Stowe's arrived in Florida nearly twenty years ahead of Henry Flagler. Harriet, her brother Charles Beecher, and others felt Florida did not have as many racial divisions as the rest of the South following the Civil War. They dreamed of making the state a safe place for freedmen and progressive northerners.
Harriet helped establish schools for African American children in Florida. In 1872, Stowe published Palmetto Leaves. The book was a compilation of pieces she wrote after she and her husband began wintering in Mandarin. It is a book filled with ink drawings and words about the people and wildlife of the area.
It includes stories like the one about her picnic on Julington Creek with its bright sun, a blue sky, a fresh, strong breeze upon the water. Drawings show palm trees and happy dogs. There are views of the St. Johns River, like a looking-glass, the sun staring steadfastly down. There is a drawing of the stately orange tree, thirty feet high with spreading, graceful top and varnished green leaves that sat outside her home. Palmetto Leaves ends with Stowe's support of human rights.
She comments that the prosperity of the southern states must depend, on a large degree, to the right treatment and education of the Negro population. The book has been reissued and is available in bookstores. At her best, Stowe was an early and effective realist. Her portraits of local social life and her settings communicate the culture of her time. She provides us today a picture of the Florida of her time, the 1800 s. In the current historiography the book is situated as a historical representation of the life in Florida during the 1800 s.
The core issues addressed were the issues of the life of black minorities that experienced hard times back than. The hardest thing for them was to get the education, and the author was pushing the society towards the solution of the problem through her writings. Stowe describes life in Florida in the latter half of the 19 th century-a tumble-down, wild, panicky kind of life- this general happy-go-luckiness which Florida inculcates. Her idyllic sketches of picnicking, sailing, and river touring expeditions and simple stories of events and people in this tropical winter summer land became the first unsolicited promotional writing to interest northern tourists in Florida. Instead of a novel, she turned out Palmetto Leaves, a book of sketches of Floridas land and people, plus descriptions of their lives in the latter half of the 19 th century. Stowe discovered the existing problem of the education of the blacks and presented it in her book.
She was offering the presentations of the beauty of the Florida nature and integrating it into the welfare of all the people, including the blacks, so that everybody could enjoy it. The findings lead the society to the solution of the problem but the expressed ways of how to make it were not so clearly presented in the book. Therefore this is one of the major problems concerning the writing. The cumulative effects of lifes trials left Stowe searching for a more attractive living situation and by 1866 she seriously considered Florida.
My plan of going to Florida, she wrote to her brother, as it lies in my mind, is not in any sense a worldly enterprise... Her son, Frederick, preceded her, and he moved to an old plantation, Laurel Grove, on the St. Johns River, near Orange Park. Her 1867 visit there was unsatisfactory, until a short boat trip introduced her to the town of Mandarin. She ultimately purchased thirty acres on a bluff overlooking the river, and her home became one of the most photographed residences in the region. Other family members followed shortly thereafter and orange crates headed for northern cities bore the label, Oranges from Harriet Beecher Stowe, Mandarin, Fla.
The image she creates is the one which has been evoked so vividly by a generation of feminist scholars, that is, of a transnational community of women simultaneously engaged in aesthetic production and the cultural commerce of hostessing- in effect, helping her guests/ readers to get acquainted. In the early 1980 s, studies by feminist critics like Josephine Donovan and Emily Toth broke important new ground by asserting that regional writing had been persistently used by a group of interconnected (largely forgotten) women to defend female values. Works such as Uncle Toms Cabin and Palmetto Leaves, point towards a consistent strain of regional writing which aimed (explicitly) at timely political issues, though as I have demonstrated, the boundaries in this sub-genre were both directly and indirectly policed along the lines of race and gender. Each of these situations poignantly emphasizes the complex pressures which shaped white female participation in local color writing: the unveiling of Charles Egbert Craddock along with the frustrations of Rose Terry Cooke about gendered expectations for subject matter and tone; the motherly image of Harriet Beecher Stowe rendered by Jewett which ignores, or at least downplays, Stowe's politically engaged writing.
These are forces which, whether enabling or debilitating, were not felt as a major influence in the careers of their white, bourgeois, male counterparts. The author makes a case perfectly, because she showed the problem from the inside. She was living among the people of the area and she experienced the problems as well. Thus she was able to present the case in her writing and reach the necessary people to make the correct actions for them. The results of her findings are believable because even nowadays we can see that black and other ethnic identities have equal opportunities for the education and other advantages of the modern society. Harriet Beecher Stowe- the mother of us all, according to Sarah Orne Jewett- was highly influential to school of New England women writers who practiced in the local color tradition.
Stowe is frequently associated with the village tradition, a form which links her (and the women who followed) to a long line of writers both in America and abroad. However, a significant number of regional writers used Stowe's example as a model, not for her fine portraits of the quiet backwaters of New England, but rather for her highly political regional writing in service of social causes- abolition, the radical reformation of Calvinism, and womens education. Throughout her career Stowe would continue to use her productions of place to promote social and political reforms: e. g. her impassioned defense of education for the freedmen in Palmetto Leaves (1873). Bibliography: Harriet Beecher Stowe, Palmetto Leaves, New York: Viking Press, 1981.
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Research essay sample on Florida History Palmetto Leaves By Harriet Beecher Stowe
