The Journals of Martha E. McMillan

According to Joan Hedrick, one Stowe biographer, Stowe “accurately predicted that the horrors of war would create a reaction toward the comfort of home things” (312-313). As a result of the series’ popularity, Ticknor and Fields published the essays as House and Home Papers in 1865 (Hochman 83). The narrative persona, Christopher Crowfield, delights his readers with stories of his own family’s quest to create a beautiful, welcoming, and functioning parlor. Yet at the same time, this white, middle-class man warns his readers against creating a parlor that is so exclusively furnished that the room becomes uninhabitable, unwelcoming, and uncomfortable. The tension in the book lies in the fact that the book both maps the mid-nineteenth-century parlor and closes the door on it as well. Crowfield represents the conversations he has with his wife and daughters as they consider together how to make a home comfortable for all its inhabitants and its guests. Crowfield’s chief complaint about antebellum parlor ideology is that the formality of the parlor makes home life uncomfortable and unwelcoming. He critiques how families become burdened by the care of expensive carpets and furniture and as a result create rooms that people must shut up and in which the select company who enters feel uncomfortable. The series begins with “The Ravages of a Carpet”; it considers “Home-Keeping vs. House-Keeping,” “The Economy of The Beautiful” and concludes with a chapter that considers how a comfortable home-space other than an exclusively furnished parlor might contribute to “Home Religion.” House and Home Papers reflects and influences consumerism and religious discourses of the mid-nineteenth century. According to Lori Merish, Stowe’s House and Home Papers “naturalized middle-class patterns of private ownership and helped establish consumerist domesticity as an instrument of cultural hegemony” (4). Further, Merish contends that during the antebellum time period religion and secular consumerism “were forged into a novel synthesis of 29