The Courage to Speak and Hear the Truth: Sympathy and Genuine Human Contact in Harriet Beecher Stowe's The Minister's Wooing

This article argues that in The Minister's Wooing, Stowe analyzes the conditions under which sympathy enables the experience of genuine human contact. Like contemporary relational psychoanalytic theorists, Stowe posits that true sympathy, marked by conflict and blunt speech, precedes empathic identification. Because Puritanism authorizes both, it has important, though qualified, psychological benefits.