| Nineteenth-century women's patchwork-quilt fiction sought to redefine the concept of "brotherhood" in Winthrop's "city upon a hill" by providing an inclusive and matriarchal model for the communal experiment that was America. Patchwork-quilt fiction uses realistic detail, with women's metaphors such as the hearth/home/kitchen, the garden, and the quilt to express feminine ideas about community.; Texts by Susan Warner, Sarah Josepha Hale, and Maria Cummins describe community as an inclusive family, based on love, interdependence, and tolerance rather than simply blood ties. This fiction is based on the premise that a stable homelife will have a positive effect on society; therefore, the home-hearth, the quilt, and the garden are used to convey a sense of home as sanctuary.; Harriet Beecher Stowe's fiction builds on and expands this tradition, focusing on the concept of society as community. She adds a millennial aspect to her fiction, indicating that home, garden, and quilt represent ultimate community in Heaven.; Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin conflicts with Caroline Hentz's The Planter's Northern Bride because Stowe argues against slavery using patchwork-quilt values of matriarchy and inclusion, while Hentz argues against abolition using patriarchal and hierarchal values. The ultimate outcome of the abolition question was the fragmentation of community in the Civil War.; Local color fiction such by Mary Wilkins Freeman, Sarah Orne Jewett, and Susan Glaspell focuses on this fragmentation of community. This fiction critiques the patchwork-quilt model of community through inversion of its major images: the rocker by the hearth is replaced by a chair by a window, the garden is no longer "home," and the quilt is stitched improperly. Home has become a prison.; Despite this sense of loss, the patchwork-quilt tradition continues to this day, especially in the works of African-American writers. As writers from other American cultures add their voices, this tradition will become, in itself, a patchwork quilt. |
