Seduction's Offspring: Resisting Sentimental Violence from Wilson to Wells

Abstract

Seduction's Offspring:Resisting Sentimental Violence from Wilson to Wells Sarah Sillin (bio) The story of American sentimentalism is one of literary bequest, wherein eighteenth-century seduction novels passed an aesthetic legacy down to nineteenth-century domestic fiction. Both pervasive genres relate stories about the need for American girls to restrain their passions and feel for others, punctuated by thick descriptions of characters' affect. Given this shared emphasis on how feeling shapes local and national communities, critics often interrogate sentimentalism's politics. Ann Douglas and Jane Tompkins famously debated whether the mode's valorization of suffering and sympathy proves conservative or progressive.1 Further, critics have explored the political stakes of sentimentalism's turn from seduction novels to domestic fiction and what that turn suggests about American culture. Does the shift from seduction novels' unruly desire to domestic fiction's well-regulated sympathy signal that women were gaining power to foster national cohesion (Baym)? Or did antebellum fiction perpetuate demands that women subordinate their own desires to serve the community (Barnes)? Meanwhile, Laura Romero argued that sentimental texts often integrate "radical" views (for instance, on gender or class) with "reactionary" stances (say, on race); thus, we would do well to consider how sentimentalism's turn affected various groups, such as white and black women, in disparate ways (4). In response to these uneven effects, a number of nineteenth-century writers entwine conventions of both genres to offer divergent views on sentimentalism's legacy.2 This essay argues that tensions in sentimentalism proved generative for nineteenth-century African American women writers who rethink familiar portraits of the shift from the seduction plot to domestic fiction. Prior scholarship elucidates how African American writers blend genres to create space for black voices. Slave narratives often play on sentimental conventions to claim authority for and direct readers' sympathy to enslaved peoples (F. Foster; Carby). Likewise, midcentury African American novels interweave autobiography and fiction to question whose discourse readers recognize as authentic (Andrews 24). We can see this engagement with slave narratives and sentimentalism in one of the first novels by an African American woman: Harriet Wilson's Our Nig: or, Sketches from the Life of a Free Black (1859). Scholars demonstrate that Wilson draws on sentimental conventions as rewritten in slave narratives (Carby 45) to fictionalize elements of her own life via a protagonist who resembles sentimental heroines and enslaved women (Peterson). Wilson found that the "sugar-coated, wealth-bestrewn happy endings" of "white sentimental novels," "did not match [her] … constant struggle" (Gates and Wilson lix). In other words, she participates in what Lauren Berlant calls postsentimentalism: work that rethinks the mode's conventions by refusing to sublimate "subaltern struggles into conventions of narrative satisfaction and redemptive fantasy" (655). Sentimentalism often conflates all forms of pain and then redirects sympathy toward the privileged (Berlant 641). In contrast, Wilson questions whether powerful white women merit sympathy, given that claims of white moral sensibility mask antiblack violence. Beyond suggesting that the critiques that would define postsentimentalism emerged alongside sentimentalism, Wilson demonstrates that comedy can play a [End Page 277] vital role in such affective resistance. By entwining sentimental conventions with humor, she unsettles this mode's fantasy that benevolence superseded intemperate feeling. Nina Baym argues that antebellum writers of "woman's fiction" rejected sentimentalism that expressed "private, excessive, undisciplined, self-centered emotionality" (as in the seduction novel), while celebrating sentimentalism that reflected "Enlightenment advocacy of philanthropy and benevolence" (xxix, xxx). Wilson, however, satirizes these forms for their shared narratives of white feminine virtue that obscure African Americans' pleasure and pain.3 The white fallen woman's desires foster violence, rendering her undeserving of sympathy; Wilson invites readers to identify instead with her irreverently funny African American protagonist.4 Although antebellum culture valorized well-regulated sympathy, the illicit desires of the seduction plot did not dwindle away; instead, they became a nest egg, accruing interest in the domestic sphere.5 Wilson suggests that the white fallen woman and republican mother spend their unruly feelings in violent displays of power as they project their sins onto an African American girl. This rewriting elucidates a criticism that African American writers would level at sentimentalism across the nineteenth century: the...