Content area
Abstract
In Declarations of Sentimentalism: American Women's Writing 1850–1900, I argue that sentimentalism is a form of political rhetoric which allowed white and African American women writers of the antebellum, postbellum and post-Reconstruction eras to address issues of gender, class and race. Addressing such issues as urbanization, shifting economic systems, slavery, abolitionism, racism, suffrage, and womenis rights, the texts covered in this study were determined by their writer's societal, cultural and political contexts. But, by the writers' participation in these discussions, I argue that these texts were also socially, culturally and politically determining.
Sentimentalism's rhetorical effectiveness relies upon pathos. In its ability to spark public sympathy, benevolence, action and reform, sentimentalism is an effective rhetorical mode for enacting individual, social or political change often across the barriers of race and class. The fact that many of the novels in this study sold thousands of copies suggests that sentimentalism was both familiar and accessible to an unprecedented female readership. In this way, these novels were a highly public forum which has implications for the political work they could do.
In Declarations of Sentimentalism, I examine ten texts in detail: Susan Warner's The Wide, Wide World and Queechy; Maria Susanna Cummins's The Lamplighter and Mabel Vaughan; Harriet Jacobs's Incidents in the Life of A Slave Girl Caroline Lee Hentz's The Planter's Northern Bride; Louisa May Alcott's Work; Lillie Devereux Blake's Fettered for Life; Frances E. W. Harper's Iola Leroy and Pauline E. Hopkins's Contending Forces. My critical stance is informed by late twentieth-century feminist and cultural history reading strategies. Covering American history from the antebellum to post-Reconstruction era, I locate each text within a cultural, historical and political moment. I examine the ways the novels challenge and revision dominant societal assumptions about women and their roles in rebuilding and reforming their communities and the nation.
