Houses divided: Sentimentality and the function of biracial characters in American abolitionist fiction (William Wells Brown, Lydia Maria Child, Emily Clemens Pearson, Harriet Beecher Stowe)

Biracial characters are often read as indicators of ideological and literary weakness in abolitionist texts, products of their creators' “sentimentality,” a word used to describe both illogical, emotional thinking—including unconscious endorsement of the racial ideology underlying slavery—and argument through particular literary tropes—stereotyped characters and emotional plots involving separations and reunions of family members. In this study, I draw on the work of feminist recuperators of sentimentality to argue that biracial characters have the potential, not always fulfilled, to help readers understand and reject the racial dynamics of the slave system. Such understanding is most likely to occur when biracial characters appear not as isolated figures but as members of biologically-related interracial families that serve as microcosms of the nation—their context in the work of Lydia Maria Child, William Wells Brown, and Emily Clemens Pearson, but not, significantly, in Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin, the best-known sentimental abolitionist text.; In chapters 1 and 2, I analyze the role of genre labels—“romance” in the antebellum period, “sentimentalism” and “realism” in the 20th century—in criticism of abolitionist fiction, highlighting the differing conceptions of “stereotype” found in the work of African-Americanist critics—Sterling Brown, James Baldwin, and Richard Yarborough—and recuperators of sentimentality—Jane Tompkins and Philip Fisher. Chapter 3 argues that the label for one stereotype often associated with abolitionist fiction—“tragic mulatto”—is more appropriately applied to the inherently conflicted 20th-century characters Sterling Brown coined it to describe than to situationally tragic mulattoes such as the heroines of Child's “The Quadroons.” Chapters 4 and 5 analyze William Wells Brown's Clotel(le) and Pearson's Cousin Franck's Household, paying particular attention to the authors' use of gothic tropes of madness and inheritance to analyze and then reorganize interracial households as models for a racially egalitarian future. Chapters 6 and 7 examine Stowe's tendency to value the racial hierarchies of unrelated patriarchal plantation households over more egalitarian arrangements, even in Dred, which begins by using the tensions in an interracial family to illuminate the injustice of slavery.