Early American Literature

Once a pejorative, "sentimentalism" is now an analytic. The term has exhibited impressive longevity as a category of analysis in the study of early and nineteenth-century American literature. Sometimes understood as a genre of writing or an affective mode, sometimes seen as a rhetorical strategy for movements such as abolitionism, as a structure of feeling, or as a cultural formation, always viewed as a technology for racialization and the management of other forms of difference such as gender and sexuality, sentimentalism is now a well-established keyword for the study of American cultures.

This analytic has always had geographies attached to it. Some scholars have argued that sentimentalism in the US context was (and is) a national, nationalist, and nationalizing phenomenon, almost exceptionally American. Some have portrayed it as a crucially Anglo-American mode [End Page 246] of thought, transported from Scottish Common Sense philosophy into literary form by those like Harriet Beecher Stowe who read Adam Smith and his interlocutors. Some have drawn a more broadly transatlantic map, including in the scope of sentimentalism its manifestations in continental Europe such figures as Rousseau and Goethe.

One of the accomplishments of Maria A. Windell's compelling Transamerican Sentimentalism and Nineteenth-Century US Literary History is that from its very title it draws a new map for sentimentalism, but it does so without negating those previous maps. For Windell, sentimentalism has always been a mode that travels across national borders in the northern Americas. Through historicized close reading of numerous literary texts, she shows that writers in Haiti, Cuba, Mexico, and Indigenous North America were engaged with sentimentalism as a mode. At the same time she argues for the importance of those writers and that geography for many of the US-based writers who have always been read as "sentimental," including writers of "seduction novels" such as Hannah Webster Foster and Susanna Rowson; works of sentimental abolition such as Uncle Tom's Cabin; Black writers such as Harriet Jacobs, Frederick Douglass, and Martin Delany who have long been seen as engaging with the sentimental mode; and later writers of texts that emulate or respond to these antecedents, such as Helen Hunt Jackson.

Windell carefully sets up her claims through increasingly provocative juxtapositions. She starts out in her first chapter where many other scholars of literary sentimentalism begin, with the coquette, but argues for the "creolization" of that figure, showing how the coquettish characters in Leonora Sansay's Secret History both build on and transform the type developed in early novels by Foster, Rowson, William Hill Brown, and others. The second chapter moves us to newer literary territory by focusing on Mary Peabody Mann's Juanita: A Romance of Real Life in Cuba Fifty Years Ago. Here Windell takes on another familiar figure of sentimental fiction, the "tragic mulatta." This character type becomes more plural and more complex than it has previously seemed, for Windell argues that we don't fully understand the sentimentalized figure of the "tragic mulatta" unless she is read alongside the figures of "the Moor" and "the mulata" as developed in a Caribbean context. The complex history of Juanita's composition and publication—it was conceived on a visit to Cuba in the 1830s but not published till the 1880s—allows Windell to place it in relation to both US [End Page 247] abolitionism and racial formations before the Civil War and the forms of racialization the US attributed to Cuba before and after the Spanish American War. Though this chapter's many moving parts can make its argument feel a more diffuse than the first, its focus on a single novel holds it together.

The analyses of sentimental character types in Windell's first two chapters allow her to broaden her scope and her application of the concept of sentimentalism in what follows. Her analyses of the Californio author María Amparo Ruiz de Burton's 1885 The Squatter and the Don and especially of Cherokee writer John Rollin Ridge's 1854...