Paper for Slavery: Past, Present and Future
2nd Global Meeting, Prague, Czech Republic, 2nd- 4th May, 2016
Karen-Margrethe Simonsen
Associate Professor, Comparative Literature, Aarhus University, Denmark
Sentimentalism and Political Agency in Sab. The Genres of Slave Narratives as a Challenge to
Understanding Slavery.
The premise in this paper is that discourses about slavery are determined not only by the immediate
political and legal contexts but also by available styles and rhetorical modes and their assumed
effect on different kinds of spectators. Many of the texts about slavery are ambiguous in terms of
genre and are written not by the victims but by ‘spectators’, political or human rights agents,
historians or literary writers who are in a distanced position from the actual slavery. Documentation
mix with narration, political agendas mix with affective appeals, positions of victimhood and
agency are negotiated in complicated ways. The complexity of slavery-stories challenges our
understanding of what slavery is, and our own role as historical spectators.
In order to understand the role of sentimentalism in slave narratives, I will discuss the
sentimental novel by Gertrudis Gomez de Avellaneda: Sab (the Cuban/Spanish equivalent of Uncle
Tom’s Cabin), written between 1836 and 1839 and published 1841 in Spain. I say it is the
equivalent of Uncle Tom’s Cabin but not only is it earlier than that novel (published 1852), the
function of sentimentalism is also different.
The paper will be divided into two parts: 1. First I will discuss what sentimentalism is,
and its relation to politics and especially abolitionism in the 19th century. 2. Then I will analyze
Sab’s genre trying to establish the different functions of sentimentality, discussing the tragic modes
of telling, the character of natural law, the structure of identification, and the importance of feeling
for politics 3. I will end the paper by discussing whether Sab is to be seen as a conservative or a
revolutionary novel and what role sentiment plays in this.
1. Sentimentalism, politics and abolitionism
In the book Inventing Human Rights, Lynn Hunt claims that empathy is a precondition for the
existence of human rights and that empathy was not fully developed until the eighteenth century
when the sentimental novel “enabled readers to empathize across class, sex, and national lines”
(Hunt 2007: 38), and one could add: across race. Sentimentality is thus not just irrational feeling,
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and it is not just individual, it has a social function of reaching out, creating solidarity among
people, who do not know each other. Yet in order to raise empathy it is an absolute necessity that an
identification is created with a unique person, like Pamela in Samuel Richardson’s novel by the
same name or Julie/Heloïse in Jacques Rousseau’s novel Julie ou la nouvelle Heloïse. An example
from the 19th century would be Harriet Beecher Stowe, whose novel about Uncle Tom raised a
wave of collective indignation and ‘sudden’ identification with the sufferings of a black person.1
The question is how this relation between the unique life story and a general sympathy
is created in slave narratives. In "I Was Born": Slave Narratives, Their Status as Autobiography and
as Literature”, James Olney makes the claim that many of the autobiographical life narratives
written by former slaves follow the same narrative line. If a reader reads a dozen slave narratives
“seldom will he discover anything new or different, but only, always more and more of the same.”
(Olney, 2). He then goes on to systematize a long list of recurring elements and repetitiveness in the
slave narratives.
As Olney himself hints, the patterns of repetitiveness are ethically worrying since they
seem to undermine the uniqueness of life stories of suffering. For him, the repetitiveness primarily
reveals that the texts don’t have any literary quality and he questions the often claimed relation
between these slave narrations and the birth of an independent black literature. However, for my
purpose, these patterns are interesting for a different reason: they reveal a rhetorical necessity that
must have historical reasons. The slave narratives must have been written in that particular way,
because it was assumed - consciously or unconsciously, due to the author’s own choices or the
instigation by abolitionist friends - that that kind of narration was the most persuasive.2 Far from
being a documentation of the lack of literary abilities of the writer, the repetitive patterns is a
documentation of the political aim of the text: the paradox of the patterns is that they are at once
understood to be individualized and general.3
Just like the autobiographical slave narratives, the novels of sentimentalism create a
link between individual and general suffering, between personal experience and social reality. The
question is: what kind of sentimentality are we talking about, and what is the ethical and political
As the anecdote has it, Stowe was greeted by President Lincoln as the “little woman who wrote the book that made
this great war”. Recently researchers have begun to doubt the veracity of the anecdote ( Vollaro, 18), and it is perhaps
natural to do so, since the sentimentalism of Stowe’s novel is more conservative than revolutionary
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As has been shown various times, the narrative for instance of Olaudah Equiano made “heavy borrowings” from
abolitionists Anthony Benezet and Thomas Clarkson and from literary writers Daniel Defoe and Jonathan Swift?
(Angelo Constanzo, 7). These borrowings, far from being a documentation of the lack of literary abilities of the writer,
is a documentation of the political aim of the text. But this political aim is not different from the sentimental story,
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I use the word ’sentimental’ here in a purely descriptive way, to designate a story that is meant to get the reader to
identify with the main person, and engage in his or her personal life.
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function of sentimentality? In this paper, I will make a general distinction between conservative and
revolutionary sentimentality. Despite its apparently revolutionary effects, I will see Harriet Beecher
Stowe as a representative of conservative sentimentalism, that is different from the revolutionary
sentimentality of Sab. Sab is revolutionary because its sentiment is rooted in a radical natural
equality, located outside of society, in natural law. This natural law is not represented by a
comforting God but is associated with a sorrowful Jesus and dug directly out of the wild nature. It is
a deeply felt equality that is meant to break down any conventional order of hierarchy, to reevaluate
the very foundations of society, and instigate action from below. The sentimentality is not leading
towards peaceful redemption (as it is in Stowe) but to conflict and revolution. To borrow a term
from Jacques Rancière: it is a sentimentality of dissensus. I will argue against some new readings
that have argued that Avalleneda was not revolutionary and that the novel Sab is not an abolitionist
novel.
2. Sab: Revolutionary sentiment and political revolution
It has been argued that 18th and 19th century colonial society far from abolishing the relation
between family and society that according to Michel Foucault was so strong in the early modern
period, rather strengthens the relation (Amit S. Rai, 6). This is true of colonial power that often
builds empirical structures on the structure of family relations (the empire being both the benevolent
and castigating father), and it is true of the literature in the period, especially the romantic or the
sentimental literature that treat family issues, especially threats to family structures that may
undermine the political family-structure of the empire. The most obvious threat here is the marriage
or a love relation or even sexual relation between a black slave and a white lady. Whereas sexual
relations between white males and black female slaves only seem to confirm the power of the
whites, the potential sexual relations between black slaves and white females are deeply erosive of
the political structure of white society. Apparently, the topic was so dangerous that Avellaneda’s
book that was published 1841 in Spain immediately was censored in Cuba and it was not published
there until 1883, sixteen years’ after the end of the slave trade (1867) and three years before the
final abolition of slavery in the island (1886). The plot is simple:
The mulatto Sab has been raised at a sugar plantation, in the house of Don Carlos B
and has fallen in love with Don Carlos’ daughter, Carlota. Unaware of this love, Carlota sees Sab as
a kind of brother. She is engaged to be married with Jorge Otway, an English merchant who has
risen quickly in the social hierarchy of society, due to economic talent. However, because of his
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fathers’ unlucky economic transactions the family has lost much of its wealth and Jorge Otway,
pressed by his father who mistakenly thinks that the family of Don Carlos B. is incredibly rich,
Otway is considering marrying Carlota though he does not love her. As the reader knows, and
Otway finds out, Don Carlos B, just like Otway’s own father, has lost much of his wealth.
Therefore, Otway decides not to marry Carlota. The novel thematizes a moment of crisis for the two
white families in the story. This is the situation, where the mulatto Sab comes to play a decisive
role. By pure accident, he has a lottery ticket of enormous value, enough to restore the families to
former wealth. First he wants to give it to Teresa, a less attractive, white friend of the house who is
in love with Jorge Otway. Sab gathers correctly that the English merchant, Otway, will prefer the
woman with money to the woman of beauty and grace. However, Teresa, being a virtuous stoic,
will not receive the lottery bill and Sab decides to secretly swop Carlota’s lottery bill into the
winning one. Sab thus becomes a true hero, sacrificing not only his own happiness but also his hope
of revenge, as he backs up the marriage between his enemy and the love of his heart. Sab personally
witnesses how Otway, reading the letter with the news that Carlota has just won a premiun of 40
thousand duros, changes his mind and decides to marry Carlota. However, the story does not end in
this truly romantic tragedy. It turns out that the marriage between Carlota and Otway is very
unhappy, Teresa who is also unhappy recedes to a nunnery, and Sab dies from a curious disease,
vomiting blood. But before he dies, he writes a letter to Teresa, and this letter is almost the
concluding remarks of the novel. In this letter, he establishes the natural law that makes him or
ought to make him equal to any white man:
“¿El gran jefe de esta gran familia humana, habrá establecido diferentes leyes para los que nacen
con la tez negra y la tez blanca? ¿No tienen todos las mismas necesidades, las mismas pasiones, los
mismos defectos? ¿Por qué pues tendrán los unos el derecho de esclavizar y los otros la obligación
de obedecer?” (188)
However, despite the fact that natural law restores equality, in the face of actual inequality, Sab is
despairing:
“Nunca he podido comprender estas cosas, Teresa, por más que se las he preguntado al sol, y a la
luna, y a las estrellas, y a los vientos bramadores del huracán, y a las suaves brisas de la noche “
(189)
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The state of colonial society is thus clearly one that is ‘out of joint’, so removed from natural law
that it is even impossible to understand it. Not the stars, nor even the hurricanes can explain the
disequilibrium of society. In the letter and in Carlota’s mind, as she later reads it, a connection is
made between the enslavement of blacks and the slavery of women in a patriarchical society. Sab
dreams of a time when a god will restore the world to its natural course but he sees only fatal human
errors (193).
The emotional drama of the story thus impresses on the reader a double awareness of
natural equality and social inequality. In this double-ness rests its critical quality, and Sab is the
virtuous hero who incarnates and points to the ideal of natural morality. Yet if we consider the
relation between the characters, it is not all that simple, because it turns out that within the novel,
there is a hierarchy of virtue and the quality of virtue is dependent on the relation between
sentiment and rationality.
It is therefore very interesting to see that in the book there are actually two different
kinds of romantic heroes, namely Teresa and Sab. Both of them attempt to perform heroic selfrenunciation but whereas Sab considers Teresa to be more successful due to her rationality, he
considers himself to have failed due to his enormous capacity for love and sentiment:
“es que a vos os sostiene la razón y a mí me devora el sentimiento. Vuestro corazón es del más puro
oro, el mío es de fuego” (190).
Sab’s ‘mistake’, and the reason why he does not consider himself to be truly virtuous is thus that he
feels too much: his sentiments are his problem, his capacity for love and ardent feelings. Yet the
whole story dramatizes the necessity of these feelings. Sab’s love for Carlota is depicted as the
highest good. To have been loved like that, radically and without reservation is considered to be the
highest happiness. However, he sees not himself but Teresa as the most virtuous person, since she is
passionate but manages to control her passions. The problem with Sab’s passions is that they are too
ardent, and this is the reason why he must die. He performs the ultimate virtuous act of giving the
love of his life to his enemy, and ought to be admired for his deed, yet is devoured from within, the vomited blood being a metaphorical symptom of the wound of the self-renunciation. Teresa, on
the other hand, does not die (at least not at first). The novel wants to persuade us that she is happy
in her stoic self-renunciation within the convent. Thus she is put forward as an ideal person. The
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problem is that she can only be happy and virtuous inside the confinement of a nunnery. She is
incapable of extending this happy state to the outside of the convent. Carlota who is outside the
convent and married to Otway may be considered virtuous in a more conventional way but she is
ignorant of the love, Sab bears to her and the love, Teresa has for her husband, Otway, and she is
extremely unhappy in her marriage. In this way, the social condition seems to make any individual
happiness or virtuousness impossible. Any possible virtuous act will lead to death or a deathlike
condition- either the conventional frozenness of a loveless marriage, the sterile confinement of the
convent or the tragic event of real death.
The sacrifice and death of Sab, seen in isolation, constitute a romantic tragedy. In a
way he essentializes the unhappy fate of the slave. But the story demonstrates not only the fatal life
of one person but how this unhappiness is mirrored in every good person in the book. Also, it is
significant that the book does not end with the heroic deed of Sab but with the bitter letter he writes,
almost on his deathbed. This letter changes the novel from being ‘only’ a sentimental novel into
being a novel on sentimentality and on the role of sentiments.
It might be true, as Catherine Davies has claimed that in this novel: “Sentiment
becomes a moral prerogative; virtue is predicated on the capacity for feeling” (Davies 15), yet the
novel clearly shows that feeling is a failure, or to phrase it in a different way: there is no way you
can build social reality and morality on feeling, since it will shipwreck on the inequality of society.
This might also be the reason that nature in Sab is not envisioned as a peaceful, paradise-like state
but is a tropical nature full of hurricanes, sudden eruptions and wilderness. And this is probably the
reason why Sab’s voice is one of dissensus rather than one of possible consensus. He disagrees
radically with every part of the unequal social order. There is no possibility of tranquil empathy,
only violent eruption. The comforting voice of Teresa does not soothe his mind, it only adds
bitterness to his desperation.
3. Conservative or revolutionary?
The novel gives voice to the people who did not historically have a voice and in this sense, it turns
a’ historical’ victim into a literary hero, and it is possible to classify this novel, not only as an
abolitionist novel (“a book that deliberately attacks the institution of slavery” (Romeo FivelDémoret 2), but also even as a ‘rebel romance’, which acc. to the definition by Colleen C. O. Brien
is a novel that creates new models of intimacy and political engagement (C. O. Brian 7).
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Yet there is a problem with the hero of our story. As José M. Marrero Enríquez has
pointed out, Sab is not an ordinary slave, he is son of a princess, he has been brought up almost as a
brother to the daughter of the house, he can read and write. He is not black, and actually he is not
even mulatto. According to Doris Sommer, he is “neither white, nor black, nor mulatto.” In the
book he is described as of a “yellowish white with a touch of black”. So is he really a voice from
below? In the end, he chooses not to make a rebellion but rather accept and support the
conventional marriage between Carlota and the English merchant, - a marriage that upholds social
and racial hierarchy rather than undermines it. Sab’s feelings have the potential of revolution and it
is the intention of the novel that the reader must sense the radicalism of his feelings and their
potential for erupting the very conditions of society, and the distance between the revolutionary
potential and the anti-revolutionary conventional realism of the ending. Yet he is not rebellious and
this is a significant reason why some critics have thought of Sab as a conservative novel. According
to José Gomariz, the novel is not an abolitionist text at all (Gomariz 97). In the words of Claudette
Williams, Sab only pays “lip-service to the anti-slavery cause” (Williams 169). Even the letter that
is clearly a devastating critique of the whole institution of slavery is according to her only
“halfhearted” and it can only be so, because Sab can be suspected of ‘complicity with his enslavers”
To back up her claim, Williams quotes the following replique from Sab to Teresa:
“tranqulizaos, Teresa, ningún peligro os amenaza; los esclavos arrastran pacientemente su cadena:
acaso solo necesitan parar romperla, oír una voz que les grite: “¡Sois hombres!” pero esa voz no
será la mía …!” (243)
Does this mean that Avellaneda, like the members of the saccharocracy of Cuba and like some of
the abolitionists, were frightened of a slave rebellion, like the one that had been seen in Haiti or like
the ones earlier in the century in Cuba? Hardly, - it is much more likely that she thought a true
rebellion in Cuba simply unrealistic. What she had witnessed in Cuba was that despite the two
rebellions, slavery not only continued but even grew through the first half of the century. The power
of the saccharocracy was increasing, not diminishing. Sab’s letter is a letter of radical dissensus, it
is in fact that cri de la nature, that he claims not to make. But its bitterness is a sign of the
disillusioned idealism, his own and maybe that of the novel’s author. The radicalism of Avellaneda
has often been explained by the fact that she links black slavery with the oppression of women, but
this linkage can also underline the difficulty of change.
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Only one person in the novel expresses explicitly the hope or danger of a true revolution. She is
a minor character: it is the old woman Sab chooses to call his mother, Martina, who says: “la raza
negra será [la] terrible vengadora de los hombres cobrizos”. Her prediction echoes the fears of Don
Carlos B. and the other Cubans; “siempre alarmados los Cubanos, despúes del espantoso y reciente
ejemplo de una isla vecina”. (REF) The revolution of Haiti is the natural backdrop of the novel, and
it remains a utopian horizon for the radical dissensus of Sab.
Even though he himself is not able or willing to act directly, fighting against slavery, his letter is
a violent J’accuse-attack at the enslaving society, and his love for Carlota turns him into a true
rebel. He thinks himself that he loves ‘too much’ but it is clear from the context that this excess of
love only is a problem against the sterile order of society. Thus if Martina foresees the rise of an
avenging black army, Sab has already made the first attack, through love. He may not see it himself,
but the reader cannot help seeing it. Therefore it is not the explicit failure of Sab to be a moral hero
that is the message of the novel, it his desire that tears down the borders and hierarchies of society
that is the message. Love relations between white ladies and black (or mulatto) slaves will definitely
undermine society.
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