Activist Sentiments: Reading Black Women in the Nineteenth Century (review)

In Activist Sentiments: Reading Black Women in the Nineteenth Century, P. Gabrielle Foreman explicates ways in which texts written by Harriet Jacobs, Harriet E. Wilson, and Frances Ellen Watkins Harper read and represent cultural and political literacies. She additionally argues that less familiar, "raceless" novels written by Emma Dunham Kelley-Hawkins and Amelia E. Johnson are in fact evidence of literary engagement in debates about race. In an effort to challenge flattened readings of sentimentality with multivalent interpretations, Foreman offers a fresh look at historical and cultural contexts to demonstrate how these authors and texts became both visible and relevant in the nineteenth century. Drawing from her extensive archival research, Foreman provides a strong foundation from which to understand conflicts between power and sexuality in these texts.

In the first chapter, "The Politics of Sex and Representation in Harriet Jacobs's Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl," Foreman considers Harriet Jacobs's analysis of sexuality and slavery beyond "conventional, normalized" implications to include homosexual and incestuous abuse in the 1861 text (14). Foreman questions "politics of transparency" that frame Jacobs as one-dimensional and easily understood through a sentimental lens (20). She also questions approaches to black sentimental writing that discourage recovery of multivalent nuances which, she argues, are characteristic of the genre. By addressing both silences and moments of truth in the text, she argues that Jacobs complicates the paternity of her children and therefore challenges the power of her owner Dr. Flint to sell her. Foreman also rewrites the saint-like depiction of Aunt Martha (Molly Horniblow, Brent's/Jacobs's grandmother) by invoking implications of Horniblow's own sexual history and sale. Foreman uses this evidence to prove that distrust of audiences encouraged authors to "undertell" stories to match expectations; thus, she further emphasizes the need for contemporary readers to look beyond the text for additional information (21).

Foreman argues that Jacobs exposes sexual terror and homosexual abuse within antislavery critique while arguing that the North is also tainted by "contagion of Southern dissipation" (23). She suggests that Northern pedagogy alone cannot purify the patriarchal institution, as white women are also exposed to and participate in depravity. Her argument that Jacobs highlights illicit behavior to attract the attention of readers who ignore the plight of enslaved women offers an important rationale for revisiting the intended audience. Foreman convincingly argues that the text was not intended to appeal simply to the women's sentimental or domestic side, but instead to implicate them in their own ideological flaws.

In the second chapter, "Naming Our Nig's Multivalent Mothers," Foreman offers a critique of human and property relations beyond race and region-based domesticity to both challenge and complicate white and black maternity in Harriet E. Wilson's Our Nig (1859). She argues that the text reassembles racialized associations to produce a number of contested racial interpretations. She argues that the homonymic link between "Mag," "Nab," and "Nig" prevents readings of transparent character roles. Although "Nig" is a mulatto servant, for example, the politics of naming represent a critique of Northern figures and events as even "Nab"/Abby, the white aunt of the family she serves, is disenfranchised through her marginal place in the family. Analyzing the connection between "Nig" and her mother Mag, Foreman argues convincingly that Our Nig substitutes a "bad" white mother for a black one, therefore moving beyond both the slavery narrative that previously characterized black motherhood and sentimental tropes used to represent white mothers. Foreman supports her argument that Wilson engages her readership with generic clues for racial classification (linked to unstable categorizations of race in the antebellum period) with insightful analysis of these categorizations. Foreman convincingly suggests that even the contemporary reader's knowledge and comfort are disturbed as categories of identification are disrupted by characterization in Our Nig.

In the second half of her book, Foreman evaluates political agendas of postbellum texts, arguing that the promise of emancipation called black...