In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Reviewed by:
  • Apocalyptic Sentimentalism: Love and Fear in U.S. Antebellum Literature by Kevin Pelletier
  • Ethan J. Kytle (bio)
Apocalyptic Sentimentalism: Love and Fear in U.S. Antebellum Literature. By Kevin Pelletier. (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2015. Pp. 256. Cloth, $49.95.)

In a provocative 1970 New York Review of Books essay titled “Mrs. Stowe’s Vengeance,” literary critic Ellen Moers highlights the underappreciated features of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s antislavery novels. Uncle Tom’s Cabin and Dred, she argues, stand out for their “vitality, passion, [and] humor.” Moers adds that Stowe’s “shriek of moral revulsion” at the peculiar institution “still reaches our ears and shakes our hearts.” Moers concludes her essay with a discussion of Milly, the enslaved character in Dred who convinces the novel’s titular hero not to lead a bloody slave revolt. “Leave de vengeance” to the Lord, Milly advises Dred. “Modern readers, who do not share Milly’s faith or that of her author in the might of the Lord, are inclined to believe that Harriet Beecher Stowe had no interest in vengeance,” Moers explains. “The nineteenth century knew her better, and read her differently.”1

Literary scholar Kevin Pelletier reads her differently, too. Indeed, his new monograph, Apocalyptic Sentimentalism: Love and Fear in U.S. Antebellum Literature, underscores the surprising extent to which sentimental authors like Stowe employed a language of violence and terror. Most recent scholarship on nineteenth-century sentimentalism portrays it as a literary tradition that was grounded solely in appeals to love and sympathy, for better or for worse. By contrast, Pelletier argues that vengeance played an equally important role in a strain of that tradition, which he calls “apocalyptic sentimentalism” (4). Focusing on literature written by and about a diverse set of antislavery figures, including David Walker, Nat Turner, Maria W. Stewart, John Brown, and Stowe, Pelletier reveals that warnings about the wrath of a vengeful God often coexisted with, and worked to reinforce, pleas for love, compassion, and sympathetic identification.

The earliest example of apocalyptic sentimental literature Pelletier examines is David Walker’s 1829 Appeal to the Coloured Citizens of the World, a pamphlet known for its threats of divine fury toward slaveholders. Yet as Pelletier deftly demonstrates, Walker’s Appeal is also a sentimental text, which “at several key moments pleas for white readers to [End Page 275] nurture compassion for the slave so that America can become a nation of racial harmony rather than discord” (37). Highlighting the black reformer’s “repeated pairing of love and vengeance,” Pelletier explicates Walker’s “incipient strategy for inspiring sympathy in those who fail to feel compassion for slaves” (41). The experience of terror, Walker implies, may be the only way to spur an indifferent white public to identify with the enslaved.

Pelletier also exposes how writers more often associated with sentimentalism than Walker, such as Maria W. Stewart and Harriet Beecher Stowe, used terror to “energize” their “calls for sympathy and love” (5). A free black New Englander whose public lectures challenged racial and gender barriers in the early 1830s, Stewart deployed “stern warnings of theological vengeance in order to generate greater Christian love and compassion” (60). Similarly, Stowe repeatedly couples love and vengeance in both Uncle Tom’s Cabin and Dred. Pelletier’s close reading of these two novels, which comprises a good portion of his book, demonstrates that the “inchoate apocalyptic sentimentalism” evident in the work of Walker and Stewart was the defining feature of Stowe’s 1850s fiction, signaling the “maturation of this tradition” on the cusp of the Civil War (100).

Apocalyptic Sentimentalism also explores the cultural influence of Nat Turner and John Brown, antislavery crusaders who fashioned themselves as the embodiment of divine vengeance. A Virginia slave whose 1831 rebellion struck fear in the heart of the white South, Turner never embraced the sympathetic goals of Walker, Stewart, or Stowe. Nevertheless, Pelletier maintains, his insurrection and subsequent confessions about it—in which Turner spoke of his desire “to carry terror and devastation wherever we went”—shaped apocalyptic sentimentalism by providing “subsequent writers with a powerful rhetorical construction for contesting slavery by linking acts of insurrection with prophesies of God’s apocalyptic retribution” (44...

pdf