The Sensational Turn and the Civil War: Thrilling the Broken Nation in Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Agnes of Sorrento and Augusta Jane Evans’s Macaria

Written on opposite sides of the Mason-Dixon line, the two popular Civil-War-era novels this essay discusses point to an underexplored dimension of 1860s American fiction, showing how the fashion for “sensationalism” shapes fantasies of literature’s relevance to a divided nation. In Agnes of Sorrento, Harriet Beecher Stowe displaces anxieties about sectionalism and mass readership onto a narrative of medieval Italy. In Macaria, Confederate nationalist Augusta Jane Evans imagines a rebirth of Southern culture. Both novels explore what sensational effect might offer politically-salient literature in a extraordinarily violent era. Sensationalism is a strange animal in a public sphere steeped in deadly political controversy, a transatlantic 1860s trend that reflects an awareness of expanding mass cultural consumption by celebrating novels and plays that flaunt their lack of pedagogical, moral, or sublime value—their absolute distance from the gravity of politics. American critics of the time distinguish spectacular sensation plays from the “legitimate” theater, and sensation novels from works with “purpose”; but by the mid-nineteenth century, the broad appeal of these pleasure-centered forms is an unquestionable fact.¹ Across considerable ideological differences, Agnes and Macaria reveal the pressure that this fashion’s popularity places on notions of purposeful fiction—and women’s fiction in particular—as literary culture struggles with the immanent politics of slavery and sectional sovereignty.

Against the backdrop of the war, Stowe’s and Evans’s works posed similar arguments about sensational aesthetics as they thematized mass popularity as a literary and a political problem. After seeing Uncle Tom’s Cabin variously adapted, parodied, enjoyed, and disparaged for nearly a decade, Stowe wrote Agnes, a story featuring a Catholic priest frustrated by the intractable “crowds” that take pleasure in “images of terror” meant to shock them into decency, and a climactic scene in which the title character charms a dangerous urban mob. Set in the contentious religious climate of fourteenth-century Italy, Agnes of Sorrento develops clear echoes of American sectionalism, likening Italy’s Northern reformers to New England Puritans opposed to a populace characterized by the violent, unstable, but aesthetically creative “Southern mind.” Stowe’s novel rejects both of these geographical and temperamental extremes, calling for a national popular literature that will reconcile the moral purpose of the “North” with mass audiences driven by sensual appetites.²

Evans’s Macaria similarly portrays the divide between North and South as necessitating a new kind of mass culture. In a plot that parallels Evans’s own career as a Southern author whose national success depended in large part on her acceptance by New York publishers, Macaria tells the story of two Georgian friends—Electra and Irene—pursuing careers in art and medicine by studying in Manhattan. When the Civil War breaks out in the novel, however, Electra and Irene return to Georgia and dedicate themselves to uplifting the Southern “masses.” Claiming that, “aesthetics, properly directed, is one of the most powerful engines of civilization,” the two women attempt to lay the institutional groundwork for large-scale cultural production independent of Northern influence.³ But as Evans wrote Macaria, from 1862 to 1864, the fate of the real Confederacy falling increasingly in doubt, her narrative drifted away from Electra’s and Irene’s initially optimistic plans to rival New York on its own terms. By its final chapter, the novel has begun to articulate a very different model of popular appeal as a political “engine,” embodied not in the gradual diffusion of knowledge and beauty but in a painting meant to impress its viewers with a gruesome scene, Electra’s “Modern Macaria.”

Alongside their common fascination with mass culture, Agnes of Sorrento and Macaria share an interest in the agency of media and mediation, particularly as it relates to bodies—dwelling extensively on images and texts that represent corporeality, or cause physical reactions. Recent scholarship by Naomi Z. Sofer and Dorothy Z. Baker presents compelling arguments for reading the 1860s novels of both Stowe and Evans in light of the religiously...