The Making of Racial Sentiment: Slavery and the Birth of the Frontier Romance (review)

242Reviews me as simplistic. To Johnson's credit, the clarity and openness oftone with which he writes do seem to create a space in which readers feel invited to think for themselves and to articulate their disagreements. In that sense, BeyondPractical Virtuesucceeds in promoting the sort ofdemocratic giveand -take that its final chapter describes. The University of Texas at AustinPhillip Barrish Tawil, Ezra. The Making ofRacialSentiment: Slavery and the Birth of the Frontier Romance. New York: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2006. 244 pp. Cloth: $85.00. In The Making of Racial Sentiment, Ezra Tawil makes several "counterintuitive" claims: that the frontier novels of the 1820s and 1830s by male (Cooper) and female (Child, Sedgwick) novelists should be considered as part ofthe same tradition of domestic frontier romance (and not as opposing traditions); that because of a "legally imposed [national] silence" on slavery from the 1780s to the 1840s, the frontier romance provided a "way ofengaging the contested question ofslavery" by providing an "alternate language" through which "the issues surrounding slavery could be transcoded into other terms" (33); that the frontier romance bears an unacknowledged relationship to the novel ofslavery [exemplified by Uncle Tom s Cabin (1852)]; and, centrally, that both genres contributed to the nineteenth -century "common sense" about race by joining with an emerging scientific discourse that posited race as an irreducible essence located as much within the body as on its surface. Tawil clearly explains the changes in scientific thought that affect (and are affected by) the novels. Seventeenth- and eighteenth-century science emphasized "monogeny," a theory of human origins positing that "all the diverse 'nations' were descended from a single human pair" and that physical and cultural differences were the result of "degeneration" caused by such influences as climate and diet (44). Such differences were not "permanent or immutable," and even features "such as skin color or cranial shape" were believed "to be alterable" (45). By the middle of the nineteenth century , "polygenesis," the theory that each "race" of man developed from distinctively different progenitors, had "supplanted monogenesis as the new scientific common sense" and posited "a new kind ofhuman body" permanently and essentially "endowed with 'race'" (48). The domestic frontier romance's "most profound contribution to American racial discourse was in fact the delineation of a racialized interior," defining "race as a special kind ofsubjectivity," and contributing to the developing racialist discourse "the notion that members of different races both feel different things, and Studies in American Fiction243 feel things differently" (151,2). The Making ofRacial Sentiment effectively and convincingly shows how the transition between two systems of scientific knowledge leaves it mark on frontier romances, from ThePioneers (which, Tawil demonstrates, "can be read as a kind of hinge between the two systems of classification") to The Wept of Wish-Ton-Wish (which favors "a specifically nineteenthcentury racialism") (81, 138). Less convincing is Tawil's attempt "to recover the actual lines of filiation" between the frontier romance and the novel of slavery, in part because a large body ofwritten work (slave narratives , anti-slavery speeches printed and circulated despite legal restrictions) that bridges the two genres is absent from the book (4). Tawil also often pauses to explain what he is not doing or not claiming, with each restriction resulting in increasingly abstract (and, seemingly, fewer "actual") connections between the genres. He finally comments that he is only "concerned with the contribution made by a few specific works ofthe 1820s to a particular common sense about race in the antebellum period," a much less ambitious project than he outlines in the introductory chapter, and one that leaves multiple questions unanswered (98). If the "sentimental bond" between daughter and mother in the frontier romance marks the difference between white and non-white races, what do we make of sentimental abolitionist poetry that depicts the bond between mother and child as evidence of the humanity of the enslaved? Why does sentimental subjectivity as difference perform cultural work while depictions of shared sentiments fail to affect the emerging racialist discourse? As white novelists do the cultural work of articulating a racialized black interiority, how do African Americans contribute to or counter those racial constructions? Or what do we do with...