Sibling Romance in American Fiction, 1835–1900 by Emily E. VanDette (review)

Emily VanDette’s recent publication, Sibling Romance in American Fiction, 1835–1900, offers an expansive and engaging look at the brother-sister bond in nineteenth-century American literature, with a particular emphasis on the importance of this dynamic in the context of national crisis. In the post-Revolutionary era, the success of the nation hinged upon the success of individual families; however, in spite of this powerful ideal, VanDette argues, the significance of the sibling bond to that history has “for the most part escaped substantive notice” (3). VanDette aims to remedy this absence, and she does so admirably and comprehensively. As she explains, “Sibling attachment represented for nineteenth-century American novelists a relationship that modeled mutual obligation, loyalty, and affection, ideals that were as tantalizing as they were elusive to a nation struggling to maintain unity and solidarity while preserving the rights and identities of individuals” (3). With this claim as her anchor, VanDette begins with an examination of domestic advice and children’s periodical literature from the 1830s, focusing mainly on Catharine Maria Sedgwick’s historical novel The Linwoods (1835) and William Alcott’s The Young Man’s Guide (1836), using these to illustrate how siblings represented the potential of the family to “inculcate and insulate,” a socializing process deemed critical in a nation of self-determining citizenry (29).

In the second chapter, VanDette focuses on three novels from 1835 that develop the sibling romance in the context of the Revolutionary War: Sedgwick’s The Linwoods, John Pendelton Kennedy’s Horse-Shoe Robinson, and William Gilmore Simms’ The Partisan. These three important but less frequently studied works emphasize the sibling relationships between Revolutionary War soldiers, whose morale and motivation, VanDette explains, depended upon their strong sisters.

Chapter three tackles a different manifestation of the brother-sister bond, this time centering on the danger of the attachment in Caroline Lee Hentz’s 1856 novel, Ernest Linwood, which was published posthumously. In this work, VanDette argues, the dark consequences of the familial bond gone too far—incest—reveals the destabilizing potential of a beloved cultural and literary idea and showcases Hentz’s suspicion of nuclear family love (86).

Chapter four brings our attention to Harriet Beecher Stowe’s second abolitionist novel, Dred, published the same year as Hentz’s Ernest Linwood. VanDette contends that Stowe’s representations of multiple, opposite-sex sibling dynamics in Dred “complicate the binary definitions of family in antebellum America, and thereby challenge a main tenet of proslavery sentimentalist discourse” (111). As such, this chapter sets the stage for the final one, which addresses the emergence of African American literary voices at the end of the nineteenth century.

In chapter five, then, VanDette introduces the literature of the “African American Nadir”—the period from the official end of Reconstruction in 1877 to the turn of the twentieth century, or 1901—and explores the sibling bond in Frances Harper’s Iola Leroy (1892), Charles Chesnutt’s The House Behind the Cedars (1900), and Pauline Hopkins’ Contending Forces (1900). VanDette proposes that these authors revise and challenge the romantic nuclear family and sibling bond, and remain important because of the vision of Black-centric consanguinity, solidarity, and nationalistic identity that they offer.

Finally, VanDette’s epilogue extends the conversation into a consideration of how the sibling romance, which she has explored through mostly noncanonical works, impacts more celebrated authors such as Hawthorne, Poe, and Melville. Perhaps she will expand upon this theme in a second work, for, as she has shown, the genre of sibling romance fiction would benefit from still more attention.