Apocalyptic Sentimentalism; Love and Fear in Antebellum Literature by Kevin Pelletier (review)

If there is a universal quality to emotions such as love, fear, and vengeance, the expressions and embedded meanings are contingent on time, place, and person. In Apocalyptic Sentimentalism, Kevin Pelletier demonstrates this historical contingency in his close readings of works by David Walker, Nat Turner, Maria W. Stewart, Harriet Beecher Stowe, John Brown, and others in order to recover fear “as an indispensable engine of cultural and political transformation” in antebellum sentimentalist literature (3). Pelletier argues that while previous scholars have considered love and vengeance contradictory, the culture of sentiment in the nineteenth century had not only the capacity but also the need for a concurrent duality of these elements. Love was not enough to soften the hardened hearts of sinners—it was necessary to inspire fear of God’s hard hand of justice. In five argument-driven chapters, Pelletier traces how apocalyptic sentimentalism emerged in the late 1820s and came to maturity in the 1850s and how its logic dissolved between John Brown’s raid and the end of the Civil War.

One of the most appealing features of Apocalyptic Sentimentalism is the care with which Pelletier reconstructs what he calls the antebellum economy of emotions. Apocalyptic sentimentalism was the product of religious and political tensions between a world of slavery and freedom and a world of severe Calvinism and more gentle Protestantism. Understanding sentimentalism, Pelletier contends, requires exploration into the mentality of antebellum America. Part of this requires letting go of what he considers a secular political sensibility embedded in modern scholarly interpretations of antebellum America.

Pelletier divides his work chronologically into three parts. In the first part, in chapter 1, he reexamines David Walker and Nat Turner—two people not usually included in the canon of sentimentalist literature—as part of the genre’s religious origins. Pelletier contends that David Walker’s Appeal to the Colored Citizens of the World not only envisions God’s wrath upon white slaveholders but also advocates that compassion and sympathy across the color line might prevent destruction. If Walker was the progenitor of apocalyptic sentimentalism, Nat Turner’s jailhouse confessions became what Pelletier calls the “connective tissue” between Walker and later abolitionist texts (47). In chapter 2, Pelletier examines the writings of Maria Stewart, who positioned herself as advocating in a style similar to Walker’s. She used the image of the apocalypse “to inspire sentimental bonds between black Americans that might generate among them a more enthusiastic spirit of reform and resistance” (71). More clearly than Walker, Stewart used the emotions of love and fear as a catalyst for sympathy not only between whites and blacks but also between men and women within free black communities in the north.

Parts 2 and 3 focus on the structure of apocalyptic sentimentalism in the 1850s and beyond, with an emphasis in the second part on the writings of Harriet Beecher Stowe and John Brown’s letters from a Charles Town jail in the third. Pelletier argues that Stowe never had blind faith in the power of love to inspire change. In Uncle Tom’s Cabin, she pleads to northern readers to change their hearts, but she also asks them to ponder God’s power to destroy people who do not “uphold the theological imperatives of justice and mercy” (98). And while this novel is the most famous antislavery work of the sentimentalist genre, Pelletier also considers Stowe’s subsequent work Dred—in which Dred is a sentimental character who embodies God’s retribution on unrepentant whites—as even more adherent to the logic of apocalyptic sentimentalism. Finally, there is John Brown, who for Pelletier represents both the climax of apocalyptic sentimentalism and the point at which the discourse began to break down as antislavery sentimentalists debated the pairing of vengeance and love.

This book will spark discussion, and at times Pelletier’s interpretations are likely to face resistance. In Pelletier’s analysis, for example, the agency...