Abstract
Sentimental novels were the juggernaut of the publishing industry in America in the nineteenth century. Also known as novels of domesticity and, more recently, as women’s fiction, these novels were written largely by and for women. The story was one of survival, of girls cast out to make their way in the world. However, they were to hold fast to the dictates of Victorian decorum and embrace the four tenets of the so-called “Cult of True Womanhood”: piety, sexual purity, submission, and domesticity. This study examines how the sentimental novel influenced four later novels by African American women writers. With harsh punishments against literacy, it was primarily only until after emancipation that African American women began writing novels. This study, then, explores how the authors of four novels both appropriated and reconfigured the template of precursory novels written by white women.
Critics have more recently begun to re-evaluate the genre of the sentimental novel, a genre dismissed as unimportant for most of the twentieth century. What needs further study is the influence of these astoundingly popular texts on the novels of a previously repressed group of authors, black women. By examining this connection, this study contributes to an understanding of the intertextuality of women’s fiction, an intertextuality both deliberate and inadvertent as well as often consciously oppositional.
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