SOURCE: Bakker, Jan. “Twists of Sentiment in Antebellum Southern Romance.” The Southern Literary Journal 26, no. 1 (fall 1993): 3-13.

[In the following essay, Bakker emphasizes Caroline Lee Hentz's and E. D. E. N. Southworth's manipulation of conventional sentimental devices in their early romances for the purpose of disclosing “unpleasant truths” about life in the South.]

This discussion of some twists of sentiment in antebellum Southern romance is limited to two first works by female writers of the time and place: Lovell's Folly (1833), by Caroline Lee Hentz (1800-1856); and Retribution; or, The Vale of Shadows. A Tale of Passion (1849), by Emma Dorothy Eliza Navitte Southworth (1819-1899)—or Eden, as she preferred.¹ Hentz and Southworth are two of the women authors of the Old South who, Jay B. Hubbell writes in The South in American Literature, 1607-1900, outnumbered contemporary men of the region who can be considered professional writers (603). In Pastoral in Antebellum Southern Romance I discuss how idyllic imagery is used again and again by leading male authors of the Old South to reveal their concerned and worried awareness of American realities that compromised the arcadian vision of their area they so regularly evoke in fiction. In this look at the first romances of Hentz and Southworth, however, I want to show how certain routine sentimental devices—those appeals to the pathetic, those appeals “to emotions, especially pity, as a means of moral distinction and moral persuasion” (Clark 20)—also are used or twisted to work against themselves. I want to show how sentimental patterns can evoke a terror as well as a tear.

In a recent study of the use of sentiment in Victorian literature, Fred Kaplan in Sacred Tears sees the rosy moral philosophy of Enlightenment optimism as the direct intellectual source of nineteenth-century literary sentimentality (3-6). This sentimental tradition indicates humanity's possession of innate moral feelings or sentiments that tend to the good as opposed to the bad; that lead to the triumph of the heart over “self-serving calculation” (16-17, 33). For Kaplan, nineteenth-century sentimental fiction sets up a kind of “corrective mirror” for society (59) by its defense of the “value of the ideal against the increasingly powerful forces of philosophical realism, which claimed that the ideal has no place in life and literature” (37).

On the other hand—and my approach derives in part from this idea—John Mullan in Sentiment and Sociability sees an image in the sentimental mirror that reveals the “limitations to benevolence.” Benevolence in sentimental literature actually “tends to the exception rather than the rule” (40). This notion is the key for me to the “other” stories I see in Lovell's Folly and Retribution. In their first long fictions, Caroline Lee Hentz and Eden Southworth, for one thing, face the issues of Southern slavery and Southern and national apocalypse with surprising directness. They do indeed use the escapist forms of sentimental idealism to frame their works, but in this popular frame they also can be rather sharp and terrifying critics and prophets of actuality in their time and place. So, too, they imbue their respective first fictions with that “mood of despair” that Herbert Ross Brown in The Sentimental Novel in America, 1789-1860 says is an element “native to the sentimentalist” (162).

The corrective mirror Hentz and Southworth hold up on occasion can be a darkening, blistering glass that shows in the particularities of despair associated with chattel slavery some unsentimental limitations to benevolence not only in their fiction but also in their real-life America. Jane Tompkins in Sensational Designs has the idea that beyond being mere entertainments, such seemingly light fictions such as theirs have “other … cultural” work to do as virtual “blueprints for survival” (xvii, 38, 149). Somewhat similarly in her discussion of works by Cooper, Poe, Hawthorne, and Melville, Cynthia S. Jordan in Second Stories sees underlying “second stories” in which women appear as a sociopolitically oppressed underclass. The stories of such characters underlie surface narratives and subtly work against them. My contention is that the lesser known Southern romancers Hentz and Southworth in Lovell's Folly and Retribution work in some significant second stories of their own. And they are not so subtle about it. By means of certain unidealistic, cautionary mirror reflections of another sociopolitical human problem in their area and in the nation that could destroy both, they too offered their readers some vital instruction for survival.

Lovell's Folly is set in Hentz's native Massachusetts, where the Southern family of Lorelly Sutherland—herself, her mysteriously ailing mother, and their two house slaves, Venus and November—come for a holiday by the seaside. In this romance, their New England neighbor, Viola Rovington, is an epitome of female virtue and high-flown idealism in antebellum fiction twenty years before Harriet Beecher Stowe's Little Eva in Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852). Viola is blond, pale, cherubic, ill. Self-absorbed with her suffering, sweet Viola sees in a “young, pale, lifeless flower … a prophecy of my early fate” (103-104). Her favorite verse is H. Kirke White's sonnet, “The Goddess of Consumption,” whose “prayer,” she says, “is answered in me” (261):

In the dismal night air drest,
I will creep into her breast;
Flush her cheek, and bleach her skin,
And feed on the vital fire within.(2)

Perhaps Roderick Usher's isolated and self-consuming situation within the unhealthful, moldering walls of his crumbling mansion in a land of no precise geographical location can be taken as Edgar Allan Poe's skillfully disguised commentary—the second story in “The Fall of the House of Usher”—on the alienated and doomed South of his day. This is a possible interpretation to which Lewis P. Simpson and Louis D. Rubin, Jr., respectively, also allude (99-102; 150-60, 167). Perhaps, too, an even larger significance can be attached to the ill and withdrawn Viola Rovington in Lovell's Folly. For her part, Caroline Lee Hentz deals quite openly and pessimistically with the issue of a crumbling social order brought on by chattel slavery and Southern isolation in the United States. And the ill and dying Yankee maiden Viola Rovington can be regarded as much a paradigm of national malady as Poe's Usher can be seen as a paradigm of regional illness. Thus, Viola is more than that stock character in sentimental fiction, whom John Mullan identifies, whose otherworldly virtue only can resolve itself in illness and death (16). Viola's dissolution portends something other than excessive spirituality. The story of her consumptive decay lingers ominously throughout the romance, running parallel to all the other threads of narrative in it. In a sense, Viola is the very exemplar of a national deathwish. In the lines I have quoted from her favorite sonnet, Consumption says: “I will feed on the vital fire within.”

Another northern neighbor of the Sutherlands, Mrs. Elmwood, refers to slavery as a “hereditary” evil, a “national malady” that the “better class” of people North and South must work together to cure (254). As it evolves, the matter of Hentz's second story in Lovell's Folly boils down to her contemporary Southerners' obsessive, unspoken fear of servile insurrection. In the story this fear is revealed particularly in the frequency with which an imagery of the latent danger of volcanic social upheaval occurs. This imagery works, of course, to compromise, to twist Hentz's sentimental portraits of Venus as a happy slave and Viola as a dying beauty. Speaking to Lorelly, Mrs. Elmwood says that Southerners such as the Sutherlands are no “more responsible” for slavery than is someone “who lives near, or is born in the vicinity of a volcano, for the burning deluge that sweeps over the vale” (254). The importance of this imagery of fire is ramified in the narrative by two surprising actions of November.

November already has shown his molten metal in Massachusetts when another coachman, the white Yankee Jack Bruce, tips over the Sutherland carriage with his stage. On top of this, he calls November a “negur” November bridles at the word. “Call me a negur again and I'll fight you,” he says to Bruce. “Me no more negur than you” (115). To reassure herself, Lorelly later tells Mrs. Elmwood, who has had the bad taste to mention a past slave revolt in Charleston, that November prefers service to her family to the emancipation to Liberia her father once offered him. She goes on to say that she has the “most implicit reliance on the affection of our own servants” (189-90). True, Caroline Hentz said in her own voice a little before this exchange, some slaves in the South do suffer under the “tyrannical task-master—unfeelingly exposed to the burning sun or the piercing wind.” Many others, however, “are mildly superintended by tender and benevolent masters, all their wants liberally supplied, and their wishes kindly indulged. Thus disguised, the bitter draught of slavery is sweetened, and though the iron may clank, it does not enter the soul” (78).

When Mrs. Elmwood in her turn posits the sentimental ideal of the peculiar institution, she also alludes to chains. November's “chains,” she says to Lorelly, “are clankless. The oil of kindness falls on the polished links, and prevents that corrosion which galls the flesh and drinks the blood” (190). As the story develops, the reader sees, ironically, that November's chains do clank. Even as she speaks, neither Mrs. Elmwood nor Lorelly knows what subtle corrosion of outrage is galling November's servile loyalty in his new environment. As consumption feeds on the vital fire of Viola's life in the Rovingtons' neat cottage, discontent with the polished links of his servitude starts to feed on the consciousness of November, thanks to his association with the free blacks and the white help who work in the hotel kitchen of the resort at Nahant.

One day when Lorelly sends Venus to tell November to bring around the carriage, he refuses to do so. I am “a big gentleman of color, and no vile slave,” Venus reports him as saying. To stricken Lorelly herself, he says: “I an't going to be ordered about any more, like a nigger, when I can be a free gentleman. Missus no abuse me longer. I tell her she better stay home, if she want nigger slave to dog after her. … Every body free in a free country, Miss Lora. … I no such fool but I know that myself. Here I been working and working for nothing, or just what's as good; when I'm my own master, after all, and might have had a heap of money, and my own coach too” (249-50).

Afterwards, when six-foot tall November tearfully apologizes to Lorelly for his defiance, a sympathetic bond appears to be reestablished between mistress and man. But there is a distinct limit attached to their mutually benevolent feelings now, as Hentz clearly indicates in her text. With tears November laments to Lorelly: “No quality folks learned me such notions.—No—kitchen buckroes, that's all; I never go near 'em again.” Then: “Most freely did Lorelly accord her forgiveness. …” Nevertheless, this sentimental scene, designed like Viola's death to bring a tear to the eye, is marred by a canker of doubt, a twist.

November, after all, has had a taste of freedom. He could never speak to a white man in the South as he spoke to Jack Bruce in the North. Lorelly on her part has had a taste of the truth in her coachman's bitter outburst against his servitude. She has had a taste of shame. I cannot imagine her association with November as ever being quite the same again as when she told Mrs. Elmwood of her confidence in the “affection of our own servants.” Hentz cannot imagine it either, for she has Lorelly think in her heart of hearts of “a secret something that told her, too, that the ‘kitchen buckroes’ were half right in their assertions” (252).

Unlike Caroline Lee Hentz, who defended slavery in her fiction of the 1850s, the young Eden Southworth was an abolitionist in antebellum Washington, D.C., or right across the Potomac where she sometimes lived in Virginia. In some surprising twists in the sentimental and sensational patterns of Retribution, she works in the nightmare, and tells her second story. She holds up her corrective mirror and provides her blueprint for survival in a skillful three-part development of subtly linked slave episodes involving a model farm in Virginia, a plantation on Cuba, and another on Santo Domingo, where Mrs. Elmwood's volcano metaphors in Lovell's Folly of the previous decade become a graphic and terrible reality.

Even though the issue of slavery plays an important part in Retribution, whose action is set in the opening decades of the nineteenth century, the romance tells a story of sexual passion that the subtitle promises. Colonel Ernest Dent of Virginia develops an illicit, sadomasochistic desire for his consumptive wife Hester's finishing school roommate, conniving Juliette Summers, an impoverished refugee from the late eighteenth-century slave rebellions on Santo Domingo. Unsuspecting Hester Dent—reflective, “grave pale,” and ill (10)—is the ailing sentimental paragon of virtue with a twist in Retribution. She is not infatuated with the idea of her death as is Viola in Lovell's Folly. Hester does not go gently into that good night. She is defiant of death as she wastes away in her marriage to philandering Ernest, and in her friendship for aspiring Juliette. In response to a sympathetic neighbor's request if she is ready to die, Hester weeps but expresses a terrific and unexpected determination to live. Life, she says, holds “dear, good, old mother earth; and I love it … besides It contains all my treasures! all my heart's treasures” (64). The emphatic “mother earth” here is the Dent model farm, The Vale.

At The Vale the slaves work happily and well for wages. At the start of Southworth's romance, the model farm is neat and prosperous. Life there is content and productive. Its labor is remunerated, as November wanted to be for his work for the Sutherlands. The Dent slaves, furthermore, have assurance of an even better future as free men on Hester's twenty-first birthday. The Vale, then, is a serious antebellum Southern standard for Eden Southworth that is sagely prophetic in her fiction's blueprint for survival. By no means is this farm to be taken as a mere sentimental idealization. When Hester dies, though, just before she turns twenty one, Dent discovers an illegality in the manumission papers she prepared with her attorney.

So benevolence finds its limitation in Retribution in the reality of economic necessity. Politically ambitious Colonel Dent sees the need to hang on to what he has inherited from Hester. Later, as the financial costs of his political career grow, and as his new bride Juliette's demands for fine clothes and jewelry increase, Dent even stops paying his slaves' wages. They, in turn, lose pride in the model farm. The Vale falls into neglect and decay, the mansion molders—a decay and molder that parallel the moral degeneration, needless to say, of deceitful Ernest and his covetous Juliette.

Years before all this happens and when ailing Hester was eighteen, a new bride, and The Vale a happy farm, Ernest Dent made a trip to Richmond. He bought household furniture, musical instruments, and horses. At an auction he also bought the attractive, seventeen-year old mulatto from Cuba, Erminie Dozier—Minny. He gives Minny to Hester. In an entire chapter Minny Dozier has her own tale to tell of her life on a Cuban plantation. Here, a colleague tells me, I might be working with a subplot rather than a second story in Southworth's romance. Let us see.

Minny tells Hester that she is the daughter of a quadroon house servant by a French-Cuban sugar planter, Alphonse Dozier. He was a kindly, cheerful, benevolent man. But he was also self-indulgent, Minny says, growing “fleshy, short-winded and drowsy” over his food and wine (37). At bottom he was also thoughtless. Minny's mother chafed at being “not his wife, not his willing mistress, but his slave.” In bitterness her “wild, rebellious heart throbbed itself to death” (37). Alphonse grieved and reared Minny as his daughter in all the concomitant fineries and luxuries of a pampered scion of a wealthy planter.

But Dozier could not buy her an education. He was furious when a school in Havana refused to admit her because she is black. He vowed that Minny “should be the richest heiress in Cuba, for all their contempt—and that he'd make his will the next day” (37). This he never did, Minny relates, nor did he prepare “free papers” for her. Meantime, while singing with the birds in the tropical forest, Minny describes meeting a young hunter with whom she fell in love and married—Guillieme La Chappelle, the son of a French opera singer who was on tour in Havanna. Guillieme and Minny lived happily on the plantation for a year. But when Guillieme was called back to France to attend his ailing father, Minny had to stay behind because she was so pregnant. All of us, Minny tells Hester, forgot the “fact I was a slave”; they overlooked the “darker feature in my circumstances” (38-39). Guillieme was reported lost at sea; Minny gave premature birth to a girl. She fell into a fever; her father died, intestate. This was only the beginning.

Plantation benevolence fails in Minny's story with the sudden demise of a kindly but careless master-father who succumbs to gluttony in an alcoholic “apoplexy.” The scenes of her tribulations that ensue are as moving, as compelling as any Harriet Beecher Stowe employs in Uncle Tom's Cabin a few years later. Pathos is adumbrated in Minny's account by Southworth's use of some very realistic physical details and psychologically acute insights. Minny comes to her senses, for instance, in a dank, foul-smelling slave cabin, appalled at her lot and at the “blue, scrawny, whining” ugliness of her baby (40). Alphonse Dozier's white heirs are in his mansion to auction off everything.

To the physical horror of Minny's dispossession, Southworth adds the psychologically insightful detail of an unsympathetic “gleam of malicious triumph” in Aunt Peggy's face in the cabin as she tells Dozier's slave daughter of what has happened since his death. Benevolence fails again in Retribution in an old slave's spite. Minny has been turned out of her father's house, Peggy gloats, because, “child, times is changed with you, indeed. You aint no better 'an any o' the rest of us now.” And she chuckles over the fact that “Ole massa” never gave confused and horrified Minny her “free papers.” She no longer belongs to her husband even, but she is “anoder man's property.” In “weariness and stupor” Minny endures the “auction block,” and is sold to a New Orleans slave trader (40).

Sitting “among a crowd of negroes in the hot broiling sun,” Minny worries over her “little suffering baby,” and watches as her “personal property, the furniture of my bed-chamber, all given me by Guillieme” are auctioned away (40). His guns and dogs also go because there is no one to claim them for him. She does not count anymore as daughter, or wife. To cheer his valuable property, the slave trader lies that Minny's daughter has been adopted by a good woman of Havanna. He even forges a letter to prove his tale. In New Orleans Minny is sold to a rich widower of Richmond who would have made her suffer “my mother's fate,” she goes on to tell Hester. Minny is spared this crowning indignity, however, because her grief for her lost baby “had impaired my beauty” (40). When the widower dies, she is again put on auction, and Colonel Dent buys her for Hester.

Minny's convincing and moving story of servile helplessness early in Retribution has its equally powerful parallel in a linked event that is narrated near the end of the romance. It is this significant linking, I think, that makes her story something more integral in Southworth's romance than a sentimentally moving subplot. In Southworth's third slave episode, Juliette Dent tells of servile insurrection on Santo Domingo. These carefully balanced narratives of stunned and grieving servile docility and then of enraged and bloody servile uprising abroad importantly bracket the less dramatic but no less ominous developments at home in Virginia. There disappointment, dissatisfaction, dereliction of duty, and deep ill-will grow among the Dent slaves at The Vale, as thoughtless and self-indulgent Ernest pursues his ambassadorial career and mollifies his “enchantress” Juliette (85).

In Italy with remorseful Ernest shortly before he returns to Virginia to free his slaves, Juliette—who, I fear, is actually growing mad with jealousy of Ernest and the effects of the opium she takes for her nerves—Juliette has a sudden recollection of the disaster that befell her parents on Santo Domingo when she was a little girl. She tells her story to her Italian admirer, Ippolyto di Nazzalina, with the excuse that she feels the memory presages some doom awaiting her (98). True, Juliette becomes the mistress of a German Grand Duke who has her beheaded, but Southworth's intent in Juliette's reminiscence is much more serious than its melodramatic outcome would seem to indicate in the romance pattern.

The violent Caribbean episode Juliette describes is the capping event in the indignities suffered by a people represented by Dent's slaves and Dozier's Minny. Significantly, too, Southworth's twist here is the first narration of an actual slave revolt that I have encountered in my reading of antebellum Southern romance. It is a good, strong piece of writing.

Juliette describes her nightmare in broken, incrementally intensifying rhythms, in dislocated syllable-beats indicative of chaos (98). What she is talking about is apocalypse, the end of a civilization. And this interpolation in Southworth's tale of social climbing and sexual passion has an “or else” intent. Here the throbbing of the rebellious heart of Minny's mother is transformed into a different, deadly beat. Thus Mrs. Elmwood's genteel geothermal metaphors in Lovell's Folly take on the distinct and unmistakable form in Retribution of a raw and physical terror that provides a startling twist of meaning for those words in Southworth's title: retribution, shadows, passion. In what Juliette has to say here to nervous Ippolyto, the melodramatically romantic title of Eden Southworth's sentimental tale takes on that other, that second meaning beyond mere reference to the dismal affairs of Juliette and her Dent:

The Island of Santo Domingo, near the sea-coast. Deep, dark night—storm, thunder, and lightning—and the dashing of the wild sea against the coast—and the roar of the cataracts, and the howling of the wind. A burning homestead, smoke, flames, falling roofs, glowing beams, and blazing rafters hurled through the air before the furious blast, and hundreds of dark demons leaping, capering, and exulting in frantic orgies through the scene. These were the sights. The reverberations of the thunder—the roaring of the sea—the noise of the cataracts—the howls and shrieks of the wind—the groans of the wounded and dying—the screams of women and children, and the triumphant shouts of the blacks. These were the sounds.

(98)

Caroline Lee Hentz and Eden Southworth twist patterns of sentimentality in their first romances to reveal some unpleasant truths about, and possibilities of life in their United States. They use sentimental devices to magnify such truths and possibilities by sudden, ironic, terrifying juxtapositions that actually show limitations in human benevolence. In Lovell's Folly and Retribution images of fire roll under and over quiet landscapes North and South, over and under Southern and northern placid surfaces that only seem to depict human sympathy and benevolence. Some dire social reminders and warnings in their respective romances are the second stories of Hentz and Southworth. Because of November, Lorelly Sutherland and the reader of Lovell's Folly are made to understand the justice of a slave's discontent with his lot, when he stops to brood over it. It is unrenumerated labor, involuntary servitude, not the hardness of life that gall November and the Dent slaves, as well as Minny and her mother. In Juliette's depiction of racial terror on Santo Domingo, the reader of Retribution is led to see the grimmest alternative to racial injustice in America. In the blueprint for survival underlying these two romances, a prescription emerges for the health of the South and the nation in a surcease of dread that might best be stated in the words of a contemporary spiritual: “Let my people go.”

Notes

1. I am grateful to the American Antiquarian Society, Worcester, Massachusetts, for both lodging and access to these and other books and papers in Society holdings during my stay in the fall of 1989.

2. This very sonnet, coincidentally, is the first item of all written on a scrap of paper in the youthful hand of another antebellum Southern author from the North, Caroline Gilman, in the folder containing her papers in the Samuel and Caroline Gilman Papers at the American Antiquarian Society. The entire sonnet reads:

   In the dismal night air drest,
   I will creep into her breast;
   Flush her cheek, and bleach her skin,
   And feed on the vital fire within.
   Lover! do not trust her eyes.—
   When they sparkle most, she dies!
   Mother! do not trust her breath,
   Comfort! she will breathe in death.
   Father! do not strive to save her.—
   She is mine, and I will have her.—
   The coffin must be her bridal bed,
   The winding sheet must wrap her head,
   The whispering winds must o'er her sigh,
   For soon in her grave the maid must lie.

Works Cited

Bakker, Jan. Pastoral in Antebellum Southern Romance. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 1989.

Brown, Herbert Ross. The Sentimental Novel in America, 1789-1860. Durham: Duke UP, 1940.

Clark, Suzanne. Sentimental Modernism: Women Writers and the Revolution of the Word. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1991.

Hentz, Caroline Lee. Lovell's Folly. Cincinnati: Hubbard and Edmunds, 1833.

Hubbell, Jay B. The South in American Literature. 1607-1900. Durham: Duke UP, 1954.

Jordan, Cynthia S. Second Stories: The Politics of Language. Form and Gender in Early American Fictions. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1989.

Kaplan, Fred. Sacred Tears: Sentimentality in Victorian Literature. Oxford: Clarendon P, 1987.

Mullan John. Sentiment and Sociability: The Language of Feeling in the Eighteenth Century. Oxford: Clarendon P, 1988.

Rubin, Louis D., Jr. The Edge of the Swamp: A Study in the Literature and Society of the Old South. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 1989.

Simpson, Lewis P. The Brazen Face of History: Studies in the Literary Consciousness in America. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 1980.

Southworth, Eden. Retribution; or, The Vale of Shadows. A Tale of Passion. New York: Harper and Brothers, 1849.

Stowe, Harriet Beecher. Uncle Tom's Cabin; or, Life Among the Lowly. New York: Macmillan, 1962.

Thompkins, Jane. Sensational Designs: The Cultural Work of American Fiction, 1790-1860. New York: Oxford UP, 1985.