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Apocalyptic Sentimentalism: Love and Fear in U. S. Antebellum Literature by Kevin Pelletier

2021; Kent State University Press; Volume: 67; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/cwh.2021.0042

1533-6271

Steven M. Stowe,

American Constitutional Law and Politics

Reviewed by: Apocalyptic Sentimentalism: Love and Fear in U. S. Antebellum Literature by Kevin Pelletier Steven Stowe Apocalyptic Sentimentalism: Love and Fear in U. S. Antebellum Literature. Kevin Pelletier. Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 2018. ISBN 978-082035-467-5. 272 pp., paper, $26.95. The African American antislavery writer and lecturer Maria Stewart wrote in 1832 of a time "when the world shall be on fire, and the elements shall pass away with a great noise. … Better for us that we had never been born" (59). Such language [End Page 314] might seem overwrought to many readers today, but Kevin Pelletier argues in Apocalyptic Sentimentalism: Love and Fear in U. S. Antebellum Literature that this language struck deeply into the imaginations of Americans struggling with slavery, as deeply as words of love and compassion. The essential aim of his insightful, thought-provoking book, Pelletier writes, is to examine key antislavery texts in order to "illustrate how one of America's foundational conceptual categories, the apocalypse, formed an essential facet of the nineteenth century's sentimental aesthetics, and how this sentimental aesthetics was, in turn, deployed within one of the great reform movements in this nation's history." The literary embrace of the Biblical apocalypse "is not incidental to this [sentimental] tradition, but rather one of the major engines of American literary and cultural history" (31). While this last somewhat overstates what the book is able to do, Pelletier incisively shows how love and fear were bound together. A major accomplishment of this study is to recapture the fierceness and danger inside the century's reformist Christianity. The authors whose texts are examined here are major figures in the doom of American slavery, and Pelletier sees a developmental pattern in the way they expressed the intertwining of love and terror. Three African American writers made the opening moves: David Walker and his much-circulated Appeal (1829), the 1831 Confessions of Nat Turner, and Maria Stewart's lectures of the same decade. They are followed by the flowering of love and vengeance in Harriet Beecher Stowe's two novels, Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852) and Dred (1856). The study wraps up with a look the letters of John Brown, written while he was imprisoned after the electrifying failure of his 1859 attack on the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry, Virginia. All three of these writers, Pelletier argues, stood within yet somewhat aslant to the beginnings of American sentimental writing, so much the better for initiating the new link between God's love and God's punishment in the antislavery cause. Nat Turner presents Pelletier with a particular challenge: words of love are pretty scarce in Turner's brief (and not directly authored) text. Nonetheless, Pelletier suggests that in Turner's self-image as the instrument of divine judgment there are words that call upon the warmth of human feeling. And Pelletier is persuasive about the importance of the fact that Turner's call for violence was "presented within an apocalyptic context (rather than a secular revolutionary one)" (38). Harriet Beecher Stowe, writing at the height of the sentimental style, has long been held up as an exemplar of its sympathetic heart, privileging love and compassion as weapons against the slave power. With respect to both of Stowe's novels covered here, Pelletier gives illuminating attention to images of apocalyptic judgment awaiting anyone who did not act to end slavery. In the end, though, Pelletier is more successful in showing the salience of this in Dred. [End Page 315] John Brown is in some ways the antislavery figure most innovatively seen here, largely because Brown has mostly been written about in terms of his violence, as is the case with Turner. But Brown's circle of followers and friends was much larger than Turner's, and his self-told story more open to personal reflection. Pelletier convincingly argues that Brown can be seen as the "apotheosis of apocalyptic sentimentalism" because he did not evoke violence as a spur to the power of love, but rather spoke of a love that "precedes and motivates violence," transforming violence into something pure and whole (155–56). If Pelletier sometimes strains to bring all of...