Sentimental vs. Realistic Techniques in American Fiction

Introduction: Sentimentalism vs. Modernism as Vehicles for Social Change

Despite critical caveats about literary quality, the use of sentimental techniques in novels that attempt to precipitate social change is ultimately more persuasive than the use of modernist techniques in similarly motivated social-activist novels. Sentimental strategies that encourage readers to identify with idealized characters and familiar, even formulaic plots allow sentimental novels to act as more popularly persuasive vehicles for social change than modernist novels that deploy realistic techniques. The latter rely on less obvious strategies of identification with protagonists and present more morally complex scenarios, making them compelling as art but less effective as instruments of popular persuasion.

One of the greatest strengths of the sentimental novel is its ability to elicit empathy. Although a literary critic may blanch at the use of such devices as stock characters and idealized moral scenarios — deployed most vividly in works such as Uncle Tom's Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe and Plum Bun by Jessie Redmon Fauset — these sentimental techniques reach a larger audience on a more visceral level than the harder-to-identify-with, more distanced literary devices found in, for example, Nella Larsen's Passing. In the sentimental novels, unlike Passing, the ordinary reader — regardless of race or initial political persuasion — is able to enter the inner world of oppressed African-American characters and identify with those who suffer, rather than viewing them with the detached objectivity encouraged by Larsen's modernism.

Empathy and Identification in Uncle Tom's Cabin

The empathy that the sentimental novel elicits is far greater than the more complex identification produced by realistic texts. The power of sentimentalism, as embodied in Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin, is perhaps best exemplified in its subtitle, "Life Among the Lowly." In other words, Stowe aims to give the reader a vivid sense of what it means to live as an African-American slave — to feel as a slave — rather than to offer an objective debate upon the issue that was roiling American society in her day. The novel begins with a young African-American woman named Eliza who faces the prospect of being separated from her child and fears every moment that she will be torn from her husband, because she is in bondage.

Lest the reader immediately protest the racial dynamics of the scenario — the characters positioned to elicit the reader's foremost sympathy are largely of mixed rather than entirely African-American heritage — it should be noted that the same is true of Larsen's modernist Passing and of Plum Bun, both works by African-American authors. All three novels use multiracial characters to complicate the societal issues being debated in their narrative contexts.

The empathetic texture of Stowe's narrative is demonstrated in her use not of race or degrees of racial status, but of motherhood and fatherhood, to draw her largely White readership into the world of the "lowly." By invoking a common humanity — Eliza's love for her child and her desire for a morally and socially acknowledged marital union — Stowe drew upon sentimental reader assumptions about what it meant to be a good Christian and a good American. African-Americans, Stowe suggested, were fundamentally the same as Whites, because all human beings, regardless of race, are capable of feeling and sentiment toward their families. The need for freedom, she argued, was fierce within the human heart, and the need to honor family was the most pressing need of all, particularly for women. Of Uncle Tom, one character states: "This black fellow, — who is he … A true fellow, who went to Canada more than a year ago. He heard, after he got there, that his master was so angry at him for going off that he had whipped his poor old mother; and he has come all the way back to comfort her, and get a chance to get her away." (Stowe 167)

Moral Appeals and Sentimental Persuasion in Stowe's Narrative

This empathetic identification — in contrast to a realistic novel like Passing, which takes no sides as to right or wrong — is openly solicited both from the reader and from wavering White characters in Stowe's novel. One woman, confronted with the hiding Eliza, chides her Senator husband who is, as the chapter's title proclaims, just a man like any other when confronted with a pleading wife and a mother desperate to protect her baby. As the man relents toward Eliza and toward his wife, the Whites and Blacks valorized by Stowe emerge as idealized individuals united by shared feeling: "O, nonsense, John! — You can talk all night, but you wouldn't do it. I put it to you, John, — would you now turn away a poor, shivering, hungry creature from your door, because he was a runaway? Would you, now?" (Stowe 122–123)

The complicated questions a modernist author might raise in a realistic novel — such as whether helping one individual slave validates a system of slavery by leaving its legal structure intact — are rendered secondary to alleviating the immediate emotional suffering of Eliza. "I should like to see you doing that, John — I really should! Turning a woman out of doors in a snowstorm, for instance; or maybe you'd take her up and put her in jail, wouldn't you? You would make a great hand at that!" (Stowe 123) Stowe makes open use of the "pathetic" dimension of femininity to further her cause, knowing it will likely persuade her reading public.

This extreme moral claim upon the reader's affections — the sentimental extremity of situations in which characters are constantly forced to choose between freedom and family, between duty and their impulse toward liberty — compels the reader to ask: what would I do if confronted with a runaway slave? Stowe clearly hoped that her Northern readership would answer this sentimental plea to the heart not with questions of law or debates over the proper role of women, but with simple, heartfelt actions that would help African-Americans in bondage.

Conclusion: Reflection vs. Change

Although not as idealized as Stowe's Christian Uncle Tom, Angela has resonance in her depiction with the wronged Eliza and Cassie — a light-skinned and lovely figure spurned as "unlike" by Black characters who are the more exposed victims of racism, and castigated by White society if she refuses to be regarded as inferior. But whereas the sentimental romance of Plum Bun and the melodramatic suffering of Uncle Tom's Cabin compel identification and implicitly call for action, the modernism of Passing is much subtler. Larsen does not issue a call to the White reader to aid the oppressed, nor to champion the talented Black woman. Though Larsen's novel is artistically compelling, its intense interiority and moral ambiguity ultimately promote reflection rather than change.

Works Cited

Fauset, Jessie Redmon. Plum Bun. Boston: Beacon Press, 1999.

Larsen, Nella. Passing. New York: Anchor Books, 2001.

Stowe, Harriet Beecher. Uncle Tom's Cabin. 1852.