The story of American sentimentalism is one of literary bequest, wherein eighteenth-century seduction novels passed an aesthetic legacy down to nineteenth-century domestic fiction. Both pervasive genres relate stories about the need for American girls to restrain their passions and feel for others, punctuated by thick descriptions of characters’ affect. Given this shared emphasis on how feeling shapes local and national communities, critics often interrogate sentimentalism’s politics. Ann Douglas and Jane Tompkins famously debated whether the mode’s valorization of suffering and sympathy proves conservative or progressive.1 Further, critics have explored the political stakes of sentimentalism’s turn from seduction novels to domestic fiction and what that turn suggests about American culture. Does the shift from seduction novels’ unruly desire to domestic fiction’s well-regulated sympathy signal that women were gaining power to foster national cohesion (Baym)? Or did antebellum fiction perpetuate demands that women subordinate their own desires to serve the community (Barnes)? Meanwhile, Laura Romero argued that sentimental texts often integrate “radical” views (for instance, on gender or class) with “reactionary” stances (say, on race); thus, we would do well to consider how sentimentalism’s turn affected various groups, such as white and black women, in disparate ways (4). In response to these uneven effects, a number of nineteenthcentury writers entwine conventions of both genres to offer divergent views on sentimentalism’s legacy.2 This essay argues that tensions in sentimentalism proved generative for nineteenth-century African American women writers who rethink familiar portraits of the shift from the seduction plot to domestic fiction. Prior scholarship elucidates how African American writers blend genres to create space for black voices. Slave narratives often play on sentimental conventions to claim authority for and direct readers’ sympathy to enslaved peoples (F. Foster; Carby). Likewise, midcentury African American novels interweave autobiography and fiction to question whose discourse readers recognize as authentic (Andrews 24). We can see this engagement with slave narratives and sentimentalism in one of the first novels by an African American woman: Harriet Wilson’s Our Nig: or, Sketches from the Life of a Free Black (1859). Scholars demonstrate that Wilson draws on sentimental conventions as rewritten in slave narratives (Carby 45) to fictionalize elements of her own life via a protagonist who resembles sentimental heroines and enslaved women (Peterson). Wilson found that the “sugar-coated, wealth-bestrewn happy endings” of “white sentimental novels,” “did not match [her] . . . constant struggle” (Gates and Wilson lix). In other words, she participates in what Lauren Berlant calls postsentimentalism: work that rethinks the mode’s conventions by refusing to sublimate “subaltern struggles into conventions of narrative satisfaction and redemptive fantasy” (655). Sentimentalism often conflates all forms of pain and then redirects sympathy toward the privileged (Berlant 641). In contrast, Wilson questions whether powerful white women merit sympathy, given that claims of white moral sensibility mask antiblack violence. Beyond suggesting that the critiques that would define postsentimentalism emerged alongside sentimentalism, Wilson demonstrates that comedy can play a

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诱惑的后代：抵抗从威尔逊到威尔斯的情感暴力

美国多愁善感的故事是文学遗产之一，其中 18 世纪的诱惑小说将美学遗产传给了 19 世纪的国内小说。这两种普遍的类型都讲述了美国女孩需要克制自己的激情和对他人的感觉的故事，并以对人物情感的详细描述来打断。鉴于这种对情感如何塑造地方和国家社区的共同强调，批评家经常质疑多愁善感的政治。安·道格拉斯 (Ann Douglas) 和简·汤普金斯 (Jane Tompkins) 曾就这种模式对痛苦和同情的价值化是保守还是进步进行了著名的辩论。1 此外，评论家探讨了感伤主义从诱惑小说转向国内小说的政治风险，以及这种转变对美国文化的暗示。从诱惑小说的不羁欲望到家庭小说的规范同情的转变是否表明女性正在获得促进民族凝聚力的权力（Baym）？或者战前小说是否一直要求女性服从自己为社区服务的愿望（巴恩斯）？与此同时，劳拉·罗梅罗（Laura Romero）认为，感伤的文本往往将“激进”观点（例如，关于性别或阶级）与“反动”立场（例如，关于种族）结合起来；因此，我们最好考虑一下多愁善感的转变如何以不同的方式影响各种群体，例如白人和黑人女性 (4)。为了应对这些不均衡的影响，许多 19 世纪的作家将这两种类型的传统交织在一起，对感伤主义的遗产提出了不同的看法。2 本文认为，对 19 世纪非洲裔美国女性作家来说，感伤主义中的紧张局势对她们重新思考了从诱惑情节到家庭小说的转变的熟悉描绘。先前的奖学金阐明了非裔美国作家如何融合体裁为黑人声音创造空间。奴隶叙事经常利用感伤的习俗来为被奴役的人民争取权威并引导读者同情（F.福斯特；卡比）。同样，本世纪中叶的非裔美国人小说将自传和小说交织在一起，以质疑读者认为哪些话语是真实的（安德鲁斯 24）。我们可以在一位非裔美国女性的第一部小说中看到这种对奴隶叙事和多愁善感的参与：哈丽特·威尔逊的《我们的黑人：或者，自由黑人生活的草图》（1859）。学者们证明，威尔逊借鉴了奴隶叙事（Carby 45）中重写的感伤惯例，通过一个类似于感伤女主人公和被奴役妇女的主角（彼得森）虚构了她自己生活的元素。威尔逊发现，“白人感伤小说”的“糖衣、富贵大团圆结局”“与[她]不符。. . 不断的斗争”（盖茨和威尔逊利克斯）。换句话说，她参与了劳伦·伯兰特 (Lauren Berlant) 所说的后情感主义：通过拒绝将“从属斗争升华到叙事满足和救赎幻想的惯例”(655) 来重新思考模式惯例的工作。多愁善感常常将所有形式的痛苦混为一谈，然后将同情转向特权者（Berlant 641）。相比之下，威尔逊质疑有权势的白人女性是否值得同情，鉴于白人道德敏感性的主张掩盖了反黑人暴力。除了暗示定义后情感主义的批评与多愁善感同时出现之外，威尔逊还证明喜剧可以发挥