The Ethical Bind of Sentimentalism

This chapter maps intimacy in the public sphere and the alternately ethical and exploitative cross-racial bonds sentimentalists have cultivated. The chapter focuses on the challenges Sojourner Truth faced as an African American woman to occupy the position of a civic emoter who channels the nation’s feelings. The chapter examines the writing and editing of the Narrative of Sojourner Truth (1850, 1875, 1884), a process that involved deeply felt and vexed relations between Truth and her white editors that continued through the text’s publication, as well as white women’s sympathy and emotional impositions in the text’s reception into the twenty-first century. Truth models sentimentalism’s ethical capacities, refusing victimization as she expresses compassion toward her former master. Much of her white audience failed to recognize her rhetorical power, yet Truth insisted on taking up space without apology, living out much of her life in her home in Northampton, Massachusetts.