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Part of
A Comparative Literary History of Modern Slavery: The Atlantic world and beyond
Edited by Madeleine Dobie, Mads Anders Baggesgaard and Karen-Margrethe Simonsen
[Comparative History of Literatures in European Languages XXXVI] 2024
► pp. 136–155

Chapter 7
Melodramatic tableaux vivants

Slavery and passionate melancholy in Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda’s Sab

The novel Sab (1841) by the Cuban-Spanish writer Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda has been called both a radical anti-slavery novel (Sommer 1991, Davies 2013) and an anti-abolitionist novel that only pays lip service to the abolitionist cause (Williams 2008, Gomariz, 2009). In this article I approach this ambiguity by moving the focus from content to form and from story to reader. Building on insights by Peter Brooks (1976), Jacky Bowring (2017) and David Denby (1994), I argue that formally the novel is a melodramatic tragedy and that its melodramatic tableaux vivants foster moral reflection in the reader by creating a clash between the ideal and the real and between surface and depth. I develop this in critical dialogue with ideas about the (dis)connection between emotionality, empathy and human rights developed by Lynn Hunt (Hunt 2007) and Lynn Festa (2006).
Keywords: Cuba, melodrama, natural rights, human rights, tableau vivant, melancholy, tragedy
Article outline
  • A tragic love story
  • Melodrama and the moral universe
  • Tableaux vivants in eighteenth-century literature and in Sab: Contradiction and absorption
  • The morality of sentiments: Romantic love and the religious vision of natural rights
  • Race and moral sentiment
  • Melancholic tableaux, melodrama and injustice
  • Notes
  • References
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