Crossing the Spheres: Female Sentiment and Political Power in Woman in the Nineteenth Century and Uncle Tom’s Cabin

In nineteenth-century America, although the prevailing gender ideology of “separate spheres” confined women to the domestic sphere and degraded the political value of female sentiment based on mind-body dualism, women of this era leveraged sentimental rhetoric to bridge the separate spheres. As representative political and literary texts of the period, Woman in the Nineteenth Century and Uncle Tom’s Cabin serve as quintessential examples of how female emotion was transformed into a potent political force within the Abolitionist Movement. Through direct address, female writers managed to establish a metaleptic connection between the text and society, and between the private and public spheres. Furthermore, through typological narrative, they employed biblical subtexts to endow female sentiment with spiritual legitimacy, dissolving the boundary between personal desire and public cause. Finally, through embodied image, they subverted the hierarchy of language over sentiment, proving that the female body and emotion possess a higher credibility in attaining truth over male intellectual discourse. By mediating the tension between sympathy and the freedom of interpretation, female sentimental rhetoric urged identification while preserving interpretive autonomy, laying the ground for political rights of expression and interpretation.