Ellens

One of the things that really struck me about the second half of the book was the parting scene between Ellen and her mother when Ellen goes to live first with the Sand's in Washington and then with Mr. and Mrs. Hobbs in Brooklyn. Perhaps it was just the similarity in names, but I thought that the scene eerily echoed the parting scene in Wide Wide World. The sentimentality is the same, a call for the daughter to do her best to behave among strangers and to depend on God for her comforts. In Wide Wide World this call seemed like too much, and the sentimentality of it sometimes repulses readers, it certainly made me a little less than sympathetic, but in Linda and Ellen's case it seems appropriate. The situation of slavery is one that makes us predisposed to listen to the sufferers. Perhaps it is from these kinds of slave narratives that the tactic of using sentimentality in novels to try and gain the sympathy of the reader, to pull the reader over to the cause that the writer is trying so hard to champion, be it antislavery or pro religion. While this is a proper tactic for the antislavery cause, because the slaves are totally deserving of our sympathy, we feel that it grates a little when used in Wide Wide World because we aren't entirely sure that Ellen is a good object of sympathy. She doesn't take any agency to change her situation, whereas the slaves in slave narratives are always trying to escape slavery.

I am not quite sure that sentimentality is the right word to describe the use of language in Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, but it would be correct in a fictional or fictionalized narrative. I think that is another reason that it rings more true – it is true here.