Harriet E. Wilson's Our Nig

Typically in women’s sentimental fiction, the sphere of domesticity is emphasized throughout the novel, defining a woman to truly be a woman through marriage, her exertion of control from the domestic sphere, and the strong familial bonds that she creates. Nina Baym’s “overplot” of women’s fiction highlights this as Henry Louis Gates, Jr. states that Harriet E. Wilson’s Our Nig “shares the tripartite structure of other women’s novels” (Gates xliii). Throughout Our Nig, Wilson deviates from the guidelines of the sentimental form in order to clarify how all women can not simply be placed into the domestic sphere and thrive. She emphasizes the reality that in particular, the trials and tribulations of African-American women during this time simply

It can be said that Wilson’s Our Nig is a response to Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin as she uses the typical women’s fiction plot to reconstruct her white female audience’s expectation of what the domestic sphere is; more specifically, how that sphere of domesticity encompasses and includes, or excludes, African-American women. In order to make her overall argument evident, Wilson makes use of what Gates defines to be a “central component” (Gates xli) of women’s sentimental fiction, the pairing of a heroine and a villainess and furthermore, reverses the common aspect of sentimentalism that women are the natural maternal figures for the heroine and “whose presence reinforced the idea that ‘relations with their own sex constituted the texture’ of women’s lives primarily” (Gates xlii), through the oppressive characters Mrs. Bellmont and Mary and the abandonment by Frado’s mother, Mag. Wilson also exposes the reality that the wrongs of slavery can not be made right through women, especially white women. This is emphasized

By ending the work with Frado as an underdog, Wilson confronts the sentimental ideal that a woman is happy in her womanhood once she is married and safely inside the walls of her domestic sphere. Frado, like her mother, is left husband-less after the abandonment and eventual death of her husband yet, she does not allow herself to enter “the darkness of perpetual infamy” (Wilson 16) like her mother but instead asserts agency by seeking out the public to tell her story. In this way, Wilson rejects conventions of women being weak or frail when paternal figures are absent and alternatively provides the genre of sentimental fiction with a real woman who, shaped by her experiences, will continue to fight on in attempts to give her child the life that she did not