‘Well, seriously Flora, what can we women do?’ Sentimentalism, Suffrage and Reform in Lillie Devereux Blake’s Fettered for Life

Abstract

Explores Blake’s reform agenda and her use and revisioning of sentimentalism for rhetorical purposes. Argues that she reconfigures the sentimental novel to incite political action and begin a radical reform of patriarchal postbellum America, focusing on suffrage, legal protection of women’s lives and property, educational reform, and equitable pay and employment opportunities. Demonstrates that the eight suspicious or unnatural deaths in the novel are linked to a corrupt social order and archaic, ill-founded assumptions about women and womanhood.