Sentimental Confessions: Spiritual Narratives of Nineteenth-Century African American Women . By Joycelyn Moody. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2001. 216 pp. $40.00, cloth.

In Sentimental Confessions Joycelyn Moody has provided us with a sophisticated literary-critical discussion of six life-writing texts by nineteenth-century African American women--texts that Moody, an assistant professor of English at the University of Washington, illuminates newly in relation to one another by reading them as a group of "spiritual narratives." Moody has also begun to use these texts as the basis for theological analysis, and she urges other African-American(ist) scholars to join her in a serious effort to explore such "sacred works" (177).

One facet of Moody's own "mission" in this study is to "propel early black holy women's stories into literary studies and, through them, . . . reshape our understanding of nineteenth-century U. S. literature"(ix). The close readings she provides of Maria Stewart's Productions (1835) and Meditations (1879), Jarena Lee's Religious Experience and Journal (1849), Zilpha Elaw's Memoirs (1846), Nancy Prince's Narrative (1850), Mattie J. Jackson's Story (1866), and Julia Foote's A Brand Plucked From the Fire (1879) are themselves important demonstrations that these under-discussed individual autobiographical writings can "endure scholarly scrutiny" (175). Moody is in constructive dialogue throughout the book with historians of American nineteenth-century literature generally and of African American literature (especially women's writings) more particularly. She deftly situates these texts within recent revisionist discussion of the forms and meanings of literary "sentimentalism," a rhetoric strongly associated with (white) women's fiction during the era of the cult of True Womanhood. Pointing out that autobiographical narrative springs up from the same cultural ground as fiction, and that black women writers had access to the same sentimental tropes (conventions) as whites, Moody argues that these autobiographers frequently (but not always) wrote in this literary language with subversive intent--realizing that they "could buttress their texts against white contempt and dismissal with discourses of sentimentalism and evangelicalism. With spiritual narratives that commingled Protestantism and sentimentalism, then, they maximized their opportunities to assert a counternarrative." (20)

One effect of the book is to destabilize the category of "spiritual narrative," so that scholars of literature and religion can no longer continue to take it for granted. If Moody's definition of "spiritual narrative" were more conventional, one might quibble with her selection of texts. For example, rather than include the facilitated autobiographical narratives of the sectarian itinerant preachers Sojourner Truth and Rebecca Jackson, Moody chose to argue that the writings of the "protofeminist lecturer" Maria Stewart and the former slave narrator Mattie L. Jackson represent important contributions to a developing tradition of spiritual narrative by African American "holy women." While I am not persuaded by every detail of Moody's argument for including the 1879 Stewart text and the Jackson narrative within such a spiritual narrative tradition (45-46, 115-117), the enterprise of revisioning the category and delineating the impacts of the spiritual narrative's conventions on more secular life-writing is challenging and important work.

Sentimental Confessions has a second, more complex goal, as well as a second intended audience. Moody argues that "a void . . . exists in scholarly investigations of early black women's spiritual autobiographies, as yet unfilled by either womanist theo-ethicists or African American(ist) literary historians." (176) Moody's "own location as a scholar" places her between the literary critics (who must survive in an academy generally hostile to religious worldviews) and the "womanist religion scholars," many of whom are also ordained Afro-Protestant clergywomen. In her final chapter she speaks directly to these two groups of scholars about the puzzlingly thin discussions to date of the theological dimension in texts such as these. What can explain the avoidance? Are black women scholars in particular afraid to confront the "bogeywoman--the stereotype of the black churchwoman"?

"Because the academy purports to privilege 'reason' over 'emotion,' and because this figure [of ungovernable female ecstatic spirituality] connotes 'irrationality' and 'blind faith,' and because black feminist scholars occupy so precarious a place in the academy, too few of us are willing to attend to the autobiographies where sister-ministers of the Gospel wait for us. . . .So finally this book calls for the reading of early black holy women as more than either literary figures or preachers. . . Reading for theological rather than--or as well as--political, social, literary, or cultural significance requires attention to what early black holy women writers assert and instruct about who and how 'God' is and about the kinds of relationships humans (should) have with the divine. . . I urge black feminist scholars, free from the restrictions that have previously bound us, especially to continue the essential work of theorizing African American women's spirituality and our sexuality. . .(172-177)."

This is a bold conclusion to a very good book which is full of interesting insights into these nineteenth-century texts. Moody is a first-rate thinker and writer, and she is admirably tough-minded (she points out less than heroic aspects of her writers' life and textual choices when relevant, just as she is prepared to point out the limitations she sees in the work of scholars she clearly admires). Some questions about the relationship between spiritual narrative and gendered nineteenth-century sentimentalism might still be asked, but this provocative and pioneering study deepens our understanding of African American women's literary and spiritual history.

Jean Humez, University of Massachusetts, Boston