SOURCE: Kirkpatrick, Susan. “Gómez de Avellaneda's Sab: Gendering the Liberal Romantic Subject.” In In the Feminine Mode: Essays on Hispanic Women Writers, pp. 115-30. Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 1990.

In the following essay, Kirkpatrick claims that the women and slave characters in Sab are alternative depictions of romantic and liberal ideologies. Using this construction Avellaneda critiques the cultural inequities inherent in those ideologies.

Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda's novel Sab was the first abolitionist novel to be published in Spanish.¹ Two details—the gender of the author and the date of publication in 1841, a key year for Spanish romanticism—point to another achievement as well: Sab attributes to female characters the new paradigm of subjectivity that emerged with Spain's romantic movement. The novel's condemnation of slavery is intimately related to its representation of women as the subjects of romantic experience, and this connection is made possible by a...