Sab (novel)

Sab
AuthorGertrudis Gomez de Avellaneda
LanguageSpanish
Publication date
1841
Publication placeCuba

Sab is a novel written by Gertrudis Gomez de Avellaneda and published in Madrid in 1841.[1] The novel centers around the character of Sab, a mulato slave who is in love with his white master's daughter Carlota. The pain of Sab's unrequited love for Carlota leads Sab to his own death, which occurs during Carlota's wedding to Enrique Otway. The novel was not published in Cuba until 1914.

Sab is regarded by some scholars as an anti-slavery novel, and some have also suggested that it criticizes the institution of marriage. [citation needed] The novel was written a decade before Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin. According to Nina M. Scott, Sab, just like Beecher Stowe's novel, criticizes slavery as a displacement of what Elizabeth Ammons calls "maternal values by a profit-hungry masculine ethic [the slave economy] that regards human beings as... commodities."[2] The publishing of Sab is considered a precursor to the antislavery movements. [citation needed]

For another critic, Sab is "the only feminist-abolitionist novel published by a woman in nineteenth-century Spain or its slave-holding colony Cuba."[3]

  1. ^ Murray, Christopher John (13 May 2013). ¤Encyclopedia of the Romantic Era, 1760–1850. Routledge. ISBN 9781135455781.
  2. ^ Gómez de Avellaneda, Gertrudis. Sab and Autobiography. Trans. and ed. by Nina M. Scott. U. of Texas Press, Austin, 1993, p. xxiv.
  3. ^ Davies 2001, p. 1.