Sab

Synopsis

Sab is a novel written by Gertrudis Gomez de Avellaneda and published in Madrid in 1841. 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. 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." The publishing of Sab is considered a precursor to the antislavery movements. For another critic, Sab is "the only feminist-abolitionist novel published by a woman in nineteenth-century Spain or its slave-holding colony Cuba."

Text license: CC BY-SA 4.0 · Source

Details

Type

Book

Release date

January 1, 1841

Created by

Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda

Countries

Spain, Cuba