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Liberation and consumption: disease, imperialism, and the conversion of the heathen in Hemans, Sigourney and Stowe

This essay launches its argument with reference to hints from my monograph ‘Consumption and Literature’. In that book I argued that consumption serves to ‘liberate’ into Christianity and imperial destiny –via a dying white heroine – the Indian Other. This article extends this argument further into transatlantic Romanticism by discussing an apparent contradiction to the phenomenon of the redemptive consumption of the white Christian heroine as discussed in the monograph. The essay involves a new analysis of the American context and criticism, including new research from newspaper archives, as well as casting Hemans’ work in a new light.