I once saw two beautiful children playing together. One was a fair white child; the other was her slave, and also her sister. When I saw them embracing each other, and heard their joyous laughter, I turned sadly away from the lovely sight. I foresaw the inevitable blight that would fall on the little slave's heart.
I knew how soon her laughter would be changed to sighs.
~ Jacobs, Harriet Ann (2012-05-17). Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl Written by Herself (p. 24). . Kindle Edition.
This specimen of the object-child wing stands apart from other autobiographical/first-person accounts, and from the classroom wing, though it, too, sentimentally expresses some manner of idealism for interaction with those suffering under American slavery. In the sentimental genre, children are not intended to be individuals but simply interchangeable inhabitants of the space of childhood much in the same way that Dickens uses children: for pathos. It is their presence, treatment, and education that concerns us, not their faces or personalities. The book itself is still intended as a kind of space for education, but the student is adult learning about the experiences and evils of American slavery - the gaze is at the child, not through the child, and the reader is not asked to become childlike.
Children named in the novel (there aren't many) include (earlier) Linda herself, her brother William, and her two children, Benny and Ellen. All of them temporarily live in a space protected from the reality of the adults they live around, illustrated quite aptly by a moment when Linda describes seeing a white and slave child playing together, and bemoans that moment when they must learn that they are not the same. Linda knows of that experience because she had it herself. The slave child is not given privileged information about her/his social prospects, but both are kept ignorant of it until a time when they must be separated.
The Sentimental genre here shows its form. This "learning" of something that is not essentially true, but unnecessarily true of society is the text creating a conundrum for the reader. The innocence of children playing together is shown to the reader as something idealistic, but "true," and the separation of the children as painfully unfortunate. After all, why should they not continue playing together as equals in perpetuity? But the children were never economic or social equals, and their eventual separation is both true and false: the system which requires their separation is an economic reality, though socially constructed (indicated by Linda's experience in England), and is therefore a surface "truth" which can/should be abolished with respect to the underlying truth that the children are essentially equal, which proves that skin color is no basis for discrimination and that no person should be the property of any other person, etc.
Linda's experience in England solidifies the impression, and necessarily describes a (probably imaginary) society without racism. Linda means America to admire England for their progressive and fair culture, which treats people better than slavery does slaves. She describes the homes of even the poorest of the English (clean and safe), and the education of all children (remarking notably that children are much the same everywhere). She must produce an ideal if only to prove that change is possible: for the English, too, at some time held slaves. The educated reader will know that this is a necessary fiction (or simply a relative experience) because we have historical accounts that racism did and still does exist in England, although our definitions of it have likely become more stringent than previously. Linda, for instance, was not seeking employment and so would not have experienced that kind of rejection on the basis of her parentage.
Acknowledging this probably "literarying" makes more sense, then, when Linda's description of an "ideal" employer rings somewhat false or overly sentimentalized. Her verbal adoration of a "good" white friend (protecting the helpless, bravely harboring fugitives, treating people kindly) must necessarily overpower her resentment of the "cunning" white enemies or the poor white people seduced by the legal fiction that they can sell a servant for quick cash. Especially if the novel is to serve one of its rhetorical purposes, which is to gain sympathy for abolitionists, it must express a hope for and reward of real kindness towards the cause. Linda's employer acts "correctly," and her sympathy is rewarded by loyalty, and presumably Heaven (eternal rewards are a necessary staple of the sentimental novel).
So many scare-quotes! Sorry Howard!
I think a key difference between the didactive novel for children (The Classroom Wing) and the didactic novel for adults (The Object-Child Wing) is the difference between "this is the world you will live in" and "we need to change the world," and pitiable children change adults, and admirable adults change children.Further, a key difference between the "remembered" autobiography and the object-child biography is the degree to which childhood is sentimentalized, and the author paints herself pathetically.
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