theme

In his introduction to the 1983 edition of the novel, Gates claims that Our Nig is a major example of generic fusion in which a woman writer appropriated black male (the slave narrative) and white female (the sentimental novel) forms and revised these into a synthesis at once peculiarly black and female." In many ways Frado does typify the sentimental heroine—parentless, poor, friendless and abused, relying on her own strength of character—but she also diverges from that tradition in her rejection of religion and her inability to establish a stable domestic life. Julia Stern (1995) contends that such differences mark Wilson's synthesis of sentimental and gothic traditions, particularly in the portrayal of Frado's suffering. And, while the novel itself is not literally a slave narrative, some critics have conjectured that the slave-narrative conventions used in Our Nig were intended to demonstrate the parallels between the treatments of blacks in the North and the South, including the similar economic motivations that structure relations within both systems.