Journal of Postcolonial Writing· 2026Q1
The ethics of opacity in Sara Collins’s The Confessions of Frannie Langton
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Short summary
Sara Collins’s novel The Confessions of Frannie Langton reveals writing as a double-edged sword, where literacy, intended for emancipation, instead binds the formerly enslaved protagonist to legal and moral systems that equate agency with guilt.
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Key points
- The novel critiques the Enlightenment idea that literacy guarantees emancipation.
- Writing functions as a 'pharmakon,' both a remedy and a poison, for the protagonist.
- Frannie's confession, under legal pressure, turns her inherent ambiguity into perceived guilt.
- Collins exposes the continuation of racialized legal and epistemic structures post-slavery.
AI-generated from the title and abstract; the full text is not read.
Abstract
Sara Collins’s The Confessions of Frannie Langton interrogates the Enlightenment fantasy that literacy guarantees emancipation. This article argues that the novel exposes writing as a pharmakon, both remedy and poison, by showing how reading and authorship bind Frannie, a formerly enslaved Black woman, to epistemologies of law, science, and morality that equate agency with culpability. Framed by the Old Bailey’s demand for motive and narrative clarity, Frannie’s confession converts opacity into guilt. Through engagements with Charlevoix, Milton, Voltaire, Defoe, Wollstonecraft, and Mary Shelley, Collins exposes abolition without emancipation: the persistence of racialized juridical and epistemic structures after slavery’s legal abolition. Against testimonial economies that harvest Black suffering for metropolitan sympathy, the novel turns to love, embodiment, Gothic monstrosity, and fiction as forms of opacity. Its ethical horizon is not innocence but the right to remain unreadably human beyond confession’s moral ledger, and against coercive self-knowledge under the law’s accusing gaze.
The authors' abstract, as published at the source. Journal of Postcolonial Writing, 2026 · DOI ↗
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Field: Literature and Literary Theory
Literature and Literary TheoryArts and Humanities