The ethics of opacity in Sara Collins’s The Confessions of Frannie Langton

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.