At a time when sectional conflicts were dividing the nation, the
five best-selling southern domestic novelists vigorously came to
the defense of their native region. In response to northern
criticism, Caroline Gilman, Caroline Hentz, Maria McIntosh, Mary
Virginia Terhune, and Augusta Jane Evans presented through their
fiction what they believed to be the ""true"" South. From the
mid-1830s through 1866, these five novelists wrote about an ordered
South governed by the aristocratic ethic of noblesse oblige, and
argued that slavery was part of a larger system of reciprocal
relationships that made southern society the moral superior of the
individualistic North. Scholars have typically approached the
domestic novel as a national rather than a regional phenomenon,
assuming that because practically all domestic fiction was written
by and for women, the elements of all domestic novels are
essentially identical. Elizabeth Moss corrects that simplification,
locating Gilman Hentz, McIntosh, Terhune, and Evans within the
broader context of antebellum social and political culture and
establishing their lives and works as important sources of
information concerning the attitudes of southerners, particularly
southern women, toward power and authority within their society.
Moss's study of the novels of these women challenges the
""transhistorical view"" of women's history and integrates women
into the larger context of antebellum southern history. Domestic
Novelists in the Old South shows that whereas northern readers and
writers of domestic fiction may have been interested in changing
their society, their southern counterparts were concerned with
strengthening and sustaining the South's existing social structure.
But the southern domestic novelists did more than reiterate the
ideology of the ruling class; they also developed a compelling
defense of slavery in terms of southern culture that reflected
their perceptions of southern society and women's place within it.
Just how strong an impact these books had cannot be precisely
determined, but Moss argues that at the height of their popularity,
the five novelists were able to reach a broader audience than male
apologists. In spite of their literary and historical significance,
Caroline Gilman, Caroline Hentz, Maria McIntosh, Mary Virginia
Tehune, and Augusta Jane Evans have received scant scholarly
attention. Moss shows that the lives and works of these five women
illuminate the important role domestic novelists played in the
ideological warfare of the day. Writing in the language of
domesticity, they appealed to the women of America, using the
images of home and hearth to make a persuasive case for antebellum
southern culture.
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