Originally published in 1887 and never before reprinted, Juanita is
a historical romance based on Mary Peabody Mann's experience of
living on a Cuban slaveholder's plantation from 1833 to 1835. The
novel centers on the extended visit of Helen Wentworth, a New
England teacher, to a childhood friend's plantation, where she
witnesses African slaves' arrivals and their sale and gross
mistreatment at the hands of coffee and sugar planters. Juanita is
a beautiful mulatta slave with whom the plantation owner's son
falls in love. Extending the tradition of Gothic fiction in the
Americas, Mann's novel raises questions about the relation of
slavery in the Caribbean to that in the United States, and between
romance and race, adding an important element to our understanding
of nineteenth-century American literature.
A surprising number of middle-class women from the United States
traveled to Cuba in the early nineteenth century, but few stayed as
long or possessed the literary gifts and intellectual connections
of Mary Peabody Mann. Her sister Sophia, with whom she traveled,
married Nathaniel Hawthorne. Mann worked with her husband, the
educational reformer Horace Mann, and with her sister Elizabeth
Peabody, who founded the kindergarten movement in the United
States. In addition, she held close friendships with her neighbors
Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry. David Thoreau. The reissue of
Juanita thus introduces contemporary readers to a neglected novel
by a woman placed at the very center of the American Renaissance
and American reform movements.
Patricia M. Ard's introductory essay reinvigorates the place of
women writers in the period, and it extends the critical discussion
surroundingHawthorne's use of the romance in his fiction by showing
possible mutual influences between Mann and Hawthorne. Ard also
discusses how Mann shares with her contemporary Harriet Beecher
Stowe a liberal, Christian-centered, maternal consciousness, as
well as an anxiety about race, which is evident in the color
hierarchy among her slave characters. Viewed in this light, Juanita
raises significant questions about the motives and effectiveness of
antislavery feminist authors and informs our understanding of
canonical texts such as Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852) and Incidents in
the Life of a Slave Girl (1861).
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