Nostalgia and the Emotional Turn in Postbellum Plantation Memoirs
DOI :
https://doi.org/10.7413/2281813819609Mots-clés :
Lost Cause, Nostalgia, Old South, Plantation, SlaveryRésumé
This article examines how white southern memoirists of the late nineteenth-century nostalgically constructed the Old South, using plantation life-writing to assert regional identity and historical distinctiveness after emancipation, the Civil War, and Reconstruction. These memoirs depict the antebellum plantation as a harmonious, orderly society characterized by racial stability, rigid class hierarchies, and prescribed gender roles. The article carefully explores how nostalgia shaped these depictions, transporting former enslavers and their families into a romanticized past that glossed over, or elided, the harsh realities of plantation era slavery. Central to these narratives is the image of the ‘faithful slave,’ particularly the Mammy figure, whose depiction reinforced paternalistic myths. Through these rhetorical strategies, plantation memoirists sought to create a vision of race relations rooted in an idealized past, one that could influence future interactions between white and Black southerners to ensure continued white dominance within southern society and culture.
Références
Baptist, E. E. (2002), Creating an Old South: Middle Florida’s Plantation Frontier before the Civil War, Chapel Hill, University of North Carolina Press.
Becker, T. (2023), Yesterday: A New History of Nostalgia, Cambridge, Harvard University Press.
Blight, D. W. (2001), Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory, Cambridge, Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.
Boym, S. (2001), The Future of Nostalgia, New York, Basic Books.
Cobb, J.C. (2005), Away Down South: A History of Southern Identity, New York, Oxford University Press.
Cook, R. J. (2017), Civil War Memories: Contesting the Past in the United States since 1865, Baltimore, Johns Hopkins University Press.
Davis, F. (1979), Yearning for Yesterday: A Sociology of Nostalgia, New York, Free Press.
De Saussure, Mrs. N. B. (1909), Old Plantation Days: Being Recollections of Southern Life Before the Civil War, New York, Duffield.
Devereux, M. (1906), Plantation Sketches, Cambridge, Riverside Press.
Domby, A. H. (2020), The False Cause: Fraud, Fabrication, and White Supremacy in Confederate Memory, Charlottesville, University of Virginia Press.
Fox-Genovese, E. and Genovese, E.D. (2005), The Mind of the Master Class: History and Faith in the Southern Slaveholders’ View, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press.
Gannon, B. A. (2017), Americans Remember Their Civil War, Santa Barbara, Praeger.
Hamill, H.M. (1904), The Old South: A Monograph, Nashville, Smith and Lamar.
Harden, W. (1913), A History of Savannah and South Georgia, 2 volumes, Chicago, Lewis Publishing.
Janney, C. E. (2013), Remembering the Civil War: Reunion and the Limits of Reconciliation, Chapel Hill, University of North Carolina Press.
Mallard, R. Q. (1892), Plantation Life before Emancipation, Richmond, Whittet and Shepperson.
Matt, S.J. (2011), Homesickness: An American History, Oxford, Oxford University Press.
McElya, M. (2007), Clinging to Mammy: The Faithful Slave in Twentieth-Century America, Cambridge, Harvard University Press.
Putnam, S. B. ([1867], reprint, 1996), Richmond during the War: Four Years of Personal Observation, Lincoln, University of Nebraska Press.
Ripley, E. (1912), Social Life in Old New Orleans: Being Recollections of my Girlhood, New York, D. Appleton.
Rutledge, A. (1940), Rain on the Marsh, Columbia, Bostick & Thornley.
Smedes, S. D. (1887), Memorials of a Southern Planter, Baltimore, Cushings & Bailey.
Thomas, E. J. (1923), Memoirs of a Southerner, 1840-1923, Savannah, no publisher.
Villavaso, E. J. (1913), review of Social Life in Old New Orleans: Being Recollections of my Girlhood, by Eliza Ripley, Southwestern Historical Quarterly, 16: 433.
“What They Read,” (1913), Vogue, 41, Issue 6, 15 March: 68.
Wise, J. S. (1899), The End of an Era, Boston, Houghton, Mifflin.
Téléchargements
Publiée
Numéro
Rubrique
Licence
Authors who publish with this journal agree to the following terms:- Authors retain copyright and grant the journal right of first publication with the work simultaneously licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution License that allows others to share the work with an acknowledgement of the work's authorship and initial publication in this journal.
- Authors are able to enter into separate, additional contractual arrangements for the non-exclusive distribution of the journal's published version of the work (e.g., post it to an institutional repository or publish it in a book), with an acknowledgement of its initial publication in this journal.
- Authors are permitted and encouraged to post their work online (e.g., in institutional repositories or on their website) prior to and during the submission process, as it can lead to productive exchanges, as well as earlier and greater citation of published work (See The Effect of Open Access).
