In the Master's Eye: Representations of Women, Blacks, and Poor Whites in Antebellum Southern Literature , and: Literature and Humanitarian Reform in the Civil War Era (review)

Abstract

150CIVIL WAR HISTORY In the Master's Eye: Representations of Women, Blacks, and Poor Whites in Antebellum Southern Literature. By Susan J. Tracy. (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1995. Pp. ix, 307. $42.50.) Literature andHumanitarian Reform in the Civil War Era. By Gregory Eiselein. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996. Pp. xi, 215. $29.95.) The two works under review here arejoined by their authors' common desire to extract from literature (novels, poems, essays, personal accounts) a picture, in the first instance, of the slave holders' worldview on the eve of the Civil War, and in the second case, a description of the crippling, suffocating attitudes that marred the efforts of well-meaning humanitarians in all but a few cases. Both authors also follow guidelines ofcultural studies to describe not only what ideas reigned during the period of study, but how and why the ideas were produced. Susan J. Tracy studies five male novelists often associated with the defense of slavery and Southern culture: John Pendleton Kennedy, William Alexander Caruthers, Nathaniel BeverleyTucker, William Gilmore Simms, andJames Ewell Heath, whom Tracy identifies as "the only true liberal ofthe group" (1). Tracey considers her work to be a "Marxist feminist project ... to consider the parts of a literary text in relation to the whole" (2). Sure enough, she rounds up the usual savants—Karl Marx,Antonio Gramsci, RaymondWilliams, Eugene Genovese— and with their methodological help argues that the proslavery argument "was as much about gender and class as it was about race relations" (4). Various chapters explore the novelists' characterizations ofthe place for poor whites, blacks, daughters, mothers, spinsters, fallen women, belles, "spirited" women, and slaves. Not surprisingly, she finds that the novelists reflected the ideas of the South's ruling "class," which exercised patriarchal powerwith "terror and violence" (224). Anyone familiar with the novelists studied or with the writings of George Fitzhugh knows that a wide range of national and especially Northern developments came under the condemning gaze of these writers. Especially during the Jackson period, the land was ablaze with proposals from crackpot schemers who wished to redesign the social order with blueprints of their own manufacture . If Tracy is correct, that the novelists' characters reflect concerns about class and gender more than race, and that they in turn represent the social vision ofthe South's leaders, then it is no surprise that gender and class figured prominently in the worries ofthe elite. In the "Age ofthe Common Man" and uncommon women like Sarah and Angelina Grimké, or striking Lowell mill girls, threats to social order were ubiquitous and varied. The dates of Tracy's main texts may offer an explanation for her discovery. The appendix which lists the novels examined reveals the median date of publication to be 1838. One wonders if a description of a "worldview" extracted from a literary analysis of many novels written during or before the Jackson period can suffice to describe the notions of a generation living a quarter century later. Gregory Eiselein, assistant professor of English at Kansas State University, has authored Literature and Humanitarian Reform in the Civil War Era, which BOOK REVIEWSI5I joins seven other titles in the series Philanthropic Studies, edited by Robert Payton and Dwight Burlingame. The subject of the study is the writing and philanthropic practices of John Brown, Louisa May Alcott, Lydia Maria Child, Henry Thoreau, former slave Harriet Jacobs, and especiallyWaltWhitman, who emerges as the most successful practitioner of "eccentric philanthropy." Normal philanthropy, Eiselein asserts, is marred by authoritarianism, control, efforts to stabiUze society, efficiency, social distance between the giver and receiver of the act, and—after the Civil War—the presence and misguided efforts of the national government. In his work the author hopes to defend benevolence from defamation by writers who either praise it uncritically for its pure selflessness, or from "social control" historians who see in benevolence only aggressive efforts to exact obligations "and control the thinking, values, and activities of certain groups" ( 1 1 ). Neither ofthese interpretations "can explain the complexity , diversity, or idiosyncracy of benevolent work" ( 1 2). Benevolence could be made acceptable only if "eccentric" care-giving, by which Eiselein means care that is noncoercive and patient centered, were the...