‘To create and cherish a true southern literature’: Genre, Gender and Authorship in William Gilmore Simms's Answer toUncle Tom's Cabin

Abstract

AbstractSince its publication in 1852, Harriet Beecher Stowe'sUncle Tom's Cabinhas challenged its readers to respond to the interlocking rhetorics of gender and genre in the aesthetics of sentimentality. Whilst critical reclamations of the novel at the end of the twentieth century have located the novel in a tradition of female readers and writers, few readings have sought to understand the novel's aesthetics within the specific context of southern male responses and criticisms of the novel. This article interrogates William Gilmore Simms's self‐proclaimed answer to Stowe through his refiguring of established notions of gender and genre in the aesthetic claims of his southern plantation hero Captain Porgy for men of the South. Contextualised within the critical discourses of fact and fiction voiced by leading southern intellectuals published in the southern press and Simms's own developing critical language in the 1840s and 1850s, this article identifies Simms's ‘sensible’ southern man as a model of southern male authorship that sought to reconcile Stowe's antithetical aesthetic spaces of the masculine marketplace and the feminine home.