Domestic Pastoral in The Holcombes

Templeton, Peter

doi:10.1007/978-3-030-04888-4_6

Peter Templeton²

73 Accesses

Abstract

Templeton offers one of the first extended assessments of the writing of Mary Tucker Magill, a relative of Nathaniel Beverley Tucker and one of the first voices following the Civil War to write literature lamenting the defeat of the South. This chapter assesses not only Magill’s contributions to a nascent ‘Lost Cause’ mythology, but reads her novel The Holcombes as a combination of the popular female-authored genre of domestic fiction with the pastoral and romantic tropes of plantation literature, to create an image of the Old South that defies Northern criticisms.

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Notes

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2.
Gavin Wright, Slavery and American Economic Development (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2013), 49.
3.
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4.
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5.
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6.
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7.
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8.
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9.
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10.
Lucinda Hardwick MacKethan, The Dream of Arcady: Place and Time in Southern Literature (Baton Rouge; Louisiana State University Press, 1980), 3.
11.
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12.
Moss, Domestic Novelists, 59.
13.
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15.
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16.
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17.
Anne Firor Scott, The Southern Lady: From Pedestal to Politics 1830–1930 (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1995), 96.
18.
Mary Tucker Magill, Women, or, Chronicles of the Late War (Baltimore: Turnbull Brothers, 1871), x.
19.
Elizabeth Young, Disarming the Nation: Women’s Writing and the American Civil War (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 4. For examples of this kind of women’s literature, see Sally Rochester Ford, Raids and Romance of Morgan and His Men (Mobile, AL: Sigmund H. Goetzel, 1863) and Augusta Jane Evans, Macaria (Richmond, VA: West & Johnson, 1863).
20.
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21.
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22.
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23.
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24.
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25.
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26.
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27.
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28.
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29.
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30.
Rollin G. Osterweis, The Myth of the Lost Cause (Hamden, CT: Archon, 1973), 11.
31.
Osterweis, Myth of the Lost Cause, 19.
32.
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33.
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34.
Laura Elizabeth Kopp, Teaching the Confederacy: Textbooks in the Civil War South (np: ProQuest LLC, 2009), 102.
35.
Osterweis, Myth of the Lost Cause, 21.
36.
James C. Cobb, Away Down South: A History of Southern Identity (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), 22.
37.
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38.
Bertram Wyatt-Brown, Southern Honor: Ethics and Behavior in the Old South (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 49.
39.
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40.
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41.
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42.
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43.
Moss, Domestic Novelists, 36.
44.
Moss, Domestic Novelists, 42.
45.
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46.
Drew Gilpin Faust, Mothers of Invention: Women of the Slaveholding South in the American Civil War (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996), 252–253.
47.
For more, see Peter Templeton, ‘The Lost Cause and the Mirror of Wessex: The Literature of the Postbellum South and Thomas Hardy as parallax’, Symbiosis: A Journal of Anglo-American Literary Relations 21, No. 2 (2017).
48.
Eric Hobsbawm, ‘Introduction: Inventing Traditions’, in The Invention of Tradition, ed. Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 1.
49.
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50.
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51.
Jameson, The Political Unconscious, 111.
52.
Wyatt-Brown, Southern Honor, 97.
53.
Wyatt-Brown, Southern Honor, 97; Anonymous, Calendar of the University of the South (Nashville, TN: Paul and Tavel, 1871), 34.
54.
John G. Cawelti, The Six-Gun Mystique Sequel (Bowling Green, OH: Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1999), 76.
55.
Censer, Reconstruction of White Southern Womanhood, 78.
56.
Peterson, The Jefferson Image, 167.
57.
Anonymous, ‘American Literature’, The Saturday Review of Politics, Literature, Science and Art 33 (1872): 258.
58.
Merrill Maguire Skaggs, The Folk of Southern Fiction (Athens: The University of Georgia Press, 1972), 12.
59.
Maurie D. McInnes, The Politics of Taste in Antebellum Charleston (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005), 68.
60.
M.B. Hammond, ‘The Southern Farmer and the Cotton Question’, Political Science Quarterly 12 (1897): 457.
61.
Moss, Domestic Novelists, 95.
62.
Censer, Reconstruction of White Southern Womanhood, 18.
63.
Censer, Reconstruction of White Southern Womanhood, 247.
64.
Osterweis, Myth of the Lost Cause, 13.
65.
For information that is still helpful regarding copper-mining in the nineteenth-century South, see F. E. Richter, ‘The Copper-mining industry in the United States’, The Quarterly Journal of Economics 41 (1927): 236–291.
66.
Terry Gifford, Pastoral (London: Routledge, 1999), 11.
67.
Paul Giles, The Global Remapping of American Literature (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011), 73.
68.
This kind of false consciousness has some basis in the historical record. Consider, for example, the pride taken by slaves deputed to errands at the Great House Farm described by Frederick Douglass in Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, Written by Himself, ed. Deborah E. McDowell (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 23.
69.
C. Vann Woodward, The Burden of Southern History, (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1970), 91.
70.
Roger Sales, English Literature in History 1780–1830: Pastoral and Politics (London: Hutchison, 1983), 72.
71.
Moss, Domestic Novelists, 40.
72.
Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom’s Cabin; or Life Among the Lowly, ed. Ann Douglas (London: Penguin, 1987), 608.
73.
Cobb, Away Down South, 80.
74.
Censer, Reconstruction of White Southern Womanhood, 244.
75.
Richard Weaver, quoted in MacKethan, The Dream of Arcady, 15.

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Loughborough University, Loughborough, UK
Peter Templeton

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Templeton, P. (2019). Domestic Pastoral in The Holcombes. In: The Politics of Southern Pastoral Literature, 1785–1885. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-04888-4_6

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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-04888-4_6
Published: 27 December 2018
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-030-04887-7
Online ISBN: 978-3-030-04888-4
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