Rewriting the Old South: Iconic Identities of the Antebellum Southern Elite Planter Class,
1790-1860
Abstract:
The American antebellum South sparked an iconic image of plantation life, known today as the “legend of the Old South.” Honor, paternalism, and true womanhood can be seen as the legend’s cultural portraits of the identities of elite southern planters and mistresses. Antebellum novels acted as an agent in the formation of the legend of the Old South, not only projecting romanticized identities onto the elite planter class, but also forging those identities as reality. A consequence of this was rooted in the ways in which the planter class was led to dictate their lives, for the most part, around the sentiments within the legend. This created a further distortion of plantation life, from both an internal and external standpoint. George Tucker’s The Valley of Shenandoah (1824) and John Pendleton Kennedy’s Swallow Barn (1832) are two novels that strove to present plantation life in a more realistic manner – not implementing the veil of grandeur as the norm – but still tended to uphold the iconic romanticism of the planter class’ respective identities. The strength of romantic identity within the legend is exemplified through these two novels, but the true reality of the planter class’ lives ultimately broke down the façade and revealed the crafted nature of this ideological construct.