“...the bold atmosphere of Mrs. Hentz” and Others: Fast Food and Feminine Rebelliousness

in Some Romances of the Old South

Jan Bakker

In the romances of the female authors of the Old South, there is no myth-making on the theme of the lost American Eden such as appears in the adventure fiction of their male counterparts. What the women wrote were indoor, triumph-of-love domestic romances that reveal suppressed rebelliousness against the expected submissiveness of females in the nineteenth century. A feminist urge is evident in the neglected fiction of women authors of the antebellum South well before it finds its clearer voice in the twen- tieth century. Back then and in that place, among women there was indeed a chafing at the bit. But in their day there was little thought that a struggle for the greater rights for women could b? won in any mea- sure. There is a current of pessimism that underlies their uncertain fantasies of feminine freedom. It is a very private kind of feminism that is kept out of focus for the sake of the authors’ professional and personal endurance in the male-dominated world of the planta- tion South.

One typical example of this pattern of hesitant feminine social protest occurs buried unexpectedly in a lovers’ conversation at the end of Chapter 16 in Eliza Anne Dupuy’s (1814-1881) The Planter’s Daughter ( 1 856). This statement is unique for Mrs. Dupuy: her romances usually are not at all critical of the contemporary relationship between men and women. The main theme in The Planter S Daughter is the danger of land speculation, which destroys the generous, wealthy planter Charles Harrington. Before the crash comes to Wavertree Plantation, however, his beautiful daughter Adele talks one day with her chivalrous Virginia beau Philip Evelyn. Her statement about the need for some redress of wrongs done to women of her time is surprising, because she is other- wise so typical of the demure, blonde, graceful, domestically content Southern belle-a planter’s daughter-who appears in antebellum Southern romances.

Adele and Philip are discussing the character of Eve in Milton’s Paradise Lost and Elizabeth Barrett

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Browning’s Drama of Exile. Adele feels Mrs. Browning’s Eve is “truer to our ideal of the womanly nature” than is Milton’s. Philip laughs and says in a “mock heroic tone” that he cannot tolerate such “rebellion against the long established superiority of my sex over yours.” Adele persists: “You forget that this is the age of woman’s rights-or rather the redressing of her wrongs. 1 need not take up arms in their defense, because my sex are proving themselves in every way, quite capable of taking care of them- selves.”

In answer to Philip’s question if she is “really an advocate of these women’s conventions,” she answers, “Yes, if by such means only right can assert itself.” But then, using her protected and privileged social standing as a way out, Adele backs away from her statement. Agitation will do for those other women who suffer and for whom new liberalizing laws might be helpful; she would not, after all, take part in such a convention. She would stay on the side- lines. Conventions are all right for women who actu- ally today endure

... evils that legislation can correct. I can very well under- stand that as society is now constructed, a woman may be made too much a slave of a worthless or unprincipled hus- band. But I am so fortunate as to occupy a position that in a measure places me above the sufferings by which women among the medium and lower walks of life are often crushed. There is another objection [that I have to the femi- nine reformers]-they claim too much; they wish to step out of the sphere nature has evidently allotted to them, and claim such privileges as would destroy the feminine quali- ties which are their greatest charm. They forget the beauti- ful words of Roger Asham to Lady Jane Gray--“Women, like plants in woods, derive their softness and tenderness from the shade.”

Through Adele, then, Mrs. Dupuy makes and then backs away from an antebellum Southern woman’s protest against social and domestic restrictions and

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Burleque and cooch appeared to be a perfect match. Very quickly, the cooch dancer became a highly popu- lar feature of burlesque, and imitators of Little Egypt flourished with their “Oriental dances” and “Salome dances” of seven veils. As one might suspect, the undulations, shimmies, scanty costumes, and sexual overtones ignited the American public to great contro- versy over such a perverse and public display of the female body.3 The press, of course, was eager to sell papers based on the depravity of the dancers.

Sensationalism and the Press Fortunately for Millie, her controversial career

coincided with several pivotal events in the history of journalism. One was the publication of photographs in daily newspapers and the other was the race between William Randolph Hearst and Joseph Pulitzer to corner a market on the popular press (Emery). Adopting P.T. Barnurn’s notion that “there’s a sucker born every minute,” Hearst and Pulitzer stooped lower and lower each week with sensational headlines tar- geted at a gulible mass audience. In his book Sensationalism and the New York Press, John D. Stevens chronicles bizzare headlines from the JournaE’s Sunday supplement, such as “White Woman Among Cannibals,” “Photographing the Unknown Dead,” and “Stole the Pastor’s Baptismal Trousers” (83-84). Sensationalism became a trademark of many daily papers as they fought to keep readership. Often, crime, particularly violent or sex-related crime, was rewarded with the celebrity of the criminal, thanks to the media buildup. Stevens explains:

Much of what is labeled “sensationalism” is news of crime. No other type of news is of such universal interest. Newspaper accounts emphasizing thrills, horrors, shocks and alarms do not so much inform the readers as allow them to share feelings of the actors in the real-life Grand Guignol .... For many, reading such stories is a kind of “guilty pleasure.” ( 5 )

Stevens recounts three dimensions of sensationalism, as cited in George Juergen’s book about Pulitzer: “(1) emphasis on personalities; (2) preference for trivial over significant news, and (3) use of colloquial, per- sonal language” (5-6). De Leon’s many arrests, depraved dances, and outspoken character made her a perfect vehicle for selling papers in a sensationalistic market.

De Leon’s Image in the Press Although scanty attire and orgasmic undulations

would soon define Millie De Leon as a performer,

surprisingly, early photographs portray her with an innocent purity, perhaps as a way of dispelling any protest from the wives of male-heavy audiences. One of De Leon’s earliest and most striking images was published in Broadway Magazine as a full page pho- tograph of the girl with a white veil swathed around her, in a pose reminiscent of the Virgin Mary (2 Aug. 1901: 283).4 Another early photo is a head shot of Millie wearing a hat, with feathers high around her neck. She is looking up at the camera, with just a hint of Mona Lisa’s smile (See Figure 1). Could this shy young woman possibly pose a threat to American decency?

Somewhat like the pop-icon Madonna, who rein- vents her image to gain press and public attention, De Leon underwent a change. Perhaps Mlle. De Leon’s early photographs did little to drum up business, for her later pictures depicted her from head to toe, wear- ing glitzy gowns bedecked with ruffles and spangles. In several photographs, she thrust a leg at the camera, and in one case she bared her midriff in a Spanish- inspired costume (Vanity Fair 17 Apr. 1908). Along with the more daring visual images came a con- tentious personality, as reported in the newspapers. In January of 1903, a headline read, “Court to Decide Morality of Dance that Shocked Brooklyn Detective” (NYPL clipping file). The column explained how an officer “arrested Mlle. De Leon in a spectacular manner, rushing from the wings on to the stage, grab- bing her by the neck and dragging her off stage” just before she threw her garters to the audience, a maneu- ver that was to become her decadent trademark.’ A raucous crowd followed the two to the police station, jeering and hooting at the officer all the while. This brush with the law paid off in public demand, for she soon rose from a simple company member to a fea- tured performer (Toll 228). Several months later, De Leon got her name in the papers again, this time for filing a lawsuit against her costumer, who allegedly ruined her expensive, imported costumes while clean- ing them. After hearing a lengthy plea from Mlle. De Leon about her Parisian hats and Trefoussa gloves, the judge examined the piles of clothing and quipped, “There’s too many frills in this case for an immediate decision” (NYPL clipping file, 4 Oct. 1903).

A year later, in 1904, Millie hit a jackpot of pub- licity with a lengthy story that guaranteed her notori- ety. The Morning Telegraph reported, “Dance of the Girl in Blue too Much for Indianapolis.” After announcing De Leon had been canceled because her dance was “too close to the Little Egypt style,” the story recounted her bout with Herman Haas, a bank teller “who spent a small fortune on his admiration for

“...the bold atmosphere of Mrs. Hentz” and Others . 3

jealous school-master who moved his family from North to South in the 1830s. Every few years there- after, he would move again to other schools, fearful, so the story goes, of other men’s attentions to his wife. Her tentative feminist statements call for greater domestic freedom for women, especially where the unjust tyranny of a jealous husband is concerned. In creating her more robust and assertive female charac- ters, she shows, too, a contempt for the nineteenth- century stereotype in romance of the delicate, fading heroine.

The quality that makes her pattern particularly significant is the rather bitter manner in which she withdraws from her rebellious statements. She does not ever get off her limb the easy way Mrs. Dupuy does by having a character say something like, “Oh, well, I don’t believe in going too far; besides, I’m above it all.” Mrs. Hentz’s withdrawals involve the disintegration of an independent female character as she diminishes into apologetic and grateful mild domesticity.

Being stifled by the rigors of male-dominated life troubled Caroline Lee Hentz as well as her characters. The painful, restless, hopeless discontent of an intelli- gent, lively, free-spirited, and lovely woman imbues the diary she kept in Florence, Alabama, in 1836. There she was the victim of the like of those “mid- night assassins of reputation,” the skulking “they- sayers of society” (1 44) who slander Gabriella’s dead mother in her novel Ernest Linwood (1 856). There she was criticized, maligned for “the bold atmosphere of Mrs. Hentz,” she bitterly writes, that “a sour, vinegar old maid’ has been talking about, “venting her spleen on me” in this “cold, strange land” without friends (Diary May 13, 1836).

If the bold, the entrapped Mrs. Hentz desired greater freedom for herself and her sex, she wanted to accept the responsibility of liberation as well. At a time when most women were still reluctant to take any steps at all to attain even a modicum of self- reliance if not independence, Caroline Hentz was will- ing to take a step and to go one farther. Intelligent women like herself should not only have a fair share of domestic and social freedom, they should bear a fair share of the burdens, too. “School again,” she writes in her Diary on May 30, 1836:

Alternate coaching and scolding, counsel and reproof- frown and smiles-Oh! what a life it is-oh woe’s me- this weary world! I am often tempted to say-! Yet man is doomed to earn his subsistence by the sweat of his brow and the fire of his brain and why not woman also?

Gossip and loneliness were not the only things that bothered her as a newcomer to the South. She did not like the teaching profession either, making some pointed statements about it earlier in an entry of February 11, 1836:

Perhaps there is no situation in life, where one is so exposed to misinterpretation as ours.-Teachers of child- hood and youth!-at the mercy of unreasonable and some- times unprincipled children,-and credulous and prejudiced parents or guardians. It requires more patience than the patience of Job, the wisdom of Solomon, the meekness of Moses, or the adaptive power of a St. Paul--to be sufficient for the duties of our profession ... the ungrateful profession.

For diversion-and, of course, to the further con- sternation of that vinegar old maid-she liked to jump rope with the girls, feeling it was “no departure from dignity” (February 9). She kept “one link” with the “great world’’ by publishing poetry and reading criti- cism of it (February 20). She consoled herself in lone- liness by thinking of the vanity, the emptiness of winter dances long ago, “that gay company, dancing with me in the giddy ring” (February 22). Still, in the “loneliness of the midnight hour” on March 8 she felt “borne down by despondency.” As spring came, she writes on April 27 that:

I sometimes fall into hypochondriac fits-I feel as if there were no one in the world to love me, as if I were removed from all that were once interested in my happiness and that those around me were alienated from me .... I sigh, I pant to attain what I sometimes fear I have irrecoverably lost .... I am weary in body and mind and weary, sick at heart ....

If Caroline Gilman wrote to fill in the slow moments of an idle day and Eliza Dupuy to support herself, Caroline Hentz wrote to express through her characterizations of the independent lady a part of herself she daily struggled to suppress. Nevertheless, in order not to sound too revolutionary in her fiction, and as an expression of her own feeling of futility, her independent women always undergo a change. Their free, rebellious spirits diminish into acquiescent domesticity as the stories close. The pattern of Mrs. Hentz’s domestic retreat does not vary.

In Marcus Warland (1 852), for example, the story of an orphan’s rise to the status of successful attorney, Florence Delaval appears quite assertive, even Tom- boyish at first in her riding clothes and crop as she splashes water on and laughs at Marcus, college- bound and pausing at the Long Moss Spring. She writes him a note in which she says she is as ambi-

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tious as he is: “Were I a boy, I would climb the Jura peaks of liberation.” One day she bursts out to her brother: “Oh! I detest the idea of being a woman ... the stilts of womanhood” (132).

When she quietly marries Marcus at the end of the tale, though, she is a much diminished woman. Mrs. Hentz withdraws her from the role of independent lady so that she can fit smoothly into married life. Florence becomes the typically submissive, content- to-be-domestic wife of antebellum Southern romance. “I have been very rash, and, I fear now, very unwom- anly” (278), she says to Marcus at the end.

In Eoline (1 852), the independent heroine Eoline Glenmore leaves home because she does not want to marry her father’s choice for her. The best chapters in this romance occur at the manly Miss Manly’s girls’ school, Magnolia Vale, where Eoline goes to teach. Her father respects and Miss Manly resents the “brave undaunted spirit, the firm self-reliance, and moral courage that formed the deep under stratum of her character” (22). In leaving home, of course, she was resisting the “chains of parental despotism” (44), and Mrs. Hentz approves:

And who does not feel that she was right-this noble young girl! who refused to sell her birthright for a miserable mess of potage; and was willing to sacrifice wealth, luxury, and home, rather than barter her soul’s independence, her heart’s liberty, her life’s good, in a traffic unsanctioned by God or man!-her heart was unawakened, her will was free .... (29)

Enjoying her liberty, Eoline dislikes but does not rebel at the rigors of work and the tyranny of Miss Manly at the school. It is here, however, that her strong female character starts to melt. “I need the dis- cipline I am passing through” (71), she says to herself. She even goes so far as to envy her demure and sickly pale colleague, Louisa More: “I would give all, Louisa, for your meek, Christian spirit” (66). In the end, all Eoline desires, she who once described hers as a soaring spirit (157), is “restoration to her home, freedom from her impulsive vows, a union with Horace Cleveland,” the bookish boy who was her father’s choice for her in the first place. He has turned into a successful lawyer meanwhile, much improved by some years of study in Europe.

In Robert Graham ( 1 855), another independent woman is reduced to domesticity after the usual romantic involvements of thwarted and recovered love. The really significant element to be found here is in the wicked pleasure Mrs. Hentz obviously takes in ridiculing the physical weakness and tiresome sen-

sitivity of the demure and genteel, sickly pale lady, Julia Bellenden. She is from the North, travelling in the South with her brother Henry. The novel’s inde- pendent lady, “Gay, dashing, merry,” daring horse- woman, Nora Marshall of the “wild, rebellious spirit,” makes Julia look like a pampered fool (27, 46). Mrs. Hentz writes that lively Nora, as “incapable of fatigue, as she was insensible to fear,” seems like a Northern girl, while pining Julia seems Southern: “elastic, impulsive, but never gay ... all grace and refinement and sensibility ... her thoughts like pure white clouds, floating over the ethereal blue” (26-27). Julia even calls herself a “frail young thing” (33). It is in the humiliation she suffers at Nora’s hands that Caroline Hentz shows her resistance to the stereotype of the subdued, frail gentlewoman.

Walking with Nora towards a fountain in the live oaks at Pine Grove Plantation, Julia’s thoughts under “those high-priests of the forest” swing up to God. Nora is watching, and a devilish whim overwhelms her. She feels that Julia’s “grave and devout counte- nance” is “exceedingly out of place.” Impulsively, she grasps a handful of the hanging Spanish moss and drapes the dusty stuff over Julia’s head, exclaiming that thus, she would make a pretty nun. Julia is not “particularly pleased at such a rude interruption of her reverential emotions,” and “she quietly released her- self from the gray old veil. The dust, however, still lingered in her eyes, making her shed involuntary tears” while Nora laughs (29-30).

At the fountain, Nora again is seized by a devilish whim. She nudges Julia’s arm as she drinks from the gourd. Julia trips and steps into the cold water, her hair falling loose and wild around her face. Nora cries out with mock delight: “...thou beautiful mermaid.” The other does not think it is funny at all. Standing in water in her ruined pumps, her skirts soaked, she immediately begins to cough. She is “really afraid of the wild girl,” who helps her out of the fountain then with apologies. Reclining weakly on a sofa back in the big house, Julia confesses that “it is astonishing how little I can bear. The slightest shock sometimes produces fainting fits ...” (33). Later, Nora reacts to Julia’s weakness with typical, irreverent frankness and mockery: “Do tell me,” she asks, “how do you con- trive to faint. It looks so interesting, and creates such a sensation” (1 32).

True, nevertheless, to the pattern of the fate of Mrs. Hentz’s wild and free young ladies, Nora experi- ences her own reduction. A little ashamed of her treat- ment of the visitor at the fountain, she admits that she is not at all so much afraid of the severely religious preacher and master of Pine Grove, Robert Graham,

“...the bold atmosphere of Mrs. Hentz” and Others 5

as she is of Julia, whose “feminine timidity, shrinking modesty, and angelic purity ... are a silent, constant reproach of my rudeness and thoughtlessness” (45). Riding with Julia’s brother Henry, she says she has never known “constraint in my life. I could not bear it. I have always had my own way.”

When Henry asks her if the “undisputed domain of your own wild will” has made her happy, Nora does a sudden switch. Her diminution is underway. In a “tone of deep seriousness,” she answers, “No!” What she wants, it turns out, is to be dominated: “I would reverence the master-spirit with the power to govern my own. I would kneel in humble prostration at such a shrine.” Henry gazes on her with “surprise and-admiration,’’ and thinks: “Oh! that I could keep this wild and wayward creature in this charming, womanly mood!” (59-60). In the end, he marries Nora, for the “Discipline of life has subdued the exu- berance of [her] animal gaiety,” and “he felt that she retained [nevertheless] all the warmth and vitality and individuality he so much admired, with the added grace of gentleness, sweetness, and womanly depen- dence” (237).

In contrast, Gabriella Linwood of Ernest Lin- wood; ol; The Inner Life of the Author is quite ready to give up her “womanly dependence” on her hus- band. Given its theme of the irrational and tyrannical nature of masculine jealousy, this romance must have been particularly close to Mrs. Hentz’s heart because of her own jealous husband. Gabriella, who, unlike her creator, is very wealthy, leaves Ernest but returns to him at the story’s conclusion. She is not at all sub- dued or diminished by her experience, but rather she is strengthened by it all because she has lost the blind- ing, girlish passion for the dark, romantic Ernest that made her endure the worst of the insane abuses of his unjust, insulting jealousy. Gabriella is the first heroine of Caroline Hentz who is both ladylike and strong from start to finish.

Madge Melville fills the role of the diminished free lady in this romance. She is virtually a parody figure, however-one of those female conventioneers described by Mrs. Dupuy’s Adele who claim too much. Madge lacks any of the charm of the other free- spirited women in Mrs. Hentz’s fiction. She is, actu- ally, something of a boor. She is loud, destructive of other people’s property and domestic harmony, “strong as a lion, wakeful as an owl,” she says of her- self, with a laugh that fills “every nook and comer of the capacious mansion” where Ernest and Gabriella live in New York City. One feels little sense of loss when this “bold, masculine, wild, and free,” this “dashing and untamable” (214) Madge fades into the

“chains” of matrimony (231) in the end. “ ...[ Wloman- ized ... not only by the refining power of love, but the chastening touch of sorrow” (466), she is married to a college professor.

Gabriella, on the other hand, certainly does not shrink into domesticity in this story. As a matter of fact, she marries Ernest early in the narrative and grows in character as a result. She grows into Caroline Lee Hentz’s feminine ideal. Madge Melville, speaking for the author, describes Gabriella as “the model wife of the nineteenth century ... wisest, virtuousest, best” (303). Ladylike and acquiescent in home affairs, Gabriella is willing to be a dutiful wife. She is not willing, however, to be dominated by her husband when his irrational jealousy makes him unjustly suspi- cious of her behavior.

As a child at Grandison Place, Ernest’s family home, Gabriella dreamed of being a poet and of resist- ing authority: “Must I weave for others the chain whose daily restraint chafed and galled my free, impa- tient spirit? Must I bear the awful burden of authority, that awful appendage of youth?” (29). Her impatient attitude toward authority changes, however, with the coming of adulthood. When Ernest expresses his love for her, she is willing to fit into the domestic, good- wife role her era designated for her. After Ernest’s proposal, “I have tasted woman’s highest, holiest joy,” she says to herself, “-the joy of loving and being loved” (191).

But her youthful free nature reasserts itself with mature strength when Ernest accuses her of respond- ing with amorous interest to the attentions of strange men. She will not tolerate his demeaning injustice: “My spirit rose in rebellion at the stem despotism of his manner, and nerved itself to resist his coercive will .... I felt firm to endure, strong to resist” (291). After all, she tells Ernest, “You did not stoop, or lower yourself, by wedding me. Love made us equal” (315). His vain and foolish passion soon makes her feel “above him,” to whom she had previously “looked up ... with reverence due to a superior being ...” (333).

Even Ernest’s mother finally turns against him. She says that she was wrong in counseling Gabriella to submit to his storms of temper. “I will tell her to stand firm and undaunted,” she says, “and breast the tempest. I will stand by her side and protect her ... if my son will be unjust, will be insane, I will at least protect [her] from the consequences of his guilty rashness” (358).

So, in Ernest Linwood, the women join hands in resisting the tyranny of the unjust man. In the end, after cool-headed Gabriella suggests a practical sepa- ration until “we can make a new covenant ... till pas-

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sion shall be elevated by esteem, love sustained by confidence” (4 1 S), Ernest and Gabriella are reunited. Now they “love each other as fondly” as before, but “less idolatrously” (467). Gabriella the foolish, love- smitten, man-smitten girl has grown up. It is Ernest who is diminished from a Byronic, self-absorbed, haughty domestic tyrant into a better husband, a man of some kindness and consideration and respect for others.

It is midway in the novel that a seemingly tired, bitter Mrs. Hentz posits the ideal marriage. This is the well-modulated relationship of Mr. and Mrs. Brahan. Gabriella’s love for Ernest grew out of an impetuous great passion, so taken was she by his smoldering Byronic beauty. In contrast, Mrs. Brahan tells Gabriella that “ours was not one of those romantic attachments which partake of the wildness of insanity, but a serene, steady flame, that burns brighter and brighter as life rolls on.” Even Madge Melville’s mar- riage works well because it is not a passionate affair, but instead a sensibly arranged relationship that grows out of a mild and patient mutual attraction between herself and Professor Regulus.

By the end of Ernest Linwood, Caroline Hentz seems somewhat tired out. In the final analysis, she might have felt as she put her pen away, there really can be no independent woman or man in God’s plan of life. Women and men alike are wrapped in those “fang-like chains of custom” of which Mrs. Gilman’s rebelliously fantasizing narrator speaks in Recollections of a Housekeeper. There is as much res- ignation as irony reflected, too, in something Gabriella says early in Ernest Linwood: “Better the daily task, the measured duty, the chained-down spirit, the girdled heart” than her vain dreams of literary freedom and greatness (69). The wild urges to free- dom of her heroines, and the domestic resistance of Gabriella are empty gestures for the essentially pes- simistic Mrs. Hentz, who sees only a final, universal anxiety for mankind. As she writes in Robert Graham:

The prophet voice which declared that “man is born to trou- ble as the sparks fly upward,” finds its echo in every human heart, whether darkened by ignorance or enlightened by

knowledge; and as in a bright, cloudless, glorious summer day, we look anxiously for the evening cloud, beyond the exuberance and fearlessness of youthful gaiety we perceive the advancing shadows of life. (27)

What Mrs. Caroline Lee Hentz reveals in Robert Graham is the defeatism characteristic of the novels written by Southern women at that time. She says in effect that life is short, and feminine revolt against male chauvinism is consequently not worth the trou- ble. What current feminism would argue is the oppo- site-that because life is short, women’s struggle for self-realization has special importance and meaning, and is worth the trouble.

Works Cited

Dupuy, Eliza Ann. The Planter’s Daughter. A Tale of Louisiana. Philadelphia: T. B . Peterson, 1857.

Gilman, Caroline. Recollections of a [New England] Housekeeper. New York: Harper, 1834.

-. Recollections of a Southern Matron. New York: Harper, 1838.

Hentz, Caroline Lee. Eoline; or , Magnotia Vale. Philadelphia: Fany and McMillan, 1852.

- . Ernest Linwood; or, The Inner Life of the Author. Philadelphia: T . B. Peterson, 1856.

-. Marcus Warland; or, The Long Moss Spring. A Tale ofrhe South. Philadelphia: A. Hart, 1853.

-. Robert Graham. A Sequel to Linda. Philadelphia: T . B . Peterson, 1855.

Hentz Family Papers 332, MS. Caroline Lee Hentz, Diary-Florence, Ala. 1836. Chapel Hill, NC: South- ern Historical Collection, U of North Carolina.

Jan Bakker is Professor of English at Utah State Univer- sity, where he offers courses in American literature of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. A specialist in the antebellum writing of the American South, he is author of Pastoral in Antebellum Southern Romance (LSU, 1989) and various articles on the women writers of the time and place.