Lucinda MacKethan, Plantation Romances and Slave Narratives: Symbiotic Genres

Read together, the "loyalist" plantation romance and the "fugitive" slave narrative speak to one another as symbiotic southern genres, even if only contrapuntally. The plantation romances exhibit considerable anxiety about the stability of the slaveholding South, while the slave narratives are not only stories of flight from the South but of deeply held cultural and familial roots in the South. When Jacobs and Douglass's narratives are grouped under the heading of "Literatures of Slavery" with plantation romances and Anti-Tom novels, the regional dynamic of the antebellum South is clarified for all of these genres.

Many of the novels that we call plantation romances also bear a different name: we know them and see them discussed as "Anti-Tom novels," written implicitly or explicitly to counter the negative view of the South that Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852) popularized with such amazing force. Even before her novel appeared serially, southern novels set on plantations were responding to abolitionist rhetoric with idealistic portrayals of the master class, embellished with usually silent slaves in the background. The slave narrative, conversely, is viewed as having its impetus as an explicitly abolitionist form, like Stowe's novel (indeed the narratives were an important source for her book's rendering of slave life). The fugitive or freed slaves, writing first-hand accounts of bondage, would hardly be expected to claim to be southerners and might understandably have identified themselves, once free, as radically "Different-From" the region where they had been denied human identity. Yet the narratives actually remind us how deeply slaves "belonged" to the South – not only in the horrifying legal sense but also in terms of their own self-identification, as well as loyalty to their own blood families (not their romantically and falsely defined "white" families).

Read together, the "loyalist" plantation romance and the "fugitive" slave narrative speak to one another as symbiotic southern genres, even if only contrapuntally. The plantation romances were written partly as answers to Northern media’s images, yet it is also striking to note some thematic coding within the genre that deconstructs some of the transparent pro-slavery positions they presume to vocate. This genre was perhaps not intentionally one of resistance, yet writers and readers of such works seem to have been unable to avoid using the form not only to promote their way of life but also to express their deep anxieties about it.