The Planter’s Northern Bride by Caroline Lee Hentz
The Planter’s Northern Bride by Caroline Lee Hentz
My rating: 1 of 5 stars
It is instructive, particularly in 2020, to read a book like this one, written as a refutation of Uncle Tom’s Cabin; in this syrupy novel about a northern woman’s marriage to a fabulously wealthy planter I was treated to the actual thinking of a writer who intended to do her best to defend the system of slavery. Her efforts are clear on every page. The planter in question is presented in terms of absolute, unquestioned nobility. The innocent northern girl whom he marries comes from a family of inept abolitionists whose views on slavery are presented as childishly naive. There are passages of the book that are achingly awful: a slave’s protestation of the fact that she hates her own looks and wishes she looked like a white woman; the freeing of a slave that is depicted as a callous kidnapping, ending in the slave’s return and her pleas to be returned to the good life of being human chattel; a slave rebellion by slaves who just don’t know any better, which is put down with the tenderest admonitions by the lordly master. It is a thoroughly sickening read, but if you want to know the attitudes that shaped so-called benevolent masters, here you have it, the whole deck of cards laid out for your inspection. It amazes me that the author cannot see her own false ideas. But the blindness of the writer is complete. What recommends her as a novelist is the thoroughness with which she documents the self-deception of a whole society, lost in a view of the world that reaffirmed its members in their collective wrongdoing.