Representing the plantation mistress in antebellum American literature

Scope and method of study. The purpose of this study was to examine the portrayal of the plantation mistress in southern women's diaries, slave narratives and abolitionist documents. More specifically, this thesis focused on exploring how nineteenth-century literary conventions and societal expectation affect the portrayal of the plantation mistress in antebellum American literature.;Findings and conclusions. The myth of the southern lady and the cult of true womanhood ultimately influenced the historical or literary representation of the southern woman. The image of the southern white plantation mistress has long been plagued with stereotypes which misrepresent these women and distort their true value and importance in antebellum history. The works of Child, Jacobs, Douglass, Stowe, Griffith and Mary Chesnut devote attention to the lives of elite southern women of antebellum America. Written for different purposes and by authors from different racial and social backgrounds, their writings document both personal experience and social context in an attempt to reconstruct life under slavery. Taken together, these six authors provide us with a comprehensive portrayal of the plantation mistress as seen from the perspectives of northern and southern women and former slaves. Their texts present an understanding of the ways in which various characteristics of the mistress are exposed and emphasized according to the writers' view points and the rhetorical and historical contexts at the time of publication. While abolitionist writers and former slaves focus more on the corrupting effect of slavery on the mistress which resulted in her violence and rage, southern women writers provide a justification for the conflicting nature of the mistress as she struggled to maintain her lady-like image while facing the reality of her life.