Nostalgia and the Emotional Turn in Postbellum Plantation Memoirs

Abstract

This article examines how white southern memoirists of the late nineteenth-century nostalgically constructed the Old South, using plantation life-writing to assert regional identity and historical distinctiveness after emancipation, the Civil War, and Reconstruction. These memoirs depict the antebellum plantation as a harmonious, orderly society characterized by racial stability, rigid class hierarchies, and prescribed gender roles. The article carefully explores how nostalgia shaped these depictions, transporting former enslavers and their families into a romanticized past that glossed over, or elided, the harsh realities of plantation era slavery. Central to these narratives is the image of the ‘faithful slave,’ particularly the Mammy figure, whose depiction reinforced paternalistic myths. Through these rhetorical strategies, plantation memoirists sought to create a vision of race relations rooted in an idealized past, one that could influence future interactions between white and Black southerners to ensure continued white dominance within southern society and culture