Susan J. Tracy
In the Master’s Eye: Representations of Women, Blacks, and Poor Whites in Antebellum Southern Literature
Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1995. Pp. 307. $42.50
Reviewed by Barbara Rose

In George Tucker’s The Valley of Shenandoah (1824), a novel of the “Plantation School,” the protagonist Edward Grayson escorts his Northern guest around his estate, Beechwood. Exchanging greetings with his slaves as the two men pass through his fields, Grayson assures his friend from New York that blacks are better off as slaves than as “free laborers.” In fact, he argues, those born into slavery do not resent their situation; rather, they prosper under the benevolent concern of their white master, who cares for them as he would for his own chil­dren. Grayson’s educational stroll around Beechwood, identified by Susan Tracy as a standard convention of the plantation novel, is strikingly reminiscent of uto­pian narratives in which an authority figure, giving a guided tour to a visitor from our corrupt world, overcomes all objections by patiently answering each question raised by his ignorant but later suitably impressed guest. The analogy seems appropriate when one considers that the authoritarian nature of both sys­tems relies on discipline both external and internal: under the threat of punishment-a threat implicit in the regulatory gaze of “the master’s eye”-all mem­bers not only know their place, but they also know enough to keep to it.

In the Master’s Eye examines how the race, gender, and class inequalities of the plantation system are cloaked in the myth of benign paternalism in the antebellum historical romances of six authors: George Tucker, James Ewell Heath, William Alexander Caruthers, John Pendleton Kennedy, Nathaniel Bev­erly Tucker, and William Gilmore Simms. Their novels construct an upper-class planter hero whose “natural superiority” justifies control of his equally natural inferiors: women, blacks, and poor whites. The latter, because of their innate in­capacity for self-government, are necessarily under the benevolent care of the master, who governs them as a loving father governs his family.

These writers portray the plantation as one Christian family based on har­mony and loving discipline, emphasizing the affectionate bonds between master and slave; in fact, so grateful are the slaves that they refuse the offer of manumis­sion. In Kennedy’s Swallow Barn (1832), for example, Frank Meriwether is a model planter, “kind and considerate” toward his slaves and dependents. “His slaves appreciate this,” Kennedy writes, “and hold him in most affectionate rev­erence, and, therefore, are not only contented, but happy under his dominion” (156). Because the focus of these novels is on the evident superiority of the mas­ter, and hence the superiority of the plantation system he represents, blacks are never depicted with one another or with other whites without the master being present, as Tracy shrewdly notes. Defined and regulated as dependent children by the master’s eye, they have no existence beyond his scope.

Not only is the institution of slavery presented as protective, it is also offered as a civilizing force, introducing slaves to the morality and discipline of work. Swallow Barn depicts household slaves serving their master and his family with a happy mix of affection and deference: “A bevy of domestics, in every stage of training, attended upon the table, presenting a lively type of the progress of civi­lization, or the march of intellect; the veteran waiting man being well- contrasted with the rude half-monkey, half-boy, who seemed to have been for the first time admitted to the parlor: whilst between these two, were exhibited the successive degrees that mark the advance from the young savage to the sedate and sophisti­cated image of the old-fashioned negro nobility” (145).

Implicit in this crude racist vocabulary is the admonition that any threat to the system is a threat to civilization. To abolish slave labor is to abolish social order, unleashing chaos, violence, and savagery-the same terrors that real-life slavery both relied on and perpetuated, as the autobiographies of Frederick Douglass and Harriet Jacobs make clear. Because change is what the plantation system could not tolerate, it comes as no surprise that the novels Tracy examines are rigidly formulaic. She identifies a paradigmatic romance plot in which an upper-class heroine is rescued from the threats of a poor-white villain by the planter hero and his faithful black retainer. Harmony is restored with a reinvigorated paternalism, simultaneously reinforcing the symmetries of gender and class divisions and diverting attention from the realities of racial divisions. Then as now, “family values” have an almost irresistible ideological pull.

In her too brief conclusion, Tracy asks: “Why have these myths of the Old South persisted so long after the defeat of the planter class?” (216). Although she can offer no explanations beyond the obvious ones-racism and sexism-her gloomy tone is well-founded. The glamour of the Plantation Myth lives on: in 1998’s Christmas issue of The New York Times Book Review a major publisher advertised a lavish picture-book about Tara next to a biography of Jackie Robinson.