The Culture of Defeat: On National Trauma, Mourning, and Recovery

by Wolfgang Schivelbusch

contrasting it with a satanic fall from grace. In Uncle Tom’s Cabin, the genial but weak-willed planter is the Southerner St. Clare, whereas the evil slave master is the transplanted Yankee Legree. Historian W. R. Taylor describes the villainous Legree as an “anti-planter” and his mansion, which perverts the principles of the “good” plantation, as an “anti-home”: “What we are given in a few pages is an evocative vision of the home become a factory, where everything, finally, is weighed in the balance scale of Legree’s cotton house. Southerners, who almost universally objected to these scenes, never fully understood that Harriet Stowe had simply imported into the South the factory scenes which Southerners were fond of invoking as contrast to the paternalism of the plantation.”127 Thus, far from consistently embodying the evils of slavery, the plantation, even in abolitionist novels, continues to represent the idealized image of an intact agrarian-patriarchal society.