SOURCE: Gwin, Minrose C. “‘A Lie More Palatable Than the Truth’: Fictional Sisterhood in a Fictional South.” In Black and White Women of the Old South: The Peculiar Sisterhood in American Literature, pp. 19-43. Knoxville: The University of Tennessee Press, 1985.

In the following essay, Gwin suggests thematic affinities between Harriet Beecher Stowe's abolitionist novel Uncle Tom's Cabin and Mary H. Eastman's pro-slavery response Aunt Phillis's Cabin, especially in terms of the feminist subtext in both novels—Southern women as a whole standing against the dominant male power structure.

… literature and sociology are not one and the same; it is impossible to discuss them as if they were.

James Baldwin, “Everybody's Protest Novel”

Because writers of fiction and poetry tend to grope for meanings rather than superimpose them—Yeats called this process the “public dream”—literary criticism can bring to the surface what otherwise might lie buried in the...