SOURCE: Bakker, Jan. “‘… The Bold Atmosphere of Mrs. Hentz’ and Others: Fast Food and Feminine Rebelliousness in Some Romances of the Old South.” Journal of American Culture 21, no. 2 (summer 1998): 1-6.

In the following essay, Bakker explores the theme of hesitant or repressed rebellion by women in the writings of Caroline Lee Hentz, Caroline Gilman, and Eliza Ann Dupuy.

In the romances of the female authors of the Old South, there is no myth-making on the theme of the lost American Eden such as appears in the adventure fiction of their male counterparts. What the women wrote were indoor, triumph-of-love domestic romances that reveal suppressed rebelliousness against the expected submissiveness of females in the nineteenth century. A feminist urge is evident in the neglected fiction of women authors of the antebellum South well before it finds its clearer voice in the twentieth century. Back then and in that place...