SOURCE: Gebhard, Caroline. “Reconstructing Southern Manhood: Race, Sentimentality, and Camp in the Plantation Myth.” In Haunted Bodies: Gender and Southern Texts, edited by Anne Goodwyn Jones and Susan V. Donaldson, pp. 132-55. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1997.

In the following essay, Gebhard enumerates culturally subversive qualities in otherwise sentimental representations of white Southern gentlemen in the literature of the New South.

[Colonel Grangerford] was a gentleman all over. … His hands was long and thin, and every day of his life he put on a clean shirt and a full suit from head to foot made out of linen so white it hurt your eyes to look at it.

—Mark Twain, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

He had been a colonel in the Confederate army, and still maintained, with the title, the military bearing which had always accompanied it. His hair and mustache were white and silky, emphasizing the rugged...