SOURCE: "Thomas Nelson Page and the Postbellum Writers," in The Heroic Ideal in American Literature, The Free Press, 1971, pp. 105-11.

Gross discusses the protagonist of "Marse Chan" as Page's most fully delineated Southern hero.

Nowhere in postbellum Southern literature is [the] formal perpetuation of Southern chauvinism more clearly articulated than in the fiction of Thomas Nelson Page; indeed Page's conception of character and place and time is controlled by his slavish dedication to an idealization of the code of Southern heroism. He fuses the sentimental literary tradition and the glorification of the Southern past, and gives them a special significance, a special poignance, in the postbellum period when the South is suffering what he felt was the ignominy of Reconstruction. By idealizing the historical South and transmuting it into a civilization that is parochial and self-sufficient and intensely chauvinistic, Page makes the various types in his fiction—the...