SOURCE: "Thomas Nelson Page: The Plantation as Arcady," in The Virginia Quarterly Review, Vol. 54, No. 2, Spring, 1978, pp. 314-32.

MacKethan relates how Page created his Arcadian vision of the antebellum South from his conflicted awareness that the Old South was forever destroyed yet still a symbol of strength and pride for the New South.

Thomas Nelson Page, the elder son of a Virginia aristocrat living on a gracious plantation, could watch with pride as his father rode out in bright uniform and flowing cape to defend the Confederacy. Yet in later years, he would remember his father's homecoming even better than his grand departure. What was most vivid to his memory was the image of "his hand over his face, and his groan, ''I never expected to come home so.'" Out of such recollections, out of his sense of the discontinuity in memories of life before and after...