SOURCE: "Plantation Fiction, 1865-1900," in The History of Southern Literature, edited by Louis D. Rubin, Jr., and others, Louisiana State University Press, 1985, pp. 209-18.

MacKethan comments on how Page unconsciously reveals the weaknesses of the plantation system through his use of black narrators who embody the tensions of the master-slave relationship.

The literary phenomenon of the Old South, centered in the image of plantation culture, was the creation of writers pursuing careers in a very different South, dubbed "new" in economic, social, and political as well as literary structures. Thomas Nelson Page, the most durable of the post-Civil War plantation romancers, might assert that "the New South is . . . simply the Old South with its energies directed into new lines"; however, it was solely the newness of those lines that encouraged postbellum admirers of the plantation to turn a defeated way of life into a substantial legend. The design...