CAROLINE LEE HENTZ'S LONG JOURNEY

Alabama Heritage, Winter 2005 by Beidler, Philip D

And here, perhaps, we find Hcntz at last in her deepest identity as a popular nineteenth-century women's writer. Like other contemporary women writers, she practiced what might today be termed strategic feminism, perfecting the early American novel of female education-a genre by women, about women's concerns, and written largely for women. At the same time, she wrote passionately, prolifically, popularly, and profitably. In this degree, Caroline Lee Hent/, set a fairly conventional example of the larger national sisterhood of women writers. But her art called her as well to larger matters of political and cultural participation. In her final novel, she delineated a heroine's struggle to climb her way out of material and spiritual impoverishment, toward what we might now call self-actuali/ation and independent personhood, in a historical and literary example that stays with us to this day.

As for Nicholas, he died in Marianna, Florida, in November 1856. But by then, Caroline Lee Hentz, exhausted with years of nursing attendance, had already preceded him to the grave.

"THE ANTI-TOM"

USUAI, ESTIMATES IDENTIFY between twenty and thirty titles that can be grouped under the rubric of "anti-Toms"-southern novels written specifically in direct response to Harriet Beecher Stowe's anti-slavery novel Uncle Tom's Cabin. In 1852 alone (the year Stowe's novel appeared in book form, following its 1851-52 serialization in the abolitionist journal the National Era), at least eight contenders entered the field, including William Gilmore Simms's loftily entitled The Sword and the Distaff.

Some titles made clear their intention to confront Stowe directly: Robert Criswell's Uncle Tom's Cabin Contrasted with Buckingham Hall, the Planters Home; W. L. Smith 's Life at the South; or, Uncle T Om 's Cabin As It Is; and C. H. Wiley's work of the same name, subtitled A Companion to Uncle Tom's Cabin. Others ranged from the semiparodic, as in Mary H. Eastman's Aunt Phillis's Cabin, to the deflationary, as in the Rev. Baynard R. Hall's Frank freeman's Barber Shop. In 1853 at least five more followed, with ingenious anti-Stowe titles at a premium. M. J. Mclntosh published 'L'he Lofty and'theLowly; or, Good in All and None All Good, and J. W. Page followed suit with Uncle Robin in His Cabin in Virginia, and Tom without One in Boston. Matters tailed off in 1854, with Caroline Lee Hentz's novel of that year finding its ehief competition in Simms's republished Sword and the Distaff, under the new title Woodcraft, and Lucien Chase's English Serfdom and American Slavery; or, Ourselves as Others see Us. Still, the last half of the decade would record ten more efforts, extending to the very eve of the Civil War.