Behind Closed Doors: Southern Upper-Class Notions of Womanhood in the Plantation Mistress's Intimate Sphere

Abstract

This paper focuses on the extent to which the plantation mistress’s intimate sphere corresponded to southern upper-class notions of womanhood in the period from 1820 to 1860. As a contribution to the feminist revisionist scholars examining the roles and identities of plantation mistresses in the antebellum South, this paper gives an interdisciplinary approach—historical, socio-cultural, and psychological—to the ways in which southern ladies adopted the poststructuralist concept of fluid identities as they mediated community requirements and the private sphere. Understanding the complex and oxymoronic identities of southern ladies as they moved from the public sphere to the private sphere, and vice versa, allows for a deeper knowledge of the social functions and behavioral implications of the intense public surveillance within the close-knit southern community of gentility.