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Abstract
The plantation “Big Houses” of the antebellum U.S. South rest upon a nexus of power relations that broadly inform conceptions of “South” in many of its ideological configurations, be they economic, racial, ecological, or political. These sites’ treatment by writers as sites of pastoral and plantation romance before the Civil War emphasizes these edifices’ centrality for conducting a series of cultural signifiers. Following the collapse of the Confederacy in 1865, this edifice becomes rendered in the literature as a fragmentary monument of its former self, being framed through imageries of ruination, destruction, and dissolution. In this way, southern writers take part in a larger literary tradition commonly practiced by European and American writers which moralized on the ruins of antiquity in ways that reflect their perceptions of the modernity. Although the ruined or destroyed plantation home punctuates literature of the Reconstruction and New South periods, scholarly analysis of the aesthetic and ideological implications of these desiccated mansions remains relatively non-existent. I examine the treatment of the ruined and destroyed plantation big house by utilizing interpretive frameworks often applied to European ruin literature to draw out the aesthetic and semiotic implications of this transnational conceit. Analyzing these tropological patterns reveals the deeper nostalgias, critiques, anxieties, or reflections on empire, race, gender, modernity, and the environment. Focusing on the works of Constance Fenimore Woolson, Thomas Nelson Page, Booker T. Washington, W.E.B. Du Bois, and William Faulkner, I examine the trope of plantation ruin through extant frameworks of ruin theory. Delineating these movements in the ruination and destruction of the plantation home invites a unique method for ‘reading’ the defunctionalized, abandoned plantation big house as a metonym of the U.S. and its South, clarifies the ideological predilections of certain authors, exposes undiscovered racial tropes and spatial symbolisms, has applicability within larger networks of transnational, transatlantic cultural exchange and for present communities living among ruin, and offers unique possibilities for interdisciplinary pedagogy.