SOURCE: Gwin, Minrose C. “‘A Lie More Palatable Than the Truth’: Fictional Sisterhood in a Fictional South.” In Black and White Women of the Old South: The Peculiar Sisterhood in American Literature, pp. 19-43. Knoxville: The University of Tennessee Press, 1985.
In the following essay, Gwin suggests thematic affinities between Harriet Beecher Stowe's abolitionist novel Uncle Tom's Cabin and Mary H. Eastman's pro-slavery response Aunt Phillis's Cabin, especially in terms of the feminist subtext in both novels—Southern women as a whole standing against the dominant male power structure.
