SOURCE: Tracey, Karen. “Caroline Hentz: Counterplots in the Old South.” In Plots and Proposals: American Women's Fiction, 1850-90, pp. 49-75. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2000.

In the following excerpt, Tracey examines the “double-proposal” novels of Caroline Lee Hentz as works that critique the position of privileged women in antebellum society while reinforcing the overall values of the Old South.

… [Elsewhere] I argue that the double-proposal plot is inherently likely to destabilize readers' notions of love and marriage, since by its very structure it calls into question easy clichés of “the right suitor” and “true love.” And I argue that women writers of double-proposal novels were, in general, interested in reform of courtship and marriage and in expanded opportunities for women outside of marriage. How, then, to explain the appearance of this supposedly progressive plot in works by Caroline Hentz and Augusta Evans, avowedly conservative writers of the...