SOURCE: “Domesticity and the Discourse of Slavery: ‘John Lamar’ and ‘Blind Tom’ by Rebecca Harding Davis,” in ESQ, Vol. 38, 1st Quarter, 1992, pp. 31-56.

In the following essay, Pfaelzer asserts that Davis challenges the notion that women and slaves thrive in confinement in her stories “John Lamar” and “Blind Tom”.

In July of 1867, William Dean Howells concluded that “our war has not only left us the burden of a tremendous national debt, but has laid upon our literature a charge under which it has hitherto staggered very lamely.”¹ Modern critics from Daniel Aaron to Hazel Carby have tended to agree: in terms of literature, the Civil War was barren. This significant absence stems from the narrative conventions of antebellum literature, from the hidden history of abolition fiction, from historical ambivalence about the war and about race, and—most particularly—from cultural repressions of slavery.

Daniel Aaron initially accounts for...