SOURCE: "On DuBose Heyward's Peter Ashley," in Classics of Civil War Fiction, edited by David Madden and Peggy Bach, University Press of Mississippi, 1991, pp. 17-30.

In the following essay, Brown examines Peter Ashley, maintaining that the novel, while engaging, fails to explore the significant social and psychological issues it raises.

The "Old South," like any area that possesses distinctive characteristics and a complex and tragic history, has served many purposes in the world's imagination. Henry James, for one, fell in love with Charleston, whose fabled houses recalled "the fallen pride of provincial palazzini," whose walled and secret gardens called to mind some "little old-world quarter of quiet convents."

No surprise that a writer who made his meanings out of vivid oppositions—American youth and innocence vs. European age and experience—should have appropriated Charleston as an emblem of the lost beauty of a more genteel age. Whatever corruption...