December 1, 2000

Cuban Slaveholder’s Plantation is the Setting of a Recently Reissued Novel

(Mahwah) -- Patricia M. Ard, assistant professor of English at Ramapo College of New Jersey and a Morristown resident, is the author of an introductory essay and editor of the recently reissued Juanita: A Romance of Real Life in Cuba Fifty Years Ago. Originally published in 1887 and reissued in September by the University Press of Virginia, the novel was written by Mary Peabody Mann, who based it on her experience of living on a Cuban slaveholder’s plantation from 1833 to 1835.

Though a surprising number of middle-class women from the United States traveled to Cuba in the early 19th century, few possessed the literary gifts and intellectual connections of Mary Peabody Mann. Mann was at the center of New England intellectual life: she was married to Horace Mann, a prominent and effective proponent of public education; her sister Sophia was married to Nathaniel Hawthorne; and her sister Elizabeth brought the kindergarten movement to the United States.

An outgrowth of the Gothic literary tradition in the Americas, Juanita centers on the extended visit of Helen Wentworth, a New England teacher, to a childhood friend’s plantation. There she witnesses African slaves’ arrival, sale and gross mistreatment at the hands of coffee and sugar planters. The novel’s namesake is the beautiful mulatta slave with whom the plantation owner’s son falls in love. The novel raises questions about the relation of slavery in the Caribbean to that in the United States, while also probing the connection between romance and race.

Ard’s introductory essay reinvigorates the place of women writers in the American Renaissance and American reform movements. Showing possible mutual influences between Mann and Nathaniel Hawthorne, Ard also discusses links between Mann and her contemporary, Harriet Beecher Stowe. As it brings to light significant aspects of antislavery feminist authors, Juanita informs the reading of canonical texts such as Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852) and Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861). The reissue of Juanita both introduces contemporary readers to a neglected novel and illuminates our understanding of 19th century American literature.

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