Intimacy and Power in the Old South: Ritual in the Lives of the Planters

Steven M. Stowe examines three types of ritual central to the elite planter culture of the pre-Civil War South: the affair of honor, courtship, and coming of age. Using these rituals as forman "maps" of Southern culture, Stowe shows how each embodies themes of authority, sexuality, and kinship, and he explores the full significance of such events as duels, cotillions, and the departure of a young person for school. In private lives these social rituals were embraced or resisted and ultimately shaped into everyday experience. Stowe;s biographies of three families show that the boundaries of private and social life became difficult to draw. The resulting tension between expectations and their fulfillment, between power and intimacy, lies at the heart of planter sulture in the Old South.