ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the relationship between Tamera Alexander’s Christian romance novels for women and the historical plantation sites, now museums, where they are set. Rather than providing an apolitical romantic fantasy imbued with strong morals, as their marketing suggests, these novels further a tradition of Southern women shaping Lost Cause Civil War narratives. Alexander inserts apologist rhetoric into her novels, even as she invites readers to visit the sites which inspired them. Readers then arrive at the sites carrying preconceived notions and internalized narratives that bear little relationship to documented histories of the Civil War.
Focusing upon Christmas at Carnton, this chapter explores Alexander’s politicization of romances as she endeavours to inculcate readers into a pro-South viewpoint that minimizes slavery’s horrors and impacts while furthering whitewashed nostalgia about plantation life. Connecting this strategy to well-established traditions by groups like the Ladies Memorial Association and Daughters of the Confederacy, the chapter demonstrates how women’s work has promoted Lost Cause narratives, right up to the present. In turn, this exploration highlights the symbiotic relationship between text and museum sites as each “sells” the other’s fictions.
