ABSTRACT
Harriet Beecher Stowe, Caroline Lee Hentz, and Kate Chopin are representative of nineteenth-century white women writers who produced works that reflect a range in their portrayal of the black female character—a range that includes clear examples of the older black woman in the role of the stereotypical mammy. This chapter will determine the basis on which each mammy figure is delineated within the context of the ideal white female by drawing attention to the language of the narrator, the white mistress, the minor character, and the mammy figure herself, as well as the absence of the language. Both Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852) and Hentz's The Planter's Northern Bride (1854) were published prior to the Civil War. Stowe writes from the anti-slavery and Hentz from the pro-slavery perspective. Chopin integrates race, gender, and class issues in her short stories, "La Belle Zoraïde (1894), "A No Account Creole" (1894), and "Beyond the Bayou" (1894), and in her novel, The Awakening (1899), which were published long after the Civil War. Chopin published during a decade when black female literary works flourished.
