The Sonic South: Nineteenth-Century Plantation Literature (Sound in History)

An examination of the influence of white listening practices on literary representations of the plantation South

Early colonial histories of the plantation South often relied on multisensory descriptions to construct an image of the region as a “land of beauty.” While these early accounts are rich in visual and tactile imagery, aural impressions played an important role in constructing its paradisiacal nature. To truly enjoy this southern Elysium, however, necessitated a kind of selective hearing—a willingness to shut one’s ears to the sounds of slavery. While travelers south frequently remarked on the aural disconnect between the South they first longed for and the one they found, antislavery activists worked tirelessly from the 1830s on to heighten this sonic dissonance, encouraging listeners to “open” their ears “to the cries, tears and groans” of the enslaved, as David Walker called for in his Appeal.

In The Sonic South, Rebeccah Bechtold traces the legacy of these ways of hearing in the popular plantation literature of the 1830s to 1860s, studying how white listeners both heard and imagined the plantation South and its Black communities. While proslavery writers like William L. G. Smith and Caroline Hentz contended that the physiological differences between whites and Blacks could be tracked in how each heard the world around them, antislavery writers like Harriet Beecher Stowe, James Robert Gilmore, Epes Sargent, and Lydia Maria Child relied on sound’s more ephemeral qualities to highlight the potential potency of Black voices to unsettle the status quo, illustrating in the process how easily the idealized southern soundscape could erode. Bechtold argues that, collectively, these writings demonstrate the importance of the southern soundscape to the South’s regional identity and to white perceptions of the enslaved.