Juanita: A Romance of Real Life in Cuba Fifty Years Ago

by Mary Tyler Peabody Mann (Editor)

Originally published in 1887 and never before reprinted, Juanita is a historical romance based on Mary Peabody Mann's experience of living on a Cuban slaveholder's plantation from 1833 to 1835. The novel centers on the extended visit of helen Wentworth, a New England teacher, to a childhood friend's plantation, where she witnesses African slaves' arrivals and their sale and gross mistreatment at the hands of coffee and sugar planters. Juanita is a beautiful mulatta slave with whom the plantation owner's son falls in love. Extending the tradition of Gothic fiction in the Americas, Mann's novel raises questions about the relation of slavery in the Caribbean to that in the United States, and between romance and race, adding an important element to our understanding of nineteenth-century American literature. Patricia M. Ard's introductory essay places Mann- with her literary gifts and intellectual connections to Nathaniel Hawthorne, Ralph Waldo Emmerson, and Henry David Thoreau- at the very center of the American Renaissance and American reform movements.

222 pages, Paperback

First published October 1, 2000

About the author

Mary Tyler Peabody Mann was born the second oldest Peabody sister in the influential Massachusetts family. Mary was a teacher, writer, reformer, abolitionist, and the wife of educator, Horace Mann.

Reviews

[Dusty · Rating 3 out of 5]

Like Gómez de Avellaneda's Sab or Macedo's Simeão, Juanita pertains to that genre of nineteenth-century works of fiction that oppose slavery by promoting condescending and racist stereotypes.

The book is based on a trip the author, Mary Tyler Peabody Mann, who happened also to be the wife of Horace Mann and sister-in-law of Nathaniel Hawthorne, took to Cuba sometime in the 1830s, though she didn't start transforming her experiences into a novel until the 1850s and didn't finish it until the 1880s. Her ostensible point is that slavery has no place in a just and Christian society, but why that point was relevant when the book was published in 1887 -- after slavery had been abolished and the United States and phased out in Cuba -- seems an unanswered question.

What's novel about Mann's entry in the abolitionist canon is, I think, her perspective as an educator. Juanita may be Juanita's title character, but its protagonist is the New-England schoolteacher Helen Wentworth, arguably a stand-in for the author herself, who can't help but contrast the educational systems of Cuba and the United States, ultimately arguing that the inefficiencies of the former are what makes it less ready for nationhood and more susceptible to the sinful practice of slavery. Moreover, many of the book's most poignant scenes take place in the Rodriguez plantation's two nurseries, the luxurious one for the family's white children and the one makeshift in an abandoned chicken coop for slave children, driving home Frederick Douglass's point that it is varying levels of education that most criminally separates the powerful from the subordinate social classes.

Thumbs up for the novel's emphasis on social justice -- Mann could be considered a forerunner to Jane Addams in certain rhetorical aspects -- and for the Virginia press for making the book available to readers at large. Thumbs down for Mann's hurtful depictions of dark-skinned characters, the scheming, orangutan-armed housemaid Camilla in particular.

[Katie · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book gets very rushed toward the end--after a leisurely portrait of life on a coffee plantation in Cuba, the final chapters cram in years, rushing toward the ending which the reader knows cannot be good. Otherwise fairly intriguing.

[Justin · Rating 2 out of 5]

I give it some credit for at least being abolitionist, but damn this book sucks. Just 450 pages of watching white people talk about how bad slavery is. Let the damn slaves speak for themselves!