Beyond the Big House: Southern Girlhoods in Louise Clarke Pyrnelle’s Diddie, Dumps, and Tot

In 1882, Louise Clarke Pyrnelle published the children’s novel Diddie, Dumps, and Tot: Or, Plantation Child-Life. Though mostly obscure now, Diddie, Dumps, and Tot was popular in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. As late as 1947, the book ranked at number 45—directly before Adventures of Huckleberry Finn—on the South Atlantic Bulletin’s list of “One Hundred Famous Southern Books” (English 13). Much of the novel’s popularity then (and obscurity now) rests on its romanticized depiction of plantation life. Diddie, Dumps, and Tot tells of the daily adventures and misadventures of three girl slaveholders (named Diddie, Dumps, and Tot) and their three girl slaves (named Riar, Chris, and Dilsey) on a Mississippi plantation. The girls play games and listen to folktales from adult slaves in a fashion similar to Joel Chandler Harris’ Uncle Remus stories. Pyrnelle, a teacher from Alabama, loosely based the book on her own experiences growing up on a plantation in the 1850s. Pyrnelle wrote one other plantation novel, Miss Li’l’ Tweetty, which was published posthumously in 1917 and told of one white girl and one black girl. Through its six main characters, however, Diddie, Dumps, and Tot offers a more nuanced portrait of how region shapes different girlhoods. As Pyrnelle explains in the novel’s preface, she intends to give “insight into a childhood peculiar to the South” (viii). Most notably, this book provides insight into what made girlhood Southern in the late nineteenth century.

Through its Southern setting, Diddie, Dumps, and Tot complicates typical representations of girls in late-nineteenth-century children’s literature. Most children’s books of this era focused on white girls in domestic settings. As Claudia Nelson explains, these books focused “on the interior, both of the home and of the individual, rather than on outdoor adventure or imperial conquest” (67). In contrast, books for and about boys more commonly showed outdoor travel away from home.¹ Pyrnelle’s plantation is certainly a domestic setting; however, the book presents black and white girls who engage in outdoor pursuits more frequently than they spend time inside their houses. In Diddie, Dumps, and Tot, girlhood varies by region because of the spaces girls inhabit and the ways they influence and are influenced by those spaces.

Focusing on the book’s outdoor settings, I show how Pyrnelle defines Southern girlhood as plantation girlhood, and she constructs two forms of Southern girlhood that are either white or black. The Southern features of these girlhoods become particularly apparent when considering the novel’s spatial concerns. Drawing upon spatial theory, as well as historical information about the spatial arrangement of plantations, I demonstrate how Pyrnelle represents plantation spaces that have gendered and racial meanings. The book then complicates the gender designations of these areas in order to reinforce the racial codes of slavery. Through their outdoor play, the black and white girl characters suggest that the division between masculinity and femininity is more fluid for Southern girls; however, this gender fluidity functions to privilege whiteness above blackness. Pyrnelle also connects white supremacist values to an agrarian ideal, thus using these two girlhoods to promote rural, outdoor lifestyles. Ultimately, I argue that the book’s spatial concerns identify a crucial link between girlhood, race, and agrarianism in its construction of Southern identity.

Like most postbellum plantation fiction, such as books by Thomas Nelson Page or Joel Chandler Harris, Diddie, Dumps, and Tot provides a white, elite perspective that romanticizes slavery and plantation life. For instance, Pyrnelle notes in the preface her hope “to tell of the pleasant and happy relations that existed between master and slave” (vi). In general, scholars tend to focus on the novel’s racial features. While Joyce E. Kelley asserts that the novel “challenge[s] the rigidity of the slave system” (142), other scholars, such as Donnarae MacCann and Paula Connolly, have noted that Pyrnelle reinforces racial stereotypes that subordinate blackness to whiteness. Likewise, Kristina DuRocher argues that Diddie, Dumps, and Tot socialized white Southern children into enforcing segregation, especially as the book was read into...