Shades Of Scarlett: Cultural Images Of Historical Southern Women

Abstract

The white antebellum/Civil War-era woman occupies an evolving archetypal status in American cultural consciousness throughout the twentieth century. In 1936, extending a one-hundred year tradition of featuring Southern belles in novels, Margaret Mitchell published Gone with the Wind; in 1996, Charles Frazier published Cold Mountain. Both of these novels offer striking images of the Southern belle as well as the "poor white" Southern woman. My paper will compare the images and interactions of upper and lower class female characters, considering the earlier stereotypical characteristics given to each group, the homosocial relationships between the two groups, and the revision of both, and will show that the strict social and cultural boundaries separating these two groups are reworked in the later novel. The 1967 novel Christy serves as a midpoint text and offers a modification of the GWTW belle/poor white female interaction that somewhat foreshadows the major revision given in Cold Mountain.