An Introduction
The Southern belle is one of the most well known archetypes in American history. A composite ideal, the belle represents everything that a lady in the antebellum South strove to be. The belle was an intelligent, beautiful, charming, accomplished, and wealthy daughter of a plantation owner. The first documented prototype of a Southern belle, Bel Tracy, appeared in 1832 in John Pendleton Kennedy’s novel Swallow Barn and the traits she possessed dominated beliefs about ideal Southern womanhood for many years. From her heyday in the 18th and 19th centuries, through the American Civil War which challenged everything the plantation society stood for, and even into the 20th and 21st centuries, the belle ideal evolved and changed, and is alive and well.
The Southern colonies of the United States were founded by 17th century English explorers seeking economic prosperity, particularly in gold. The first prominent settlement of British colonists was established in 1607 in Jamestown, Virginia. Despite early failures and hardships, Virginia and the other Southern colonies became quite prosperous with the introduction of cash crops such as tobacco, sugar cane, cotton, rice and indigo to their economies. The economic and political power in the South was held by planters whose prosperity was dependent upon the cultivation and sale of these crops to Europe. Their wealth and success allowed them to construct a plantation aristocracy which placed these wealthy white landowners and their families at the top of the social hierarchy, followed by poor white yeoman farmers and indentured servants, and finally by slaves. This plantation system persevered through many generations of Southern colonists and through the American Revolution when the colonies won independence from Britain, securing it as a distinct part of life in the South.
One of the biggest upsets in elite Southern society came when war erupted between the states of the union. The Civil War caused the monumental destruction of not only the Southern architectural landscape but also the traditional Southern way of life. During the Civil War, belles were forced to put aside the aristocratic life that they had been prepared to live and redefine “bellehood” within the confines of a culture evolving before their eyes. Ironically, in their attempts to preserve the plantation culture, they participated in irreversibly changing it. However, in the years following the war, the idea of the Southern belle in American culture persisted and even thrived as elite Southerners grasped at the last vestiges of their former plantation society.
This attachment to the old way of life persisted past reconstruction and into the 20th and 21st centuries through many more wars and social movements and has now become a beloved part of Americana, partly due to the widespread dissemination of idealized plantation images by the media. In 1936, sixty years after the Civil War ended, Margaret Mitchell published her best-selling novel Gone With the Wind, whose fiesty heroine Scarlett O’Hara became the most iconic example of a “Southern belle” in history. The book was so wildly popular that three years later, in 1939, David O. Selznik adapted a screenplay from the book. Starring Vivien Leigh as Scarlett O’Hara, the film would go on to win ten Academy Awards and continues to be regarded as one of the greatest films of all time by both critics ans casual viewers alike. Similarly, in 1947, playwright Tennessee Williams wrote A Streetcar Named Desire featuring another iconic Southern belle in American culture, Blanche DuBois. The play had a two year run on Broadway and was made into a film in 1951, and like “Gone with the Wind” starred Vivien Leigh as its heroine. The play has also been adapted into a ballet, opera, and several television specials.
This fascination with the belles of the Old South plantation culture has spread well into the technological age, past movies, books and television shows, and onto the internet in blogs, personal websites, and online stores. Currently, a search on Google pulls up hundreds of pages that refer to the Southern belle. The hits include links to social networking sites, how-to articles, advertisements for books, YouTube videos, and blogs. The Southern belle strongly endures in American culture as an idealistic standard of womanhood in many ways.
The number of books and movies featuring the Southern belle created after the passing of the Civil War is staggering, indicating an American enchantment with the qualities she represents. Critically analyzing the creation and perseverance of this archetype allows the discovery of the Southern belle’s cultural purpose in America. Scholars such as Catherine Clinton in Tara Revisited: Women, War, and the Plantation Legend have discussed the actual lives of Southern woman from colonial times until the present. However, Clinton devotes only one chapter in her book to the societal conception of the Southern belle and dismisses the figure as a myth, existing only in the minds of Americans and the media. In addition, Giselle Roberts discusses at length the lives of actual elite, young Southern women in Confederate Belles but she does not go beyond this, into the persistence of the belle in modern culture.
Though discussion of the actual lives of the majority of Southern women is obviously important and cannot be ignored, expansion on the topic is necessary to include the ways in which the belle changed over time and has remained relevant. A great deal of the current historiography dealing with the Old South and its stereotypes focuses on debunking the myths associated with them, such as the Mammy figure, and perhaps, the Southern belle. Not enough attention has been paid to why those myths, if they are indeed such, gained such enduring popularity on such a large scale, and why they persist into the present. It is as important to deconstruct the reasons behind the American fascination and reverence of historical figures such as the Southern belle as it is to debunk any myths that persist there. Analysis of American beliefs over time that have allowed the Southern belle to live on in the hearts and minds of its citizens is invaluable to any study of Southern culture, and bridges time from colonial and antebellum America to the present day because it provides insight into what parts of history and culture the country considers important and worth preserving.
Life in the South has indeed changed drastically since Kennedy’s Bel Tracy and Mitchells’ Scarlett O’Hara were conceptualized. The United States is no longer a country tending to fresh wounds from the Civil War and many strides have been made since Jim Crow and race wars surged strongly in the reconstructed United States, so why is this idealized portrait of Southern women still prevalent? What was the role of the belle and in the antebellum South and what is her role now? Is she still relevant, and how? What caused these changes? The Southern belle was initially created as an archetype of womanly perfection to ensure cultural preservation in the face of looming, monumental and inevitable change. The ways of the Old South plantation culture were being threatened by the spread of industrialization and modernity from the North. The creation and idealization of an paradisiacal South, including the idyllic belle, allowed Southerners to old onto the last vestiges of theold way of life after t he Civil War forced change upon them. It is because of these attempts to preserve the culture of the Old South that the belle of the New South took shape.
Though many aspects of life in the South have changed, many of the main characteristics of the archetypal Southern belle still remain the same. For example, though most Americans no longer live on sprawling plantation properties with servants or participate in elaborate courtship rituals characteristic of the Old South, the modern day Southern belle is still expected to live an extremely extravagant lifestyle and possess unmatched beauty and charm in order to attract the attention of men. The change in what characteristics make up a true Southern belle likely occurred due to the assault on Southern culture during and after the Civil War, forcing belles to reevaluate what constituted Southern ladyhood. In their attempts to preserve an outmoded way of life, belles participated in transforming the archetype into a figure which could remain relevant regardless of social revolution in America, allowing the South to celebrate its distinct heritage.
Scarlett O’Hara, like eveything else in the South, has evolved.
This blog will showcase images, video, articles, excerpts from books, and more from the antebellum era to the present, relating to the Southern belle and her place in American culture and history.
