Graduation Semester and Year
2007
Language
English
Document Type
Thesis
Degree Name
Master of Arts in English
Department
English
First Advisor
Timothy R Morris
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.
Disciplines
Arts and Humanities | English Language and Literature
License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-Share Alike 4.0 International License.
Recommended Citation
Tunnell, Gail Nash, "Shades Of Scarlett: Cultural Images Of Historical Southern Women" (2007). English Theses. 43.
https://mavmatrix.uta.edu/english_theses/43
Comments
Degree granted by The University of Texas at Arlington