| Description |
x, 201 pages ; 24 cm |
| Bibliography |
Includes bibliographical references (pages 187-198) and index. |
| Contents |
Introduction: the Southern lady's dark double -- The beautiful serpent; or, not quite Eden -- E.D.E.N. Southworth -- Caroline Lee Hentz -- Augusta Jane Evans -- Women with moveable ways: the bad belle as survivor -- Ellen Glasgow -- Evelyn Scott -- Margaret Mitchell -- Caroline Gordon -- To call myself an artist: destroying the bad belle -- Eudora Welty -- Elizabeth Spencer -- Lee Smith -- Kaye Gibbons -- Conclusion: for whom the belle told. |
| Summary |
Publisher's description: When Scarlett O'Hara fluttered her dark lashes, did she threaten only the gentleman in her parlor or the very culture that produced her? Examining the ₃bad belle₄ as a recurring character, The Belle Gone Bad finds that white southern women writers from the antebellum period to the present have used treacherous belles to subtly indict their culture from within. Combining the southern ideal of ladyhood with the sexual power of the dark seductress, the bad belle is the perfect figure with which to critique a culture that effectively enslaved both its white and black women. Betina Entzminger traces the development of the bad belle from nineteenth-century domestic novelist E.D.E.N. Southworth to contemporary novelist Kaye Gibbons. Coy and alluring like the traditional southern belle, the bad belle is also manipulative and knowing. By making the patriarch vulnerable to women who outwardly conform to the limiting conventions of womanhood but inwardly break all the rules, these writers challenged a society that stereotyped black women as promiscuous and forced white women onto pedestals while committing heinous acts in their name. The Belle Gone Bad shows that even writers who have been critically dismissed as too domestic or conservative to be innovative did challenge southern institutions and conceptions about race, class, and gender. What unites the dangerous belles created by several generations of women writing in the South, old and new, is their liberating potential. |
| Subject |
American fiction -- Southern States -- History and criticism.
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American fiction. |
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Southern States. |
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American fiction -- Women authors -- History and criticism.
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American fiction -- Women authors. |
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American fiction -- White authors -- History and criticism.
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American fiction -- White authors. |
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Women and literature -- Southern States.
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Women and literature. |
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Man-woman relationships in literature.
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Man-woman relationships in literature. |
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Southern States -- In literature.
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Femmes fatales in literature.
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Femmes fatales in literature. |
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Seduction in literature.
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Seduction in literature. |
| ISBN |
0807128368 paperback alkaline paper |
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080712785X alkaline paper |
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9780807127858 alkaline paper |
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9780807128367 paperback alkaline paper |
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