no*

MYTH AND AGONYs THE SOUTHERN WOMAN AS BELLE

Anne W. Lyons

A Dissertation

Submitted to the Graduate School of Bowling Green State University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of

DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY

December 1974

Approved by Doctoral Committee cì 1975

ANNE WARD LYONS

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED ABSTRACT

The character of the Southern belle in American literature was first the product of an incipient literary parataxis characterized by the aureate language of self-discovery. She emerged by force of language, not necessarily an invention so much as>a (travesty. She was importantly ready-made for surviving in a world whose primitive and instinctive elements were batokened by fantasy on the one hand, and a presumed integrity on the other. A character who belonged more to literature than to life, she was an archetypal force both of an uncertain morality and a moribund code of chivalry. Not without deep ties to the descriptive elements which spawned her, and by the forces of war and romance and budding literary realism, the belle found her way into the marketplace where insipience gave way to true immediacy, where her formerAsexual, psychological, and moral displacement became the seedbeds of exploitation. Preserved in an aura of flashing eyes and sober allegiances, she was both stereotyped and parodied. She was then subjected to the alienation, tension, and psychological obtuseness which only caricature could adequately sustain.

The fundamental reason for the belle's existence was that the early writers of the bellehood code wanted a personhood that sounded romantic but had to function as real. The maze of trappings and convoluted stylizations which accompanied her character, rather than confine her to a stereotypical role, opened a variety of horizons for keeping her alive and well. The result of this treatment was the universally recognized "Southern belle"--a pathetically weak and shallow yet physically alluring coquette, a creature of unsur­ passed voluptuosity. In the hands of writers like Tennessee Williams, William Faulkner, Carson McCullers, and others the belle fulfilled her dramatic potential, the germ of which she had always possessed, while becoming exactly the opposite of what she began as. She was freed from the prison of stereotyped melodrama and the confinements of popular convention. 16

Contents

Page Preface ...... i

Paradox: Southern Vision and the Belle...... 1

Literary Stances of Conduct; The Emergence of the Belle as a Figure of Life...... 25

The Physical, Moral, Psychological Belle ...... 26

The Mode of Description and Motivation...... 36

The Cosmetic Belle...... 42

The Belle in Caricature...... 54

The Decadent Belle...... 58

The Vision Realized; Writers of the Bellehood Code...... 68

Frances Neuiman: The Belle as a Preoccupation...... 74

Tennessee Williams: The High-Tensioned Woman ...... 81

Carson McCullers; Disavowing the Grotesque as Figures of Life...... 92

Robert Penn Warren; Melodrama Under the Wire ...... 99

William Faulkner: The Belle and her Losses ...... 104

Lillian Heilman: Women of Outrage and Light...... 112

Stark Young; The Belle in Transition...... 117

Caroline Gordon; Instinct for the Pattern...... 123

Allen Tate: The Fugitive Tradition and the Belle ...... 125

Eudora Welty: Character and Place by Implosion ...... 126

All the Ruined Helens; The Psychology of What Remains ...... 130 Preface

The evidence for dealing with a regional phenomenon such as the

Southern belle came with its own built-in prejudices, including the one which prompted me to skepticism, even to laughter. And then came the reading of hundreds of the earliest attempts at celebrating the so-called chivalric code of the antebellum South. What I found was an abundance of literary fluff, but soon enough I became absorbed in the emerging sincerity and intensity which seemed invariably to underlie all the subject matter. I was quickly aware, for example, of what could be called a cosmic strain running through all of the literature—much of it ludicrous, some absolutely banal, but all simply designed and impulsively executed.

There is unquestionably in the Southern literary vision evidence of pragmatic parataxis. One by one, the works and authors I encountered seemed to pass by as part of a single huge process, growing like Topsy, replacing one another in a panorama which seemed to defy both reason and evolution. I found expediency at the roots, temperament solidifying form, with complete idealism synthesizing these. And so, left with the puzzle that this generated, I purposely tried to isolate the paradoxes from which natural problems would arise.

First was the major difficulty of describing the sensibilities out of which the subject matters came, and here I encountered volumes of speculative material, none of which seemed ever exactly to fit the ii

general feelings I was getting as my reading progressed. For one

thing, I had assumed that there had to be some kind of relationship

between the South’s emergent triumph in American literature which

worked well with the ideals and foundations of the American Republic.

Many commentators had believed the South an isolated place, given to

its eccentricities which had grown from a lack of connection with

main-line American history. Here I was deluged with theories about

the religious and sociological principles and quirks that have, as

William Van O'Connor describes it, "produced a regional literature

principally concerned with the grotesque." O'Connor and most of the

Southern apologists, except Walter Sullivan, make the grotesque their primary assumption. Even C. Hugh Holman tries occasionally to argue

in favor of the grotesque. From the beginning I have disagreed with this tenet; I trust that this study proves a more perceptive digest

of the Southern sensibility.

What I wanted to do, too, was better link the South with America itself, to demonstrate the truth of William Gilmore Simms's statement,

"to be national in literature, one must needs be sectional," by suggesting that Southern literature, far from being provincial and consequently predictable, had no totally familiar surfaces, simply because the American nation itself had none. Among the many significant problems which emerged, certainly a most important one was the identification of an American sensibility as well. Hence, one of the fundamental subtleties of the paper is the assumption that the South, as a part of the United States of America, fights the Victorian ethic iii

in all its arts. Again Sullivan’s ideas are attractive, because he

contends that the major problem of American writers lies in their

struggle with our Victorian-Romantic ideals. All of American

literature, not simply that which issues from the South, is affected

by this heritage, even though the Southern stereotypes seem abler at

straddling the fence.

More and more the Southern belle seems to call attention to this problem. I could not find in her, therefore, an evolution per se.

I made serious efforts to start with the earliest forms and go from there to the next step, but there was no evolution of the character.

Almost as though expediency controlled her, the belle reappeared when she was needed, and changed little in her own code while authors continued to manipulate her surroundings, whether these were on the plantation or in the city mansion, whether she was posed on the great lawn or beside a gilded harp. It appears indisputable that the fundamental reason for the belle's existence is that the early writers of the bellehood code wanted a personhood that sounded romantic but had to function as real. The result is the maze of trappings and convoluted stylizations which instead of confining the belle to a stereotypical role opened up all kinds of horizons for keeping her alive and well.

There is a dramatic change, however, in the process which occurred after psychological forces could be applied to that

"sweetness and light" whose former motive had been only the great affirmation of human dignity. The belle in the hands of writers like IV

Tennessee Williams, William Faulkner, Carson McCullers, Truman

Capote, and others reaches the peak of dramatic possibilities while becoming exactly the opposite of what she began as. How then could I insist on an evolution when, in fact, that potentiality was always true; its strain of concentration is present as much in the earliest belles as in the twentieth century ones? The major difference was in the treatment, the public appeal, or the artistic problems of the age. This is also why the term itself was always such a pregnant one, even when it was applied unsuccessfully; it was punned by Pope, degraded by abolitionists, shunned by effetes, yet found its way into the very blood of popular literature, finally taking on the proper cynicism of our time. Indeed, women doormen have taken the name "Doorbelles" while the Dairy Farmers' Wives' Coalition call themselves "Cowbelles."

This point remains: the belle was a romantic caricature, always virtually high-tensioned and neurotic, always, as Blanche DuBois puts it, bred to "epic fornication." My task was to convey this as gently and faithfully as the belle herself has served the purposes of literature: whether a Bel Tracy, or a Scarlett O'Hara, or a Blanche

DuBois, she remained, to one degree or another, a capable figure of life, an incontestable representative of art. The starting point of this study is a curious one, a paradox: the Southern belle is a beauty, attractively charming and feminine, but a travesty, a bitch goddess and a termagant. And the concluding thesis is a further paradox: inasmuch as the mature treatments of the belle acknowledge V

that she is artificial, self-indulgent, lonely, without dignity or

self-respect, but nevertheless tortured by her own psychological

awareness, she thus becomes genuinely real and humanly sensitive—

a character who has profitably endured the torment of social systems

and their attendant pressures.

Research problems presented the greatest initial challenge.

The literature relevant to my study had remained an uncharted domain

because all but Southern critics seem to hold the character in

contempt. Southern scholars, on the other hand, tend to be

chauvinistic and inaccurate: I regularly found books mistitled in

citation, characters inaccurately described, and digests which more

suited polemicism than scholarship. Even though I found John M.

Bradbury's Renaissance in the South a valuable tool for this work

since it surveys both the major and minor writers of the Southern

Renaissance, in several instances I found it inaccurate. Ferreting

out primary source material thus meant hours of searching through and reading annotated and unannotated bibliographies, critical texts, book reviews, periodicals printed on microfilm and tedious microfiche, numerous period studies such as Francis P. Gaines's The Southern

Plantation, and any source that might possibly lead to accounts of the belle, in or out of fiction—but chiefly the former. The holdings of the A. C. Clark Library of Bemidji State College were invaluable, especially the entire Wright Collection of nineteenth century American novels. In addition, I had the efficient cooperation and assistance of the college research librarians. VI

I owe special thanks to Bowling Green University, Richard

Carpenter and Charles Leone, For awarding me a summer dissertation grant. The study could not possibly have been completed without this assistance. And of course, thanks is due my major reader, Ray B.

Browne, and the committee which advised me, especially Robert Early who did invaluable work with the editing of such a plethora of related but impertinent material. Last, I am grateful to my research assistant, Elizabeth Blue, for the same invaluable assistance; to

Robert Lyons, for whom the dissertation is, as a nineteenth century dedication might phrase it, "lovingly inscribed." I

Chapter i

Paradox: Southern Vision and the Belle

That there is such a thing as a belle is assumed primarily on the grounds that she has always been called that. Her shape and sensibilities in fiction readily conjure up Scarlett O’Hara or an exquisitely gowned plantation lady posed beneath a porte cochere.

She is a figure of life, then, and a figure whose nature embodies all the characteristics of the fictional stereotype. The major issue concerning her is not, however, that she exists. The major issue is that she has come to represent what William Gass calls the

"stylization of desire," which is to say that simultaneously she embodies the process of an emergent type of fiction, and also suggests an entire historical aesthetic. Admittedly, this is true of every stereotype from the termagant wife to the good fairy. But in the case of the belle and her development—not her evolution—we encounter a strain of additional emergences which not only complicate her origins, but also leaves behind the kind of mystery that enlivens and makes her continually attractive to new writers.

Let us presume at the outset that Aristotle was correct when he said that the syntax of literature is the same as the syntax of

William H. Gass, Fiction and the Figures of Life (New York: Random House, 1958), p. 191 ff. 2

reality. Supposing this and supposing the belle a part of a

development which is the result of a correspondence between reality

and an apt means of describing reality, we can further suggest that

a definition for the belle is not yet necessary. From the beginning

we are dealing with a thoroughly defined character. What the

literature lacks in its first recognizable stages, however, is a mature treatment of her. The tracing of the correspondence between

this figure of literature and the reality behind her has, of course, a primary relationship to literary vision. In other words, what we are going to trace first are those shaping factors which produced a character who changed little over the years, whose purpose was somehow ironically unable to come into its own on its own.

The South, obviously, has something to do with this. It is not the South so much historically or even fictionally as the South in its native temperament and those elements or eccentricities which, as

Thomas Wolfe puts it, make the Southern writer "wreak out" his paying phrases and his credible characters. If we are to see the belle emerging from this process too, we need a controlling image of that vision which seems most likely to generate the backdrops and trappings.

One can be easily overwhelmed by the volumes on this subject, and while the Southern sensibility has been described as everything from a preoccupation with the grotesque to an essentially Protestant religious phenomenon, there is, as in Hugh Holman’s view, a single

2 C. Hugh Holman, The Roots of Southern Writing: Essays on the Literature of the American South (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1972), p. 57. 3

abiding force which transcends all other attempts to characterize this

sensibility. The word Holman uses is "paradox," and from the maze of explanations of this word we can selectively narrow down the elements of paradox which best suit any discussion of the Southern belle.

The belle is, in fact, a paradox for the same reason she is, from the first, definable: in its simplicity the definition excludes the complications which could more completely define a belle. This is where the problem starts. Since literary paradox is in fact elemental— supposedly self-evident—its most logical form lies in the exploitation of contradiction and in the incantatory powers of language itself. In a primitive way, this is what the early writers were trying to do in making this character sound plausible. But by our standards of language, she comes off as extremely artificial. Holman and Hoffman particularly suggest that the Southern character, specifically the

Southern figure of life, more than any other product of regional art, shows the marks of men living comfortably in this world. Where the beginnings and development of the belle’s treatment in this regard are concerned, the underlying causes are myriad. It is in Walter

Sullivan’s Death by Melancholy^ and Howard Zinn’s The Southern

Mystique^ that we find the most pertinent digests of the vision which underlies the Southern scale of invention. In brief, Sullivan and

3 Holman, p. 2.

4 Death by Melancholy : Essays on Modern Southern Fiction (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1972).

New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1964. 4

Zinn attribute nearly the entire vision to five issues:

1 ) a preoccupation with the primitive, the instinctual elements of literary invention, and their correspondence with reality;

2) the obsession for finding single, all-encompassing paradigms for reality (this obsession finally found fulfillment in the 1920's and began serious decline about 1946);

3) a fickle but definite eschatology;

4) a primitive acceptance of and dependence on first or self-evident principles;

5) a view of man as essentially mysterious.

What this has to do with the belle is that she, at least on the

surface, seems to embody and to mirror these same variations, this set

of five principles. The earliest forms of the character invite

comparison to Flaubert's Madame Bovary and to Kate Chopin's Edna

Pontellier in their instinctive behavior, for example, but this

comparison is superficial in the light of the presumed consciences and exaggerated authenticity of these women. The prototypical example

is Bel Tracy of John P. Kennedy's Swallow Barn, an 1832 work regarded

by Gaines and others as the first successful "southern plantation

fiction."6 Gaines suggests that the book was written "with an eye

on the model rather than the material." When Kennedy describes the characters and the world they inhabit, there is an already contestable

6 Swallow Barn; or, A. Sojourn in the Old Dominion (1832; rpt. New York: G. P. Putnam and Sons, 1872). 7 Francis Pendleton Gaines, The Southern Plantation: A. Study in the Development and the Accuracy of a Tradition (1924; rpt. Gloucester, Massachusetts: Peter Smith, 1962), p. 18. 5

aesthetic :

She /Bel Tracy/ has a vein of romance in her composition which engenders some fastidious notions touching propriety of manners, and gives her—if I can trust Hazard’s opinion, which I find confirmed in what I have seen—a predilection for that solemn foppery which women sometimes imagine to be refinement. • . . Bel’s temper naturally is most uncongenial with these pretensions, as she constantly shows when off her guard;—but by a certain ply of her mind, got perhaps in some by-path of education, or nurtured by a fanciful conceit, or left upon her memory amongst the impressions of some character she has been taught to admire, or peradventure, being the physical disclosure in her organization of some peculiarly aristocratic drop of blood inherited from some over-stately grandam, and reappearing at the surface after the lapse of a century.“

It is significant that patterns of imitation continued to emerge.

The strain is, moreover, steady from the 1830's:

1835; William Gilmore Simms' The Partisan

... the stately and the beautiful Katharine Walton—one of those high-souled creatures that awe while they attract; and, even while they invite and captivate control and discourage.9

1052: Caroline Lee Hentz’s Marcus Warland

L’eclair sat in the upper end of the hall, in the full blaze of the chandelier, and she well represented the night of ’starry climes and cloudless skies.' . . . Her movements seemed to flow into each other, like the moonlight wanes, gently, undulating.

1867: John William DeForest's Miss Ravenel's Conversion

Miss Ravenel . . . was very fair, with lively blue eyes and exceedingly handsome hair, very luxuriant, very wavy and of a flossy blonde color lighted up by flashes of amber, ...

8 Kennedy, p. 109. g The Partisan: A. Tale of the Revolution (New York: Raper and Bros., 1835), I, p. 109.

0 Marcus Warland; or, the Long Moss Spring, A_ Tale of the South. (Philadelphia: A. Hart, 1852), p. 102. 6

uncommon grace of manner and movement. ... She had her father’s sympathetic character as well as his graceful cordiality and consequent charm of manner, the whole made more fascinating by being veiled in a delicate gauze of womanly dignity 311

1900: Mary Johnston’s Prisoners of Hope

/Patricia/ shaded her eyes with a great fan of carved ivory and painted silk. They were beautiful eyes; large, brown, perfect in shape and expression, and set in a lovely, imperious, laughing face. The divinity to whom it belonged was clad in a gown of green dimity . . . according to the latest Paris mode.^

In Isa Glenn’s 1928 novel, Southern Charm, Mrs. Habersham is "a high­ born Southern lady," endorsing her husband’s appraisal of a young woman's physical attributes: "Your father used to say that there was no place in the world for an ugly woman. He even went so far as to say—although of course he was joking—that a plain girl baby should be strangled at birth." Finally, we note that as late as

1946 Frank Yerby relies on these same patterns of description in

The Foxes of Harrow. He continues the tradition of idealizing the physical characteristics of the woman:

Stephen was looking at her, watching the sun touch the midnight masses of hair with golden highlights, watching the eyes into which all light seemed to have passed and drowned, leaving only a flicker now and then to break the surface. Odalie had skin as fair as a Scandinavian’s, against which the heavy waves of gleaming jet broke with

11 Miss Ravenel's Conversion from Secession to Loyalty (1867; rpt. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1966), p. 6. 17 z Prisoners of Hope : A. Tale of Colonial Virginia (Boston: Houghton Mifflin and Company, 1900), p. 1.

New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1928, p. 20.

New York: The Dial Press, 1946. 7

double force. Watching her mouth moving, the lips not pink, red—wine-red and petal-soft—Steven was lost so that the mockery passed by him unheard.15

For the time being, we need only mention that Faulkner, Williams,

Styron, Tate, McCullers, Capote, and a host of other contemporary writers pursue similar descriptions, but with the maturity that makes treatment of them at this point inappropriate.

What is more common to intervening treatments is the natural paradox that happens when terms of description emerge directly from their author’s writing problems. It is a norm of the intuitive construction of character that a struggle remains between what the character must be "as herself," and what the author might "have her be." When the two coincide, the result is a more artful work. When they do not, maturity of form and vision can be regarded as the missing links. Whatever the final expression of who Bel Tracy or

Catherine Habersham are, it is obvious that they are not drawn from but against a motive that seems largely the writer’s desire to force them to work rather than let them work. The point that is important is that these traditional belles are believable characters only when they can claim an existence beyond the trappings of description.

That what lies beyond the description is false or exaggerated for whatever reason, is always significant. Moreover, that the manifestation of a faltering aesthetic produces a superficial and ironic identity in the figures which represent it suggests that the very forms through which expression is found are also going to be

15 The Foxes of Harrow 79 8

superficial. In the case of Swallow Barn the author admits that his

work is "utterly unartistic."

That a serious work of fiction could come from such an admission

is neither unthinkable nor degrading, since this illustrates a

fundamental characteristic of the intuitive process. The Southern writers of the Nineteenth Century can be notably characterized by their dependence on the intuitive process and by a dislike for revision. The research of Fred Lewis Pattee makes a point, furthermore, of their

having been preoccupied with romance,"’"'’ and romance is the ultimate dependence on instinct. With it, the writer of uncertain vision

oftener evades issues of craft in the name of his "struggle" than retouching for excitement. Characteristically, the author dealing with the early belles overstates his character because he wants a description more than he wants a character. The vessel is filled with language that he somehow supposes ought to evoke a woman who will fit a needed part. That this is fundamental to the emergence of her character is shown elsewhere as well:

Her eyes were not always soft, either. Sometimes they sparkled with light as the breaking wave does upon the storm-tossed sea, and sometimes they swam steadily with the depth of a still pool that compasses upon its surface a picture of the deepest heaven—as they did at that moment. As the young lover marked the slow rise and fall of the girlish bosom, as his eyes fell upon the scarlet ribbon of her mocking lips, as he watched the flush of warm color in her dark cheek—rich hue that rose might have envied. . . .8

"I6 Kennedy, p. 11.

n The Feminine Fifties (1940; rpt. New York: Kennikat Press, Inc., 1966).

"*8 Cyrus Townsend Brady, The Southerners; A Story of the Civil War (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1918), p. 47. 9

So, let us note that the term belle, at this stage, is already

something of a travesty. It continues as a shade of her writers'

substitution of description for substance. Further, and most

importantly, she is a paradigm of the developing Southern vision,

characterized in part by a wreaking out process which here is confined

in the description. The more sophisticated developers of the

character appear to have known this to one degree or another since

they pick up increasingly familiar terms. William Gilmore Simms

comes right to the point when describing the heroine of Katharine 19 Walton: "She was an heiress and a beauty, and consequently a belle."

Even in the modern treatments such givens are presumed. Consider

Margaret Mitchell, for example, whose Scarlett O'Hara is a sometimes embarrassing display of the jargon of descriptions

Her eyes were pale green without a touch of hazel, starred with bristly black lashes and slightly tilted at the ends. Above them, her thick black brows slanted upward, cutting a startling oblique line in her magnolia-white skin—that skin so prized by Southern women. . .

The fundamental issue here, as in former such treatments, is language.

The source, if not the entire motivation, appears to come from

Mitchell's preoccupation with that purposeless aura that from the beginning suggested a tradition where there was none. That an adjustment is necessary for accepting Scarlett's eventual lot, surely emerging as much from the complications of Miss Mitchell's description

1^ Katharine Walton or the Rebel of Dorchesters An Historical Romance of the Revolution in Carolina (Philadelphias A. Hart, 1851), p. 80.

Gone With the Wind (1936; rpt. New Yorks The Macmillan Co., 1965), p. 3. 10

as anything else, we need only note their general impossibility:

Scarlett’s numerous marriages, her inane quest for Ashley, her dreamy revelations. If these are not the result of an immensely confining first sentence, they hardly reflect a feasibly constructed universe.

Even more literate examples follow the pattern. Peyton of Lie Down in Darkness is thus described:

All the boys called her beautiful. She was beautiful. Her eyes were brown, always hugely attentive; like her mouth, they lent her face at once an air of thoughtfulness and of inquisitiveness. Her lips, which were just full enough, seemed always slightly parted in a questioning way, as if asking a softly tolerant ’Why?’ of all those young men who from the time she could remember had hovered about her, their vague, anonymous voices always busy like dozens of bees. Her hair was dark brown and generally cut short so that it closely framed her face. . .

What we see, then, in these suggestions is that the stress is on making the character sound credible. The mistaken presumption that such writing constituted fine art occurred, apparently, for two reasons: first, because the Nineteenth Century was a time of devotion to inflated rhetoric, but chiefly because the South itself, as Hoffman has written, was attempting to establish an aesthetic, a sense of art, before it had a conscience. Apparently, the combination of these two factors, apart from producing a questionable naivete, established an "instant" tradition. If we carry the idea further and couple it with the steady infiltration of Victorian romanticism from Europe and elsewhere, it is no wonder that the process occurred irrevocably and

91 \ William Styron (New York: Random House, Inc., 1951), p. 83.

Frederick J. Hoffman, The Art of Southern Fiction : _A Study of Some Modern Novelists (Carbondale: So. Illinois Univ. Press, 1957), p. 19 ff. 11

hastily. Indeed, the literary climate, probably more so than the social or religious climates during the late Eighteenth Century and full Nineteenth Century in the South, was ripe for these so-called concepts of beauty that the Romantics invented and the Victorians tried to legislate. The belle, the paradigm of at least the woman's side of this unreal world, is easily the victim of what the definition of beauty might become when unhampered by the real facts. Neither is it surprising that in transitions we find the belle becoming less and less the example of a writer's control over his material and more and more a part of his historical conscience.

There is a clear point of transition here as we see the process becoming more sophisticated, if still more incredible. Writers like

Kennedy continue to admit in prefaces and similar writings of the time, a complete uncertainty of their materials "a book of travels, a diary, 23 a collection of letters, a drama." In other words, a work of general parataxis, guided by an instinct whose source becomes more and more grounded in the stability of already assumed traditions. The personal adventure in Swallow Barn was begun, as Kennedy also says, "on the plan of a series of detached sketches linked together by the hooks 24 and eyes of a traveller’s notes." The author of Meadow Brook,

Mrs. Mary J. Holmes, admits in the preface: "For my portrayals of

Georgia life, I am indebted to a friend, who recently spent two years 25 . . in that State. ..." An anonymous author ostensibly writing a

23 Kennedy, p. 11.

24 Kennedy, p. 11.

25 New York: Carleton, 1870, p. vi. 12

journal in the Southern Literary Messenger called "Sketches of Southern 26 Life," is actually using this guise to tell a love story. An

important conclusion emerges: the character of the belle exemplifies

the sketchy hooks and eyes of a Southern traveler’s notes. Uneven

from this force, she is motivated still strongly from out of the blue.

What, for example, did motivate the likes of Bel Tracy?

Motivation is the most fundamental though potentially disastrous problem of literary instinct. The points to be made about the subject pervade this study and establish certain conventions which should always be suspended over our conclusions:

1) Until the serious writer of the 1920’s and thereafter, the character of the belle is not a credible figure of life, not a full representative of the Southern aesthetic nor of its sense of propriety.

2) As a part of the wreaking out process, the belle begins as something of an embarrassing figure of romance, not so tragic as a Madame Bovary though, given the vision that sustained Flaubert’s heroine, a little more credible.

3) In the early stages, the belle is not manipulated by the hand of any major writer; consequently, she is used indiscriminately—a virtue, if anything, since her uncertain value in reality preserves her for a later demolition of the false conventions which supposedly had been her domain.

4) Her function from the beginning is more often tonal than dramatic. This gives way to her role as one merely of description and finally to her confused identity and significantly paratactic sterotype.

The substantiating evidence of these points is in what Gaines 27 sees as the "fixed attitude toward plantation material" which

14(1848), pp. 470-75; 15(1849), pp. 158-165. 27 Gaines, p. 11 13

existed intact through even the early parts of the Twentieth Century.

Her significant "stylization", to return to Gass's term, is to

complement the emerging concept of mansions, ornate gardens, and

spacious hallways. It was Kennedy, Simms, Sedgwick, and others like

them who flavored the belle’s world with the traditional landscapes,

patches of melons, magnolia blossoms, and thriftless gaiety which

could become credible only in a flood of equally ornate descriptions

and personal conquests. The point is that none of this might ever

have been true, but the impact of the wish factors, grounded in pure

Romanticism, so short-circuited the truth that the writers found themselves obliged not only to sell this world which had never really existed, but to believe in it as well. At any rate, once Kennedy treatments were done, the Southern plantation, says Gaines, did exist with all its literary conventions, including the merrymaking which

"knew no retiring ebb." One of the most prescriptive elements in that world was the woman with the proper outward expressions of the attendant inner grace. This is probably the first real definition of the belle for the original domain of her existence in American literature is the mansion or plantation house. Kennedy was not alone in making her, nor in being forced to accept the most fitting forms in describing her for a popular audience:

It was not her beauty however, ... which excited the interest of Henry. ... There was a natural grace of movement about Fanny, a light that beamed from the full,

28 Gaines, p. 22. 14

dark hazel eyes, which seemed to emanate from the true, beautiful and tender spirit enshrined in this fair casket, and a charming mixture of timidity and frankness in her greetings to /him/.

No one that looked upon the fair, sweet face, and girlish form of Eoline, would dream of the brave, undaunted spirit, the firm self-reliance, and moral courage that formed the deep under stratum of her character. Her gentleness, modesty and sensibility were visible in her countenance and audible in the tones of a voice, which, whether in speaking or singing, discoursed the sweetest music. Her complexion had the fairness of the magnolia blended with the blush of the rose. Her hair, of a pale golden brown, reminded one of the ripples of a sunlit lake by its soft waves, giving beautiful alternations of light and shade, as it flowed back from her face. . . . 8

There was W. A. Carruthers who pushed heavily beyond midnight parleys, prophetic dreams, a stilted and grandiose vocabulary to the glorification of such plantation living as a part of actual history, thus adding a dimension of plantation elegance as the focal point of 31 heritage itself. Paulding added the "respectable" colonel type, whose influence in the development of the belle appears to be the 32 source of many of the entrapment qualities which characterize her.

This was in the 1930’s, and the thrust of additions from there runs largely along polemical lines; that is, suddenly these heroines have to be defended as though they were what plantation life had always been, and from there on, right into the Twentieth Century, writers

29 "Sketches of Southern Life," p. 473. 30 Caroline Lee Hentz, Eoline or Magnolia Vale (Philadelphia: T. B. Peterson, 1852), p. 22. 31 Caines, p. 23.

32 Gaines, p. 24 ff. 15

like Thomas Melson Page, Caroline Lee Hentz, G. C. Eggleston, Stark

Young, and others relied on these givens of early plantation Fiction.

In The Southern Lady: From Pedestal to Politics, 1630-1930, Anne

Firor Scott emphasizes that, in reality, the Southern woman's role in

family bearing and rearing, in household duties (supervision of slaves,

servants, etc.) accorded poorly with the image of a delicate,

frivolous, submissive woman. Despite such historical evidence,

the myth of the belle continued; as late as 1957 Upton Sinclair would

write in the foreword of his wife’s autobiography: "This is the story 34 of a Southern belle, told by a real one ..."

This process suggests a further demonstration of the wreaking out

nature of the Southern vision in which there also emerged a certain

defBaselessness; something which eventually brings both the character

of the Southern belle and the preoccupation of Southern writers to the

brink of a new ethic as well as a new regional pride. It is at this

point that political problems become far too subtle for the plantation

characters to ride over with anything but oblivion. And in the thick

of this we encounter the wives and mothers of the Simon Legrees naively 35 staying at home training their daughters in a code of naivete. It

33 Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970, p. 23.

3^ Mary Craig Sinclair, Southern Belle (New York: Crown Publications, Inc., 1957.)

Emily Jane Putnam in The Lady; Studies of Certain Significant Phases of Her History (1910; rpt. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970), reaffirms the hardships of the lady of the plantation as well as her repugnance toward slavery. One lady bitterly declared herself "chief slave of the harem," p. 306. 16

is here, for example, that we discover the real seeds of an Ailie

Calhoun, who in the hands of Scott Fitzgerald, and with the aid of

the superior literary conventions of the 1920’s, straddles the fence

between real naivete and the wily use of it for her own protection.

This is not the lot of Bel Tracy, nor of George C. Eggleston's

Dorothy South, who have not yet come beyond the barriers of poetry reading, curling fans, studying the Romances, spinning, and ordering the servants. The heroine of Eggleston’s novel, Dorothy South, like all of them, stands untouched and untainted by reality: ". . . Dorothy had browsed somewhat in this old library, particularly among the British

Essayists and in some old volumes of Dramas. Her purity had revolted 36 at Fielding, Smollett and their kind ..."

For the time being the turning tide belongs to the polemicists, to the abolitionists like Harriet Beecher Stowe, who less than glorifying the lot of Southern women, nonetheless unconsciously create their own belle-like Little Evas, and, curiously, adopt the cosmetics of the belle for their heroines. Early in the story Mrs. Stowe describes the slave Eliza:

There was the same rich, full, dark eye, with its long lashes; the same ripples of silky black hair. The brown of her complexion gave way on the cheek to a perceptible flush, which deepened as she saw the gaze of the strange man fixed upon her in bold and undisguised admiration. Her dress was of the neatest possible fit, and set off to advantage her finely moulded shape—a delicately formed hand and a trim foot and ankle. . .

Boston: Lothrop Publishing Company, 1902, p. 119.

UhcI6 Tom's Cabin (New York: Washington Square Press, 1852), p. 4 17

This is another paradox, carrying the unmistakable overtones of a regional literature. The belle remains submerged in it as though she were biding her time, and would not find her full place, her believable place, until the Reconstruction when we see her becoming a nearly plausible figure of life. With the end of the plantation, the belle must face the realities of the tradition that has spawned her and go out into the marketplace.

But for now we have seen her limited to the effects of her creators’ concepts of popular time and place, and to a kind of

"situationism," both in her disposition and in their own craft. That no two situations are ever alike, no personality ever twice the same, seems never to have bothered these writers. In brief, their belles remain stilted and predictable:

"the brightest star in the constellation of fashion;" "initiated in the mysteries of ’high life’;" "a triumphant entree into the highest circle;" of "affected benevolence," and with Tt Q "time and money to gain accomplishments."

While the continuity of history, certainly of human interaction, as Howard Zinn says, ought to arise from the relative flow of situations that the person confronts day in and day out and ought to be defined as the integration of all the roles that a particular person has to enact, the initial belle seems woefully confined to the perpetuation of her own description. This is one of the sources of the later stereotypes, but more important, it is why the first writers dealing with her are not

38 Almira Lincoln Phelps, "Belles," in Women of the South, ed. Mary Forrest (New York: Derby and Jackson, 1861), p. 193. 18

particularly interested in having her become a full figure of live.

For those of us studying the character now, her credibility suffers.

Moreover, her stylization is simultaneously ludicrous and attractive.

Thus, the attempt to render an in-depth treatment of so unchanging a

character reveals her as pathetic.

It is interesting that the artistic problem here never bothered

the early writers of the bellehood code either. And the significant explanation which is far more a virtue than a hindrance, is once again a matter involving the Southern vision. It is a simple matter that the belle, like the adaptation of plantation-oriented history itself and the consequent historical conscience which seems unalterably spurious to twentieth century writers and critics, is the product of the obsession which is also part of the Southern aesthetic. She is, as Holman once again suggests, a product of that art which finds its best outlet in the "one-stab endeavors"—the epic impulse of a Thomas

Wolfe or a William Faulkner. However, here we shall not call this impulse sick or decadent or grotesque as it has been called so often, 39 because it is also a notable paradox.

*IQ The question of whether or not there is such a thing as Southern writing is, of course, a celebrated one. While the idea of the grotesque as a fundamental element in this concept of regionalism remains debated, it is also an over-used and somewhat convenient explanation. Hoffman, attacking that basic issue, offers in the first chapter of The Art of Southern Fiction a lucid treatment of the question. Long before William Carlos Williams had made his famous statement that the only universal is the local, William Gilmore Simms had said: "To be national in literature, one must needs be sectional." —Dedication, The Wigwam and the Cabin (New York: 1856). 19

The plantation literature, as incipiently representative of the

Southern vision, is also primitive art with contingencies as

calculable as its characters are, in the long run, attractive. Here

a better word for continuity might be contiguous since the belle

as representative of the artistic process, does not hold up well in

any single manifestation of the developments that made her. To a

degree at least, the belle appears to have emerged from some need to

keep her going, some guilt to finish her or let her grow. If we

accept Faulkner's observation that every work of art has a correspondent

moment in reality, it is likely that we would therefore see the belle,

in many ways, as a stand-in for the South’s conscience. In itself the

spotting of details in reality as morally irrevocable is an art-

begetting process, which with Southern characters takes on a form

lying somewhere between sheer inanity and the fundamental morality of

the freak who, in Flannery O’Connor's "A Temple of the Holy Ghost"

confessed to the circus audience, "I don't dispute hit /sic?• This

is the way he wanted me to be." The earliest belles were not always

capable of this awareness any more than Southern writers have always

been. What is finally important is that this literary source had produced the more venerable and lucid belles, the Blanches, and

Maggies-the-Cat. How impressive these characters appear beside the

infant belles of earlier times.

Alice May had turned out well. What wife could have more successfully kept her husband enamoured for twenty years? Alice May understood the value, in this steady stealthy control of a husband, of a delicate feminine dependence. She understood the 20

things by which a wife can keep a man in a state of willing subjection.

Even so, we note that the writer was painstakingly true to the form.

Moreover, he attempts to deal with the pathos of the condition as well.

At the age of seven ... the child was produced at balls and routes, where her singular beauty attracted every eye, and her dexterous, graceful management of her little person, already disciplined to the rules of Vestris, called forth loud applause. The child and the grandmother were alike bewildered with the incense that was offered to the infant belle, and future heiress.41

It is clear that from the beginning the belle had her creators* concern, their nearly cosmic desire to style her from a vision of more profound matters. It remains, of course, a one-stab effort, somehow contingent on having the readership accept the ambition contained in the vision, and its shallowness as well. The resulting paradox is this: the writers* attempts to keep this character immediate, that is close to the reader, make her also an insipient character. Hence a further dimension of insipience is added, and insipience itself becomes a factor in her stylization. It seems reasonable to suggest that she would never have interested the later more serious and talented writers without this element. Faulkner, for example, usually makes an issue of his belles* insipience: Miss Emily Grierson ignores reality: "Perhaps he considers himself the sheriff ... I have no

Isa Glenn, Southern Charm, p. 13.

Catherine Marie Sedgwick, Redwood: A Tale (New York: E. Bliss and E. White, 1824), pp. 78-79. 21

taxes in Jefferson; "^2 Rosa Coldfield pathetically relates a great moment of her life, the return of Thomas Sutpen to the plantation after the death of Charles Bon s "I looked up and saw him looking at me. He had seen me for twenty years, but now he was. looking at me; 43 he stood there in the path looking at me. . . the aloof and neurotic Mrs. Caroline Bascomb Compson hides in her bedroom nursing psychosomatic headaches and deducting, for example, that Benjy’s idiocy is her "punishment for putting aside my pride and marrying a 44 man who held himself above me."

What Faulkner and Williams and a host of other Southern writers of substance note in this condition, furthermore, is its eschatology, a sense of potential self-redemption which gives the belle a cosmic quality, though she most often is unaware of it. In many of the early belles—Caroline Redwood, Fanny, and Dorothy South, for example—this was no more than a deus ex machina acceptance of place or station, a part which is more the concern of her author than of herself. For those writers the allegiance is to the form as a kind of escape, whereas with Faulkner it is a full restoration of the social order.

Considering again Absalom, Absalom! we find self-awareness styled as the offshoot of the old-style belle's world collapsing commiserately

"A Rose for Emily" in Collected Stories of William Faulkner (New York: Random House, 1943), p. 121.

William Faulkner, Absalom, Absalom! (New Yorks Random House, 1936), p. 162.

William Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury (New Yorks Cape and Smith, 1929), p. 122. 22

with the downfall of the vision that has spawned her. Clytie’s fire

scene is something more than a convenient way of ending a book. This would not have been true of earlier writers in the same tradition;

for them a conflagration had to be only a circumstance to demonstrate

the heroine’s innate allegiance to her training. Simms uses the

occasion of the fall of Charleston to the British during the

Revolutionary War, for example, to demonstrate the loyalty of his heroine: "Katharine Walton moved in a circle which in her heart she loathed and received the devotions of those whose tributes revolted 45 equally her patriotism and her pride."

Holman, borrowing from Wallace Stevens, describes this situation 46 as "divergent ways going in the shadow of indecipherable causes."

What he means to describe is not only the history of the Southern character, but the vision behind the character as well. Nothing more verifies the techniques of approach than the vision which makes true figures of life. Faulkner maintained, "Mo one individual can look at truth. It blinds you. Someone else looks at it and sees a slightly awry phase of it. But taken all together, the truth is in what they saw though nobody saw the truth intact.The Southern emphasis, however, as Faulkner also suggests, has been an attempt at seeing the truth intact. And part of what we see in the tradition affecting the belle is the mistaken duty to truth which the writers put before her

45 Katharine Walton, p. 110.

45 Holman, p. 169.

4? Holman, p. 171. 23

function. She must be a manifestation of the so-called truth of the

tradition. These writers are on the one hand breathlessly serving

the eschatological while displacing the real function of fictional

figures of life. This is but another of the lost causes for which

the South has always been politically, economically, socially, and

religiously famous. It produces a fundamental guilt in all pursuits,

especially those in which the refrain of truth must emerge. This is 48 the stuff of legendry, as Karanikas says, a "dynastic wound," which

the belle serves more credibly than she does fiction. Her growing

consciousness and the new dimensions seen in her by the more gifted

writers, becomes circuitous in its ideal, to be sure. But the concept

of life here remains somehow the reasonable acceptance of the

instinctive first principles that the great works of Southern fiction

finally show. That this is also inherently pessimistic, making man

the ultimate mystery of the universe, may also be the reason why the

belle paradoxically remains defined and unchanging even though she is

little more than an apt symbol of the futility that generated her.

That the Southern experience is, as the development of the belle

suggests, essentially paratactic, might also explain a vision which

breeds primitive art, but paradoxically thrives on corruption,

mediocrity, and incompetence. The archetypes of antebellum culture,

for this reason, can be regarded as little more than average Americans, and the belle, certainly a somewhat blinded excuse for their prenatal

ZQ Alexander Karanikas, Tillers of a. Mytht Southern Agrarians as Social and Literary Critics (Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1966), p. 59. 24

dream of aristocratic dignity. The profounder side of this is what results: America, the land of bounty, of heroism, of psychological soundness, of eminent historical conscience. C. Vann Woodward and

W. J. Cash seem to agree that the mythical elements which result from 49 this kind of parataxis are both sound and inevitably art-bearing.

Perhaps there is no better example of this process at work than the belle who stumbles through centuries of attempts to assume her way into dignity only to find that the process has betrayed her, ravaged her, and left her alone with a conscience as subtle as God’s. It is entirely conceivable that Blanche DuBois is, in this sense, as much a representative of American art and its virtues as she is of wreaked out

Southern vision. Moreover, the belle through hundreds of variations remains a remarkable paradigm of an America straddling Romanticism while at the same time bound eventually to be realistic. This is her fundamental paradox. Her development is an old stand-by for the paradox which explains American rebellion against a too pretty universe and against the legislation of the beautiful which cause her finally to reject the Victorian aesthetic. It is, indeed, strongly significant that she embodies the most fundamental bastardy, but then seeks the most epical of explanations for her beauty. One is put in mind almost immediately of the celebrated first lines of Gone With the Wind, a popular bit of Americana to be sure, where Margaret Mitchell would have us believe that "Scarlett O’Hara was not beautiful," but then spends the next 1027 pages making her a super-star.

45 Cf. C. Vann Woodward, "The Southern Ethic in a Puritan World," William and Mary Quarterly, 25 (1968) and W. J. Cash, The Mind of the South (New York: Random House, 1941). 25

Chapter ii

Literary Stances of Conduct: The Emergence of the

Belle as a Figure of Life

The most obvious area in the development of the character of the

belle is also the most alluring one: her emergence as a figure of life,

the related credibility problems, and, most important, the means and

literary stances by which the credibility is finally achieved. First, we must restate that the Nineteenth Century—the belle's true century

sociologically-possessed certain literary conventions which today have

become anomalies. Not the least of these is the simple question of the

literary craft itself which was remarkably over-serious in that it regularly overstated and, as we have maintained elsewhere, was description-ridden. Contemporary writers of the bellehood code disdain this convention of nineteenth century writing. It is not in the province of this study to dwell on the why, but merely to suggest that the serious writer of the time was serious because the popular demand <1 was for a genre of epical verisimilitude which flourished regionally.

This helps explain the underlying interest in a regional tradition which, in many cases, had to be assumed rather than historically verified. That this phenomenon also establishes the belle in the

Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries means that the stereotype eventually

Cf. Gaines, p. 18 ff., and Wilbur J. Cash, The Mind of the South, Chapter I, pp. 3-29. 26

had to be dealt with in the same tradition for the Twentieth Century.

These considerations aside, we must come to terms with the major

qualities which both the character and the fabric of her motivation

and description produce. For convenience, the four most useful

categories are these:

1) the physical, moral, and psychological terms of description;

2) elements of conscience and motivation both presumed and emergent; distinctions between author motivation and character motivation;

3) stances of the cosmetic belle: her social trappings giving way to external components, finally to the stereotype, and ultimately to the caricature;

4) a working definition of the bellehood code, thus of the belle herself, in all the pertinent complexities.

The Physical, Moral, Psychological Belle

We begin with the sort of jargon that seems to have been prevalent

from earliest treatments of the belle. She sometimes was, to a

preposterous degree, physically devastating. The early writers,

consequently, are preoccupied with those elements which most properly 2 suspend her as "beautiful, gentle, full of winning ways." What attends upon this in the more abstract form, but undoubtedly a matter

of primary intent, is an underlying but regularly undefined, supposedly

evocative voluptuousness. And that voluptuosity is the belle's abiding

2- Anne Firor Scott, "After Suffrage: Southern Women in the Twenties," in Myth and Southern History, ed. Patrick Gerster and Nicholas Cords (Chicago: ' Rand McNally Co., 1974), p. 229. 27

physical raison d’etre. More than sixty years before Margaret Mitchell used the ploy William Deforest tells the reader that "the belle of the steamer," Kate Beaumont, is not beautiful but possesses

an oval contour, features faintly aquiline, abundant chestnut hair, soft hazel eyes, a complexion neither dark nor light, a constant delicate color in the cheeks. ... It was the expression that did the beholder’s business; it was the sweetness, the purity, the unmeant dignity; it was the indescribable.

About this we suppose a number of motives» first, that the writers themselves usually confused telling with showing. It was all right if the character "sounded" as if she were what she ought to be, not necessarily that she also acted the part. Far more significant than the convention itself, which was standard literary practice in both eighteenth and nineteenth century prose, is the writer's apparent intention to have constantly reinforced a cultural pattern. In order to support the grand elegance, the writer needed a tone that was suitable. William C. Falkner, great-grandfather of Faulkner, writing a

Decameron-like novel near the end of the Nineteenth Century gives this grandiloquent description of Lottie at the grand balls

Who was the fair one that attracted such attention? . . . The square shoulders and straight body, the beautiful arms and bright golden hair were visible. . . . Never had my eyes beheld such a lovely object as the one then before me, such radiant beauty, such lofty dazzling charms, such large liquid blue eyes and bright golden hair, such round pretty arms, such a tall stately form’ Nothing could match this angelic creaturei^

3 John W. DeForest, Kate Beaumont (Bostons James R. Osgood and Style, 1872), p. 9.

4 Col. William C. Falkner, The White Rose of Memphis (1881; rpt. New York: Coley Taylor, the Bond Wheelwright Co., 1953), pp. 91-92. 28

Secondly, these terms of description usually guarded the deeper

character possibilities which the age did not permit a serious writer

to broach in anything but subtleties. Here the ramifications, including

those which suppose the origin of the belle to be in the French uses of

the word, the belle as "mistress" or "whore," are slightly ludicrous—

Bel Tracy, herself, being the prototype. From there, various authors further confuse the origin of the name and, as in the case of DeForest's

Mrs. LaRue, adopt dialects to go with the presumed origins of their characterizations:

But she was the detestation of most of her lady acquaintances—who were venomously jealous of her attractions—or rather seductions—and abhorred her for the unscrupulous manner in which she put them to use, abusing her in a way which was enough to make a man rally to her rescue. She really cared little for that divin sens du qenesique concerning which she prattled so freely to her intimates. . . .5

That the most striking of them, Belle Watling, emerges in the same tradition suggests a conflict which only Margaret Mitchell appears to have exploited fully and which we presume must have been instrumental in the rash of American saloon types who are in some form, belles.

Another more prominent use of "subtletie" is traced by the Oxford

English Dictionary to Alexander Pope and his Arabella (the Belinda of

"Rape of the Lock"):

Yet graceful Ease, and Sweetness void of Pride, Might hide her Faults, if Belles had Faults to hide: If to her share some Female Errors fall, Look on her Face, and you’ll forget 'em all. (Canto II, 11. 15-18)56

5 Miss Ravenel's Conversion, pp. 350-51.

® Alexander Pope, The Rape of the Lock and Other Poems, ed. Geoffry Tilloston (London: Methuen & Co., Ltd., 1940), p. 160. 29

The tradition here is characteristically mock heroic, though it is rare in the American tradition and remains a measure of simple evasion in dealing with certain subjects repulsive to the later characteristic

Victorian-American moral climate. That a woman might have the sexual difficulties one realistically attaches to "winning ways" had only regularly to be implied by sometimes ridiculous conventions as in the case of Laura from the poem, "The Belles of Williamsburgs"

See Laura, sprightly nymph advance, Through all the mazes of the dance, With light fantastic toe; See laughter sparkle in her eye— At her approach new joys arise, New fires within us glow.?

It was not until just before the 1870’s when OeForest published a questionably artful Miss Ravenel's Conversion that a creeping toleration for the traditional sex-oriented stereotypes was developed and the tradition of the belle as something of a sexually displaced individual 8 grew up. Hence, she is also described as "having masculine good sense" g and being so passionate as to "spring like the antelope." The natural result, as Gaines points out, was a rash of evocative though unrevealing titles as well such as Retribution, Virginia and Margaret, The Mother- 10 In-Law, The Planter’s Northern Bride. With the publication of Meadow

Brook in 1857, we are allowed a glimpse of what the physical flushes do potentially mean, but this begins to be marred with polemicism. It is

7 Anon., Southern Literary Messenger, II (July, 1836), pp. 469-70.

8 The Partisan, Vol. II, p. 45.

9 Marcus Warland, p. 102.

10 P. 50. 30

the era of abolition which complicates worldly-wise young belles' lives with real moral questions. Perhaps unfortunately, they are oftentimes glosses of Northern writers' misconceptions of the character suddenly gone politically crazed over the question of slavery as in the case of

4 4 Ellen Griffin. Gaines notes also that the hodgepodge of politicism and the already established jargon of description produce the most characteristic of the sentimental treatments of the belle.

The domestic romance grows from here, with a very few fully realized belles patterned from the characters of John Esten Cooke, whose heroine he recognized (according to the Southern Literary

Messenger) as a challenge to his art. He maintains the jargon of description s

The lady was mounted upon a tall white horse, which stood perfectly quiet. ... Rather would one acquainted with the singular character of horses have said that his animal was subdued by the gentle hand of his rider and so laid aside from pure affection, all his waywardness.

The rider was a young girl about eighteen, and of rare and extraordinary beauty. Her hair . . . dark chestnut, and her complexion was dazzling. The eyes were large, full, and dark—instinct with fire and softness—feminine modesty. . .

At the same time Cooke "labored lovingly to exhibit a radiant creature of charm and winsomeness, of accomplished personality, of coquetry, of courage, of independence, of the open life, of tenderness and devotion" 13 who was also credible. He failed in the elements of coquetry, however,

^1 Katharine Walton, p. 80.

12 The Virginia Comedians t or Old Days in the Old Dominion (New York: D. Appleton & Co., 1854), p. 25.

1Gaines, p. 51. 31

in the same way that Kennedy had failed with them. Cooke's Virginia

belle emerges, like Bel Tracy, as something of a mockery because the tradition would not have let her really be all of what he described her as, let alone accept the motivation which was a glorification of plantation life more than it was of a character's struggle.

That this eventually took on clear moral overtones is especially understandable in light of the eventual preoccupation that Southern stylists had with justifying slavery. For a period, then, the belle could be nothing but a morally upstanding backbone of Southern society and typical treatments like those of Mrs. Bellamy in Marcus Warland show up regularly:

This sweet evening she was sitting in a crimson-covered rocking chair, reading the pages of a book, that seemed 'her inmost soul to find'. ... On a low chair, a little removed from Mrs. Bellamy, sat a young mulatto girl, who, from her singular beauty and docility, was the pet of the household. . . . Cora, for such was the name of the beautiful mulatto, was mistress of the needle, and had been brought up in the house, under the affectionate and watchful eye of her mistress. Her language, in consequence of this, was free from the pecularities of the African dialect. Mrs. Bellamy loved Cora as tenderly as if no dusky tint shaded the ruby of her cheek; and had Mrs. Bellamy been an angel of light, Cora could not have worshipped her with more entire devotion.14

Other belles, like Fanny in"Sketches of Southern Life," read the 15 Bible to the Negroes and teach them scripture. The outcome is a twisted if still attractive personality, perhaps no longer the figure of popular understanding that she had been earlier or will become later.

14 P. 71.

15 p. 72. 32

The interim, wartime belle has an almost singular mode of existence

characterized, as Hoffman describes the fictional figures of the time,

by her creators’ attempts to draw her close to the reader, then, almost without exception, to confine her to place. She emerges from place, oftener outside of time and outside the normal focuses of human intercourse. For a time, then, we get descriptions of her such as 17 these: Mrs. Bellamy was "sitting in a crimson-covered chair."

"Eoline heaved a deep sigh, and going towards her harp, she began to draw the green covering over its gilded frame and glittering wires.

She thus stood, with her head slightly averted, and her arms raised in 1 8 an unconsciously graceful position." When L’eclair danced "no nymph of the wood ... possessed more of the music, the poetry, the eloquence of motion.

It is important to note that those facets of description which pull the belle eventually beyond place in, for example, later treatments by Stark Young or Hamilton Basso, are also the elements which transfer her to the Twentieth Century without much trouble at all. Furthermore, it is significant that the stereotype had so many convoluted trappings that she could nearly perfectly be subjected to a budding popular interest in psychology itself. Consider, for example, the Freudian possibilities here:

16 P. 163 ff.

12 Marcus Warland, p. 71.

18 Eoline, p. 22.

19 Marcus Warland, p. 102. 33

From Thomas Nelson Page's In Ole Virginia, 1887s

The old man soothed her with carresses and baby talk, such as he had used to comfort her with when she was a little girl. . . . 'Polly, do you remember,' asked the old man, holding her off from him and gazing at the girlish face fondly—'do you remember how, when you were a little scrap, you used to climb up on my knee and squeeze me, "just one more," . . . and how you used to say you were "going to marry Bob" and me when you were grown up?'20

Or from John William DeForest's Kate Beaumont, 1872s

0, potent influence of mere speechless, unobtrusive, carefully veiled and yet splendidly visible womanly purity! /aimed? ... towards civilizing and sanctifying the other sex"?21

A woman in the same house has so many devilish chances at a fellow, and ... in a ship, even more chances than in a house.22

The Freudian cache of terms seems more than adequate, too, to deal with the likes of Caroline Redwood, an undisputed bitch, who is ruthless toward her woman competitor. In the attempt to get her man,

Caroline "affected every grace, she pretended to every virtue that she 23 believed would advance her designs." Dr Page's black belle Rachel— admittedly a caricature—who while bethrothed to Dick is at the same time the mistress of Uncle Isaac whose previous four wives "left him because they were unable to stand his whippings, which were said to be not only frequent, but tremendous."

m In Ole Virginia or Marse Chan and Other Stories (1887; rpt. New Yorks Charles Scribner's Sons, 1915), pp. 268, 248.

21 P. 4.

22 p. g.

Redwood, Vol. II, p. 148. 24 "Rachel's Lovers" in Pastime Stories (1894; rpt. Freeport, New Yorks Books for Libraries Press, 1969), p. 185. 34

By the time and in the intervening complications by which Faulkner

arrives on the scene, there is a total wealth of material to examine

from all sorts of psychological points of view. Is it any wonder that

Miss Emily Grierson, typifying the process, is anything but a woman

capable of facing reality, let alone doing it without the crutches of a

safe code of conduct, hiding her underlying passions? It probably

cannot be denied either, that subsequent writers have also, if not

directly then on the periphery, picked up on many of the problems of

character generated by the simple hodgepodge of psychological auras

feeding into the belle's constant revision. What is Miss Emily but a reflection of a many-pronged tradition only now become necessarily psychological because it no longer has merely to "sound" its true self?

Later we will see that the elements which critics so often label grotesque in the writings, for example, of Welty, McCullers, Styron, and Williams, are less the result of the convenient association with

Reconstruction poverty, and with a South deluded by its own depravity and decadence than of a simple development of character psychology itself. Such criticism ignores, of course, these fundamental issues described above. But more interestingly, this view denies the Southern 25 vision crucial self-understanding and self-awareness.

What we are led to conclude here, then, is that the belle no less than the writers who eventually make her a credible figure of life in the moral-psychological sphere and not a stereotype serving politics or romance of even misplaced Southern vision, remains descriptively alluring, however much the trappings shift from the purely physical to

25 Cf. Hoffman, pp. 8, 9 35

the psychological.

The interim moral fabric appears to be the outgrowth of these two

poles fighting each other for control. It is true that perhaps the

later belle is, to a degree, so much a Blanche DuBois that the moral

sphere is reduced also to a psychological profile. That the physical

terms contribute to that profile finally is visible in the transitional

aspects of what the belle represents in those literary works where

writers try to exact moral significance from the purely physical. The

character of Caroline Redwood is an early and effective example.

Caroline is said to be like her mother before her, "a spoilt child and

flattered beauty." Later Caroline is described as "fashionable and

frivolous ... permitted to devote herself to everything that was

trifling, and in short, condemned to a perpetual childhood.," At the

story's end another character, Ellen, reflects a bit righteously, "I

might like Caroline have been the slave of the world, the victim of

folly." Obviously, Caroline is a woman whose psychology holds sway

only at the periphery of her character, although the author attempts

rather strikingly to play upon the antagonistic elements of social

tensions which are created by Caroline’s selfish motivations. One is

tempted to speculate on how much more successful Caroline Redwood would

have been in the hands of Tennessee Williams or Eudora Welty. In the meantime, her morality is at least a bit less tied to her gowns and her

2fi Redwood, p. 76.

27 P. 117.

29 Vol. II, p. 265. 36

eyelashes, i.e., to the physical, than is her personality: "Grandmama says that people of fortune should never lay aside the insignia of rank.

This "insignia of rank," simply stated, has included from the beginning such items as eyes, waistlines, shoes, dresses, and hairdos.

It goes without saying that each stage in the development of the belle repossesses these according to the understanding of the writers, and with attendant cumulative effects.

The Mode of Description and Motivation

It is the moral question which lingers as though underneath the development of the so-called decadence and grotesquerie, there had always been a force which went on provoking the writers of the bellehood code—some of the most adept of these writers, of course, were not

Southerners—to look upon the explanation for the character as something quite eternal and cosmically predestined. Much of what Gaines brings to his examination of the literature in The Southern Plantation suggests that an essential ingredient in most of the successful plantation stereotypes is their sense of tradition. We have already speculated that what Gaines and others have called "the tradition" might more properly be called a sense of conscience. From our point of view, this is not necessarily historical, although history certainly is an

29 P. 14 37

important part of what motivates writers. Faulkner made much of his

own "sense of history," and Carson McCullers popularly thrived on

stories of how she and her typewriter were history’s balance. What each of these writers—and significantly others—oftener resorted to in explanation for their preoccupation with characters who are always vulnerable and morally culpable because they are part of a heritage or a "dynastic wound" is that these characters are also great bearers of truth.

It is an old philosophical war-horse to try and explain the question of evil, and there is a variety of attractive though disparate views following upon this question of art as truth. It is important to note, however, that the South and writers about her virtues and vices remain consistent in somehow attaching the cause of evil to the denial of truth, and this is always a strong, if confused, motivating factor in their budding figures of life.

The belle is a paradigm of the process: the character ironically standing in as the agent of forces which she herself could not, in her early treatments, have understood anymore than she could actually have taken part in them. The point is that these forces are fictional; they never really existed, and her motivation often is more that of her creator than of a world that she moves in. That she is morally culpable, however, is regularly insisted upon. Author Catherine Sedgwick shows that Caroline Redwood fails to win her man because she is a scheming, selfish woman. By the same token author Caroline Hentz has Marcus

Warland marry the kind-hearted Florence and not belle L’eclair,

"brilliant, charming, bewildering ... she should prove an ignis 39

fatuus, shining over her marshes of folly and vanity, aimless and

betraying. . . . "3^

Of course, the reasons for her moral culpability are another

matter. Why must she be always lovely, always charming, always white

and clean? Why are the early descriptions which make her a superhuman

manifestation of an invented code of conduct so generally an attempt to

deal with place, effecting a character capable of no wrong by design

and training and yet never given much of a chance to test herself?

A. Short History of Julia tells the story of a Georgia belle who grows more jealous and bitter with age because her sister Marietta married

Carey Gordon, the man Julia wanted. Toward the end of this short history

Julia, now a confirmed spinster, comes to recognize that prescribed social codes have restrained the best in her. When her chauvinistic brother-in-law Carey Gordon assures her that it is too late for her to change, Julia resettles in her entrapment, the social mode prescribed for spinsters who live on King Street in Georgia.

The mother of Ellen Glasgow's Virginia Pendleton sees to it that books on the family bookshelves "never suffer the contaminating presence 31 of realism." Mrs. Pendleton feels that she advances the cause of righteousness when she teaches sanctified fallacies to her daughter.

The upshot of this is Virginia's total unpreparedness for her husband's request for a divorce after twenty-five years of marriage, even though his "business" kept him from home most months of the year. While

30 Marcus Warland, p. 108.

Virginia (Garden City: Doubleday, Doran and Co., 1929), p. 49. 39

holding fast to her parents' dictum, "Deny and suggestion of evil,"

Virginia is dealt out in life.

"Do good and deny evil" reiterates throughout the stories of the

belle. In Southern Charm Aunt Sallie says impressively: "Your dear

mother was one of the wisest women I ever knew. She brought you up in

absolute ignorance of the dirty side of life." In addition to being

taught by wise mothers, the young ladies of this Georgia society have

another source of wisdom, The Cassandra Tombs Seminary for Young Ladies:

Miss Cassandra was preordained to guide young girls from the innocent wickedness of the cradle to the lawful wickedness of matrimony. Between these two stages of the way of all flesh, Miss Cassandra saw to it that her girls remained cherubs with heads and hands and feet sticking to the extremities for a mass of proper clothing.

At every commencement Miss Cassandra delivered a lecture on morals:

Always remember, girls, that a lady must be pure. Among common people, women sometimes do awful things. But when a lady does an awful thing, God punishes her. She is no longer a LADY: she becomes the 'Scarlet Woman of Babylon!' Remember that, girls, and guard your good name and fair fame as you would guard pearls of great price. Like a pearl, if your diadem is dropped in vinegar it is dissolved!**4

By now it is evident that the character of the belle served so many purposes within the framework of a single identity that the writers' seams show. The moral belle seems, therefore, a figure of her writer's uncertain concern for her origin on the one hand, and his total allegiance to the givens that he always knew he could successfully

32 P. 69.

33 P. 127.

34 P. 128. 40

employ, on the other. In other words, the belle is a figure of the

moral code first because she is not believable without it, but, at the

same time she is too confined with it.

Even as late as Gone With the Wind, Ellen Robillard O’Hara is only

slightly credible in her overwhelming concern for the Slattery family

where she dies nursing Emma back to health. While dying in the squalor

which is supposed to deprecate the passing of that celebrated age,

Ellen O’Hara regularly maintains her "codal" superiority. What is this

entire syndrome but Margaret Mitchell’s passion for trying to justify

a morality in the vacuum of a stereotype?

The now embarrassing relationships between such women as Ellen

O’Hara and the mammies of the plantation tradition are other

manifestations of the belle’s paradoxical morality. Here, again, the

writers are at fault and examples are considerable. Belle Fanny, who, we recall, taught scripture to the Negroes, accepts her mammy as wise

and loving mentor: Mammy reminds Fanny that she is a lady of high blood, and such ladies never, for example, carry a basket of eggs or marry

•jc northern men—no Yankees have "high blood." The black woman's stance

is hardly credible, nor is her advice to the likes of Fanny whom we are told manages competently the more than one hundred plantation

servants. In ft Short History of Julia there is Mama Patty, probably

the author's unsuccessful attempt to create a saviour figure—"Mama

Patty loomed in her doorway, a heroic figure in a vast white nightrobe."

35 P. 72.

36 P. 31 41

When Mama Patty is not busy giving orders in her own house or to her

employers in the deGraffenried mansion, she is frequently pictured embracing, kissing, or holding Julia on her lap. Anri like Fanny’s

black mammy, Patty, too, is dedicated to the perpetuation of the bellehood code: "I ain’t got no bizness tailin’ you dis, honey, kase I 37 brung you up careful, like a little lady."

The enduring phenomenon of the belle with a developing psychology leads onward to the point at which the character is allowably broken down into her many facets, where origin does not seem to make a difference and writers become concerned with exploring her present conscience. We hastily note the difference here, between a Bel Tracy and an Alison Langdon, a belle in Carson McCullers Reflections in a. 38 Golden Eye. In the latter case, the sexual motivations are unhampered by any codal morality, the character freely expresses herself in the framework of personal exigency; then she settles herself in the consequent entrapment of a way of life whose origin she knows but cannot fathom. Likewise, her trap suggests the fundamental moral consequence of a woman who in reality is always beautiful, always a figure of romance, always fearful of the consequences of facing reality.

This type of woman is no more grotesque than anyone with a calculatedly cold conscience. She is real, though her morality stems from false conventions. Similar charcters like Dorothy South, Eoline Glenmore, or

Julia deGraffenried would be unsuccessful, we presume, without the

37 P. 76.

39 Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1941. 42

backdrop of those familiar Southern surfaces which tie them to this element of the bellehood code too. Without these same background trappings, Mary Craig Sinclair would likewise have been without justification for writing her autobiography. Calling her story

Southern Belle, Mrs. Sinclair asks her readers to accept as fact certain fictions of the codes "Being a mere man /her instructor in writing and literature/, he may have had some flutterings of the heart in the presence of a ’Southern belle' who had often been told that she was 39 irresistible to men."

The Cosmetic Belle

Just as the belle eventually took on a credible conscience, she also became a full literary convention and grew towards the status of a full figure of life. What becomes increasingly more apparent is that the beauty, gentleness and winning way of the Southern myth—whether antagonistic or protagonistic—as elements of the belle's motives, are also becoming more and more mere external components. From the beginning, as with Caroline Redwood, these were allowably sour, but with the advent of twentieth century treatments, the emergence of the moral dimension and its conventions, the blending with character types from elsewhere

(particularly the termagant, the emasculator, the whorish nymphomaniac), the belle starts her deceptive role. The very terms which we have used

39 P. 54 43

to describe her emergence promote conflicts in themselves that are best

dealt with in art or at least in an arena where their contradictions

can be adequately exploited. Fortunately, of course, none of it ever

really could have happened, but in literary forms it can go on and on

gathering steam. That so-called chivalry died at the turn of the

century may be a fact, but the fictional eye need never have accepted

that. Why not go on with it, or at least presume it for an interesting array of resultant conflicts? In a tradition which now recognizes the falseness and plays on it for a variety of reasons, the belle starts to

divide into further types. She is reinforced as a non-chronological development derived from the apparent literary vision which is a far more inviting process than mere history. In our research, this reinforcement separated into three areas:

1) the purely sterotypical belle;

2) the belle of caricature;

3) the belle of decadence.

Each in her own way seems to have been made up from certain palettes, and while we cannot run the risk of encroaching upon the territory of over-lapping and similar figures, we must see that the maturing eye of serious writers does exactly that. This means that the belle in variation, in her cosmetic, runs the gamut from the Bel Tracys of J. P» Kennedy to the Katherine Faradays of Frances Newman. In Tennessee Williams* works she becomes the laughable Sookey Pollitt or his tragic Amanda. All the while she is growing insane, inane, and sometimes unsupportable in the

Peyton Loftises, Amantha Starrs, and Caroline Compsons.

Let us say, then, that the most spectacular information belongs to the first of the areas of division. 44

The Belle as a Pure Stereotype

Coming off the earlier premises which trace romantic, political, and domestic strains, we find a considerable array of complications in the actual words of description regularly allowable in the tradition.

Further division is necessary to delineate the forms writers most frequently depended on to deliver the sound of the belles (a) the

belle as seductress, (b) the belle in domestic romance, (c) the social belle.

The seducer is invariably an emasculator in the sense that she oftener uses her men than needs them. The question of need is, of course, one of those probabilities which the moral climate avoided until the stereotype became fixed in the broadened moral sphere of the

Twentieth Century. What oftener triumphs, therefore, is a compromised staunchness of ideal. The seducer remains as ever a part of the conduct of the language which the writers employ to describe her in those actions for which she is, of course, trained. Hence, we can characterize her methods of seduction. The writings of Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald provide ample illustrations of the seductress belle. Andy, the narrator of "The Last of the Belles," renders this description of the seductress type j

There she was—the Southern type in all its purity. I would have recognized Ailie Calhoun if I’d never heard Ruth Draper or read Marse Chan. She had the adroitness sugarcoated with sweet, voluble simplicity, the suggested background of devoted fathers, brothers, 45

and admirers stretching back into the South's heroic age. . . ,40 41 *

Subsequently in her "sweet, voluble simplicity," Ailie Calhoun turns

down Lieutenant Canby—who is possibly a suicide over her—Lieutenant

Earl Schoen, Andy himself, and "there were no doubts . . . there had 41 been other men." The first sentence of Save Me the Waltz describes

Alabama Knight as one of those girls who "think they can do anything

and get away with it." And, indeed, in the course of the novel,

Alabama fulfills that prophesy. Then, of course, there is Daisy Fay

Buchanan of The Great Gatsby, who at eighteen was "by far the most

popular of all the young girls in Louisville. She dressed in white,

and had a little white roadster, and all day long the telephone rang

in her house and excited young officers from Camp Taylor demanded the privilege of monopolizing her that night. 'Anyways, for an hour!'"43 44

Daisy never matures beyond the role of seductress, and as her friend 44 Jordan Baker recalls, she "played around."

Writers in the belle tradition compulsively describe the belle

besieged by admiring men, "gentlemen callers," as Williams" Amanda so

45 frequently recalls in her nostalgic reveries. J Mary Craig Sinclair

40 Scott Fitzgerald, Taps at Reveille (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1935), p. 217.

41 P. 231.

49 Zelda Fitzgerald (1932; rpt. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1967), p. 3.

43 Scott Fitzgerald (New York: Grosset and Dunlap, 1925), p. 90

44 P. 91.

43 Tennessee Williams, The Glass Menagerie in Best Plays of the Modern American Theatre (New Yorks Crown Publishers, Inc., 1947). 46

recounts an evening when she was seventeen and four beaux arrived

simultaneously for dinner, where they made a toast to her as "queen 46 of all hearts." Earlier Thomas Nelson Page had set a precedent in

his humorous little narrative "Rachel's Lovers" in this way:

Rachel was as black as a crow, or, more poetically, as a sloe, but this did not prevent her from being a belle on the plantation; and though she had reached the mature age of twenty without taking a husband, it was not for want of offers, for she had had many. She was, indeed, the belle of the plantation, but she was also the flirt, and more than the usual number of the young bucks had endeavored to secure her without success.47

Of Peyton Loftis, Styron tells us that "by the time she had reached twelve she had lost track of the number of small boys who had asked her to marry them."

That so much of this description depends upon the physical is another of the banalities of the system. That the belle secretly seduces means that she also secretly primps and plans, she gets secretly pregnant, disliking this aspect of her lot more than any other. Frances Newman describes Evelyn Cunningham, "one of the last of the Virginia belles," in the privacy of her bedroom marking a calendar date—while the author never tells us what the date is, the "astute" reader assumes that Evelyn is marking the date of her menstrual period- and smiling complacently because her figure remains intact. We recall,

45 Southern Belle, p. 33.

47 P. 182.

z q Lie Down in Darkness, p. 84.

45 Dead Lovers Are Faithful Lovers (New York: Boni & Liveright, 1928), p7183: ~ ' 47

too, Scarlett O’Hara’s devotion to a seventeen-inch waistline—"she had a whiter bosom and a smaller waist and a tinier foot than any girl present"—and the consequent trial involved in getting it back after 50 a pregnancy. That seducer belles symptomatically bore children is no less a manifestation of a conventional distaste, however, than it is one more natural recompense for those elements in her code which demanded that also she accept the consequences of her acts. In this near anomaly there is another paradoxical inclinations for all her proper charm the belle despises the natural outcome of the place she was bred for. Far from playing on that possible tragedy, lesser writers of the bellehood code seem bent on discarding it altogether. Take the case of Anne

Arland who in Natchez Woman, a novel published in 1950, marries "in the style and manner of her young ladyhood," then after her husband’s death returns to pick up the threads of a romance with the ex-husband of her best friend. For her unscrupulousness, Arland suffers no dimunition of radiance or social position, nor even a loss of friendship 51 with the woman whose ex-husband she secures.

What we see here is that some writers also choose to let this fundamental characteristic bleed into more morally acceptable practices.

Hence, we also see the belle constantly preoccupied with personal trappings, the vanities which seem to be underlain by the same general sexual displacement, but which on the surface keep the cloak of codal respectability.

88 Gone With the Wind, p. 174.

Alice Walworth Graham (Garden City? Doubleday and Company, 1950). 48

The domestic belle is all of what the seducer is except that,

like Katherine Faraday, for example, she is hyper-sensitive to those

outward trappings which will best cover over the subtle holes in her

paradoxical code. That belles are preoccupied with dress fabrics,

cleanliness, hairdos, fashions, music, poetry, religious duties, or

facial demeanors is substantial evidence that the superficial is

regarded as a proper cover-up for whatever may legitimately or

illegitimately lie underneath. More than a casual note is made of all of this in the poem, "The Belles of Williamsburg"?

Wilt thou, advent’rous pen, describe The gay, delightful, silken tribe, That maddens all our city; Nor dread, last while you foolish claim A near approach to beauty's flame, Icarus' fate may hit ye.

With singed pinions tumbling down, The scorn and laughter of the town, Thou'lt rue thy daring flight; While every miss with cool contempt, Affronted by the bold attempt, Will, tittering, view thy plight.

Ye girls, to you devoted ever, The object still of our endeavor Is somehow to amuse you; And if instead of higher praise, You only laugh at these rude lays, We'll willingly excuse you.

At church Myrtilla lowly kneels, No passion but devotion feels, No smiles her looks environ; But let her thoughts to pleasure fly, The basilisk is in her eye And on her tongue the Syren. 49

The god of love mistook the maid, For his own Psyche, and *tis said He still remains her slave; And when the boy directs her eyes To pierce where every passion lies, Not age itself can save.

At length, fatigued with beauty’s blaze The feeble muse no more essays Her picture to complete; The promised charms of younger girls, Then nature the gay scene unfurls, Some happier bard shall treat. . . .92

And, of course, from this tradition there comes that rash of description involving all the proper objectss

1933 Mary Johnston’s Miss Delicia Allen?

She was wearing her pale green poplin striped with blue; full and flowing skirt, close bodice, graceful sleeve and under sleeve, rounded throat and fine worked collar. Her bonnet of pale straw had blue flowers but tied with a qreen ribbon. How sweet, to have pretty clothesl^^

. . . Oh, I have met Mr. Tennysoni He’s talked to me. He repeated a short poem to me—one of his own— in a deep, wonderful voice. And I'm going to meet Sir Edwin Landseer. And Mr. Thackeray is coming to dinner' « .

1881 William C. Falkner's White Rose of Memphis;

When we began to whirl round the room Lottie let her cheek rest on my shoulder; and I felt her cool sweet breath fanning my face, while her beautiful eyes gazed up into mine with an expression of unmixeri delight ... I soon became warmed up and my blood

52 Pp. 469-70. Although the poem appeared in 1836 in the Southern Literary Messenger, the editor's introductory note states that "the poem was written and circulated in that place /Williamsburg/ in 1777."

93 Bostons Little Brown & Co., 1933, p. 129.

54 P. 146 50

boiled with the intoxicating influence of the music, and the love for the girl whose cheek rested on my shoulder. I forgot everything but the dear idol who was so near my heart, and would have kept whirling round until my limbs gave way under me, but the music ceased. . . .55

1928 Isa Glenn's Southern Charm;

'Alice May,' ordered her mother, 'look what you are doing. You know I don't like having my hair pulled. ... Do be more careful with that brush. You know how I hate having the brush come down on my head with a whack. Do it gently. Start at the crown of the head and draw the brush slowly and lightly down the length of the hair. You wont make it shine if you don't do it that way—evenly. Don't forget to count a hundred strokes.'56

1918 Cyrus Brady's The Southerners;

. . . both young men sprang to assist her to mount. She looked from one outstretched hand to the other, and turning to Peyton put her little foot in his palm. . . .52

1852 Caroline Hentz's Marcus Warland;

The sweet face of Mrs. Bellamy had lost none of the winning charms that distinguished her several years before, while the soft glow of health now added to its attraction. A dress of thin white muslin softened the graceful outlines of her figure, and the flowers with which youthful taste and affection had decorated her hair, gave even a juvenile loveliness to her appearance. . . .55

The result is, again, the creature of unsurpassed voluptuosity which we have made the fundamental element of the stereotype. But the added consequence is the fully-realized code itself, which we have neglected

55 P. 94.

56 P. 89.

57 P. 62.

58 p 61. 51

to this point, hopeful of having it emerge in the same way that a definition of the belle will come about.

Yet strained by all the conventions cited above, the credibility of the social belle emerges intact because of the very struggle that writers seem to have had in keeping her going against the tradition.

With notable allegiance to the facades to the so-called "porch society" by which Hoffman again characterizes the Southern social code, the belles who remained memorable are those who, in actuality, have borne grave literary burdens in defending that tradition and far more subtle personal burdens in pretending that it existed. They do exist in the trappings with which we have familiarized ourselves, and they reinforce the fundamental paradoxes through which we have characterized their seedbed.

The essential contradiction here invites comparison to the traditions which Highet sees behind the courly love system of the

Middle Ages. Here there were always disparate origins which somehow extended themselves into a hodgepodge of Christian-pagan ideologies to defy explanation. And yet, says Highet, the system is one of the most saleable, provable comments on the reciprocal relationship between literature and human conduct ever.3^ To say this of the bellehood code, we are perhaps overselling the point, but the fact remains that we cannot deny those fundamental elements in human nature which seem all too significantly characterized by the fabrication and literary conventions that have made it as full as the courtly love ideal. Nor

cq Gilbert Highet, The Classical Tradition? Greek and Roman Influences on Western Literature (1949; rpt. London? Oxford University Press, 1967), p. 579. 52

is the fact that the character fundamentally belongs to literature more than life anything to dissuade us. The convention underlying the belle's final sociological significance should be our proof.

The outcome of descriptions such as we have discussed served as an ideal, a measure for the women who, in real life, were products of the porch society; that is, these were the women who had historically 60 managed to make Southern family life a type of matriarchy. That the extension of matriarchy as a force in building empires and nations should have at its roots something devoid of imagination and beauty is especially inconceivable for a region shaped by a Gerald O'Hara's type of agrarianism;

'Land is the only thing in the world that amounts to anything,' he shouted, his thick, short arms making wide gestures of indignation, 'for 'tis the only thing in this world that lasts, and don't you be forgetting it! 'Tis the only thing worth working for, worth fighting for—worth dying for.'®"*

That this belief needed a base also in some concept of the beautiful further dramatizes the inherent source of the belle's relationship to fundamental stylization of desire. She is, sociologically as much as literally, the rhetorical motto of a region bent from the first on defining itself, but uncertain where to begin. As leisure emerged the by-product of agrarian culture described above, so did the need for finding in that leisure a more-than-romantic avowal of the creators' rights to it. To make a long story short—and simplistic to a degree—

55 See, for example, Matthew Page Andrews (compiler), The Women of the South in War Times (Baltimore; The Norman Remington Co., 1920), p. 21. . .

61 Gone With the Wind, p. 36. 53

the social code of the belle became the standard by which the right of leisure was not only dramatized but as well upheld. It also made cavaliers of the men and, weighed against the flavor of literary expression of the day, then ceded its rights to myth, and woman—-as in most myths—became the patron. What, then, was the social code?

It seems to have begun as paratactically as did its literary counterpart, in a variety of fantasy. And what fantasy has unequivocally in common with history is that they are both extensions of the human longing to explain itself. Southern women apparently fantasized domination of the porch society while quietly serving it. The service which in history becomes the focal point of considerable strength and charm, in fantasy becomes an even more saleable explanation of elements which were as well becoming moribund, if not already dead.

In art this is transferred to genre and form by speculation rather than by clear awareness, and the sense of history that is also a natural part of this telescopes supposed ideals into fact. Thus the belle stands as a form of this transferal and it is no wonder that her lot is one of considerable profundity as well as preposterous scope. She was but the facade for dealing with ideas such as power, social class, the plantation ethic of merrymaking (picnics like the early one in Gone With the Wind,

Gaines assures us, were not fabrications), and all the attendant customs.

And as such, she is readily typified by Ellen O'Haras

She was a tall woman, standing a head higher than her fiery little husband, but she moved with such quiet grace in her swaying hoops that her height attracted no attention to itself. Her neck, rising from the black taffeta sheath of her basque, was creamy-skinned, rounded and slender, . . . She spoke in the soft slurring voice of the coastal Georgian, liquid of 54

vouiels, kind to consonants and with the barest trace of French accent. It was a voice never raised in command to a servant or reproof to a child but a voice that was obeyed instantly at Tara, . . . When Ellen was dressing for a ball or for guests or even to go to Jonesboro for Court Day, it frequently required two hours, two maids and Mammy to turn her out to her own satisfaction. . • .62

She is at once motherly and barren, moral and obtuse, idealistically sober but flippant, and these contradictions—together with the ever­ present Southern instant tradition—embody the high, consequent paradoxes.

The Belle in Caricature

Here is the point at which the convergence of romance, struggle for domestic identity, politics, and the war itself seem most to lay the groundwork for the caricature of the belle. The war, on the cine hand had been fought over the past, but clearly ebbed toward the total death of what we have noted was already moribund. A minor but significant paradigm for this was the scene of the beautiful young woman as representative of those idyllic traditions of the past now made pathetic by the encroachment of her dead dreams. The usual treatment is of the

Scarlett O'Hara sort, with the belle standing against the ruins of her

Tara or River House or Belle Reve and swearing that she will not go hungry again, that the war has not destroyed her. But gaining in station

62 Pp. 40, 41 55

and in literary preference is the same picture of the same belle, at last bereft of the trappings that once sustained her in contradictions, going sour in petty hard-nosed individualism, or, oftener, going absolutely empty-headed. These types are the fundamental caricatures, though they do, as caricatures must, lay grounds for more profound truths.

The writers of the postwar or Reconstruction belle appear to have seen in the dissolution of the actual bellehood code an even more saleable reason for bolstering it up and more strongly celebrating it. Consider, for example, Caroline Gordon’s None Shall Look Back. It is of further significance that the Reconstruction does not see the death of the belle; it sees instead her revival, but now the added dimension is an evanescent freedom from the tradition which, while only momentarily satisfying the writers of the time, later completely intrigues those who want to look beyond the belle's literary history to the true psychology of the woman herself. This is the fundamental food for the caricature, and among the most interesting is Thomas Nelson Page's early attempt to take the empty- headed caricature, do a preposterous thing—make her black. This is the character of Rachel, who, now, is forthrightly acknowledged by the term itself, thus suggesting not only the conclusive awareness readers would have had of the type, but the probable irony and amusement that attended;

"If Rachel chose to make a fool of herself, it was her right as a woman.

Rachel made the most of her opportunity, and flounced about and flouted poor Dick with the cruelty and arrogance of a much more advanced state

53 New York; Charles Scribner's Sons, 1937 56

of civilization.Subsequently, when Rachel agrees to be the fifth bride of one Uncle Isaac, the master of the plantation intervenes:

The upshot of it all was that Rachel married Dick next night, in the gown which had been given her to wed Isaac, and giggled just as happily. Most people thought at first that Isaac had delirium tremens, but he always maintained that he saw the devil himself, and gave so circumstantial a description of him that it was quite convincing, and brought him so much renewed credit that Molly shortly afterwards married him, and, be it said, duly got the physic that he had prepared for Rachel.65

DeForest, too, employs this figure as another of the revelations of the celebrated Miss Ravenel's Conversiont

He saw that Miss Ravenel was willing to talk any kind of nothing so long as she could talk of her native State, and that therefore he could please her without much intellectual strain or chance of rivalry. Consequently he prattled and made prattle for some minutes about Louisiana."

It was perfectly clear to Miss Ravenel that he meant to pay her a compliment. It occurred to her that she was probably in short dresses when the gallant Lieutenant-Colonel was on duty at Baton Rouge, and thus missed a chance of seeing her in New Orleans. But she did not allude to this ludicrous possibility; she only colored at his audacity, and said, 'Oh, it's such a lovely city! I think it is far preferable to New York.'87

This is the tradition which produces numbers of later caricatured types, some of them so true to the rubrics that they heighten caricatures into a far more serious realm. Certainly the two old maid sisters in

Stark Young's River House are emblematic of the traditions

" "Rachel's Lovers," p. 18B.

65 P. 197.

66 P. 23.

67 P. 63. 57

Miss Rosa was a little woman with an honest, combative, kind and affectionate face and quaint, awkward little movement. Her sister was taller. There was something silvery and gentle about her, about her manner, her slender body, her hair, her voice. She was somewhat deaf but would have heard better if she had paid as anxious attention as Miss Rosa would have done in her place.

'Oh, I beg your pardon,’ Miss Rosa said, shaking hands with him, 'we beg your pardon, Judge Barr.' She put her lips near to her sister’s ear. ’Now, Tellie, you see what. People will think we are crazy. That's exactly what they'll do.'33

What is important here is another major trend emerging in much

the same way that the figures of the scalawags and carpetbaggers emerge from the Reconstruction. It is almost as if it had to happen in a short-lived few years of weakness that the breakdown of the former code should have produced its looters and profiteers. However, it seems totally ironic that the same tables turned should not have been able to kill the dominant figure of the ancient tradition either; that, though her character is addended by suitable mockery, even the mockery grows from the same set of givens that would have her endure as if the still displaced source of an archetypal image; furthermore, that the dim minor area of caricature should also have claimed as its progeny the major force in American entertainment for the next sixty years, the melodrama. Ne

68 New Yorks Charles Scribner's Sons, 1929, p. 14. 58

Melodrama and the Stereotype; The Decadent Belle

The remaining strain of continuity in the character of the belle

should be traced through those elements which the stereotype and the

caricature, along with their formal legacies, codes, and their

historical bases have become a synthesis. What this synthesis is looks rudimentary beside all the complications that have gone into it, but its most simple and pertinent form looks like this; the formal stereotype of the belle leaves behind a character of fundamental alienation who in varying stages has to fight battles of identity. In the earliest forms the alienation was frequently misunderstood, if ever realized. It seems quite significant that here the budding writers* visions coincide very well with the rich but unrealized properties of their character. In brief, the stereotypical belle’s alienation is one of hit-and-miss design whose principal legacy is that maze of not-easily pinpointed stylizations which finally so confine her to certain perceptions and certain duties that she becomes remote from the conduct of mere mortals. The case of the flashing-eyed beauty Evelyn Cunningham, happily enjoying her craft of trained flirtations and codified melodrama, can gradually become through alienation, and in almost exact bearing, the decadent Amanda of Tennessee Williams's Glass Menagerie. Note the striking similarities between Evelyn Cunningham and Amanda Wingfield which nevertheless separate strongly by Williams's awareness of the alienating forces in the code which support his belle. His superior art also draws that alienation out into its natural decadence in this passage from the one-act play Something Unspoken when Miss Cornelia 59

Scott, a wealthy Southern spinster, is confronted by her secretary:

... Both of us have turned grey! But not the same kind of grey. In that velvet dressing-gown you look like the Emperor Tiberius! In his imperial toga! Your hair and your eyes are both the color of iron! Iron grey! Invincible looking! People nearby are all somewhat frightened of you. They feel your force and thBy admire you for it. They come here for opinions on this or that. What plays are good on Broadway this season, what books are worth reading and what books are trash and what records are valuable and what is the proper attitude toward bills in Congress! Oh, you're a fountain of wisdom! And in addition to that, you have your wealth! ... your mansion on Edgewater Drive ... your fabulous gardens that Pilgrims cannot go into. . .

This kind of synthesis has also produced a notable aggressiveness in

the later traditions of the belle. Here again we seem to have another

cache of hidden possibilities which could not have been realized without

the intervention of melodrama and an exhausted self-contained world.

That the better drawn belle should therefore behave with a wellspring

of inexhaustible hostility and aggressiveness both toward the objects

of her desire and her enemies' attacks is especially apt when we look at her emerging from the prison of words that invariably contained her and held her back. Faulkner's treatments here are both daring and fully realized:

Rosa Coldfield describes her childhood:

... that warped and spartan solitude ... which . . . taught me (and little else) to listen before I could comprehend.'23

And her reaction to Sutpen’s outrageous suggestion:

In 27 Wagons Full of Cotton and Other One-Act Plays (Norwalk, Connecticut: New Directions, 1953), p. 234.

23 Absalom, Absalom!. p. 140. 60

’Why, he is mad. He will decree this marriage for tonight and perform his own ceremony, himself both groom and minister; pronounce his own wild benediction on it with the very bedwarri candle in his hands and I mad too, for I will acquiesce, succumb; abet him and plunge down ... If I was saved that^night ... it was no fault, no doing of my own. ...

Unlike Rosa Coldfield, Carolina Bascomb Compson concerns herself not with moral integrity, but with appearances. To Caddy she says, "Are you going to take that baby out without his overshoes ... Do you 72 want to make him sick, with the house full of company." It is because she gives what little energy she is willing to expend in life to a selfish and fruitless concern for her own social position that

Quentin could lament so pitifully: "If I’d just had a mother so I 73 could say Mother Mother." And finally, there is Miss Emily Grierson, completely alienated and isolated from society:

Alive, Miss Emily had been a tradition, a duty, and a care; a sort of hereditary obligation upon the town, dating from that day in 1B94 when Colonel Sartoris, the mayor—he who fathered the edict that no Negro woman should appear on the streets without an apron— remitted her taxes, the dispensation dating from the death of her father on into perpetuity. Not that Miss Emily would have accepted charity. Colonel Sartoris invented an involved tale to the effect that Miss Emily’s father had loaned money to the town, which the town, as a matter of business, preferred this way of repaying. Only a man of Colonel Sartoris' generation and thought could have invented it, and only a woman could have believed it.7^

In contrast, we should note the usual acceptance that pre-

71 P. 165.

72 The Sound and the Fury, p. 28.

73 P. 190.

74 "A Rose for Emily," p. 120. 61

Reconstruction belles had of their lot because of the former acceptance

of their writers*. Carl Van Doren's description is quite appropriate;

"Domestic sentimentalism of course still walked its way of tears with a 75 sobbing audience." There are dozens of women so generated with no suitable grounds for attacking the system, nor no vital psychology for rationalizing any consequent entrapment. However, among women writers of the 1920's who relied on the belle character, a common figure is the belle mother who experiences at least the beginnings of a skeptical attitude toward her role.

Of Anne deGraffenried we are told;

/She/was lovely; a suppressed woman ... a woman who seemed not to have forgotten her body so much as to have never been completely aware of it . . . she had driven her husband to shut himself up in the back room.?5

Typically, as with all good mothers of belles, she shields her daughters from reality, especially the evil, unpleasant, or embarrassing aspects of it; "/Pregnancy? is not a fit subject for conversation among unmarried people. Suppose we talk about what you are going to wear 77 this evening?" By the time of her death, it is clear that Mrs. 7B deGraffenried recognizes her life as "lonely" and "empty." However, she does not alter her way of living in the least.

In Southern Charm, Mrs. Catharine Habersham, who, like Anne

78 The American Novel; 17B9-1939 (1940; rpt. New York; The Macmillan Company, 1965), p. 190.

75 A. Short History of Julia, p. 17. 77 P. 73.

78 P. 185. 62

deGraffenried is also a widow, dominates and manipulates the lives of

her two daughters. Alice May accepts the code of Southern charm

prescribed by her mother's standards and succeeds as a belle; however,

as Alice May reaches middle-age, Mrs. Habersham is repulsed by her

daughter's selfishness and insensitivity. On the other hand, her

daughter Laura who was the family black sheep (she became pregnant on

their European voyage and was disowned) and rebel is a perceptive and

attractive woman: "An important thing is that I outgrew the parasitic 79 stage. An important thing is that I stopped running on charm." Early

in the novel this description is given of Mrs. Habersham:

She belonged where she had been born, in one of those old pseudo-Greek houses on which the white paint had not been renewed since the Civil War, so that the Ionic columns holding up the heavy flat roofs of the deep porticos no longer gave the classic suggestion of marble but revealed that they were wooden.

But near the story's end her values have changed;

Charm, she told herself with amazement, might then come of an indifference to charm. But she was too weary—she was too old, she told herself brutally— to readjust her ideas in a new orderly sequence, and old enough to see, finally, through the veil that had been before her eyes. With mounting disgust, she decided that all Southern ladies must be born with cauls; not the caul that brings with it second sight, but a caul that cuts human eyes off from clear sight.31

Frances Newman's character, Mrs. Overton, while like Mrs. Habersham, is far more pathetic because she recognizes the entrapped situation she lives in, but is helpless to do anything about it. Hence the reader sees

79 P. 271e

80 P. 118.

01 P. 286. 63

Mrs. Ov8rton at her daughter's funeral, tastefully veiled in fine black 132 crepe and "weeping like Rachel"—but not for her children. Mrs.

Overton, Anne deGraffenried, and Mrs. Habersham all look back at their coded lives and regret the pretensions, the emptiness, and consequent unhappiness. But, predictably, none of them changes. Such situations apparently had no particular psychological after effects in the late nineteenth or early twentieth century development of the character.

There are, however, certain conservative breakthroughs that appear to be the result of the transferal of the belle of language and description from the plantation to the market place. As we have noted, this transferal is largely the product of synthesis between caricature and stereotype:

Aunt Pittypat had been christened Sarah Jane Hamilton sixty years before, but since the long-past day when her doting father had fastened this nickname upon her, because of her airy, restless, pattering little feet, no one had called her anything else. In the years that followed that second christening, many changes had taken place in her that make the pet name incongruous. Of the swiftly scampering child, all that now remained were two tiny feet, inadequate to her weight, and a tendency to prattle happily and aimlessly. She was stout, pink cheeked and silver haired and always a little breathless from too tightly laced stays. She was unable to walk more than a block on the tiny feet which she crammed into too small slippers. She had a heart which fluttered at any excitement and she pampered it shamelessly, fainting at any provocation. Everyone knew that her swggns were generally mere ladylike pretenses. . . .

The success of Aunt Pittypat is indeed in the faint understanding that the author appears to have for a woman whose aggressions ought to

"Rachel and Her Children," in American Mercury (May, 1924), II, pp. 92-96.

83 Gone With the Wind, pp. 155-56. 64

have been recognized before her duties. Nevertheless, however pedestrianly, a precedent is established for the likes of Regina or 84 Birdie in The Little Foxes. Of course the alternate humor and fear of both these situations lies in characterizations which build on concepts of station and place long gone, and upon a clearly identifiable tradition. Just as a movie director can make great use of the familiarity his audience might have with the face and acting capabilities of certain actors, so Lillian Heilman and a host of others regularly assume that because much secret torment was buried in the charms and givens of a worn-out system, there is bound to be a proportionate amount of tension in the slow realization of this reality. Often forgotten among the givens is the necessary melodrama which must give open expression to such tension, and which, depending totally on the skill of the author, must not sell the bellehood code as ever having been real.

That, finally, the belle of the decadent tradition is a woman whose lot is not solvable, and therefore linked inexorably with lost causes, and unquenchable lust, seems perfectly in order as the peak of synthesis 85 which begins with her literary confinement. One can be overwhelmed by the traditions which see the decadent belles finally wind up sleeping with dead partners, going raving mad, turning whore, committing bizarre suicides, or scores of other non-redemptive non-resolutions. In a degree, the portrayal seems to have come full circle, if we choose to be

84 Lillian Heilman (New York; Random House, 1939).

85 Writers about Southern fiction, among others John M. Bradbury, characterize certain writings as "lost cause" fiction. Renaissance in the Southt A. Critical History .of the Literature, 1920-1960 (Chapel Hill; The University of North Carolina Press, 1963), p. 49. 65

ironical again and say that this was what the belle always was potentially. It is, indeed, the suitable expression of the paradox both in vision and in that vision's realization which prompted this paper. It lays no blame on the tradition, therfore, to brand it a total parataxis, nor to ride judgment upon the early writers of the code whose senses of psychology are suspect. Nor does it allow for the opinions of those who would call the belle merely grotesque. The psychological effect of bellehood is like the psychological effect of any confinement whether of words or of real situations, and its notable conclusion is like the rock-and-roll song which cannot end but in a fade-out. What this traces unequivocally is the popularity of the form, and it keeps on. A form with no resolution will always recur, and, in a sense, the decadent belle—at least until the recent past— has almost providentially supported herself on these terms. Moreover, the proliferation of characters is aptly demonstrated by Robert Penn

Warren, Erskine Caldwell, Ross Lockridge, and countless others:

Oh, who am I? For so long that was, you might say, the cry of my heart. There were times when I would say to myself my own name—my name is Amantha Starr- over and over again, trying somehow to make myself come true. But then, even the name might fade away in the air, in the bigness of the world. The world is big, and you feel lost in it, as though the bigness recedes forever, in all directions, like a desert of sand, and distances flee glimmering from you in all directions. ... I wanted to cry out that I wasn't a nigger, I wasn't a slave, I was Amantha Starr—Oh, I was Amantha—Little Manty—Little Miss Sugar-and-Spice. I could feel the pain of wanting to cry out. 3

83 Robert Penn Warren, Band of Angels (New York; Random House, '1955), p. 3, 65. 66

This is a terrible way to drive up to a filling station and be treated. I'm Mrs. Mangrum—and you know it. Everybody knows me. . . . You're just not one of the good people, Mr. Infinger. You don't act like somebody born and raised here like the rest of us. I've been suspicious of a name like yours.87

In this face innocence was strangely confused with sensuality. The upper part of the face, the patrician brow, the delicately limned eyebrows and the great blue eyes, . . . suggested purity and romatic sadness. But these qualities were lost in the barbarously lovely lower face. The cheekbones were wide. The jawlines swept in to a precise little chin. The nose flared from a fine bridge to wide nostrils and challenged the eyes for dominance. It was in perpetual pout, as if about to offer itself for a kiss.88

The stock answers to decadence seem to offer no resolution. It

seems ludicrous to imagine that Blanche DuBois and her archetype could ever have repented, but that is hardly the point since her very strength

lies in the tension and fear which lead her onward. While we may dislike, as a suggestion of the human condition, the Scarlett 0*Hara's of the world, we are sustained by the thought that only an irresolvable paradox goes on in time. As long as a character of fiction can keep telling us that tomorrow is another day, we are apt to keep looking for it, and it does not ever matter that we have been conned.

That the confidence angle is also crucial to the development of the belle, then, completes the vast number of complications which now ought to allow at least a working definition of the character. In summary, therefore, we see the belle as first the product of an incipient

87 Erskine Caldwell, Miss Mamma Aimee (New York? New American Library, 1967), p. 36. QO Ross Lockridge, Jr., Raintree County (New York: Dell Publishing Co., 1947), p. 130. 67

literary parataxis characterized by the aureate language of self-discovery.

She emerges by force of language, not necessarily an invention so much as

a travesty. She is, thus, importantly ready-made for surviving in a

world whose primitive and instinctive elements are betokened by fantasy

on the one hand, and a kind of presumed integrity on the other. That

she is variously praised and marie fun of short-circuits her totally

credible treatment except in interim periods of symbolic searches and

political unheaval. Here she is the archetypal force both of an

uncertain morality and a moribund code of chivalry. Not without deep

ties to the descriptive elements which spawned her, and by the forces

of war and romance and budding literary realism, she finds her way into the marketplace where insipience gives way to true immediacy and her former sexual, psychological, and moral displacement become the seedbeds

of exploitation. Preserved yet in an aura of flashing eyes and sober allegiances, she is both stereotyped and parodied; then she is subjected to the alienation, tension, and psychological obtuseness which only caricature could adequately sustain. Finally a complex figure of life and near perfect example of the literary stylization of desire, she falls, with reason, into the hands of writers whose vision is commiserate with ther tradition; the flaps hang open, the closet is purged. Blanche

DuBois, Scarlett O’Hara, Katharine Walton, Bel Tracy, Eliza, and Alison

Langdon, all stand firm as the same person whose existence seems always notably to have been there, but notably hidden in the seams of an artistic process that is purely American. 68

Chapter iii

The Vision Realized: Writers of the Bellehood Code

That the elements noui defined have also been used widely is something that we have already selectively subjected to innumerable examples. What becomes pertinent now is a specific treatment of writers whose belles are part of more serious literature. If we are to apply the broader definition of the term to the belles in American fiction or to those characters who, like the termagant wife of recent times, seem to have some elemental relationship to the belle and the processes which have created her, the number of belles seems legion.

This does not matter in light of the fact that there is a wealth of stylizations which render the character, both in and out of the tradition, an enduring, not-so-stereotypical figure of life. We have noted, as well, that here the province of treatment is not something belonging necessarily to the Southern writer. It is the tradition which seems always to have borne the best fruits since, we can almost make a case for a number of near-belle types who are more probably generated from other regional preoccupations. But that is also a complex and sometimes tenuous set of givens which make their best point

1 An area of untapped research lies in ths probable relationships between the later developments of the belle and other stereotypes who in time seem to show up in characters like the flapper, mammy figures, and termagants of many varieties in the works of Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald and many other writers. 69

in examples from a narrowed definition. Hence, we shall give little more than passing mention to the scores of lesser writers whose belles remained figures of romance or domestic tragedy and other forms which we have treated as both momentary and, in themselves, somewhat inconsequential. What we want to deal with is the belle whose bones show nicely, but whose flesh is moved by the real artist's hand.

At the surface there are a number of such artists to recall.

Probably the first serious regionalist, William Gilmore Simms, created a belle who, for all the political subterfuges, stands above incipient characters of the type. Katharine Walton appears first in The Partisan:

£ Tale of the Revolution and is later re-introduced and more markedly developed with an aura which Hugh Holman suggests is a romance formula 9 Simms borrowed from Scott's Waverly novels. This belle is memorable for having been the first to become a regular element in the palette of a particular writer. Simms was critically acclaimed as "the most prolific, the most versatile, and the most successful Southern 3 antebellum man of letters."

Notable specifically for the tone shift that marks the first belle substantially free from the description code is Lillie Ravenel, the heroine of J. William DeForest’s sometimes entertaining work, Miss

Ravenel's Conversion from Secession to Loyalty. The belle character in the Pastime Stories and In Ole Virginia or Marse Chan and Other

Stories, works of Thomas Nelson Page, further exemplifies at least a

2 Holman, p. 57. 3 Holman, p. 16. 70

minor break from the flashing-eyes syndrome as well«

An’ her eyes! I do b'lieve she laugh mo' wid 'em 'n mid her mouf. She wuz de 'light o'dis plantation! When she'd come in you' house 'twuz like you'd shove back de winder an' let piece o' de sun in on de flo' — you could almas' see by her!4 5

More notably, the grouting treatment of the belle as antagonist is built upon the works of John Esten Cooke. Gaines regards Cooke as

"probably the most notable figure between Kennedy and the post-bellum 5 masters." In the dedication to his 1874 collection, Pretty Mrs.

Gaston, and Other Stories, Cooke gives evidence of his audience awareness and his own sense of humor as well«

To the Critics (radiant in ribbons and roses) who sat under the evergreens and read this history, •Pretty Mrs. Gaston' Is respectfully dedicated.6 7 8

There are minor alterations in the character as she first comes into the

Twentieth Century. Mary Johnston wrote historical romances and in the

1900 Lewis Rand produced In Jacqueline Churchill Rand a belle aware of the alienation in her code, but unfortunately so much a romantic figure 7 that her potential responsibility is short-circuited. George

Washington Cable's creole belles, Rosalie from the "ViBux Carre" in 8 Lovers of Louisiana or Aline Chapdelaine, The flower of the

4 "Meh Lady" in In Ole Virginia or Marse Chan and Other Stories, p. 99. (New York« Charles Scribner's Sons, 1887), p. 99.

5 Gaines, p. 54.

6 New York« Orange Judd Company, 1874.

7 Boston« Houghton Mifflin Co., 1908.

8 New York« Charles Scribner's Sons, 1918. 71

g Chapdelaines, are rather charming variations of the stereotype but

remain characters not quite credible for the rhetoric which surrounds

their plight. Cable's belles are significant, however, because they

bear traces of the emerging salvationless type.

Notable users of the caricature include Thomas Nelson Page who

in Pastime Stories develops the belle as a black, thus laying the foundation for uncertain but probable connection between the modern black matriarchal stereotype and the dissolution of the belle. Among the many celebrators of the belle stereotype itself, we must mention that George Cary Eggleston in Dorothy South is remarkable in what appears to be a serious attempt before Faulkner to make of the belle a symbol.^0

From here on out there is a wide variety of treatments, usually employing one or more of the above distinctions. We note in passing, for example, that there are regular appearances by standard belles in the works of innumerable writers of the Twentieth Century. Harnett T

Kane's interest in Southern and plantation history possibly provided the stepping-off place for his biographical novels of the lives of

Mrs. Robert E. Lee, Myra Clark Gaines, Mrs. Stonewall Jackson, Mrs. 11 Jefferson Davis and others. Notice the unmistakable refrains of plantation fiction in the opening paragraphs of Bride of Fortune, the story of Varina Howell Davis?

9 London? W. Collins & Co. Ltd., 1919.

10 Dorothy South: A Love Story of Virginia Just Before the War (Boston: Lothrop Publishing Co., 1902). 11 See, for example, his Plantation Parade: The Grand Manner in Louisiana (New York; William Morrow and Co., 1945). 72

Out of the sheltering dimness of the deep-sunken road that was the Natchez Trace, the carriages rolled toward the wide white house atop a rise in the uneven earth. ... In the candlelight of the arched central doorway a tall, dark-haired girl stood temporarily alone. Behind her, figures passed in a swirl, skirts rustling to the scrape of fiddles, servants maneuvering in and out with trays of wins punch, men leading partners across the hall. ... Varina Howell's dark brown eyes, the color of the Spanish sherry in the glasses, brightened as a robust new figure filled the doorway.12

Hamilton Basso, while not a major literary figure, certainly exhibits a high level of literary competence in his fiction of the

South's manners and mores. Of Basso, Bradbury writes: "All of his more important novels reflect his unwavering attachment to the South and, at the same time, his liberal-minded concern for its faults and 13 follies." Cinnamon Seed deals with the Negro problem, covering pre-Civil War to the post-depression periods. Among his variations of the belle character in this novel are Constance Cummings, a 1920*s creole belle, and an imposing mama belle, who is a chatelaine in the plantation home of her husband Robert Blackheath and who shoots "the airy yellow bitch" Bella.14 In Courthouse Square, Basso seems to be behind the comment on women made by Christopher: ". • . there is a decided similarity between camellias and Southern wbmen. They both lack something. In the case of camellias it's perfume. In the case of women it's a failure to understand what it's all about—what their function is. It's almost as if they used their accent to hide their

12 Bride of Fortune: £ Novel Based on the Life of Mrs. Jefferson Davis (Garden City: Doubleday and Co., Inc., 1948), p. 3.

18 Bradbury, p. 161.

14 New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1934, p. 15. 73

sex." Seldom, if ever, is the stereotype belle described without having a great deal made of her eyes—"the color of the Spanish sherry in the glasses;" "sparkled with light as the breaking wave does upon 17 the storm-tossed sea;" "blue, soft, and intense as the noonday sky in 18 June" —the catalogue could be endless. No doubt Hamilton Basso had this stereotypical convention in mind when Marie Barondess is discussed«

Mrs. King« "She was beautiful. She had the loveliest eyes."

Mrs. Buttonwood« "Laws, I'm not saying things against Marie. Of course she had lovely eyes. They were the biggest eyes I ever saw ... almost too big, so that they didn't look natural. And did she know how to use them on the menu! ..."

Basso was writing in 1936, more than a hundred years since the prototypical Bel Tracy looked out of her "flawless, amber" eyes.

from there on, also, it is a gaining potential partly shaded by time itself and also by a gathering storm of both popular and critical disavowal for familiar surfaces. The belle at this stage could perhaps have faded into obscurity even as a stereotype had the pattern of her character not developed so paratactically. That expediency somehow also fashioned a ripeness in both public appeal and in the craft of new writers seems yet another paradox in the belle's parthenogenic history, furthermore, that a pattern recognizing the alienating, tension-bearing, contradictory nature of the belle is what finally produces great works

19 New York« Charles Scribner's Sons, 1936, p. 13.

16 Kane, Bride of fortune, p. 3.

4 7 Brady, The Southerners, p. 47.

Hentz, Eoline, p. 22. 19 Courthouse Square, p. 49. Iii

of literature with her at the center seems inescapable.

Again, there is more inconsequential than substantial material.

But in leaving behind the inconsequential, we find it necessary at least to note the several additional writers of minor substance who in the recent past have treated the belle in this vein. Here, the names of Mary Johnston, Isa Glenn, and Gwen Bristow recur, but the writer who surfaces most often is Frances Newman. She is, interestingly enough, the only writer whose entire canon is devoted exclusively to the belle myth. For this reason her work seems the proper manifestation, at least in the popular sense, of those givens which belong more seriously to the writers who will eventually take our entire attention.

That Newman more or less fits in with Tennessee Williams, Robert Penn

Warren, Carson McCullers, William Faulkner, Allen Tate, Stark Young,

Eudora Welty, Lillian Heilman, and Caroline Gordon is something we cannot deny, and while we cannot adequately deal with the total picture enlivened by these men's and women's treatments of the decadent belle either, we do find it necessary to make suitable digests of their particular additions to the belle's on-going literary experience.

Frances Newman: The Belle as a Preoccupation

Frances Newman's two novels and single short story make use of four specific elements of the belle code:

1) the concept of minutiae as a responsible motivating factor in the morality of human endeavor;

2) feeling described instead of portrayed;

3) unconscionable preoccupation with elegance; 75

4) substitution of domestic struggle for cosmic reality.

The beginning of the Newman treatment is almost the end of it,

since after her 1924 prize-winning short story "Rachel and Her Children,"

her development of the bells becomes stilted if not totally predictable.

For example, the prescriptive code the Newman belle lives by in this

story is one calculated to demonstrate the moral significance of social prescription versus individual freedom but, ironically, the system she constructs far this purpose winds up as frustrated and often repressive as the prose itself:

... that one night soon, perhaps that very night, Captain Ashby would drop on his grey-trousered knees, and implore her to do him the great honor of becoming his wife. She would accept the great honor, she would beg him not to kneel before one so unworthy, and Captain Ashby would rise. He would timidly bend down and kiss her respectfully on the forehead.20

The heroine of this best of Newman’s stories is Mrs. Overton, a matronly belle whose duty is, as the story opens, to bury her only daughter. It is not unpredictable at all that while the clergyman eulogizes the dead woman, Mrs. Overton reviews her own disappointing life, then reflects happily on her new situation as the first lady of her deceased daughter's household. The certain ineptness of it is that she finally weeps when she realizes the truth of her unaltered, nameless existence. Newman tries urgently to give this scene significant roots in the character's conscience: "It was fortunate, indeed, that Mr.

Foster could afford that excellent quality of crape, for old Mrs.

Overton was not actually weeping like Rachel—in fact, she was not

20 American Mercury (May, 1924), 2, p. 93. 76

weeping at all."2^

This short story establishes the formula that Miss Newman uses in both of her novels as well. Here is one formula in which the

Southern belles are betrayed by social norms: external compliance brings no satisfaction or reward to the women provided with those prototypical trim bodies and fashionable frocks. These trappings, the cultural prescriptions thereof, bring prototypical unhappiness too.

Picking up there, The Hard-Boiled Virgin (1926) sports a wispy heroine of the Overton type, Katharine Faraday, whose situation is also dependent on audience acceptance of the stereotype. Katherine is born into a moderately affluent Atlanta family of considerable social consciousness, and is thus cast as the usual Southern belle. Her earliest natural instincts prefer a good book and a warm bath to feminine frills and the prescribed mores of afternoon teas. With such details as these, the groundwork for the tension between the inward personality and the outward behavior is established. This is typical

Newman too, and the reader is led to believe that the Southern belle is free and refuses to become a stereotype. It is a short-lived impression, for at the peak of maidenhood Katharine Faraday, like every other Southern belle, concentrates on gracious manners and fashionable frocks. She also searches frantically for a husband. So entrapped does she become in externals that shs is scandalized when a young man dares to kiss her before proposing marriage. That is the end of him and other potential suitors.

21 P. 92 77

The apparent saving grace is that despite her detachment from the

polite fictions of Southern society, Katharine Faraday believes enough

in her mother’s social creed and in the romance of her fantasy world,

to trust that her personal fulfillment will be found in that romantic

creed of the Southern aristocracy. Yet she is no Emma Bovary. The novel is nearly at an end before Katharine "lay in her nineteenth- century bed and dreamed dreams which she thought were giving her an

insight into a nature very unlike the nature a Southern lady should 22 have had." On an emotional level the novel thus comes full circle«

In early life Katharine was inclined to follow her own instincts but instead accepts her mother's word that the prescriptions will work; later she discovers that they have not worked; and finally, she is again allowing herself to experience her own early natural feelings.

A recurrent motif of the novel is the childhood game called

"Prisoner's Base;" one remained on the base until freed by a fellow player. The game is paradigmatic of Katharine's adult situation and desperate imprisonment in maidenhood. In childhood Katharine probably pretended indifference when overlooked by other children« as an adult she continues to pretend indifference. The image she learns to project is a bold ones she is independent, travelling in the United States and abroad, and she is a witty, clever conversationalist. Before appointments with eligible men she usually researches their interests so as to appear socially informed and versatile. It's a role that only reveals to others the contrived, almost desperate condition of her life

22 P. 247 78

The author suggests that Katharine Faraday has sublimated her

natural instincts, displacing them with artificial social standards;

she develops into a shell of a woman—a woman more gratified by her own

cleverness than in the experience of sexual intercourse. Thus, Katharine

Faraday is victorious in the struggle with the fine points of manners, but in the process of that struggle she becomes a totally selfish and deluded person. Newman intends that the code, paradoxically, bring her nothing but entrapment.

Moreoever, the author's emphasis upon the prescriptive social value system which shapes the young Southern woman into a society belle indicates that her character must displace natural, primitive feelings with an artificial code of manners outside her true self. While the metaphoric allusion of the title, a hard-boiled egg, is somewhat odious, it is an apt description of her character. She means to say that the potential of the egg's life-giving substance is denied by the life

Katharine chooses. Had she but continued to experience the development of her more primitive instincts as she had begun to as a young girl, there probably would have been no story to tell.

Dead Lovers Are Faithful Lovers (1928) is a more refined fiction than is The Hard-Soiled Virgin and the character Evelyn Cunningham is more sensitively portrayed than was Katharine Faraday though she is also a belle developing contrary to her primitive instincts.

The first two-thirds of the novel concerns the protagonist's marriage as she sees it—a perfect union. The point of view in the final third of the novel shifts to Isabel Ramsey, the paramour of

Evelyn'8 husband. In the final chapter when husband Charlton has 79

prematurely died, Mies Newman's scenario is emblematic of Evelyn's

delusion and self-centeredness and also of the author's preoccupation:

And when she lifted her cold right hand from the calla lilies, she knew that she could sit in Saint Paul's Church and feel that she was looking back towards a memory which was a beautiful memory. And when the pain rushed through every ons of her nerves again as she lifted her hand to her little hat, it did not tell her that she felt hsrself walking at last on the green oasis of a memory over which she was dropping the victorious curtain of her very long black crepe veil.23

Throughout the novel, self-centeredness and self-deception are

dominant characteristics in Evelyn Cunningham. There are motifs

galore to support the impression and the single interest of her life

is herself—the clothing she wears, the compliment a physical setting

gives her, the impression she makes on her husband, the jealous reaction

she can draw from him by gaining the attention of other men.

As ths novel develops, the reader grows increasingly more aware

that the love of Evelyn and Charlton is mere facade. It isn't needed

since Evelyn pathetically fails to recognize the sterils condition of

her existence. In addition to the fact that the marriage produces no

children, the barren union has more sober details, which also betray

the author's preoccupation. It is infidelity all the way now, a preoccupation of the tension-generated belle, later fully realized by

Williams, Evelyn seeks happiness in the slavery of prescription; she

is provided no creative engagement with life and its responsibilities.

She is the child that Lillian Heilman would later expertly Isolate in

Toys in the Attic.

23 Pp. 294-95. 80

Life and marriage are a drama in which Evelyn Cunningham

continually acts by posing properly and playing roles. She imagines,

for example, that her husband might have begun to love her "in the gold and scarlet and glamour of the homage which had painted the footlights 24 of the beautifully set stage where he had first seen her ..." She 25 never forgets that she is "one of the last of the Virginia belles," and frequently she hopes that her husband sees her as a "completely virtuous and completely well-born Lady Hamilton." Some details of her fantasizing are absurd in what appears a complicated seedbed for the sort of thing that is more successful in the work6 of Williams.

That Evelyn has no sense of her trap is all too repulsive otherwise, and her fantasies then grow pathetic. In this example she wishes that a particular negligee will cause her husband to

look at her as an Antony might have looked for the first time at a Cleopatra who could have worn it without looking anything less than the enchantress of the Nile, and as a young and dying king of France might have looked at a Mary Stuart before he gave her the last embrace ... and all the heroes of Greece might have looked at a Helen.

Not only does Evelyn Cunningham relish the roles she plays in order to be physically attractive, but she gladly plays a social role, too, despite her awareness that it requires her to "admire /her/ world

28 enough to accept all its verdicts on love and on religion and on itself."

When the implications of such a statement as this are considered, one

24 Pp. 45-46.

25 P. 29.

26 Pp. 56, 62.

27 P. 27.

20 P. 131. 81

receives a clear indication that Neuman sau the bellehood code as a

devastating form of personal dehumanization, even to the point of

allowing society to be its primary cause. Given that, Miss Newman

herself was a potential belle living in the very milieu which she

attacks. For this her insight is perhaps commendable. But what is

regrettable remains* Miss Newman's vision developed one-dimensionally.

In both novels she deliberately created one-dimensional characters

through which the omniscient narrator telegraphs, at times, her extreme

hostility toward these women; she never allows them the opportunity

to confront and resolve their situations. That there need be resolution

does not, of course, seem necessary, but neither doss Newman provide a

redemptionlsss ending. What seems to be left behind is an exploitation

of the fleshless stereotype, and fiction a little too personal to be

enduring art.

Tennessee Williams; The High-Tensioned Woman

Signi Lenea Falk has alrsady speculated that it is difficult to

trace all of Tennessee Williams' palette to the Southern vision which

critics usually assume he is celebrating. She contends, too, that a

major portion of his work was influenced by writers like D. H. Lawrence

and his love of the primitive, children, and uncorrupted but effete 30 intellectuals. What Falk possibly ignores and what others ignore who

& Tennessee Williams (New York; Twayne Publications, Inc., 1962), pp. 26 ff. 3® Gerald Weales, Tennessee Williams (Minneapolis; University of Minnesota Press, 1965), pp. 6 ff. Here we should note, too, that Williams has written a successful stage adaptation, You Touched Me, based on a D. H. Lawrence short story. 82

want to lay Williams' imagination to a too limited view of life and, therefore, one of borrowed vision, is that he, like Truman Capote, always admitted his ties to wringing out the stereotypes he grsw up with. These Southern gentlewomen—or "wenches," as Falk also calls them—are largely ths products of that sense of emotion that belongs almost exclusively to the traditions of alienation and frustration present in Williams' personal life. Furthermore, these figures are uncannily characteristic of the twentieth century elements that the 31 bellehood code became. Furthermore, they are elements that he himself characterizes as his own in prefaces, dedications, and other writings:

There is a horror in things, a horror at heart of the meaninglessness of existence. Some people cling to a certain philosophy that is handed down to them and which they accept. Life has a meaning if you're bucking for heaven. But if heaven is a fantasy, we are in this jungle with whatever we can work out for ourselves. It seems to me that the cards are stacked against us.

It appears to me, sometimes, that there are only two kinds of people who live outside what E. E. Cummings has defined as 'this socalled world of ours'—the artists and the insane. ... Of course there are those who are not practising artists and those who have not been committed to lunacy and vision, to permit them also to slip sufficiently apart from 'this socalled world of ours' to undertake or accept an exterior view of it.33

... truth, life, or reality is an organic thing which the poetic imagination can represent or suggest, in essence, only through transformation, through changing into other forms than those which were merely present in appearance.

31 See Falk, Chapter Four, "Southern Wenches," pp. 95 ff.

32 Tennessee Williams, "The Angel of the Odd," Time, March 9, 1962, p. 53.

33 From the Introduction to Reflections in £ Golden Eye by Carson McCullers (New York: New Classic, 1950). 34

34 Quoted by Weales, p. 33. 83

It is significant also that the critics are enthralled by Williams* sense of dramatic form, his ability to "build scenes of revelation or clash with a sure sense of their cumulative effect."39 For our purposes this very phrase seems but a fitting allusion to the effects character building would always have on fictional structure, and it is, not surprisingly, the same kind of relationship the belle seems to have always enjoyed with her users. That there is some constant metaphysical interaction between the pathos which pre-exists the will to write, even in the comic vein, seems also to have found its best expression in those characters whose actions and motivations also express the artist's quest for a form and language to create them. In Williams it is both striking and unique that so many of his characters are women with the classical belle-like tensions. We find Falk alluding to his "high-tensioned" women.00 Fundamental examples surely must include Maggie Pollitt of

Cat O> A. Hot Tin Roof, Alma Winemiller of Summer and Smoke, Amanda

Wingfield of The Glass Menagerie, Violet Venable of Suddenly Last Summer,

Cornelia Scott of Something Unspoken, and, of course, the archetype of the Williams' gentlewomen, Blanche DuBois of £ Streetcar Named Desire.

What finally separates out is the essentially original treatment of the belle which comes not only from Williams' admitted affection for them, as well as his great efforts to find the apt dramatic form to scale their value and their psychology. Williams explains the unrealistic worlds his characters move in: "I'm a compulsive writer because what

39 Bradbury, p. 193.

36 P. 70 84

I am doing is creating imaginary worlds into which I can retreat from

the real world because I've never made any kind of adjustment to the real world."37 38

3fl Here Williams' celebrated "antipathy for the average" is

typified and constructed dramatically in those half dozen women, products of alienation, whom we are led to see as more than credible

extensions of a code which thrived on an almost unnatural dislike for

the ugly. That this insistence on "beauty" in itself produces the

"ugly" is the inherent paradox that potentially always existed in the character of the belle, though only occasionally surfacing. Williams seems to take care when he is exploiting this, to do so with a form that invariably takes note of the underlying tradition:

Amanda, They knew how to entertain their gentlemen callers. It wasn't enough for a girl to be possessed of a pretty face and a graceful figure—although I wasn't slighted in either respect. She also needed to have a nimble wit and a tongue to meet all occasions.

Tom. What did you talk about?

Amanda. Things of importance going on in the world! Never anything coarse or common or vulgar. My callers were gentlemen— all! Among my callers were some of the most prominent young planters of the Mississippi Delta—planters and sons of planters. (Glass Menagerie 1.5.)

37 Durant da Ponte, "Williams' Feminine Characters" in Twentieth Century Interpretations of "A Streetcar Named Desire." ed. Jordan Y• Miller (Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1971), p. 54.

38 Falk, p. 1.

39 Catherine 5edgwick, author of Redwood should be credited for her insight into the paradox: "The child and grandmother were alike bewildered with the incense that was offered to the infant belle, and future heiress; and alike unconscious of the sidelong looks of contempt and whispered sneers which their pride and folly provoked." 85

Cornelia. No. I'm afraid that my garden will not be open to the Pilgrims this spring. I think the cultivation of gardens is an esthetic hobby and not a competitive sport. Individual visitors will be welcome if they call in advance. ...

Well, I'm glad that you fortified yourself with a bite to eat. What did the buffet consist of? Chicken a la king! Wouldn't you know it! That is so characteristic of poor Amelia! With bits of pimiento and tiny mushrooms in it? ... —and afterwards I suppose there was lemon sherbet with lady- fingers? What, lime sherbet? And no lady-fingers? What a departure! What a shocking apostasy! I'm quite stunned! Ho ho ho • • . (She reaches shakily for her cup.) (Something Unspoken 225.)

What would Blanche DuBois be, for example, without her dream of Belle

Revs, and what ultimately generates her intriguing psychological habits

but the supposed spectre of the dream deferred in her vision of the

plantation. While Blanche characteristically makes the famous adjustment

to her "insanity," there lurks behind in a most dramatic way, the hint

of her great dignity which remains, if not in reality, then in her own

mind and in the tradition which she has thought herself so desperately

to have fulfilled. Clearly, Blanche is a figure whose burdens are more

other-wordly, consequently more dependent on what we might call a dream

and a code dependent on this dream. By contrast, we notice the realness

of Stanley and Stella and the others who live at the center of most

issues which Blanche instinctively understands far better than they ever would, but which her code does not permit her adequately to deal with.

Moreover, that she is the only one cognizant of cosmic power—e.g. the

flower seller scene—further suggests Williams' fundamental awareness of

his character's unquestionable links with the past. Blanche herself sayet

"I don't want realism. I want magic. Yes, yes, magic! I try to give

that to people. I misrepresent things to them. I don't tell truth, 86

I tell what ought to be truth." That her very undoing should also have been the Napoleonic code as well supports a metaphysic well-traced to that world where she ironically belongs but which necessarily has turned her outward chaos into inward beauty. This might always have been the lot of the belle had she in the early stages been released from the prison of description.

Here the Notebook of Elia Kazan, particularly the section dealing with Blanche, on the direction of the play version of Streetcar seems so pertinent to the entire thesis of this writing that we shall quote from it at length:

Blanche is a social type, an emblem of a dying civilization, making its last curlicued and romantic exit. All her behavior patterns are those of the dying civilization she represents. ...

Her problem has to do with her tradition. Her notion of what a woman should be. She is stuck with this •ideal.’ It is her. It is her ego. Unless she lives by it, she cannot live; in fact her whole life has been for nothing. Even the Alan Gray incident as she now tells it and believes it to have been, is a necessary piece of romanticism* Essentially, in outline, she tells what happened, but it also serves the demands of her notion of herself, to make her special and different, out of the tradition of the romantic ladies of the past: Swinburne, Wm. Morris, Pre-Raphaelites, etc. This way it serves as an excuse for a great deal of her behavior.

Because this image of herself cannot be accomplished in reality, certainly not in the South of our day and time, it is her effort and practice to accomplish it in fantasy. Everything that she does in reality too is colored by this necessity, this compulsion to be special. So, in fact, reality becomes fantasy too. She makes it sol

The thing about the ‘tradition’ in the Nineteenth Century was that it worked then. It made a woman feel 87

Important, with her own secure position and functions, her own special worth* It also made a woman at that time one with her society. But today the tradition is an anachronism which simply does not function. It does not work. So while Blanche must believe it because it makes her special, because it makes her sticking by Belle Reve an act of heroism, rather than an absurd romanticism, still it does not work. It makes Blanche feel alone, outside of her society. Left out, insecure, shaky. The airs the 'tradition* demands isolate her further, and every once in a while, her resistance weakened by drink, she breaks down and seeks human warmth and contact where she can find it, not on her terms, on theirs; the merchant, the traveling salesman and the others ... among whom the vulgar adolescent soldiers seem the most innocent. Since she cannot integrate these episodes, she rejects them, begins to forget them, begins to live in fantasy, begins to rationalize and explain them to herself thus: 'I never was hard or self- sufficient enough ... men don't see women unless they are in bed with them. They don't admit their existence except when they're love-making. You've got to have your existence admitted by someone if you are going to receive someone's protection,' etc. As if you had to apologize for needing human contact! Also n.b. above—the word; protection. That is what she, as a woman in the tradition, so desperately needs. That's what she comes to Stella for, Stella and her husband. Not finding it from them she tries to get it from Mitch. Protection. A haven, a harbor. She is a refugee, punch drunk, and on the ropes, making her last stand, trying to keep up a gallant front, because she is a proud person. But really if Stella doesn't provide her haven, where is she to go. She's a misfit, a liar, her 'airs' alienate people, she must act superior to them which alienates them further. She doesn't know how to work* She can't make a living. She's really helpless. She needs someone to help her. Protection. She's a last dying relic of the last century now adrift in our unfriendly day. From time to time, for reasons of simple human loneliness and need she goes to pieces, smashes her tradition ... then goes back to it. This conflict has developed into a terrible crisis. All she wants is a haven: 'I want to rest! I want to breathe guietly again . . . just think! If it happens! I can leave here and have a home of my own. . . .'

If this is a romantic tragedy, what is its inevitability and what ie the tragic flaw? In the Aristotelian sense, the flaw is the need to be superior, special (or her need for protection and what it means to her), the 'tradition.' This creates an apartness so intense, a lonliness so gnawing that only a complete breakdown, a refusal, as it were, to contemplate what She's doing, a binge as it were, a destruction of all her standards, a desperate violent 88

ride on the Streetcar Named Desire can break through the walls of her tradition. The tragic flaw creates the circumstances, inevitably, that destroy her. More later.

There is another, simpler and equally terrible contradiction in her own nature. She won’t face her physical or sensual side. She calls it ’brutal desire.' She thinks she sins when she gives in to it . . . yet she does give in to it, out of loneliness ... but by calling it 'brutal desire,' she is able to separate it from her 'real self,' her 'cultured,' refined self. Her tradition makes no allowance, allows no space for this very real part of herself. So she is constantly in conflict, not at ease, sinning. She is still looking for something that doesn't exist today, a gentleman, who will treat her like a virgin, marry her, protect her, defend and maintain her honor, etc. She wants an old-fashioned wedding dressed in whits ... and still does things out of 'brutal desire* that make this impossible. Ail this too is tradition.

She has worth too—she is better than Stella. She says: 'There has been some kind of progress. ... Such things as art—as poetry and music—such kinds of new light have come into the world ... in some kinds of people some kinds of tenderer feelings have had some little beginning that we've got to make growl And cling to, and hold as our flag! In this dark march toward whatever it is we're approaching ... don't ... don't hang back with the brutes!' And though the direct psychological motivation for this is jealousy and personal frustration, still she, alone and abandoned in the crude society of New Orleans back streets, is the only voice of light. It is flickering and, in the course of the play, goes out. But it is valuable because it ie unique.

Blanche is a butterfly in a jungle looking for Just a little momentary protection, doomed to a sudden, early violent death. The more I work on Blanche, incidentally, the less insane she seems. She is caught in a fatal inner contradiction, but in another society, she would work. In Stanley's society, not

This is like a classic tragedy. Blanche is Medea or someone pursued by the Harpies, the Harpies being her own nature. Her inner sickness pursues her like doom and makes it impossible for her to attain the one thing she needs, the only thing she needs: a safe harbor. 89

An effort to phrase Blanche's spinet to find protection, to find something to hold onto, some strength in whose protection she can live, like a sucker shark or a parasite. The tradition of woman (or all women) can only live through the strength of someone else. Blanche is entirely dependent, finally the doctor!

Blanche is an outdated creature, approaching extinction • • .like the dinosaur. She is about to be pushed off the edge of the earth. On the other hand she is a heightened version, an artistic intensification of all women. Tint is what makes the play universal. Blanche's special relation to all women is that she Is at that critical point where the one thing above all else that she is dependant on? her attraction for man, is beginning to go. Blanche is like all women, dependent on a man, looking for one to hang onto? only more so!

So beyond being deeply desperate, Blanche is in a hurry. She'll be pushed off the earth soon. She carries her doom In her character. Also, her past is chasing her, catching up with her. Is it any wonder that she tries to attract each and every man she meets. She'll even take that protected feeling, that needed feeling, that superior feeling, for a moment. Because, at least for a moment, that anxiety, the hurt and the pain will be quenched. The sex act is the opposite of loneliness. Desire is the opposite of Death, for a moment the anxiety is still, for a moment the complete desire and concentration of a man is on her. He clings to you* He may aay I love you. All else is anxiety, loneliness and being adrift.

Compelled by her nature (she must be special, superior) she makes it impossible with Stanley and Stella. She acts in a utay that succeeds in being destructive. But the last bit of luck is with her. She finds the only man on earth whom she suits, a man who is looking for a dominant woman, for an instant she is happy. But her past catches up with her. Stanley, whom ehe's antagonized by her destructiveness aimed at his home, but especially by her need to be superior, uses her past, which he digs up, to destroy her. finally she takes refuge in fantasy. She must have protection, closeness, love, safe harbor. The only place she can obtain them any longer is in her own mind. She 'goes crazy.'

Blanche is a stylized character, she should be played, should be dressed, should move like a stylized figure. What is the physicalization of an aristocratic woman pregnant with her own doom? ... Behaving by a tradition that dooms her in this civilization, in this 'culture'? All her behavior patterns are old-fashioned, pure tradition. All as if jellied in rote— 90

Why does the 'Blues' music fit the play? The Blues is an expression of the loneliness and rejection, the exclusion and isolation of the Negro and their (opposite) longing for love and connection. Blanche too is 'looking for a home,' abandoned, friendless. 'I don't know where I'm going, but I'm going.' Thus the Blue piano catches the soul of Blanche, the miserable unusual human side of the girl which is beneath her frenetic duplicity, her trickery, lies, etc. It tells, it emotionally reminds you what all the fireworks are caused by.

Blanche—Physically. Must at all times give a single impression: her social mask is: the High-Bred Genteel Lady in Distress, Her past, her destiny, her falling from grace is just a surprise ... then a tragic contradiction. But the mask never breaks down.

The only way to understand any character ia through yourself. Everyone is much more alike than they willingly admit. Even as frantic and fantastic a creature as Blanche is created by things you have felt and known, if you'll dig for them and be honest about what you see.40

It becomes increasingly more significant that the alienated belle is neither an antagonist nor a protagonist. Her personhood, formerly the result of a psychology submerged in small additions and subtractions of the code, are now combined in the blackness which comes from piling all the conventions into the hat. Falk writes this: "The very human escape into self-deception, from little white lies to imaginative exaggerations to the delusions of the mad, is a theme on which Williams played many variations."410 * In other words, the natural sphere of an

Amanda or a Lady of Larkspur Lotion are exactly the same but for the outward manifestations which allow the former a type of respectability and make the latter guilty of moral depravity. A paradox as rich as this might never have been possible, Jordan Miller points out, had not

40 Directors on Directing: A. Source Book of The Modern Theater, ed. Toby Cole and Helen Krich Chinoy (Indianapolis: The Bobbs-Merrill Co., Inc., 1963), pp. 364-79.

41 P. 50 91

the development of the bellehood code always contained that propensity

Blanche DuBois calls "epic fornication." In a sense the thrust of the belle's psychology was always what the misnomer nymphomaniac—a term

Williams uses frequently in interviews—potentially expressed, but thB tensions suggested were never describable in serious nineteenth century rhetoric. J With Williams we have now a believable immediacy.

Foolhardiness has taken on tragic dimensions, becoming, in effect, the source of much of his sense of justice. And the complications which result from this produce not only some of his most notable women but also, in gratifying contrast to the standard American belles, characters who are unquestionably credible:

Amanda pursues Illusion: "Not one gentleman caller? It can't be true! There must be a flood, there must have been a tornado!" (1.6.)

Maggie fabricates reality: "Announcement of life beginning! A child is coming, sired by Brick, and out of Maggie the Cat! I have Brick's child in my body, an' that's my birthday present to Big Daddy on this birthday!"44

Cornelia Scott shuns the truth: "You know I am going into the Daughters of the Barons of Runymede! Yes, it's been established, I have a direct line to the Earl of— ... I am also eligible for the Colonial Dames and for the lijguenot Society, and what with all my other activities and so forth, why, I couldn't possibly have taken /the position/." (p.237)

Blanche fantasizes her death: "I shall die of eating an unwashed grape one day out on the ocean. I will die—with

42 Introduction to Twentieth Century Interpretations of "/[ Streetcar Named Desire." p. 11.

43 This is not to overlook the pornography of the Victorian Age, with its insistence on what would have been unthinkable conduct to the incipient belle. Even Williams' lost women would be incapable of anything but the most dreamy exercises of sexual fantasy, as in ths case of Cornelia Scott or Maggie Pollitt.

44 Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (New York: New Directions, 1955), p. 190. 92

my hand in the hand of some nice-looking ehip's doctor, a very young one • . . And I'll be buried at sea sewn up in a clean white sack and dropped overboard—at noon—in the blaze of summer—and into an ocean as blue as my first lover's eyes." (11.7.)

The final assertion regarding the plays of Tennessee Williams is that he most formally and effectively picked up these potentially metaphysical elements of the bellehood code which ironically manifest the truly epical nature of a woman who must be confined to place if she is to be successfully realized, but who also must somehow embody the transcendent elements that place itself conjures up. It is as though the Williams' women were themselves the effects of those red chairs that belles always sat in, the whispers contained in the winds which ran around the plantation's ports cochera, and the dominant truth in the dirt with which Scarlett O'Hara swore she would never go hungry again!

Carson McCullers' Reflections in a Golden Eye: Disavowing the Grotesque as Figures of Life

Almost epitomally, Carson McCullers* characters are approached as grotesque, and stand at a high point of the so-called Southern preoccupation with freaks and such. As we have suggested elsewhere in this paper, such approaches are usually specious; thus, discussion of grotesquerles is inappropriate here. That we might regard some of Mrs.

McCullers* figures of life as partly misshapen is, as with Tennessee

Williams* characters, more the result of a natural genesis which begins not with the grotesque but with the beautiful. Reflections in a Golden

Eye eeems to epitomize that process as much as Streetcar does in that both Leonora Penderton and Alison Langdon, bearing the twentieth century 93

effects of the bellehood code, wind up bereft of their rite of existence

in the paradox of struggle for it.

This is not a fundamentally grotesque process, nor does it

produce freaks. What it is basically is the expenditure of a system

finally functioning in all its intrinsic needs, a system built on the

idea that the beautiful cannot be defined outside some focus of

distortion or, more accurately, outside the intent of an artist who is

properly aware of all the complications of her forms and stylizations.

Mrs. McCullers is essentially a master of language and evocation, another of the prominent elements of the Southern vision. This is

revealed in the opening passages of any of her works—the soft, subtle

but ironic blend of the vision itself: part romantic, but suspended in

the ripe and mature stances which characterize the prose of writers able, as Williams also is, to see their characters and situations taking form through a designed and instinctive sense of the dramatic.

Consider, for example, the language of Reflections in £ Golden Eye:

The late autumn sun laid a radiant haza over the new sodded winter grass of the lawn, and even in the woods the sun shone through in places where the leaves were not so dense, to make firey golden patterns on the ground. Then suddenly the sun was gone. There was a chill in the air and a light, pure wind. It was time for retreat, from far away came the sound of the bugle, clarified by distance and echoing in the woods with a lost hollow tone. The night was near at hand. At this point Captain Penderton returned. . . .48

This passage bears a characteristically historic flavor, as though something in the tons swelled out of great wisdom and kinship with the past and with the history of mankind. But also characteristically

45 P. 6 94

there is a brutal sense of truth that accommodates Itself to whispers,

the "sound of rumor and of the chaotic.46

This phenomenon strongly conjures up the entire ethic of a remote world and grounds the emergent characters in it. Not the least of these is the two woman who are at the center of the emergent psychological force of reflection, almost ae if they are being shaped in the same tortured ethos without owing it any allegiance. Alison is the weak wife of a playboy major, Leonora the strong wife of a homosexual captain. Their situation personifies the plight of the decadent belles whom we earlier described in that tension and alienation which makes them actors against virtually all the trappings of a coda that naturally renders them a servant of the author's form.

Significantly, McCullers attaches that form to its underlying vision, for her, this vision is both the result of a "dullness in the sameness of life," which occupies both women, and a conscious attempt to wrench out of the sameness a descriptive influence on the inherent contradiction which the relationship between their station and place invariably generate. Reflections in a Golden Eye starts out with thia conditions

"An army post is a peaceful place. ... There is a fort in the South where a few years ago a murder was committedWith the same eye for confinement and with language as her evocation, she quickly assures us:

"The participants of this tragedy wers: two officers, a soldier, two women, a Filipino, and a horse."49 The subsequent emergences of the

46 Bradbury, p. 112.

47 P. 3.

48 P. 3. 95

story make the characters certain prisoners of the effects of place.

In fact* Alison Langdon and Leonora Penderton comprise a singular

outcry in this prison. The former is finally so overcome by the

constraints of her house* her demeanor, and her supposed fragility

that she is "tortured to the bone ... and on the verge of actual

lunacy."49 Ostensibly the loss of a child is the root of her fantasies and entrapment; however, there is an array of complications stemming

from other motivations, one of these is a major given of the book:

"that women carried in them a deadly and catching disease which made men crippled blind and doomed." Sy this effect, Alison is the proverbial belle, trapped in the old fluff: "A small dark fragile woman with a large nose and a sensitive mouth.She traps her husband

in the traditional genteel conduct too, driving him to Leonora who is actually tortured by her station but given to graver manifestations of it. The difference now is that Carson McCullers is selecting the details that pay, suddenly rendering useful and crucial what might have been a description given as a necessary fill-in that writers are obliged to include. The detail of the large nose seems absolutely necessary to understanding, for example, the peculiar relationship that emerges between Alison and her husband, between Anacleto and her, and, most

importantly, between Leonora and her. It is a presumed matter of psychological effect, and works in a way which totally enhances those

49 P. 72. 50 P. 13.

51 P. 51. 96

relationships and gives them a force that is essentially traceable to the place from which they emerge: the confinement has indeed become something beyond the stereotype and beyond mere description.

In her description Leonora Penderton exemplifies what a gifted twentieth century writer with the freedoms of our time could both state and imply about the character who has all of the characteristics of ths sound-right belle: "Her face had the bemused placidity of a

Madonna's and she wore her straight bronze hair brought back in a knot go at the nape of her neck." However, the more than proper secondary associations make the character still attractive and credible:

In a moment she was standing naked by the hearth. Before the bright gold and orange light of the fire her body was magnificent. The shoulders were straight so that the collar bone made a sharp pure line. Between her round breasts there were delicate blue veins. In a few years her body would be full blown like a rose with loosened petals, but now the soft roundness was controlled and disciplined by sport. Although she stood quite still and placid, there was about her body a subtle quality of vibration, as though on touching her fair flesh one would feel the slow live coursing of the bright blood beneath.5**

It is not enough to say that the sexual allusions make the difference; there is the addition of a type of admitted futility as well which straddles elements of two different worlds. While Leonora is a bitch who can eventually say to her husband: "Son, have you ever been 54 collared and dragged out in ths street and thrashed by a naked woman?"

52 P. 6.

53 P. 10.

54 P. 10. 97

she is also the woman who, "When she married the captain ... had been

a virgin. Four nights after her wedding-she was still a virgin, and

on the fifth night her status was changed only enough to leave her somewhat puzzled."5^ Here is the belle who in earlier treatments was merely beautiful, accepted her husband's follies (e.q. Ellen Robillard

O'Hara) and while a virgin at her marriage, remained unpuzzled to a degree that is psychologically obtuse.

This obtusenesa remains in the characters of Leonora and Alison,

but there is a crucial element of credibility added by the acknowledgement of sexual problems and by the subtleties in consequent actions, end in the writer's freedom to delve into this reality. Still the code remains,

"^eonora? ... held to . . . old Southern notions, such as the belief that pastry or bread is not fit to eat unless it is rolled on a marble 56 topped table," symbolic as anything we have found of the paradox 57 between the psychological patterns that may come to be by description.

55 P. 11.

56 P. 9.

87 We may cite a scene from Eudora Welty's The Optimist's Daughter (New York: Random House, 1972) to the same purpose, where bread board and bread baking are used to symbolize the polarization of tradition versus present actualities. While Laurel, at best, makes a weak case for pure romanticism, Fay scores a humorous triumph for reality: "And do what with it /tha breadboard? when you got through?" Fay eaid mockingly. "Have my try at making bread. Only last night, by the grace of God, I had my mother's recipe, written in her own hand, right before my eyes." "It all tastes alike, don't it?" "You never tasted my mother's. .1 could turn out a good loaf too­ l’d work at it." "And then who'd eat it with you?" said Fay. "Phil loved bread. He loved good bread. To break a loaf and eat it warm, just out of the oven," Laurel said. ... "Your husband? What has he got to do with it?" asked Fay. "He's dead, isn't he?" (pp. 174-75). 98

The famous scenes involving Alison Langdon and Anacleto may be regarded, at least to some degree, as yet another figure for the

‘•patterned" emergence surrounding the decadent belle. For surely

Alison has all of the descriptive economies, including a twentieth century substitute for a black servant. In this case it ie Anacleto, the bright and talented but psychologically obtuse houeeboy who continually keeps Mrs. Langdon from the brink of her final fata by little bits of proper entertainment and codal necessities. It is

Alison, in contrast to Leonora, who obeys the coda to the hilt and vary much likes it. That she consequently lives more in a fantasy world than Leonora is also significant, for it is fantasy that ostensibly makes her, and not Leonora, a ruined Helen. Her love of recordings— which are better than concerts because she can listen to them privately without having to endure the presence of other people—is symptomatic

of the potentially morbid solipsism that earlier was merely characterized by the trappings of literary and social convention. Here Alison seems a latter-day Evelyn Cunningham, but for the clear issue of motivation where she is as she is because she has gotten herself into that condition.

Evelyn Cunningham, in contrast, seems too much manipulated into her place by the hand of a writer unfree and perhaps untrained to explore the deeper issues of motivation.

Once again it is the potentially beautiful good life corrupted by the very weaknesses of the character. And these, not ironically, are at least partly engendered by the forces of customs and steadily retrievable elements of a past tradition which lend themselves well to the subtle understanding of paradox running through all of the McCullers* 99

canon. Few if any of her other characters are of the lost belle type,

however. It is a tribute to this writer's palette that after her second

novel the consequent excitement in the wry glory of the dream now

exploded gave her even deeper insights into the subtleties of other

traditions as well.

Robert Penn Warren: Melodrama Under the Wire in Band of Angels

Recent criticism has put Robert Penn Warren's fiction somewhat

into disrepute, as he becomes more and more hailed as critic and poet.58

That this is true covers the territory by which we would have to

acknowledge the general flaws of his work, especially the novel which

is most pertinent to this study. Band of Angels lacks the depth that

better novelists of the Fugitive Tradition employ. A general explanation

for this is the subject matter itself which, for all its ironic intensity,

bears an embarrassing likeness to poor melodrama. What saves the book

is Warren's brilliant sense of construction and tone, a triumph which

is difficult in light of his subject matter—-a belle who finds out that

she is really part Negro and, upon the death of her father, becomes the property of various masters.

Amantha Starr is not a character who can fight back in Blanche

DuBois* sort of melancholy and die of dreams deferred. Rather she becomes a woman driven to understand the freedom that she had always taken for

granted. To begin with, Warren had the task of making the early years

of the character credible because she must narrate from the age of nine,

58 Cf. Bradbury, p. 67 100 and her most crucial insights appear in her nineteenth year:

It would seem from this episode—of true or false memory, I cannot say—that I, a motherless child, was unloved. That is not true. ... Aunt Sukie, who was my black mammy, spoiled me because she loved me, for women like Aunt Sukie can live only by loving some small creature that they, in the accepted and sad irony of their lot and nature, know will soon grow up and withdraw, indifferent or contemptuous, even in affection."

Then, the author ie challenged to recapture the personality of the time against the backdrop of the psychological breakthroughs which occurred in the time lapse, and would have presumably made the woman's quest more fruitful. Written in 1955, the novel bears the burden of its romantic elements because Warren apparently did not want to expose the bellelike elements in Amantha's character to the mire of it9 natural psychological legacies. Yet he had to deal with the increasingly more important matter of Amantha's freedom, if the book were going to be anything more than a third-rate romance. Here the metaphysical implications of a tone charged with existential cries seem to work well enough in giving the literary value, but at the same time add a dimension to the belle that was never treated before and has not been dealt with since. Part of the problem, of course, is in the outlandish givens of the plot with which possibly only an absurdist would nowadays feel comfortable.

In brief, that dimension concerns the making of a character who is completely the product of tonal manipulation. Warren had to find tones and constructions to sustain realism and yet take its givens from pure romance. What he did then was first to employ a first person narration,

59 P. 4 101

which admittedly requires an added suspension of disbelief, and secondly, to rely on the constant repetition of questions dealing with concepts of beauty and truth and bearing directly on Amantha's search for a freedom that transcends bodily place* In other words, he revived an age on the terms by which it had traditionally been treated by stating in his character’s quest those specific questions that a twentieth century audience might now, by its conventions and its psychology, have asked then. That he resorts at first to the familiar stereotypical descriptions and situations is borne out in those phrases by which he introduces Amantha Starr:

In the carriage, I would secretly touch the silver handle of the parasol, or, with elaborate carelessness, let my hand touch the spread skirt, and pinch a tiny twist of the fabric between thumb and forefinger, with desperate, continuous pressure, as though I might squeeze out and possess some of ths mystic virtue that infused all things honored by Miss Idell's contact. D

Through the apotheosis resulting from her discovery that she is part black, Warren eventually achieves the plane upon which the existential framework of her quest can be introduced:

Who had I, Amantha Starr, been before that moment? I had been defined by the world around me, by the high trees and glowing cookhearth of Starrwood, and the bare classrooms and soaring hymns of Oberlin, by the faces bent on me in their warmth and concern, the faces of Aunt Sukie, Shaddy, Miss Idell, Mrs. Turpin, my father, Seth Parton. But now all had fled away,from me, into the deserts of distance, and I was, therefore nothing.

For in and of myself, or so it seemed, I had been nothing. I had been nothing except their continuing creation. Therefore, though I remember much of that earlier time, my own feelings, my desires, my own story, and beads on the string, the little nodes of fear and hope, love and terror,

60 P. 22 102

lust and despair, appetite and calculation, and the innermost sensation of blood and dream.

After this, it is a matter of letting the heritage unfold for the reader

in exactly the same way it unfolds for Amantha. Here the questions

become the repeated ones with which the story begins:

After he had gone, I still stood in that paralysis of horror. But what was the horror? Then I thought: It's because 1 am 1. And I thought: It's because life is coming true: I am I.32

What we ought to note about this passage in particular is that the

character is fully literate, and Amantha Starr's search is unique in the annals of belles who might have made that statement with attendant inanity. (Imagine "I am I" in the mouth of Bel Tracy or Katharine

Walton!) This character not only searches for truth but for an aesthetic as well. Moreover, both the truth and the aesthetic lie in the powers of the language which draw out of her life the issues which in the romantic mode would have gone unrealized:

But that soul, it seemed, was slain at ths graveside of my father, was slain there by his betrayal. I did not then put it thus. My hatred had not yet reached its formulation. Now, there was only the numbness, the muffling of all things, the period in which I was a being without being, as though my inner experience reflected the abstract definition of the law, which called me a chattel, a non-person, the thing without soul, and I was suspended in that vacuum of no identity, in the numbness somehow aware of the pain that was being awaited.64

On the one hand it is the romanticism which keeps her asking "Who

61 Pp. 61-62.

62 P. 64.

63 Bradbury, p. 50.

64 P. 62. 103

am I?" while twentieth century realism says go on and become another

Blanche DuBois! Ironically it is a credible combination of the old sound-right description with a meditative narrative giving force to the

character's rights and her credibility. Unlike Williams, then, Warren

chooses to zero in on the superficialities without making them self- destructive.

Much has been made of the fact that this labors the plot of Sand

of Angels. Of course it does, but that was Warren's technical challenge.

He insisted even further in finding patterns in the images he used in an attempt to soften the romance and thus keep the plot from the brink of further melodrama. His attention to color, geography, costume, and movement become a substitute for the belabored metaphysical monologues.

Still, what remains is a believable character and the tragic self- knowledge of Amantha Starr is not in her eventually literate vision of who she is, but in the role the world demands of her. She is, as Warren himself states, "part of the world of Indifferent facts destroyed by the mind's ideal construction of them."66 Unlike Tennessee Williams* or

Lillian Hallman's bailee, she really is what she is, and "Oh who am I" ceases to bs the cry of a potentially silly figure in an unsuccessful plot and becomes Instead the demand of a belle whose existence is the substance of poetry.

00 Bradbury, p. 70.

00 Bradbury, p. 67. 104

William Faulkner: The Belle and Her Losses

Perhaps enough has been said of William Faulkner's place in

Southern letters to make him the be-all of those traditions with which

'much of this paper concerns itself. In fact, the usual analysis of his

palette here seems particularly germane: ths modern degeneracy and final

impotence of a caste which had earned its right to hegemony through its

basic loyalty to an integrated code of moral behavior.87 But for all

his interest in the South, his parables about it, and most important,

hia blatant love of its inherent naturalism, he chose oftener to trade

upon symbol than upon fact. What is consequently significant for ua is

that Faulkner did provide a new form for the belle in the arena of the

symbolic which she had never had. Her tradition aside, there was an

important element in her psychology that only symbol could handle. This

already stands as a case for her being a paradigm of ths Southern

sensibility; further* the psychology of it is possibly something that

could not either have bean handled in a pre-Freudian and -Jungian world.

The symbolic force in the balls is, therefore, that pattern by which she

has adapted to her losses, those which both reality and literature have

foisted upon her.

As always, Faulkner waa sparing in his treatment of characters

too traceable to already existing modes because he regarded them as ploys to the truth.88 What he did do in the case of the belle, however, is provide us with three major symbols of the psychology of the bellehood 67 *

67 Bradbury, p. 53.

88 Cf. Faulkner’s statement on truth, p. 22 of this study. 105

code which play upon the pathetic elements there without providing, as Williams has, an out for her. That there is no salvation for

Faulkner's belles is, as in the case of Blanche DuBois, less a matter of the characters' knowledge than of their inability to react. Where

Blanche fights back tenaciously and does find at least some comfort in going off the deep end, the Faulkner belles are stuck with their moment, as though it were the underlying truth that this author so readily celebrated.

The characters we will consider here are Caroline Compson of

The Sound and the Fury, Emily Grierson of "A Rose for Emily," and Rosa

Coldfield of Absalom, Absalom! Initially we must state that these women embody fundamentally the sense of loss that Faulkner's symbolic figures always seem to bear as a result of their temperament and their training. Mrs. Compson, for example, regularly gathers her dialogue both with her children and with the servants from the closet of her personal entrapment. She loathes outsiders already as a condition of the

"disgrace" which bearing undistinguished children and losing her husband have brought. Always it is something rudimentary from the past, mysterious and as unrelenting as all the conventions that sustain it:

"I'm here alone so much that I hear every sound. ... I heard the clock strike at least a half an hour ago." Hers was a world in which, as upstart Jason puts it, "You had somebody to make you behave yourself," and this is a fitting exposition of that world to which this woman does, in fact, belong—a world where the moral sphere was dictated entirely by the codes that kept things in order. Mrs. Compson's physical and moral decay are thus the picture of an inability to sustain action without 106

something behind telling her what to do. She continually asserts,

"For my children's sake I have no pride," saying it most often to the

unfeeling Jason who neither understands the source of her so-called

pride nor her pretended concern for the children.

What Caroline Compson is actually doing is trying to cover her

loss, and it is specially important to note that she does not know what

the loss is. Certainly all the conventions of lamentation are there:

that she was "well-born," that Mr. Compson’s death had "left her alone,"

that, above all, Caddy's conduct had made of her daughter nothing less

than a public disgrace. In reality, however, there ie no background

against which Mrs. Compson may presume to have become less than what

she thinks of herself because it was not there to begin with. About all

ehe can claim is a name like Caroline Basccmb Compson, a number of broken

but formerly expensive mirrors, a falling-down mansion, and the right to

burn papers that disturb her and to disown children who have made her

name a disgrace. The simple fact is that all of this mixes together in a sense of loss that is pathetic. What this suggests is the further paradigmatic nature of a character born from Faulkner's superb understanding of those sources in the Southern vision through which

such a sense of loss has come about. It is strategic to Mrs. Compson's character that Faulkner also portrays her in the machinery of the disgrace which more aptly should always have attended those forms by which an earlier age would have sustained her. She stays in bed with the celebrated hot water bottle quite as if that feeble object also represented a last quest for proper social graces. Her prototype would have gotten away with it, but now the deed, like her language and 107

false concerns, bears its own misshapen ethic. Ule are aware of its

decadence for this reason, but more especially we are aware of the

routine nature of its insipience.

That this can become tragic and bear considerable reflection on

the nature of humanity and its weaknesses seems never to have occurred

' to the early users of the belle. In fact, the Bel Tracys that we have

seen might have proclaimed the virtue of Caroline Compson's ways.

After all, it was a noblesse oblige proposition which worked well in a

literary tradition, but could never have been true. Faulkner was

careful to surround Mrs. Compson with other proper symbols of this

force, too. Poor Benjy, far from being too much the Christ symbol, is

more aptly the paradigmatic waste issuing from ths womb of a now corrupt

earth mother, in this case, a synthesis almost of all those things which

a proper understanding of psychology would render any figure who dreamed

life away in the illusion of her own natural importance.

But there lies Caroline Sascomb Compson, the last great lady of

a tradition whose former lawns and gardens have now become a golf course.

It was never so, Faulkner says, and so now the belle ironically becomes

not only the symbol of the age that passed, but also the exact opposite

of what that age would have made of her.

Emily Grierson shares even more bluntly in this major perspective.

She is, as the story goes, the normative figure of the age which also

cannot restrain itself from natural falsity either. The trappings are

not merely decadent or bizarre. They are the supposed beautiful grown

old, the spark of a cosmic truth turned sour in its own self-perpetuation.

They are, in fact, a modal of what is moribund in every living thing. 108

Faulkner evidently is playing upon that idea which holds exactitude and stability as primary forces of the universe. This of course presumes that there was never any such thing as the beautiful and that the best way to call attention to the truth is to deny it. Miss Emily* therefore* is the absolute which denies absolutes. This is her fundamental problem and the force at the root of all deaths: what lives is true only insofar as men are willing to acknowledge it. False conventions grow up everywhere to sustain the illusion* but the last image of it is always as ugly as Emily's bedroom itself.

Here we have Faulkner's finest concept of loss. It sustains at the same time that "fallen monument" which he approaches with still consummate respect. But it is almost as if the loss* traditionally something to be met with various forms of grief* should also have been fundamentally absurd;

. • • the men through a sort of respectful affection for a fallen monument, the women mostly out of curiosity to see the inside of her house, which no one save an old man-servant—a combined gardener and cook—had seen in at least ten years.5®

That what once was, or at least represented beauty itself, is both a curiosity and a monument sgain points up an area of paradox through which the character gains added grace. We do, after all, believe entirely that this is what happens to objects, sensibilities, and personalities which have the audacity to actually become what their definitions make of them. We would, in fact, have no sense of loss without it:

69 P. 119 109

For a long while we just stood there, looking down at the profound and fleshlees grin. The body had apparently once lain in the attitude of an embrace, but now the long sleep that outlasts love, that conquers even the grimace of love, had cuckolded him. UJhat was left of him, rotted beneath what was left of the nightshirt, had become inextricable from the bad in which he lay; and upon him and upon the pillow beside him lay that even coating of the patient and biding dust.79

This says of Emily Grierson that the loss exists because there was something against which to measure it. Otherwise, there would be no such thing as grief in the world: Emily stands ae a fallen monument to the folly of definition and the psychological consequence which follows. Moreover, she ie a sophisticated fictional achievement, blending the technique of realism with the purely romantic, thus making the loss which is unreal felt as if it had not been an abstraction at all. Of course, there is no redemption in this anymore than there is in any truth which destroys its bearer.

The loss, than* is one pointed up from the equal sides of alternates in a paradox. On the one hand there is the necessity for defining reality in order to secure its boundaries against the ugly, the criminal, and the exploitative. But on the other, is the need for exploding the terms by which definition ia reached so that change itself can be explained. In both cases the weaknesses are insurmountable, and thia is what Faulkner's belles represent. Mrs. Compson and Miss Emily are, indeed, the embodiment of that side of the paradox which delivers catharsis out of the acceptance of any of the conventions operating on life.

70 P. 130 110

Rosa Coldfield is on the other side. She desperately wants to get to ths bottom of the causes for her personal distress, and her private conspiracy against definition is what Absalom, Absalom! deals with on at least two levels.

first, the presence of Miss Rosa Coldfield from the very beginning is supportive of a world blown out of proportion by the trappings of definition. The celebrated first sentence fastens her to time, to hour, to age, in short to all the abstractions which man have invented to give meaning to their presence in reality.

from a little after two oclock until almost sundown of the long still hot weary dead September afternoon they sat in what Miss Coldfield still called the office because her father had called it that—-a dim hot airless room with the blinds all closed and fastened for forty- three summers because when she was a girl someone had . believed that light and moving air carried heat and that dark waa always cooler, and which (as the sun shone fuller and fuller on the side of the house) became latticed with yellow slashes full of dust motes which Quentin thought of as being flecks of the dead old dried paint Itself blown inward from the scaling blinds as wind might have blown them.

Miss Rosa continues to wrestle with those "long-dead objects of her impotent yet indomitable frustration" which somehow sustain her in the quest of an identity which she presumes ought to corns out of her surroundings:

There would be the dim coffin-smelling gloom sweet and over-sweet with the twice-bloomed wistaria against the outer wall by the savage quiet September sun impacted distilled and hyper distilled, into which came now and then the loud cloudy flutter of the sparrows like a flat limber stick whipped by an idle boy, and the rank smell of female old flesh long embattled in virginity while the wan haggard face watched him above the faint triangle of lace at wrists and throat from the too

71 P. 7 111

tall chair in which she resembled a crucified child; and the voice not ceasing but vanishing into and then out of the long intervals like a stream, a trickle running from patch to patch of dried sand, and the ghost mused with shadowy docility as if it were the voice which he haunted where a more fortunate one would have had a house.

That Rosa Coldfield destroys and distorts the terms by which

she can ultimately tell her version of the "building and destruction of

ths Sutpen Hundred," of her relationship to its owner and hence the

true source of her frustration, is both the burden and the termination

of her life. It is as though Miss Rosa is a wasp who will die as soon

as she lets go her sting, and so she maintains herself "so bolt upright

in the straight hard chair" that the truth she finally reveals is so

confined by her surroundings—her capitulation to the surroundings—

that tragedy is the only outcome. This is her loss: that the knowledge

of the falsity behind her own station is the very thing that finally will generate her own death and purgation. Yet Miss Coldfield does not want

to die, and remains ths slave of the still myopic principles which, paradoxically, might free her if she did not feel so secure in them.

Secondly, Miss Rosa Coldfield is yet the best prepared of the numbers of people who will reveal the sordid truths about the situations in this novel. Disposed largely by hatred against Colonel Sutpen, she knows that her hatred both sustains her and is sustained in the front that she puts up for the questioning Quentin Compson who is there not so much to gather the truth about his ancestors as he is to provide

Miss Rosa and the others with an opportunity to purge themselves. Part of the truth of every definition is that it eschews purgation. Hence, those elements of the bellehood code—dignity stemming from name only or

72 P. 8. 112

stemming from the secrets of presumed stations and virtues because of name and tradition—which preserve the definition are the very same elements which finally destroy its need for being. Miss Coldfield emerges a vacuum of that necessity. She is what she ie for her own lucid but unreachable purpose.

Because there is something in the touch of flesh with flesh which abrogates, cuts sharp and straight across the devious intricate channels of decorous ordering, which enemies as well as lovers know because it makes them both-touch and touch of that which is the citadel of the central I-Am's private own: not spirit, soul; the liquourish and ungirdled mind is anyone's to take in any darkened hallway of this earthly tenement. But let flesh touch with flBsh, and watch the fail of all the eggshell shibboleth of caste and color too. Yes, I stopped dead. . . .70

Lillian Heilman: Women of Outrage and Light

Outrage was said to have been Faulkner's favorite word, and he sought to portray it with considerable bleakness. The Faulkner belles with whom we have dealt, while embodying a devaluation of the process by which social codes sre made, had nonetheless a dismal sense of their reasons for so doing. They manifested this in the quiet desperation which ultimately destroyed them and made their natural desire to get out, lacking, if not devoid of, courage.

Bradbury notes that Lillian Heilman's palette has to do with outrage, but here an outrage which "epeaks silently from lives untarnished in a native romantic idealism."74 it is an accepted fact for Miss Heilman

73 P. 139.

74 P. 191 113

that the rebellion against reality that is part of the romantic ideal is one which her characters are compelled to portray to society, and so the characters we see as belles are fundamentally drawn with an evil in them, but an evil in which Heilman does not revel. Instead, she pinpoints the insecurities which underlie the cruelties of the code, and always opposes them by determined forces of light and good will.78 In other words, the entrapment which has the same roots as Faulkner's and Williams' belles is one which ought to be seen for the probable therapeutic values at its origins; the bellehood code wore down oftener than it built up. But there remained always the presumed reasonable and salvific purpose which created the code out of good intentions and safety. The paradox yielded here is both a striking observation and a source of yet another dimension for the nearly exhausted character who has, in Heilman's treatment, become a perfect vehicle for the exploration of evil.

To begin with, Hallman always recognizes the infirmity at the root of her belle types: Birdie of The Little Foxes, is pitifully tied to the romantic ideal, wanting always the illusory contacts with the past and objects of ths past. Of course, Birdie fails to recognize her predicament. Regina, on the other hand, is confidently obstreperous in her awareness that the old holds no merit, but she eschews it on ths same terms by which she has grown up to recognize it; meantime, her fundamental temperament is one of arranged acceptance of the futile reality.78 In Toys in the Attic both Carrie and Anna Berniers wrestle with their own falsity in surroundings which characteristically entrap

75 Bradbury, p. 191.

78 The Little Foxes (Naw York: Random House, 1939). 114

them; but they struggle with the gentle ease of a sense that this will not hurt them so long as they have the one strength in reality to cling 77 to* That Julian, the source of their romantic ideal, is as weak as they are is something they suspect as well, and the epiphany which characterizes the end of the play is more their realization than hie:

"Tomorrow's another day." (3.591.)

Carrie's statement, far from paralleling the escapism of Scarlett

O'Hara, is the ultimate affirmation that the ideal which has formerly vitiated these women exists still intact. Their truth is simply in the acknowledgement that the real world has to be lightened and informed by the romantic one. Thus the women are ready to have "all that stuff go beck" to the creditors. They will "find jobs" and pay Julian's debts quite as though this were the price reality exacted to support fantasy.

Ufhat emerges, then, are belle types whose delusions are as tedious as

Blanche DuBois* but as authentic as anyone of the antebellum belles who might really have been what the Berniers women could only be in their mutual fantasy.

The duality experienced by Anna and Carrie both superceded end emerged in the world which they depend upon Julian for. But they know from the beginning that their primary problem issues from their own natural weakness.

With Birdie and Regina something of the same thing comes about, although their weakness and perception of it is a little more tragic.

The opening scenes find both women immediately framed in their persistent recourse to the boring conventions of Southern ladies. The question of

77 New York: Random House, 1961 115

their boringness underlain by their boredom is, this time, Miss Heilman's

paradigm for celebrating the weakness of the women. Their tragedies are

thosa which force them to behave as they do because they feel safe and

unsafe in such behavior—admittedly a pretense to them—but unfortunately

it is the only way, as Ben puts it, that a Southern woman may affect worldlinees without its destroying her beauty. And so both Regina and

Birdie must make entirely too much of their heritage in order to appear

beautiful. While Birdie succumbs to this situation out of need, Regina uses it to build herself a redemptive self-knowledge. This very weakness settles the world of the Giddens* household into the mold which is characterized by the visiting Marshall:

It is all true ... that you southerners occupy a unique position in America. You live better than the rest of us, you eat better, you drink better. I wonder you find time, or want to find time, to do business. (Little Foxes 1.13.)

This assumed heritage is Birdie's most guarded treasure, but Regina's curse. The play unfolds around the consequences as though the rubric surrounding this condition were the same as the one which tied Anna and Carrie Berniers' lives to their brother's invented bsauty.

Each of these women is the romantic ideal which characteristically begins only with assumptions that the beautiful is something attainable, if not in reality than in fantasy. No one is more evil than Regina

Giddens as she acts out her antagonistic perception of their mutual world. But there is no point to condemning hsr for it since the vary purpose of her denial of the romantic ideal is also her means of living with herself. Like Anna and Carrie, however, 6he is strong and cohesive in her attachment to the elements of the real world which best sustain her fantasy. It is here that Miss Heilman makes use of the most familiar 116

of the belle's trappings. In addition, there is the Giddens mansion,

but now it is a house not full of the elegant but of the beet—the

translation of what is merely pretended into what can only adequately

represent the pretense.

Real belles could not only have had the best, but the most unique as well. And Heilman's considerable change is a dramatic form of calling attention both to the real world and to the two prongs of Gidden women's fantasies. Critics have seen Regina a representative of the New South

while holding Birdie a vestigial link with the Old. This might well be true at an anagogical level, but the fact is that both woman have similar origins and their apparently opposing temperaments are less a convenient way of dramatizing desperate hopes and frustrations—thus their mutual destruction—than of calling attention to the inherent contradictions in ths system which they emerge from. Thereafter ths drama obtains moments that pay for that assumption. Consider, for example, these allegations toward Regina from her husband, Horaces

I'm sick of you, sick of this house, sick of my life hers. I'm sick of your brothers and their dirty tricks to make a dime. There must be better ways of getting rich than cheating niggers on a pound of bacon. ... To pound ths bones of this town to make dividends for you to spend? You wreck the town ... and live on it. . . . And I'll do without making the world any worse. I leave that to you. (3.104.)

Thus, Miss Hallman has authenticated a nearly symbolic relationship between her characters' origins and their on-going presence in them. It is a new perspective as well that both remain belles though caught photographically in the forces of potential change. This falls short of Williams' insistence on some kind of epitomal though unredeeming out for his frustrated women, and it also does not stretch out of them ths 117

singular moments of their lives which epitomize the entrapment as with

the Faulkner types. What remains is yet a still point in time, not so much the point of recognition or even of truth, but rather of the black and white nothingness natural to the elements of the bellehood code which are unspeakably private, hence must be compelled by apt allusions.

If these works can be adequately characterized for that portrayal it must be in the gentle light which constantly attends even the most frothy of the near moments of madness from which sanity itself rescues

Anna Berniers or a Regina Giddens. Near the end of Toys in the Attic

Anna speaks to her sister Carrie;

I loved you and so whatever I knew didn't matter. You wanted to see yourself a way you never were. Maybe that's a game you let people play when you love them. Well, we had made something together, and the words would have stayed where they belonged as we waited for our brother to need us again ... I don't wish to find a way to live without you. I am a woman who has no place to go, but I am going. . . . (3.584.)

Stark Young; The Belle in Transition

Because Stark Young distinguished himself as a drama critic and because several of his novels deal with the still mannered and aesthetically arranged life in Mississippi plantation houses, his fiction deserves some consideration. His particular rendition of the belle takes on a dimension which Bradbury describes as "applying to the historical novel same of the major principles of symbolic naturalist technique."7®

Here Young achieves some distance from the purely romantic and

78 P. 49 IIS

nostalgic portrayals of the nineteenth century South, but he is only moderately successful. The most popular of hie novels, So Red the Roaa,

depends on the established convention of plantation life as idyllic and

tbs ladies and gentlemen of the antebellum period as cultured, noble, and long-suffaring. For those readers willing to suspend these disbeliefs, the rest of Young's story seems realistic enough. Young is no doubt behind landowner Hugh McGehee who prizes ancestry and tradition:

The way I've been obliged to sea it is this: ideas and instincts work upon our memory of these people who have lived before us, and so they take on some clarity of outline. It's not to our credit to think we began today, and it*8 not to our glory to think we end today. All through time we keep coming in to the shore like waves— like waves. You stick to your blood, son; there's a certain fierceness in blood that can bind you up with a long community of life.79

Although tho son to whom these remarks are addressed diee fighting in the war, there are others in the boy's generation who at the story's end give every indication of carrying on the traditions McGehee values.

Belles abound in Young's stories, in fact he contributes the character Belle Bowdoin to stand in line with others so named: Arabella,

Bel Tracy, and Belle Watling. The lovely Julia Valletta Somerville of

So Red the Rose, while she ie a character of more than just description, comes, nevertheless, with conventional trappings. Valletta is frequently confined to some romantic setting: distractedly musing on a veranda while adoring young men look on; walking through the gardens of

Portobello, clutching to her bosom a letter from Duncan who is fighting with General Lee'a troops; or posed in a plantation drawing room like another Jenny Lind:

79 New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1936, pp. 150-51 119

At the long concert piano, which Hugh McGehee had himself selected in New York and sent down to Montrose, clearly seen by all non, as if she were a prims donna on the stage, sat a young girl in a dress of white tulle without ornaments. She was not very tall, with dark hair, pale olive skin, and a red mouth.8®

Even after Young has recounted the looting and burning of the plantations

by "drunk Negroes" and other intense personal sufferings which result from the war, he returns, with apparent seriousness, to inane discussions of clothing: Valette's wedding veil will arrive from New Orleans, or, 04 "anybody can hem tarlatan ruffles," 1 and "for the most part new dresses were to be bought in New Orleans ... at shops that Mrs. Cynthia Eppes would know."820 81W hen So Red the Rose was published in 1934, the Faulkner treatment of the belle was already on record. Hence, it does not seem unfair in assessing this novel to say that Stark Young did not realize adequate aesthetics distance from fictional treatments of the past or from his own Southern heritage.

Young's real success with the belle character ie the earlier and lees well known novel River House. In Chapter Two we alluded briefly to Miss Rosa and Miss Ellen, two credible and interestingly developed old-maid belles. In this case, the added dimension is humor—not only are they a comic pair, the one garrulous and the other quite deaf, but they have a sense of humor as well: "Now, Tellie, you see what. People will think we are crazy. That's exactly what they'll do." To this caution Miss Ellen (Tellie) only responds coolly: "They'll think right,

80 P. 13.

81 P. 408.

82 P. 412. 120

I’m afraid."83 They exemplify the code for highborn ladies—"They had

come because Miss Rosa, thinking some diversion right for Evelyn's

first day at River House, had asked a fen people to call . . *"84

—and observe noblesse oblige—they never questioned their brother about

their sister-in-law's abrupt disappearance from River House, even though

she had not returned to care for her child—but finally add up to much

more than mere character actors. Young gives these women a raison d'etre

beyond mere role playing and makes of them credible persons. Along with

the two bellaa of a former generation, Young brings to River House

plantation Evelyn Dandridge. Only recently married into the family,

Evelyn, for the most part, is Ignorant of aristocratic legacy. She

smokes, frequents the country club, and flippantly dresses in a lovely gown that had belonged to the exiled sister-in-law, Obedience (Sia Bedie)

Tait Dandridgs, who waa said to have been a Mardi Gras queen. Through

the women, than, Young conveys the tension of the generations, the uncommon values of the young and the old. Because the women of River

House are real, credible characters of flesh and blood and feeling,

Stark Young makes a definite and positive contribution to the bellehood genre.

What we must call attention to now is the fact that there are writers whose works seem to owe some special allegiance to the processed vision that has emerged collectively from the other writers this chapter has treated. We want to suggest, therein, a general pattern which not

83 P. 14.

B4 P. 135 121

only capsullzes our digest but as well sets a direction for what will

later become pertinent.

That Faulkner's vision could be called bleak, or Williams' intense,

or Heilman's gentle, at surface has little value, but when these categories are collectively considered, something very different emerges: we have, somehow instinctively, a temperament so unsettled in its function and so fully realized in its forms that there is little left beyond it.

It is valid to say that, for all time, Williams, for example, has exhausted certain aspects of the bellehood code in Blanche DuBois alone- after her one cannot resist asking: what could possibly be left? The interesting paradox again is that function is not necessarily what feeds creativity; and form, while being the font through which particular visions are channeled, must itself be constantly regenerated. The question has to be: what can feed the new writers now that we are done with Faulkner and the others?

There are of course imitators and imposters who can be dismissed out of hand. Naming periods and suggesting various kinds of renascences help little since nothing is so artificial as a hugs list of writers who have done two books apiece on a certain subject and thus remotely may be regarded as a part of the tradition they employ. What counts here most is the economy and the words and phrases, the credible character who pays! And our interest remains with this issue. The general intensity, bleakness, gentleness, or agrarian romance, which have fed the character of the belle in her best forms, also become the means by which she may still be a valid figure of life. After Faulkner and Williams she seems a particularly bleak but intense, gentle though 122

restless defender of her own self-stylized principles. We have already noted the ties which must be made with psychology, at least with an interest in motivation that never before had bean so meticulous and incipient. That a form existed entirely on its own, ready for the psychological examination, made it far easier for writers to subject her to this arena of judgment and speculation. The tradition, which also bears categorizing in the same terms with which we have dealt with the vision, had about it, as well, an insistence on credibility too; that is, there is a fierce loyalty apparent in the writers wa have noted, which defies reality in the pursuit of adequate forms for couching their own sensibilities instead. Hare the belle has held up again and again too. The "why," is at once a matter of the fundamental intensity by which stereotypes can be broken down when there is an imagination ripe for it. What results ie, of course, an even stronger strain on credibility and the consequent revelation that is usually demanded of art. What wa insist on here, therefore, is that the writers who operate out of the above sensibilities seem to keep on going with the assumption that the characters of ths past can be rediscovered and treated again without being drained of their fictional values.

At some time or the other this had to stop, and perhaps it did after Warren tried so hard with Amantha Starr. That there is that host of treatments still going on is something that we will consider in the next chapter but, for now, our interest turns to the last major writers whom we feel can be yoked with the emergences we have traced. 123

Caroline Gordon: Instinct for the Pattern

Miss Gordon is almost a major writer. But the single factor

preventing her long canon—1931 to the present—from riding higher than

it does in literary praise is her imitation of the work of her husband

Allen Tate, Faulkner, and Warren. Not an original writer, she

nevertheless has instincts—perhaps epitomal ones—for gorging out the

heart of the tradition which became Faulkner's naturalistic approach

and Warren's existential one. Bradbury consequently makes it a point

that where these men and Tate had significantly drawn on areas of

collective psychology aha more properly concentrated on individuals.

For this her bailee stand alone for their individuality, measuring

perhaps a singular area of relationship between men and women that had

not been tried before. Moreover, it ie the passive women working around

the cultural domination of the restless men from which she seems to have

drawn most of what she had to say. The Women on the Porch is Miss

Gordon's most profound treatment of those tensions in the bellehood code

by which she arrived at an unmarred and unsentimental authentication of

the confinements that make for an otherwise imitative suggestion of

Faulkner's bleakness, Warren's outcries, and Tate's intsllectuali8m.

Hers tha three sitting women, who ere the major characters, assess the

legacies which have become "perverted from the solid securities" they have known. They do it against the known infidelity of "one of their

own," in this case Catherine Lewie, who has come home to her Southern homeland to find it alien and bereft of the securities she, too, knew before. There is very nearly a mythological prototype in this character who, unlike any belle before, now carries with her the substance by which 124

the former world beet seems deposed and desolate. Her accusers, belles all, and fatelike oracles, are both the backdrop against which she measures the extent of her own change, and as wall the picture of what

"is not quite right" about it. Catherine's first encounter with them is also symptomatic•of all that she faces in the consequent force:

She ran forward, falling to her knees once when she stepped on a loose brick. She picked herself up and saw at the end of the green tunnel ths gray, spreading bulk of the house. Women were sitting on the porch. One was old and stout end wore a lace cap on her white hair. Another woman, thin almost to emaciation and with black, restlees eyes in a sand-colored face, sat close beside her, book in hand. On the steps below the two a wiry, middle-aged woman seemed just to have dropped down to rest. Her forehead, even the fine, brown hairs of her head, glistened with sweat. Her hands, loosely clenched, swung between her spread knees.85

From there on the condition of the dreadfully composed relatives, who seem almost metaphysically to represent the cause that she must plead against herself, is a picture of proper alienation. In this case it is

Catherine, trained with all the proper codes and manners, who has gone midwest to become unfaithful to her husband. That he is violent in reacting to this knowledge, and then reconciled, is another manifestation that the change which characterizes Catherine's new contempt both for her old station and even more for her new one, ie something which had to be.

In other words, Miss Gordon more than superficially celebrates the native, individual epiphany which is only proper to the quarrel between what the balle ought to be as a woman and what her training as a type potentially always made of her.

Miss Gordon exhibits an ironic control over the revelation which

85 The Women on the Porch (New York: Charles Scribnsr's Sons, 1944), p. 11. 125

is the focal point of this novelt there is a natural pattern which flow3 from confrontation between symbol and fact. For her it is a kind of morality play, and though Imitative of her husband's earlier story

"The Immortal Woman," generates a fundamental sympathy for the totally pathetic side of the belle's lost world.

Allen Tats: The Fugitive Tradition and the Belle

Tate, on the other hand, might be far mors original than his wife, but he lacks her basic sense of technique and evocation. While the belle that he characterizes in "The Immortal Woman" is a bearer of fictional force and immediacy, she is so in rather stilted and common prose. What makes the difference is undoubtedly Tate's avowed respect for the fugitive angle in the Southern aesthetic. His picture of the

South, as Bradbury suggests, "avoids all the cliches of romance, ... in favor of showing harshness, code-sanctioned injustice, and natural qc depravity" as inescapable parts of the social pattern. He was never particularly concerned with justifying any of it, just with supporting the notion that the animal facts of lif8 and man's depravity do tsnd at least to give order to reality.

His belles enter this picture with almost gleeful personal indictment, as is the case with Susan in The Fathers or Mrs. Dulany in

"The Immortal Woman." Far more significant is the fact that these women regularly grasped their roles as pieces of the fugitive pattern, and we find them running around like the symbols they are as if their relegation

86 P. 64. 126

to patterns also gave their author the right to connive their responses:

To Susan the life around her in childhood had been final; there could be no other, there never had been any other way of life—which is, I suppose, a way of saying that people living in formal societies, lacking the historical imagination, can imagine for themselves only a timeless existence: they themselves never had any origin anywhere and they can have no end, but will go on forever.87

Significantly as well, Mrs. Dulany goes out in that cosmic blast which

both signifies her subtle tragedy but also calls attention to the aminal

truth there and to the latter-day belle's domination by the silent

loneliness that is only fitting:

The sun from over the wall lit up her face. I could see that she was in tears. He took her cane, a little awkwardly. She leaned heavily on his arm; they started slowly up the street. He hesitated as if he were about to speak, but thought batter of it, smiled, and lad the old lady on her way. I never saw her again.88

Eudora Welty: Character and Place by Implosion

Eudora Welty has bean assigned a place beside Carson McCullers among the Southern traditionalists. Her writing reflects a deep sense of dependence on those economies of fictional structure and tone which, as with McCullers, rest fundamentally in evocation—in fact these woman are, in Hoffman's and others* treatments, considered together. Besides the matter of literary stance, however, the comparison has really to stop there. This is especially true in the respective considerations of the belle character, and here Welty seems to be mors in the tradition of

87 Allen Tate, The Fathers (Chicago; The Swallow Press, 1938), p. 183. ... flQ In Southern Harvest, ed. Robert Penn Warren (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1937), p. 151. 127

Warren, Tate, and Gordon. It is not difficult, given the themes of

The Ponder Heart and Delta Wedding, or even The Optimist's Daughter,

to see that the Welty subject matter is not Southern in the more desperate sense of the term. While the concerns are around the various

tensions which knit a social structure together, the emphasis remains, as Hoffman suggests, on those elements of the Southern tradition which play upon foible, mistaken impulses, or the graces and animalities of an simple human concourse. Here Welty becomes far more cosmic in her approach than any of her predecessors, and may well be the single contemporary writer who does the best job of making the sectional South more representative of a cosmic world. At any rate, the result is a long canon of women whose problems appear to relate directly to prescriptions emerging from the sort of dominations and defenses which follow upon the twentieth century shadow of the old structures. Among them are the striking older sister and the madly lonely old piano 90 teacher of the short story "June Recital." Here these two women solidly glow in the pathetic isolation with which their mistaken impulses, their futile natures uncertainly torture them. In the case of "Lily Daw 91 and the Three Ladies," there is a brilliant play on the self-righteousness which was always potentially a part of the bellehood code. This story treats the overt and pitiful episode of an inheritor of these righteous aspects trying desperately to deal with a half-witted love-struck girl

89 P. 63.

98 The Golden Apples (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1947).

9^ In A Curtain of Green (New York? Doubleday Doran, 1941), pp. 52-64. 128

who might have been herself. Ruby, in "A Piece of News," though a

second-class woman, struggles with the romance that should have been

hers when in a moment of disillusionment, she finds her name among

the obituaries of an out-of-town newspaper. Rather than being her

moment of death, it is curiously the moment at which she realizes,

however pathetically, who she is. In Ruby's case, the husband (unlike

Jim in Caroline Gordon's Ths Women on the Porch) then becomes the

reservoir into which she pours her further disillusionment: "It was

dark and vague outside. The storm had rolled away to faintness like a wagon crossing a bridge." Or, this evocative piling, drawing, sense

of implosion which is a superior legacy of the belle's, is also described

in ths last lines of "June Recital":

Into her head flowed the whole of the poem she had found in that book. It ran perfectly through her head, vanishing as it went, one line yielding to the next, like a torch race. All of it passed through her head, through her body. Sh8 slept, but sat up in bed once and said aloud, 'Because a firs was in my head.'83

The fire, we note forcefully, is that implosive madness which can only follow in the mind of one whose knowledge of self is ground pathetically in a perception that has relied too heavily on inviolable prescriptions.

It is not so much the past disgraced or even parodied but the illusion of the present stamped over the ordinary discoveries of life which never lead anywhere but to common human truth.

There follow all the characters who loosely take pert in this on-going discovery: Stella Rondo of "Why I Live at the PO," Clytia Farr

92 in Selected Stories of Eudora Welty (New York: Modern Library Edition, 1936), p. 97.

93 P. 97. 129

of "Clytie," and others. The emphasis, as Miss Welty puts it herself, had grown first from her effort to "rescue Ufa," therein to furnish evidence that everything that has gone before belongs to everything that is present; hence, tha implosion itself which must always be suggested in the characters and places she celebrates. They are inexorably thrown together, as in this highly evocative passage from one of her surmises about Southern community life itself;

Indians, Mike Fink, the flatboatmen, Burr, and Blenner­ hassett, John James Audubon, the bandit of the Trace, planters and preachers—the horse fairs, the great fires—the battles of war, the arrivals of foreign ships, and the coming of floods; could not all these things still more with their stature enter into the mind here, and their beauty still work upon tha heart? Perhaps it is the sense of place that gives us the belief that passionate things, in soma essence, endure. Whatever ie significant and whatever is tragic live as long as the place does, though they are unseen, and the new life will be built upon these things—regardless of commerce and the way of rivers and road6, and other vagaries.94

94 P. 53 130

Chapter iv

All the Ruined Helene: The Psychology of What Remains

There is a point, as we have earlier suggested, at which the belle

not only begins to bleed into other character forms, but also becomes

less attractive to serious writers. Major critics like Walter Sullivan maintain solidly that there was, after Faulkner—who, he says, wrote poorer characters after the War than before—a slow erosion of the 4 powers of the Southern vision. Other critics put the date around 1946 when virtually the whole of the American interest turned toward celebrating the World War II victory. It was a time too when even

Williams and Faulkner could not resist going to write for the movies, and a time when the film began to draw less lucidly, because of the contract system, studio powers, and popular taste, on the former warhorses of the literary market. Part of celebrating the American experience, now held as high as history had yet seen It, undoubtedly involved the treatment of those areas of our literature which most excited the popular imagination. There was no end to poor quality treatments of these stereotypes nor to the banalities in the familiar surfaces which were milked for every ounce of their potential popular appeal. Thus even a book of the general Integrity of Robert Penn

Warren's Band of Angels would get the treatment which Raoul Walsh gave

4 Pea*h by Melancholy, p. 88. 131

It in a 195? film version. Hare the quest of Amantha Starr is little

more than the travesty that the worst of tha bailee had pursued. But

this was apparently what the American public wanted, and it ie

significant that this near twenty-year period between the end of the

war and tha late 1950*a should have considerably stilted the progress of

art;

The fifteen years following World War II may have been the least exciting, least imaginative, least innovative years in the art of tha American film since Griffith founded that art in 1908.2

What is important, of course, is that the few serious achievements

of these years stand out like bolts of lightning and hence have had their major influence on the concepts remaining not only in the popular mind, but among tha elitists as well. After Blanche DuBois it seems almost impossible to see the Southern belle too much the sort that she might have been twenty years earlier. Moreover, it appears that this crucial portrayal of the heritage behind the belle is both sound and irreversible

It has been the source of most of the artistic problems surrounding her since.

The Death-Blow of Psychology

In his poem "Duty” (1841), Arthur Hugh Clough ie, of course, parodying, but his mockery of the Victorian woman is similar to, if not a full likeness of what the Twentieth Century perceives her to have

2 Gerald Mast, ft Short History of the Movies (Indianapolis: Bobbs Merrill Co., Inc., 1971), p. 334. 132

been:

With the form conforming duly Senseless what it maaneth truly, Go to church—the world requires you, To bails—the world requires you too, And marry—papa and mama desire you, And your sisters and schoolfellows do.

We have already noted that this general position had been prompted by a dssire for self-realization on the part of men who also wished the world to ba beautiful. The romantic ideal in America waa a passion for titles, the front porch, sociability, and the woman as lady—or the man as "gentleman"—had never in America achieved its old world meaning.''

There followed ths strange mix by which various sections of the country thereby tried to Invent codes for achieving these facades of dignity.

Outside the South, where Americans rscognized neither superiors nor inferiors, the special codes which had been elaborated to lubricate the relations of class were superfluous. Lacy in Allan Tate’s The Fathers states it well:

The individual quality of a man was bound up with his kin and the ’places* where they lived; thinking of a man we could easily bring before the mind’s eye all those subtly interwoven features of his position. •Class’ consisted solely in a certain code of behavior. Even years later I am always a little amazed to hear a man described as ths coal man or the steel man or the plate-glass man description of people after the way they make their money, not after their manner of life.4

In general the beautiful also took its sources from another mix based on concepts of the natural and the genial. Here American women

3 Henry Steele Commanger, The American Mind: An Interpretation of American Thought and Character Since the 1B80*s, (Toronto: Bantam Books, 1970), p. 15. 4 P. 135 133

undoubtedly bore the burden worse than the old world figures had because they singularly became the object most suggestive of those things in nature and congeniality which were most attractive; thus their pedestalization.

What she was, only her husband divined, and even he stood before her in dumb, half-amazed admiration, as he might before the inscrutable vision of a superior being. What she really was, was known only to God. Her life was one long act of devotion,—devotion to God, devotion to her husband, devotion to her children, devotion to her servants, to her friends, to the poor, to humanity. Nothing happened within the range of her knowledge that her sympathy did not reach and her charity and wisdom did not ameliorate.5

What was obtuse about this process, of course, was that it, no less than the Southern picture, created a false frame of mind built on a free association so intense that the result was, as Commager further suggests, an axiomatic moral superiority. What for the European

Victorian woman was difficult enough in its prescriptions, was for the

American even more sevsre. Moreover, this seems to have been a flavor which all parts of the nation arrived at from disparate directions. As we have shown, the South did it with pretense, with an instinctive love of dream and dignity.6

Obviously all of this had to break down in its falseness, and this breakdown is the source of the psychological panorama through which the belle has best moved and through which she most makes difficulty for the future.

5 Thomas Nelson Page, Social Life in Old Virginia Before the War (1897; rpt. Freeport, New York: Books for Libraries Press, 1970), p. 3B • ...

6 Commanger, Chapter One, "The Nineteenth-Century American," pp. 3-41. 134

Among the many principles operating on the concept of the

beautiful in the South was the rigidity with which contingent moral

axioms were made, but the paradoxical carelessness with which they were

carried out. Of course, sentimentality reigned supreme, but the

sentiment was spontaneous rather than introspective and the remaining

temperament had its built-in paranoia from the beginning. The earliest

belles exactly personified this condition. At least in reality, had

the code which supposedly sustained them been true, they would by

nature have been partly neurotic. We can only imagine the torture that

must have gone on even in the mind of Bel Tracy, whose action was tied

to social overstatement, but whose psyche was bound to cultivated underplay. Yet there is little note of this problem until writers

became interested in the psychological factors of human motivation. It stands to reason also that this investigation would not only lay bare much of the falsity which the art forms had supposed to be a lie anyhow;

these breakthroughs were ignored until a time when they were ripe enough to be significant. This began happening only in the 1920's and 1930's when the Southern vision was also adequately understood.

The first part of a probable psychological genesis might run this way:

1777 - 1840 The earliest belles operated on the assumption that persons could act parte which found their origins in codes. The role-playing element in the belle's life, far from having psychological overtones, rather carefully focused on the terms from which such conduct might have 135

been drawn«7 The struggle of the artist was for primary terms to support

this stance.

1840 - 1861 The antebellum culture supported concepts of ths beautiful Q which alao had attendant prescriptions.

1861 - 1B7Q The earliest dissolution of these prescriptions appears

to come when the Western movement imposed leveling standards on both

the North and South. Here, however, both the Northern and Southern gentlewoman going West encountered the same problems and only occasionally does the potential psychological adjustment alter the code. No writer of the time treated this matter except in the polemical fashion which Gaines discusses, but the problem was later to became a cause celebre among the more popular writers of romance and western literature; e.Q., Edna Farber,

Grace Livingstone Hill, or Zane Gray.

1B70 - 1890 The single most changing factor in the possible psychological view came with the Reconstruction and the belle waa constrained to face the market place. Here, however, the code prevails against a regularly successful acknowledgement of the personal burdens Involved. Again, too, it was something which only J. William DeForest sesme artfully aware of, and he shares with Thomas Nelson Page the rich humor which caused the latter to invent the black caricature, the essential prototype for the

7 ' Names, as much as any of the trappings pertinent here, mo6t reflect this statement as they run an almost ludicrous gamut. This list is ample proof that a major pattern, completely dependent upon romantic terms and jargon, should have had psychological overtones: Ariel Custer, Alabama Knight, Obedience "Bedie" Tait, Peyton Loftis, RosaLee Delafield, Alice May Habersham, Lillie.Ravenel, Dorothy South, Daisy Fay Buchanan, Amantha Starr, Rosalie Dural, Eoline Glenmore.

Bode’s rationale for adopting these dates also functions to describe the bells literature of the period. Carl Bode, Antebellum Culture (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1970). 136

breakdowns in codal treatments of the belle's sexuality.

1890 - 1900 The problems related to the so-called "emancipation of

women" in the nineties seem little to have affected the insistence on

the code, but what it did force was a synthesis of the belle of the

market place with the problems of Reconstruction. Consistent with the

old modes, however, the Little Colonel series of Annie Fellows Johnston

which remained popular juvenile reading for another fifty years, began

to appear during this period. The potential psychological forces

concerned the very first glimmers of displacement which were actually

treated in fiction; e.q., Valentine and Ditrichetein’s 1897 dramatization

of the popular novel, A^ Southern Romance.

1900 Size of home, nature of family life, and quality of culture

itself begins at the turn of the century to call attention of Southern

writers to their heritage as a part of the whole American picture. The

new self-consciousness produces a paradoxical view of the Southern

chivalric code, to be sure, which is now further romanticized by novelists

who proved the American past was designed deliberately to enable ladies

to while away summer afternoons. This was at the national level while

ironically the Southern gentlewoman, who supposedly enjoyed this condition

before the rest of the nation's women did, now lived in the added dreams

of a lost past. Pietistic patriotism also insisted on recreating the

social distinctions from which American ancestors had fled. The

psychological effects for the Southern woman were little noted in fiction

but a light precedent was set for the new appreciation of the South as a primary force in American links to Europe and old world culture. Here,

possibly, is the first substantial Interest in a national psychology, 137

producing as Commangar notes, Jame’s Psychology and Adams* Law of

Civilization and Decay.9

The influence of Freudian psychological principles also filtered

into literature before it did into national consciousness. Those who

supported the natural consequences of Freud's sexual base for motivation

did so with restricted public toleration, even though there was a

considerable international awe attendant on Freud's experiments. The

literary modes here tend toward angularity as the Victorian interest in

the grotesque elements of all disease, particularly mental dieorder, grows all the more sustained in darkness and chains. To Freudianism add full-scale Darwinism and already there exists a framework for dealing with the likes of Blanche DuBois, except that the popular audience had neither the moral sophistication nor the literary taste to accept it.

Now if we define the elements of psychology pertinent here as those relationships between mind and heart, between perception and truth, which generate action and trace motivation to self, there is the wealth of potential characters that little interested writers of the

Nineteenth Century. Until 1912 or so, there was, as Edward A. Ross has written, a predilection only "to intone the old litanies."^8 Hence, ws reach the irrevocable conclusion that some force—perhaps it was the far-reaching economic effects, the jar to American financial solubility of the 1830's Depression—was at work that provided the elements of human motivation which might be examined only in connection with the past. This is the key catalyst which finally produces tha first efforts at examining fictional women as the paradigm of such links. Two poles

□ Commangar, p. 49. 4 n Commangar, p. 51. 138

quickly emerge in the writings of Mary Johnston, whose audience preferred the still psychologically unrealized, purely historical belle, and Ellen Glasgow who might well have been the single author whose eye on sociology had calculated the need for change and set the groundwork for Williams' and Faulkner's characters. Consider, for example, this passage where she exposes the unrealistic elements in the psyche of her protagonist Virginia Pendleton;

Sorrow, decay, death—these appeared to her as things which must happen inevitably to other people, but from which she should be forever shielded by some beneficent Providence. She thought of them as vaguely as she did of the remote tragedies of history. They bore no closer relation to her own life than did the French Revolution or the beheading of Charles the First. ... All things, even joy, seemed to her a mere matter of willing. It was impossible that any hostile powers should withstand the radiant energy of her desire.H

While naturalism was producing a society with its defenses at least incipiently shaky and precarious, the Southern intelligentsia was being created in a Glasgowian chronicle of the social transformation of the

South from the Civil War to the First World War. She pictured that transformation, and, as Hugh Holman has described her in Three Modes of

Modern Southern Fiction, "portraysd the way in which it ¿The South/ continues to pay lip service to ideals that have lost their cause for existence and to surrender hope and energy to a social structure whose meaning and justification ended long ago. Thus . . . her people represent decayed and Ineffectual patricians." With Holman's comment in mind, consider the continuation of Virginia;

11 Virginia, p. 134.

12 Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1966, p. 76. 139

When Virginia grew to womanhood, the past order still lingered on as a state of mind; and the Southern woman, who had borne the heaviest burden of the old slavery, and the new freedom, was valued, in sentiment, chiefly as an ornament to civilization, and as restraining influence over the nature of man. But tha next decade was scarcely over when one of those momentous revolutions of opinion, more drastic in the end than any revolution of facts or institutions, had already begun. Insurgent youth, hardened by the poverty and deprivation of the postwar years, had damaged though it had not as yet entirely broken through, the fixed pattern of custom. Even in the feminine sphere was self-assertion, somewhat gradually but beneficently displacing self-sacrifice. Sentimentality, both as a rule of conduct and as a habit of mind, was yielding to the more practical, and the more profitable, virtues of common sense.'3

Emergent from such possibilities is the image of change itself as a major theme. Here the Southern belle is ones again a ready-made vehicle for tracing effects, though as yet she had not achieved the displacement which would allow the inherent frustration there to be emblematic of human struggle itself. In other words, she had not become the potential bearer of a conscious self-torture, for verification of this assertion we need only note the unchanged, ultraromantic

Virginia near the novel's conclusion, just before she receives her husband's request that she divorce him so that he can marry a Naw York actress:

Tha obligation to think independently was incomprehensible to Virginia. ... Her own instinct had been always the true instinct of the lady, to avoid 'evil,* not to seek it, to avoid it, honestly if possible, and if not honestly— well, to avoid it at any cost. The love of truth for truth's sake is the last of the eternal verities. . . .

Self-consciousness, the ingredient which finally emerges in the

13 P. 247.

14 P. 393. 140

1920's and sets up those prescriptions that produce the strain of

realism which denies the philosophic abstracts proper to naturalism,

had set the belle into a world where change itself brings her directly

into conflict with nature. Here the history seems incredibly simple as

it forges through the very souls of the Faulkner types.

Popular film picks up on the melodramatic possibilities, adding a dimension of immediacy not only to a character now thoroughly acting, playing a role that must be visually convincing, but also standing emblematic of ths very forces of motion Itself. Soma film belles appear to be an effort at enhancing the poetic nature of the character; e.q., William Wyler’s Jezebel or David Butler’s The Little Colonel, and open up long-range dramas for serializing the dynastic wound which subsequently flooded the market.

Thia process seems now to have been crucial to the palettes of

Williams and McCullers, because it left behind not merely the full scope of a many-faceted world, but also a monumental array of moments through which a most complex psychological development could be explored.

It is here, also, that Blanche DuBois becomes the high point of the bellehood code. She is, as she herself points out, left to grope through life in darkness: "And then the searchlight which had been turned on the world was turned off again and never for one moment since has there been any light that’s stronger than this—kitchen—candle. . . .•• (6.96.)

Our immediate problem is one we have repeated significantly: after

Blanche, what? It has to be the psychology that counts at last. It has to be, too, the natural disavowal of her world that culminates in the belle as an anti-hero, as much as in the twentieth century psyche which 141

denies the givens of its monumental predecessor, the Victorian Age.

There is incredible recognition of the glories of that pregnant age, along with the total dissolution of its highly questionable self-image.

That the belle will now have been reduced to a mere character actress on a screen of personages devoid of any distinguishable cultural heritage seems entirely in order.

The point must be, therefore, that she has thus come into her own for contemporary treatment, both in the absurdity and in the travesty that she also potentially was. Even Neil Simon has celebrated her existence, bringing her to center stage in her star-spangled bathing suit, member of the Olympic swimming team and defender of all and every

American tradition:

Ah may be provincial and old-fashioned. Ah may believe in a lot of things like patriotism and the Constitution because that's the way ah was brought up, and that's the way ah feel. ... And startin' tomorrow ah'm gonna swim a mile every day from now until next summer. Every American has to do what he does bsst for his country, and ah—can- swim I-*5

Moreover, her harshened, psychological nature has taken a turn for softness—which she never genuinely had—because writers like Truman

Capote and Eudora Welty have begun to feel sorry for her. Capote pities Varena and Dolly Talbo, and renders them with gentleness:

So it was a long while before I calmed down enough to notice Dolly Talbo. And when I did I fell in love, imagine what it must have been.for her when first I came to the house, a loud and prying boy of eleven. She skittered at the sound of my footsteps or, if there was no avoiding me, folded like the petals of shy-lady fern. She was one of those people who can

13 The Star-Spangled Girl (New York; Dramatists Play Service, Inc, 1967), 3.65. 142

disguise themselves as an object in ths room,a shadow in the corner, whose presence is a delicate happening. She wore the quietest shoes, plain virginal dressss with hems that touched her ankles.16

Her thousand-sided face has lent itself to such treatments as:

1957 Skye Cameron t

The girl in the white dress, with the soft waves of bright hair, belonged to New Orleans as surely as did the scent of roses and jasmine, and I knew she could ravel in such a belonging. The Creole might lie submerged, but it could come to the fore and have its day. ... I sat like a doll before the dressing table and let Oalphine do what she liked with my hair. ... Who was the girl with red hair who looked back at me in the mirror? ... I gazed into the mirror and saw with some surprise the girl who starsd back at me. The white gown was soft with French lace about the throat, giving a gentler, more feminine look than the dark, plain things I so often wors. My hair, clustered in small curls across my forehead, was drawn back in loose waves and pinned high with silver combs.17

1972 A Portion for Foxes;

"This one’s different. Old South and wisteria and all that." "Oh God," Mika groaned, "if there’s anything I can do without it’s Southern belles with a hollow ring." She wore blue jeans, an old pair of moccasins which had come unsewn, disclosing bare toes, and a man's blue shirt, ripped at the shoulder. She had on no make-up and her hair was wild and uncombed. Her eyes, blue-violet and fringed with thick black lashes, were startling and she had an especially beautiful mouth, short, with a full upper lip at the corner of which was an almost imperceptible tuft of golden down. She had a look about her—well-bred and high-strung.18

1973 The Last of the Southern Girls;

This was ths milieu /Washington, D. zj in which Carol Hollywall, nse Templeton, a Southern debutante from the

16 The Grass Harp (New York; Random House, 1951), p. 7.

17 Phyllis A. Whitney (New York; Appleton Century Crofts, Inc.) pp. 122-25.

18 Jane Mcllvaine McClary (New York; Popular Library), pp. 66-67. 143

Mississippi River town of De Soto Point, Arkansas, had grown from girlhood into maturity. They talked of her incessantly and she, being a child of this most unusual city, talked also of them. In a town, so Southern in character, where females wers then such appendages to ambitious husbands and where the more independent seethed under this inferiority, where society was ordered for males and the urges of their politics—a place of powerful men, and women they married when they were young. ... But all this coexisted with a loveliness and grace, for an aura of romance and beauty surrounded her, there was a rare electricity to her movements, she seemed touched with gold, and people would stare at her in the streets. ... The truth is that Carol Hollywell, being a Southern girl, was American to the blood, and hence was both an irredeemable romantic and a fitful pragmatist, . . . The South was ths root of her strength. ...

The 1974 novel by Kelly Cherry called Sick and full of Burning recounts

the story of a Southern belle and her reactions to being regarded as a sex symbol. It is the only novel which surfaces to date with what appears to be an accurate historical awareness of the implications of the bellehood code.

What does this mean for all the contemporary writers who find her attractive? They must see her bass in psychology. The essential artistic problem has to be in the general exhaustion which bespeaks the harsher mode now. Our time so celebrates the absurd that we no longer believe that what sounds right could ever have been anything but a put-on.

We absurdly deny regionality, facing an age in which the absurdities and contradictions in forms themselves are at the roots of art. Stylization is preferred of course, and there are those who believe that this can only lead to aaathetical bankruptcy. If we are correct to believe that there must be a correspondence betwen art and moral intelligibility, we are naturally trapped in the further travesties of accommodation to that

19 Willie Morris (New York: Avon Books), pp. 11-17 144

principle. We must also face the fact that even the character whose personhood lies in self-awareness and the tension confined there, regularly faces her ancestor in Blanche, too. Tennessee Williams himself noted that his later characters like flora Goforth and Karen

Stone ar8 what Blanche was, though they are neither Southerners nor belles. Again the major force here is the psychological one, and if it demonstrates anything at all about the problems of art in a contemporary age, it must be in the latter-day exercise of intelligibility which always destroys what has formerly existed by building upon it. Here is the gentle fabric of another paradox which a now lovely and graceful

Blanche also supplies for us: "Whoever you are—I have always depended on the kindness of strangers." (11.142.) That the stranger should occupy the best minds still writing of the South seems the natural legacy of a celebrated tradition. 145

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