MYTH and Agonys AS BELLE Anne W. Lyons Submitted to The
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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