engleski

The Golden Age of Hollywood's Belles: Is Tomorrow, After All, Another Day?

Founded on a canonized discourse, resting on a cultural and social personification – a description, a code, a projection – which legitimizes and authorizes the interpretation of culture and nature, masculinity and femininity, superiority and inferiority, power and subordination, the Southern belle stereotype is both a literature- generating principle, often supporting the very concept of Southern fiction, and a social construct, supporting the writing of Southern history and (popular) culture. In both cases, the Southern belle stereotype has to be read “against the South that created [it] for different social purposes, or reinvented [it] at crucial moments in history” thus providing insight “into anxieties and aspirations of the culture” (Roberts xii). Some of those cultural anxieties and aspirations (e.g., the Cult of True Womanhood, the Southern domestic metaphor, the plantation myth, the lost cause, etc.) are addressed by the Golden Age of Hollywood’s belles such as Julie Marsden (Jezebel), Scarlett O’Hara (Gone with the Wind), Susanna Drake (Raintree County), and Amantha Starr (Band of Angels). The purpose of this paper is therefore to explore how and why all of them, although Southern belles par excellence at first sight, attempt to deconstruct the social and cultural fabric of the antebellum/Civil War South thus developing the potential to become a subversive female force in the film. Their potential subversiveness, however, is at the end of the film revealed to be just a mask behind which yet another Southern female stereotype lurks: that of Dixie Madonna, the Confederate woman, or tragic mulatta.

stereotypes ; Southern belle ; Hollywood ; Gone with the Wind ; Band of Angels ; Jezebel ; Raintree County ;

nije evidentirano