The Belle Gone Bad: White Southern Women Writers and the Dark Seductress (review)

"Scarlett O'Hara was not beautiful" is the first line of the all-time best-selling southern novel—"but men seldom realized it when caught by her charm" (Margaret Mitchell, Gone with the Wind. [New York: Macmillan, 1936], 1).

Gone with the Wind's Scarlett, the quintessential bad belle, is smart, self-centered, and mean when she has to be, and that is what saves her. It is also what makes the bad belle endlessly intriguing. Though she may have the graces of the good belle, she's far more strategic. We may admire Melanie, but as Margaret Mitchell said herself, Scarlett is the charismatic one who captivates us.

Scarlett appears exactly halfway through Betina Entzminger's excellent study of the bad belle as portrayed by white southern women writers from the 1840s onward. Entzminger finds three major literary periods in which the bad belle flourishes, and shows how the character changes with the times—from the sensual, doomed figure in E. D. E. N. Southworth's Retribution (1849) through the post-bellum survivors (Mitchell's Scarlett and others) up to the modern writers (Lee Smith and others) who push aside the bad belle to make room for her artist-daughter. Entzminger's is a fascinating study, readable and informative about the larger culture as well as the literary world.

The bad belle is, of course, a plot device, the foil to the perfect blonde who wins the hero but is terribly dull in her niceness. The bad belle provides the conflict—luring the hero to the point of seduction, presenting an alternative to the honorable courtship and marriage plot. As Entzminger notes in her introduction, much of southern literature (like much of the world's fiction) is about the conflict between duty and desire, between the security of the traditional path and the excitement of hacking out one's own way through the wilderness. In the domestic sphere, the bad belle is the trail blazer. Especially with the earlier writers, she may be racially mixed and is often an artist—for having a profession was as suspect as having a sex life.

Entzminger recounts plots artfully and skillfully. She is the rare writer who can do a close reading that is continually engaging, as if telling the story itself. And while she occasionally, dutifully, injects theory-babble, she does not let it overwhelm the points she is making. (In fact, much of the "phallic signifier" stuff she treats respectfully is absurd, and I admire her good manners in not saying so.)

Entzminger also explores the authors' lives and why they might be drawn to the bad belle. Southworth, for instance, rebelled simply by having a public profession—but while her still-exciting novels are full of gothic and melodramatic touches, she knew her publishers' limits. Her characters do not have unmarried sex (or it is very murky if they do), and her bad belle has to die, so that the patriarchal world may survive. But we have no way of knowing how Southworth's female readers interpreted her stories. We do know that antebellum men read novels as advice books, warning them not to be seduced by "jezebels"—pretty faces hiding evil minds.

The bad belle character, like most protests, went underground during the Civil War. Among postwar white women writers, Entzminger can find only a few traces—in, for instance, Kate Chopin's Calixta in "At the 'Cadian Ball'" and "The Storm," but Calixta is neither upper class nor artistic. (Entzminger repeats the common myth that Chopin herself was raised to be a pure, fragile, submissive southern belle [79], but she was actually an urban Catholic from St. Louis.)

The war had to be cleared away before the belle could resurface in such writers as Ellen Glasgow, a discreet woman-loving woman born eight years after Appomattox. Glasgow's Romantic Comedians (1926) features a green-eyed gold digger, more...