“A Girl Is Like a Flower. … If a Rough Wind Blows near Her, Her Bloom Is Faded”: The Southern Lady in Macaria, The Battle-Ground, and Gone with the Wind

Abstract

This article examines how the Southern lady is represented in three major Southern women’s novels set during the American Civil War: Macaria (1864) by Augusta Jane Evans Wilson, The Battle-Ground (1902) by Ellen Glasgow, and Gone with the Wind (1936) by Margaret Mitchell. Although separated by over seven decades and distinct historical perspectives—Wilson as a contemporary witness, Glasgow as a postwar observer, and Mitchell as a nostalgic inheritor—their works collectively shaped enduring images of the South in American popular culture. Through textual analysis, the study explores how each author depicts female endurance, illness, and mortality to symbolize both individual and social transformation. The heroines (Wilson’s Electra and Irene, Glasgow’s Betty Ambler, and Mitchell’s Scarlett O’Hara) embody resilience amid collapse, assuming active roles in the reconstruction of Southern identity. Their struggles reflect broader tensions between traditional femininity and emerging female agency. Ultimately, the article argues that portrayals of women’s frailty and death function as metaphors for the decline of the antebellum order and the inevitable demise of the Southern lady ideal, revealing illness and death as physical and cultural markers of the South’s transformation in war and its aftermath.

1. Introduction: Context and Methodological Approach

The figure of the Southern lady has been the subject of intense academy scrutiny in recent decades. As an embodiment of the Lost Cause and the old order in the South, she has been romanticized in novels while she has also been vindicated for her industriousness and important contribution during the antebellum and the American Civil War (1861–1865) periods. Both the literary and cinematographic representations of the Southern lady have also generated much popular and scholarly interest. It has been less studied, however, the way in which the Southern lady disappeared, swept away by the new social order that was instituted in the Reconstruction period and that thus imperiled her own survival. This article analyzes the portrayal of Southern ladies’ illnesses (and ultimately death) in three novels authored by three key Southern women writers: Macaria (1864) by Augusta Jane Evans—also known as Augusta Evans Wilson—(1835–1909), The Battle-Ground (1902) by Ellen Glasgow (1873–1945), and Gone with the Wind (1936) by Margaret Mitchell (1901–1949).

At first glance, the plots of these seemingly dissimilar novels may give the inaccurate impression that they have little in common other than being all set during the Civil War, as they were published over a 72-year span. Moreover, their authors, while all Southerners, were born at different moments, and faced very different historical and social circumstances that affected their writing. In the case of Evans, she was a direct witness of the Civil War, during which she volunteered as a nurse. She was a fervent patriot in support of the Confederacy and the author of some compelling propaganda pieces published during the war. She remained as well, an “unreconstructed Rebel” by her own admission, in the postbellum period. Glasgow’s infancy in the war’s immediate aftermath, on the other hand, was decisively marked by the financial ruin it brought to her once-wealthy family. She recalled her family’s economic penury with a very telling anecdote—as a young girl she was denied a new doll because she was told her family had lost everything in the war (Wilkins 1951, p. 2). Mitchell’s knowledge of the Civil War came primarily from a treasure of oral stories she was repeatedly told during her childhood. After the publication of her only novel, she confided in an interview that “I heard everything in the world except that the Confederates lost the war. When I was ten years old, it was a violent shock to learn that General Lee had been defeated. I didn’t believe it when I first heard it and I was indignant. I still find it hard to believe, so strong are childhood impressions” (quoted in Pekerson 2012, n.p.).

Apart from their common setting in the South of the United States—or, more properly said, in the Confederate States of America—the main aspect that these novels share is their long-lasting influence in creating a perdurable representation of the Civil War. The image of this historical period as conveyed in these novels would then become firmly entrenched in America’s popular culture and the public imagination. Gone with the Wind, especially, became for many readers (and the million viewers of the 1939 cinematographic movie, as well as its international audiences) the official, historically sanctioned version of the Civil War (Jones 2024, n.p.; Tal 2021, n.p.). Despite being a novel exclusively set in Georgia, “Scarlett and her world entered the mainstream of American life, thereby incorporating the Old South, its beauties and its travails, firmly into the prevailing myth of the American past” (Fox-Genovese 1981, pp. 391–92).

More specifically, speaking about the portrayal of women, these three novels have resilient, strong female characters who, when faced with circumstances they were completely unprepared for, succeeded and became important role models for their female readers in the process. Scarlett O’Hara’s powerful oath is much quoted and even parodied and mocked in popular culture: “as God is my witness, the Yankees aren’t going to lick me. I’m going to live through this, and when it’s over, I’m never going to be hungry again. No, nor any of my folks. If I have to steal or kill—as God is my witness, I’m never going to be hungry again” (Mitchell [1936] 2022, n.p.). Scarlett’s promise that she would live through the war has echoes of Evans’ resolute heroines, Electra Grey and Irene Huntingdon, when they professed that they would create a new postbellum society in which women would make a decisive contribution. Irene outlines her plan for this new society as follows:

in order to effect this ‘consummation devoutly to be wished,’ it is necessary that the primary branches of Art should be popularized, and thrown open to the masses; and in order to open for them new avenues of support, I have determined to establish in W—a School of Design for Women … it is true that you and I are very lonely, and yet our future holds much that is bright. You have the profession you love so well, and our new School of Design to engage your thoughts; and I a thousand claims on my time and attention. I have Uncle Eric to take care of and to love, and Dr. Arnold … has promised me that, as soon as he can be spared from the hospitals, he will make his home with us. When this storm of war has spent itself, your uncle’s family will return from Europe and reside here with you. Harvey, too, will come to W—to live.

(Evans 2009, n.p.)

Scarlett’s vehement words are equally reminiscent of Glasgow’s Betty Ambler, a heroine who takes care of her family and her plantation in such a way that many regard her as a clear forerunner of Scarlett (McHaney 2019, n.p.). Betty’s confidence in a better future (“we will begin again … and this time, my dear, we will begin together” [Glasgow [1902] 2004, n.p.]) is yet an earlier version of Scarlett’s vehement words, “tomorrow will be another day” (Mitchell [1936] 2022, n.p.).

When analyzing the female protagonists of these novels, as well as the other secondary female characters, much has been written about how they portray the figures of the Southern belle and the plantation mistress. Certainly, Evans, Glasgow, and Mitchell capture how these female characters cope with the changing circumstances that would eventually wipe out the conditions which had allowed their very existence in the antebellum South. Scarlett astutely points out that “the silly fools don’t seem to realize that you can’t be a lady without money” (Mitchell [1936] 2022, n.p.). Implementing the Southern code of conduct for ladies is not possible in the hard, wartime conditions: “time and again, Ellen had said: ‘Be firm but be gentle with inferiors, especially darkies.’ But if she was gentle the darkies would sit in the kitchen all day, talking endlessly about the good old days when a house nigger wasn’t supposed to do a field hand’s work” (Mitchell [1936] 2022, n.p.). The war deprivations, compounded by the Reconstruction’s (1865–1877) harsh conditions, made the survival of the Southern lady an impossibility. In those hard times, as Rhett Butler declares, instead, “always providing you have enough courage—or money—you can do without a reputation” (Mitchell [1936] 2022, n.p.). This article examines how Evans, Glasgow, and Mitchell deal with instances of female frailty and illness (that ultimately lead to death) to represent the impossibilities for the survival of the Southern lady after the war.

2. Comparative Analysis

To begin with, it should be considered what the Southern lady represented. In the words of Clinton, she “was a symbol of gentility and refinement for plantation culture, designed to fill the requirements of chauvinist stereotype by embracing those qualities slaveowners wished to promote, even though the practical needs of plantation life cast her in quite a different role. The clash of myth and reality was monumental” (quoted in Lado-Pazos 2020, p. 8). So pervasive was this figure that, in Southern letters, there are only two types of characters available for females—the strong woman and the traditional lady in Adams’ reading (Adams 1998, p. 27). As we will see, this dichotomy applies in these three novels, with the surviving female protagonist falling into the former category, whereas the traditional lady (that is, the Southern lady) succumbs to illness.

2.1. Macaria: A New Model of Womanhood for a New, Confederate Nation

A particularity of Macaria is that, while there are not one but two strong female protagonists, the Southern lady is a mostly absent character. To start with, Electra Grey and Irene Huntingdon are not even representatives of the Southern lady, and this constitutes a good indicator of what Evans’ plans for the Southern lady were—or, come to that, the esteem that Evans felt for the Southern lady. At the beginning of the novel, both girls are motherless, meaning that the demise of the Southern lady had already occurred in the antebellum period, well before the actual conflict between the states had started. Irene has the breeding and money to become a Southern lady, but her independent spirit makes her reject the gender conventions her father, Major Huntingdon, forcefully tries to impose on her. She vehemently refuses his plan to marry her cousin, Hugh: “why should you wish to force this marriage on me? Father, do you think that a woman has no voice in a matter involving her happiness for life?” (Evans 2009, n.p.). Irene resolutely rejects this marriage even after her father threatens to disinherit her and cruelly accuses her of having no heart: “you are the only woman I ever knew who appeared utterly incapable of love; and I sometimes wonder what will become of you when I am dead” (Evans 2009, n.p.). She does not become a lady by her own, individual choice.

In contrast, Electra cannot aspire to be a lady given her lower-class background. An orphan from a very young age, she was raised by her aunt, the widowed Mrs. Aubrey. Mrs. Aubrey was destined to be a lady by birth but she is now reduced to impoverished circumstances—her marriage by love to a man her family considered beneath her had led her to be ostracized by her relatives. For Electra, a woman should rather not aspire to be a lady, but an artist instead:

what woman has done, woman may do; a glorious sisterhood of artists beckon me on; what Elizabeth Cheron, Sibylla Merian, Angelica Kauffman, Elizabeth Le Brun, Felicie Fauveau, and Rosa Bonheur have achieved, I also will accomplish, or die in the effort. These travelled no royal road to immortality, but rugged, thorny paths; and who shall stay my feet? Afar off gleams my resting-place, but ambition scourges me unflaggingly on. Do not worry about my future; I will take care of it, and of myself.

(Evans 2009, n.p.)

Because Electra also dares to divert from the conventional path of marriage and motherhood set for women, she is accused of being unfeminine or unwomanly when she turns down the marriage proposal of Mr. Clifton, an artist who had become her mentor and protector—“Electra Grey, you are unwomanly in your unsought love” (Evans 2009, n.p.). Yet, she keeps firm in her own resolution and indignantly retorts: “unwomanly! If so, made such by your unmanliness. Unwomanly! Were you more manly, I had never shocked your maudlin sentiments of propriety” (Evans 2009, n.p.).

The only characters in Macaria who could have fitted the description of the southern lady are Mrs. Huntingdon and Mrs. Aubrey. The former is Irene’s mother, but she is already dead at the beginning of the novel, leaving her daughter with no example as to how to become a Southern lady. Mrs. Aubrey’s marriage to a man below her social standing prevented her from ever fulfilling her role as Southern lady that otherwise her breeding and education predicted, as “the only daughter of wealthy and ambitious parents” (Evans n.p.). Mrs. Aubrey’s health at the beginning of the novel is frail, as she needs to work hard to support her son and niece—“the long over-taxed eyes refused to perform their office; filmy cataracts stole over them, veiling their sadness and their unshed tears—blindness was creeping on” (Evans n.p.). Even though she undergoes surgery, the operation is complicated by an infection that keeps her blind until she dies shortly afterwards.

With no Southern lady featured in the novel and given that Irene and Electra do not fit the role, a new model for womanhood is necessary. An important point to bear in mind is that Macaria was published in 1864, when the Civil War was opening new opportunities for women, some of them never heard before, such as running estates in the absence of male relatives, or becoming nurses in battlefield hospitals. At this promising time for Southern women, by choosing not to get married, Electra and Irene are proposing a new model for womanhood that would come to replace the Southern lady altogether—the Confederate woman: “thus, by different, by devious thorny paths, two sorrowing women emerged upon the broad highway of Duty, and, clasping hands, pressed forward to the divinely appointed goal—Womanly Usefulness” (Evans 2009, n.p.).

Ardent Confederate as she was, then, neither Evans nor her heroines could ever envisage anything other than the Confederacy’s ultimate victory. While Electra and Irene, as they are suspended in time by the close of Macaria, could happily live in their hope and be thus saved from the bitter disappointment the Confederate army’s defeat caused in millions of Southerners, Evans herself lived to see the crushing defeat and the death of all her elevated plans for a Confederate nation in which women could play a vital role. As the novel stands, “Evans fails to resolve the conflict between feminine self-autonomy and self-sacrifice in Macaria because her attempt to transform the slaveholding system through the elevated influence of women proves untenable” (Flint 2016, p. 459). In Evans we do not see the death of the Southern lady per se because none of her female protagonists fits the pattern to be considered as such; however, we can also anticipate the demise of the Confederate woman as outlined by Evans’ portrayal. Electra and Irene are themselves the very embodiment of what Southern womanhood should be for Evans in a victorious postbellum Confederacy. Macaria ends when the war is still raging on, but as readers, we know of the Confederacy’s crushing defeat and we can retrospectively read the novel as an idealized model of the autonomous Confederate woman that Evans envisaged but which never materialized.

2.2. The Battle-Ground: The Survival of the Fittest Woman

In 1898, Glasgow decided to start “a series of sketches dealing with life in Virginia” (quoted in Inge 1989, n.p.) that would mark a significant departure from her previous literary production. One of those sketches was The Battle-Ground, Glasgow’s fourth published novel. After having sold 21,000 copies in just two weeks (González Groba 2014, p. 27), it was an immediate bestseller that made Glasgow immensely popular virtually overnight. The novel combines her “two major preoccupations … the decay of the Old Order aristocracy and the condition of woman in her native South” (González Groba 2014, p. 27). As she had grown up listening to her father’s Civil War stories (although he had no actual first-hand experience of the battlefield), she proudly manifested that “in my blood there were remote inheritances from the past three hundred years in Virginia; and when I recorded events that occurred before I was born, I seemed to be writing of things I had actually known” (quoted in Wilkins 1951, p. 1).

Glasgow’s novels certainly do not celebrate the old order (Adams 1998, p. 6), as she did not embrace the moonlight and magnolia mythologizing process of the Old South that ran rampant by the time she set to write them. Glasgow was very much aware that such an idealized picture of the South was just a picture that had not really existed: “life never was and never will be like this” (quoted in Lear 2009, p. 26). For that reason, Glasgow constitutes “a transitional figure between the romanticization of the postbellum novel and the realism of modern southern fiction” (McCandless quoted in Rusak 2010, p. 67).

As Glasgow’s literary career progressed, she increasingly paid more attention to the Southern lady, who

had been only a memory in her first novel and did not even exist in the second one, but in the next seven novels she had hovered around the periphery, interpreted variously as being comic or tragic or cruel or stoic, and finally in Virginia, this ideal gentlewoman took the center of the stage.

(Scura 1978, p. 18)

Yet, while much of Glasgow’s scholarship on women’s roles has been devoted to her later novel, Virginia (1913), the figure of the Southern lady already occupied a central position in The Battle-Ground (Scura 1978, p. 23). Mrs. Ambler is the epitome of the Southern lady with her beauty, self-sacrifice and hard work overseeing their plantation (Scura 1978, p. 26). For all the glorification of the Southern lady’s role in the postbellum period, Glasgow shows that being the mistress of a plantation is a hard, never-ending task (Wilkins 1951, p. 14). Certainly, in the antebellum period, “family responsibilities consumed women’s lives, even those in families owning numerous slaves” (McMillen 2001, p. 194). By the time everybody has already gone to bed, Mrs. Ambler’s duties are far from being finished for the day:

She sat down upon the bedside and laid her hand on the child’s forehead. ‘Poor little firebrand,’ she said gently. ‘How the world will hurt you!’ Then she knelt down and prayed beside her, and went out again with the white light streaming upon her bosom. An hour later Betty heard her soft, slow step on the gravelled drive and knew that she was starting on a ministering errand to the quarters. Of all the souls on the great plantation, the mistress alone had never rested from her labours.

(Glasgow [1902] 2004, n.p.)

Yet, even though the work of the household mistress is glorified, as it is even harder than the slaves’ labor, in Glasgow’s assessment (Glasgow [1902] 2004, n.p.), the plantation mistress’ great contribution to the success of the family’s economy is rendered invisible and despite her many responsibilities, she receives none of the glory that the master enjoys:

The master might live with a lavish disregard of the morrow, not the master’s wife. For him were the open house, the shining table, the well-stocked wine cellar and the morning rides over the dewy fields; for her the cares of her home and children, and of the souls and bodies of the black people that had been given into her hands. In her gentle heart it seemed to her that she had a charge to keep before her God; and she went her way humbly, her thoughts filled with things so vital as the uses of her medicine chest and the unexpounded mysteries of salvation.

(Glasgow [1902] 2004, n.p.)

This is consistent with the prevalent mores at the time, for “no lady would admit that she, and not her husband, ran the plantation” in the antebellum period (Fox-Genovese 1981, p. 399). This was only made visible during the war, when the men’s physical absence from their plantations caused their management to fall squarely and unequivocally on women’s shoulders.

Given the subordinate position the plantation women are in, their contribution is acknowledged in a rueful way. Mr. Ambler’s praise for his wife’s abilities is toned down by the knowledge that her gender prevents her from fulfilling such potential:

‘You might have been President, had you been a man, my dear.’

His wife rose and took up her work-box with a laugh of protest. ‘I am quite content with the mission of my sex, sir,’ she returned, half in jest, half in wifely humility.

(Glasgow [1902] 2004, n.p.)

Mrs. Ambler is the mother of two daughters: redhead Betty, a tomboy and lady-in-the-making, and Virginia, much more malleable than her spirited sister. Betty’s red hair immediately identifies her as non-conforming with the prevalent image of Southern ladies; whereas Virginia is conventionally pretty and has a number of suitors and admirers. One of them is Dan Montjoy, their neighbor, who, after his initial infatuation with Virginia, realizes the shallowness of her physical beauty and describes her in a most negative way: “what a pretty little simpleton she was, by George, and what a dull world this would be were it not for the pretty simpletons in pink dresses!” (Glasgow [1902] 2004, n.p.). Dan is the man who is able to see beyond the conventional, shallow beauty of Virginia, and that would make him a good fit for Betty. Instead, when he sees Betty next, she is wearing a dress of blue dimity, her clothes illustrating her very unconventionality.

Yet, Mrs. Ambler, for all her attempts to tame Betty’s more active streak, is aware that the concept of womanhood is changing, as she confides to Betty—“I was brought up very carefully, my dear. … ‘A girl is like a flower,’ your grandpa always said. ‘If a rough wind blows near her, her bloom is faded.’ Things are different now—very different” (Glasgow [1902] 2004, n.p.). This gender “handicap” is further elaborated on by Mrs. Ambler, who tells Betty that “if the Lord had wanted you to be clever, He would have made you a man” (Glasgow [1902] 2004, n.p.). But, as things stand, with a gender division firmly in place, “women do not need as much sense as men, my dear,” as Mrs. Ambler declares (Glasgow, n.p.). In common with other mother characters in Glasgow’s literary production, Mrs. Ambler is “frozen by conformity” (Seidel 1991, p. 288) while the burden of creating new gender roles falls on her daughters. In the words of Seidel, in Glasgow’s novels (as well as in Gail Godwin’s), “the daughters who attempt to become autonomous women of action must reject these mores and hence reject in some measure the women who represent them” (Seidel 1991, p. 287).

In sharp contrast to women’s roles, patriarchal rule is almost divinely sanctioned, as Mrs. Ambler points out—“‘your father wouldn’t like it, my dear,’ returned Mrs. Ambler, in the tone in which she might have said, ‘it is forbidden in the Scriptures’” (Glasgow [1902] 2004, n.p.). Women’s proper place is the home, and even Betty’s venturing outdoors in their own property is frowned upon: “‘I hope she hasn’t taken to minding cattle,’ observed Dan, irritably. ‘I believe in women keeping at home, you know’” (Glasgow [1902] 2004, n.p.). This firmly marks women’s place within the home, not even in their own estate, as being outdoors is not proper.

It is a common trope to identify the situation of white Southern women with that of enslaved persons, in that “the nineteenth-century U.S. economic system necessitated a wide spectrum of female disempowerment across racial, geographical, and class lines” (Allukian 2023, p. 13). In The Battle-Ground, the similarities between slavery and marriage are made explicit when the Major contends that the abolition of one, will entail the abolition of the other: “the Major looked after him with a sigh. ‘When I hear a man talking about the abolition of slavery,’ he remarked gloomily, ‘I always expect him to want to do away with marriage next’” (Glasgow [1902] 2004, n.p.).

Betty’s physical prowess (she is seen walking, riding horseback, or carrying out tasks for herself for which many ladies turn to their slaves) allows her to survive the war, whereas her sister Virginia dies, and their mother is an extremely fragile woman at the end of the war. Mrs. Ambler’s deteriorated physical health makes her one of the invalid women that Glasgow uses “as a metaphor to reveal the mechanisms of patriarchy” (Domínguez Rué 2005, p. 16). There were autobiographical echoes in Mrs. Ambler’s illness, for Glasgow’s mother and her beloved sister Cary suffered from debilitating conditions that made them almost invalids—in the latter’s case, uterine problems, whereas in the former’s, a mental breakdown (Domínguez Rué 2005, pp. 430–31).

Mrs. Ambler’s health begins to fail after her husband’s death:

Mrs. Ambler … seemed at last to be gently withdrawing from a place in which she found herself a stranger. There was nothing to detain her now; she was too heartsick to adapt herself to many changes; loss and approaching poverty might be borne by one for whom the chief thing yet remained, but she had seen this go, and so she waited, with her pensive smile, for the moment when she too might follow. If Betty were not looking she would put her untasted food aside; but the girl soon found this out, and watched her every mouthful with imploring eyes.

(Glasgow [1902] 2004, n.p.)

By the end of the novel, Mrs. Ambler survives the war, but her health is so frail that she cannot be relied on. Instead, Betty is the one who runs the plantation and will create a new future.

In the case of Virginia, her frantic search in the city hospital for her husband, who has been reported as wounded is a serious shock to her system—“her colour came and went in quick flashes. The heat had entered into her brain and with it the memory of open wounds and the red hands of surgeons. Reaching the house at last, she flung herself all dressed upon the bed and fell into a sleep that was filled with changing dreams” (Glasgow [1902] 2004, n.p.). After a night in pain, Virginia, pregnant, dies, in an affirmation of social Darwinism, which called for the survival of only the fittest in society (just as Darwin had advanced the idea of survival of the fittest in the natural kingdom). Glasgow was introduced to these ideas at a young age by her brother-in-law, George McCormack, the husband of her sister Cary. By 1902, when The Battle-Ground came out, some southern belles still existed in Glasgow’s native Richmond, but her novel makes it clear that they lacked the necessary qualities to survive the war (Lovelock 1972, p. 30). Virginia is too feeble or weak to survive the war, and she dies because the New South that emerges after the war has no room for the values that she represents (Lovelock 1972, p. 31; González Groba 2014, p. 32). Virginia’s death thus becomes “a tragic but appropriate and unavoidable death for a southern lady bred and trained to act out her culture’s fate in her very body” (MacKethan quoted in Lado-Pazos 2019, p. 22), as it lets her body play out the expected submissiveness and self-sacrifice that southern culture requires of its women (González Groba 2014, p. 31).

The death of Virginia is presented as another war casualty, just like in Little Women, the death of Beth is compared to the pathos of the death of soldiers too (Young 1996, p. 463). Virginia’s death is no less of a sacrifice when compared to the death of the soldiers in the battlefield, showing that the war has also exacted a high price on the lives of Confederate women. What is more, Dan’s reaction upon learning of the news of Virginia’s death overwhelms him, even in spite of the many deaths of soldiers he has already witnessed—“at the instant the horrors of the battle-field, where he had seen men fall like grass before the scythe, became as nothing to the death of this one young girl” (Glasgow [1902] 2004, n.p.).

Women’s final contribution to the war effort will be to comfort the defeated soldiers. Dan is advised to go home and be nursed by his sweetheart:

Well, you take my advice and go home and tell her to cure you, now she’s got the chance. I like your face, young man, but if I ever saw a half-starved and sickly one, it is yours. Why, I shouldn’t have thought you had the strength to raise your rifle.

(Glasgow [1902] 2004, n.p.)

Betty, the woman who will cure his wounded soul, displays the strength and resiliency that Glasgow appreciated so much (McDonell 1986, p. 1). She belongs to a longstanding tradition of female characters in Southern letters that has lasted to our days:

independent women in novels by E.D.E.N. Southworth, August Jane Evans, and Ellen Glasgow challenge the southern woman stereotypes to claim space for themselves. Additionally, Scarlet O’Hara in Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind, Zora Neale Hurston’s Janie (Their Eyes Were Watching God 1937), Alice Walker’s protagonists in Meridian (1976) and The Color Purple (1982), and others in historical fictions such as Sue Monk Kidd’s The Invention of Wings (2014) about the Grimke sisters and Michele Moore’s The Cigar Factory (2016) about black and white Gullah-speaking women, act deliberately with determination to make their own decisions.

(McHaney 2019, p. n.p.)

Far from mourning the Lost Cause, Glasgow declared that “I think women have lost something precious, but have gained immeasurably, by the passing of the old order” (quoted in Riker 1968, p. 53). She characterized Betty “as the spirit that fought with gallantry and gaiety and in defeat remained undefeated” (quoted in Riker 1968, p. 59). Her female characters, Betty particularly, have the “vein of iron” (quoted in Riker 1968, p. 54), as she referred to their stamina in a letter to fellow novelist Stark Young, author of a Civil War novel, So Red the Rose (1934), whose popularity was obscured by the publication of Gone with the Wind two years later. Despite its later publication date when compared to Macaria or The Battle-Ground, it is the female protagonist of Gone with the Wind who would become the epitome of Southern womanhood.

2.3. Gone with the Wind: “Burdens Are for Shoulders Strong Enough to Carry Them”

Mitchell often complained that people read Scarlett O’Hara as the main character of Gone with the Wind, whereas Melanie was for her the true protagonist. In a 1936 letter, she wrote that “[Melanie] is really my heroine, not Scarlett. I wanted to picture in Melanie as in Ellen the true ladies of the old South, gentle in dear, frail of body perhaps, but never of courage, never swerving from what they believed the right path, and, no matter what they were called upon to do, by rude circumstance, always remaining ladies” (quoted in Cardon 2007, p. 81). Melanie is therefore the epitome of the southern lady, whereas Scarlet consistently breaks all the rules of a proper southern lady. Indeed, had Gone with the Wind been a Victorian novel, Melanie would certainly have been regarded as the true heroine, with Scarlett relegated to the secondary role of the bad woman (Gómez-Galisteo 2011, p. 20). It is debatable, though, if Mitchell’s defense of Melanie was an attempt to defuse any potential criticisms for making such a ruthless, self-centered character as Scarlett her protagonist, instead of advocating for a more proper and conventional representation of Southern womanhood. Still, the fact remains that most studies of Gone with the Wind have focused on Scarlett, due to her centrality in the narrative, but the analysis of the figure of the Southern lady (which Scarlett certainly is not) should be considered in more detail.

By setting the novel in Civil War Atlanta, Mitchell was “displacing Scarlett’s career historically while simultaneously confronting her with contemporary dilemmas” (Fox-Genovese 1981, pp. 393–94) that were in line with those of the lost generation’s, to which Mitchell belonged (Gómez-Galisteo 2011, p. 19). Mitchell was the daughter of Maybelle Stephens Mitchell, who had been an ardent defender of women’s rights and a women’s suffrage activist herself (Gómez-Galisteo 2008, n.p.). Consequently, Mitchell was particularly concerned about gender roles. However, in Gone with the Wind, “by emphasizing history and social order, which she merges with the idea of Civilization, she obscures the measure of her personal rebellion against prescribed female roles” (Fox-Genovese 1981, p. 394). In Gone with the Wind, the War between the States is conflated with the War between the Sexes but, tellingly enough, despite Mitchell’s credentials as an advocate for women’s rights, Scarlett does not make any political demand for women (Gómez-Galisteo 2011, p. 20).

Scarlett O’Hara is not a lady, although that is one of her life’s ambitions. However, for her, surviving and fighting to support her large family prevent her from being a lady, which remains a goal for the distant future. In Scarlett’s assessment, one cannot be a lady when besieged by deprivation and difficulties:

Oh some day! When there was security in her world again, then she would sit back and fold her hands and be a great lady as Ellen had been. She would be helpless and sheltered, as a lady should be, and then everyone would approve of her. Oh, how grand she would be when she had money again! Then she could permit herself to be kind and gentle, as Ellen had been, and thoughtful of other people and of the proprieties, too. She would not be driven by fears, day and night, and life would be a placid, unhurried affair. She would have time to play with her children and listen to their lessons. There would be long warm afternoons when ladies would call and, amid the rustlings of taffeta petticoats and the rhythmic harsh cracklings of palmetto fans, she would serve tea and delicious sandwiches and cakes and leisurely gossip the hours away. And she would be so kind to those who were suffering misfortune, take baskets to the poor and soup and jelly to the sick and “air” those less fortunate in her fine carriage. She would be a lady in the true Southern manner, as her mother had been. And then, everyone would love her as they had loved Ellen and they would say how unselfish she was and call her ‘Lady Bountiful.’

(Mitchell [1936] 2022, n.p.)

Therefore, for Scarlett, a requisite for being a lady is financial stability: “she knew she would never feel like a lady again until her table was weighted with silver and crystal and smoking with rich food, until her own horses and carriages stood in her stables, until black hands and not white took the cotton from Tara” (Mitchell [1936] 2022, n.p.). Scarlett’s lack of understanding is so overwhelming that

Scarlett’s tragedy lies in her inability to understand the meaning of being a lady. … Scarlett fails to realize that the prevailing etiquette represents a social effort to codify, institutionalize, and reproduce the deeper qualities of the lady and the fabric of an entire society. Having never grasped the depth and meaning of the informing spirit, she confuses it with its forms.

(Fox-Genovese 1981, p. 402)

Scarlett has a shallow understanding of what being a lady involves, and while she is indeed attracted by the public admiration that ladies do receive, for her being a lady is mostly a burden and a set of behavior and rules that she rebels against:

I’m tired of everlastingly being unnatural and never doing anything I want to do. I’m tired of acting like I don’t eat more than a bird, and walking when I want to run and saying I feel faint after a waltz, when I could dance for two days and never get tired. I’m tired of saying, ‘How wonderful you are!’ to fool men who haven’t got one-half the sense I’ve got, and I’m tired of pretending I don’t know anything, so men can tell me things and feel important while they’re doing it…

(Mitchell [1936] 2022, n.p.)

Scarlett lacks the understanding of what being a Southern lady really means, as she confuses the social conventions with the values behind them.

In contrast, the two true Southern ladies in the novel are Ellen O’Hara, Scarlett’s mother, and Melanie Hamilton, the wife of Scarlett’s love interest Ashley Wilkes (she becomes Scarlett’s sister-in-law when she marries Charles Hamilton out of heartbreak). In the novel, “Ellen and Melanie are presented as attractive and admirable, albeit highly self-disciplined and possibly repressed” (Fox-Genovese 1981, p. 402). That Scarlett idolizes her mother and longs to be like her, while she despises Melanie, colors the readers’ readings of both women (Fox-Genovese 1981, p. 403). Fittingly, as it is a novel that proposes a new type of womanhood, both Ellen and Melanie die with the demise of the Confederacy and the Old South ideals. Ellen O’Hara perishes during the war after Yankee marauders ransacked Tara, their plantation. She literally cannot survive the wanton destruction of her world and the ensuing new changes. Scarlett herself was aware that the changes in social conventions and women’s behavior were not deemed appropriate by her own mother. When analyzing her own conduct, Scarlett “knew Ellen would rather see her dead than know her guilty of such dishonor” (Mitchell [1936] 2022, n.p.). Despite the reverence and deep respect that Scarlett had for her own mother, she feels critical of her mother’s teachings, as they are only appropriate for a social order that no longer exists. As a result, without clear rules to follow, Scarlett feels helpless: “nothing, no, nothing, she taught me is of any help to me! What good will kindness do me now? What value is gentleness? Better that I’d learned to plow or chop cotton like a darky. Oh, Mother, you were wrong!” (Mitchell [1936] 2022, n.p.).

Melanie does survive the war and manages to live well into the Reconstruction years. Her death due to complications of her pregnancy signifies that the Southern lady cannot reproduce in the new times. Despite surviving the war, the Southern lady cannot survive in the new Southern social order after the humiliations of the Reconstruction. It is only when Scarlett has an epiphany (not only regarding her misguided love for Ashley Wilkes, Melanie’s husband) about the true worth of the Southern lady that she can finally realize the strength of the values that Melanie possesses (and her similarities with Ellen): “suddenly it was as if Ellen were lying behind that closed door, leaving the world for a second time. Suddenly she was standing at Tara again with the world about her ears, desolate with the knowledge that she could not face life without the terrible strength of the weak, the gentle, the tender hearted” (Mitchell [1936] 2022, n.p.). Now a new revelation comes to her, as

until the moment of Melanie’s death she remains unaware that Melanie believes in the words she uses and the standards she observes, and that those words and standards derive from strength rather than weakness. Only at Melanie’s deathbed does she recognize that Melanie too would have killed the Yankee who threatened them-or would have died in the attempt.

(Fox-Genovese 1981, p. 402)

During the war, Scarlett firmly believes that Ellen’s life lessons seem to have no validity in the new upside-down world. Moreover, she rejects the idea of behaving like Melanie, whose behavior she scorns, and fails to accept that Melanie’s behavior is what one would expect from a Southern lady, even in their new, impoverished circumstances. This lack of any role models leads to an inner conflict, for while being a Southern lady is not feasible for her, she still aspires to it, as she knows no other role models (Eaklor 2002, n.p.). This makes Scarlett feel helpless, as this personal crisis conflates her perceived lack of acceptable role models with her becoming the head of her family. However, her “gumption,” as Mitchell described it, enables her to survive and support her family. As Rhett Butler tells her, “dear Scarlett! You aren’t helpless. Anyone as selfish and determined as you are is never helpless. God help the Yankees if they should get you” (Mitchell [1936] 2022, n.p.).

While she is not a proper lady and she certainly displays numerous negative personality traits, such as ruthlessness, selfishness, vanity, and self-centeredness, “Scarlett paradoxically highlights prescribed feminine virtues by serving as counterpoint to them, both through her own failures in virtually every female role and in her relations with other women” (Eaklor 2002, n.p.). Scarlett can financially succeed and support her large family but the novel ends in failure—Melanie, whom she finally comes to recognize as her only true friend and ally, dies. Furthermore, she discovers that her love for Ashley is a childish infatuation and while she acknowledges that her true love is Rhett, he leaves her after years of waiting for her to come to this realization… By the end of the novel, then, with the death of the only surviving Southern lady and the failure of the womanhood model represented by Scarlett, there is no potential alternative that could address how women can behave in this new social order. In fact, there is no place for ladies as in this new social order ambitious women end up losing their beloved ones and families.

3. Concluding Remarks

In all three novels, Evans, Glasgow, and Mitchell used the frailty of some of their female characters, ultimately leading to illness and death, to present the demise of the Southern lady as embodiment of the system that had sustained the South. Yet, they fail to portray an alternative model that could successfully replace the Southern lady. In Macaria readers are aware, with the benefit of hindsight and even if its protagonists are not, of the demise of the Confederacy and the impossibility to implement Evans’ plans for a Confederate womanhood model. In The Battle-Ground, Betty may be different to her mother and sister, but as the novel ends when the war is just over, it is not known how she will fare in the New South. Gone with the Wind presents a woman with “gumption” who manages to survive, but at a high price in terms of love and family. Therefore, while the Southern lady proves to be an impossible model to aspire to in the postbellum period, it remains unanswered what model of womanhood could replace it by the end of the three novels. This in itself is telling of the very difficulties that Evans, Glasgow, and Mitchell themselves experienced in order to be seriously considered as professional writers while not trespassing the culturally prescribed gender roles.