Description
Betina Entzminger traces the development of the bad belle from nineteenth-century domestic novelist E.D.E.N. Southworth to contemporary novelist Kaye Gibbons. Coy and alluring like the traditional southern belle, the bad belle is also manipulative and knowing; the men subject to her cultivated charms often meet disastrous ends. By making the patriarch vulnerable to women who outwardly conform to the limiting conventions of womanhood but inwardly break all the rules, these writers challenged a society that stereotyped black women as promiscuous and forced white women onto pedestals while committing heinous acts in their name. Representations of the bad belle evolved along with southern society, and by the late twentieth century, many women writers expressed emancipation through the literal or fi gurative destruction of corrupt or would-be belles.
The Belle Gone Bad shows that even writers who have been critically dismissed as too domestic or conservative to be innovative did, through the strategy of the bad belle character, challenge southern institutions and conceptions about race, class, and gender. What unites the dangerous belles created by several generations of women writing in the South, old and new, is their liberating potential.
About the Author
Betina Entzminger has published essays on southern writers in Mississippi Quarterly, Southern Quarterly, and College Literature. A native of South Carolina, she is assistant professor of English at Bloomsburg University in Pennsylvania.
Book Information
ISBN 9780807128367
Author Betina Entzminger
Format Paperback
Page Count 201
Imprint Louisiana State University Press
Publisher Louisiana State University Press
Weight(grams) 333g