Representations of Women in Southern Literature

Abstract

The myths of southern women include mammies, belles, ladies, and mulattos. In southern fiction, drama, poetry, and memoir, these categories of women are both perpetuated and disrupted. Much southern literature also portrays these stereotypes as independent women deliberately confronting the systems of oppression including patriarchy, slavery, and racism. Such independent women struggle for and often attain agency. Other literary characters are more succinctly called rebels, openly fighting against class, social, economic, and racist constraints. Many representations of women in southern literature were popularized in the 19th century by northerner Harriet Beecher Stowe in Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852) and in the 20th century by southerner Margaret Mitchell in Gone with the Wind (1936). Between these two novels, with new publications of 19th-century fictions by African Americans, and from the 1940s into the 21st century, concurrent with modernism, feminism, and increased publication opportunities, women in southern literature are often depicted seeking agency, finding voice, and acting independently. Representations of antebellum southern women as mothers, black and white, illustrate the enormous difficulties of birthing and nurturing children to adulthood. Mothers, daughters, sisters, and young girls (black and white) in the 20th century evidence a diminishing presence of the southern past as well as vastly changing family dynamics. In southern literature of the 21st century, women vigorously explore their sexualities, races, ethnicities, social and economic classes confluent with a redefined global south, climate change, drug epidemics, and political activism. Women in 21st-century southern literature successfully challenge the hegemony of white authors and white characters and the binary of black and white.