Poor Scarlett. That silly war ruins all the best parties:
Our readings this week talk about how we codify and memorialize something called "Southern identity." *Gone with the Wind* is a perfect example of the nostalgic vision of a South that seems totally removed from the very infrastructure upon which it relied.
Here's an example from the film, where romance and religious ritual are bound up with racial subjugation and economic disparity:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oorFyVS23ns&feature=related
In Tara McPherson's Intro to *Reconstructing Dixie: Race, Gender, and Nostalgia in the Imagined South*, she talks early on about the myth of the "Southern Lady": "[The South] remains at once the site of the trauma of slavery and also the mythic location of a vast nostalgia industry. In many ways, Americans can't seem to get enough of the horrors of slavery, and yet we remain unable to connect this past to the romanticized history of the plantation, unable or unwilling to process the emotional registers still echoing from the eras of slavery and Jim Crow. The brutalities of those periods remain dissociated from our representations of the material site of those atrocities, the plantation home. Furthermore, the very figure who underwrote the widespread lynching of black southern men (and women) during the era of segregation in the South somehow remains collectible. The white southern lady--as mythologized image of innocence and purity--floats free from the violence for which she was the cover story..."
The romanticized version of something called Southern femininity relies on a firmly entrenched structure of economic access and race-based labor framework. Interestingly, Mammy becomes the voice of maternalistic morality, telling Scarlett to "behave" and to "act like a lady"...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G4546UkGWSw&feature=related
We talked about this a little in class, but what do you make of Alabama's Azalea Trail Maids?
Here's a blurb about the controversy that ensued after their being asked to march in Obama's inaugural parade:
http://www.local15tv.com/news/local/story/Controversy-Over-The-Azalea-Trail-Maids/_log9pDFgk-nF4cuv1wq3Q.cspx
The father of one of the maids says in the article: "they've never represented slavery or racism.... only
More? Okay, sure:
http://www.wsfa.com/Global/story.asp?S=9655036
So are these innocuous images based on popular culture's trips to the movies? Should there be any responsibility attached to these representations? What does this suggest about the politics of memory and memorializing?
Personally when I see the Trail Maids I don't think of old south, slavery, or plantations. I think of well-to-do families that want to show off their daughters and by extension their own financial successes, that or "Why are those girls so dressed up for an Easter egg hunt?"
ReplyDeleteBut yes, these are fictionalized versions of the Southern Lady, it's simply a part of human nature to tell only partial truths. We are very adept at retelling the glories of our past while simultaneously hiding the very atrocities that often built the beauty we love to memorialize.
I have to agree somewhat. When I see the Trail Maids, my mind doesn't jump straight to slavery. There's a romanticized ideal of the "Southern Lady" who is always clean-cut, well-spoken, kind, carefree, etc. Of course, her idle time comes at the expense of slavery. It's much like the romantic idea of the cowboys and the west. All little boys wanted to grow up to be a cowboy, but life in the West was anything but easy.
ReplyDeleteI can completely understand how this could be insulting in several ways. For those whose ancestors were slaves this can be a very touchy subject. Seeing these girls like this could be very painful for them. When dealing with touchy areas of history we need to have a little more tact because it could get potentially out of hand.
Of course we don't always want to acknowledge how horrible we were in the past, but I don't believe that the Trail Maids are trying to bring back the "old ways". Sometimes people are just looking to be insulted.
I'm not saying that we need to ignore what happened because slavery was absolutely terrible. But in not ignoring slavery we can't ignore the well-to-do "Southern Lady." As much as we remember one aspect of history we have to remember another. What happened, happened. It was awful. We have to learn from those mistakes and move on.
I don't know much about it personally. I have never heard of the Trail Maids until last Monday, so I don't know exactly why some people do it. I can definitely see it as disrespectful, but I can also see the romanticized ideals of it, too.
Well, I have to say that I was one of these girls...sorta. I went to Hoover High School, a suburb of Birmingham, AL. We had a community service group that was HIGHLY competitive that you went through an entire interview process, etc. to be inducted into. 30-40 sophomore girls were picked every year to serve as "hostess to the community" for two years (junior and senior year). After you were chosen you were told all of the details of what your dress could be and couldn't be and at the end of that year, your dress was to be finished and there would be a kind of induction where each girl would be presented and her father would walk her out showing off her dress and inducting her into the Hoover Belles as we were called.
ReplyDeleteWhen I was in high school and in the Hoover Belles I never thought about the types of women we were representing when we were dressed like that in our dresses. I merely thought about the community service we were doing and the "hostess" part of the job. And we did do community service, we didnt always wear our dresses, some event required us to serve tables for community events, among other things.
But now looking back on that time, I can see how it can look bad from an outside point of view. We never discriminated against African American girls from being able to interview and potentially get into the group. But seeing those dresses is a direct representation of what the South used to be and the types of people that wore those dresses were directly involved in the messy underbelly of the South pre and post Civil War.
Another thing that could be associated with these dresses is the patriarchal stereotype that women are to be dainty and stay inside in the cool weather while the men went out to the world to work and bring home the bacon. I feel that over time this belief has died down but there are still people out there that believe that women should be subservient to men and that the woman's place is in the home with the family. And I believe that the meaning of the Trail Maids or any group similar could be seen as a statement for the pushing of women back into the house where they "belong".
On my blog I will try to locate some of my pictures from when I was a "Belle" to show that my group was not as "hard core" as the Trail Maids, but the style and dress is still there.
Reagan, you bring up a really interesting point in your attention to patriarchy as a concurrent subtext (or meta-text?) alongside race. Yes, images of domesticity and private space are absolutely marked as "the feminine sphere"--a woman's "place", quite literally.
ReplyDeleteI think even the memory of your concentrating on "community service" and the "hostess" bit speaks to that kind of space, no? The induction, too--they all seem like different strands of the same thread that you're thinking about here (patriarchy, I mean). What does it mean, for instance, for girls to be "presented"--there are tons of implicit claims that that makes, aren't there? And to your point, it's certainly not an arbitrary decision for the father to "present" his daughter!
Andie and Ryan, you're both bringing up a point that both Cobb and McPherson discuss...We talked about "lenticular logics" in class, about the manipulation of images and lenses... I wonder what you all think about the privileging of image--whose image "counts" and how do we know? Hmmm...that may be a post. In other words, remember how we talked about the possibilities that something can exist in the structural framework of a thing without our necessarily "seeing" it? Think McPherson's reference of psychoanalyst Joan Riviere (p. 21) and her notion that "genuine womanliness and the masquerade...they are the same thing"... Ah, this is going to be a post. I want to get more responses to this...
Yeah I do believe that the hostess and presenting of these girls is very patriarchal, but what would a ceremony like that look like (if still existing) in a non patriarchal society or instance? I mean there are so many things in our life and society that cannot been seen without this lens that we have over our eyes. I mean it is possible to ponder and think on a magic "if" but even that is just in theory and could never really be known because we still have a biased of what we do know and have experienced.
ReplyDeleteThe dresses, the debutant balls, the parades, the pictures in the perfect settings, these are all more about people wanting to live out fantasy than it is perpetuating a myth. You can call how people look it at it and play it out as using lenses or codifying a persona, but is that not semantics for the deeper issue of people wanting to feel more important than they actually are? And is that not why the myth is so important? The myth provides the ability to live in a pretend world of such structure whereas history might not be so much fun.
ReplyDeleteI do agree with RK. However, when I see this, the first thing that comes to mind is that patriarchal society. I do think that we've mostly moved away from that, but there are still some who want to maintain that patriarchy. I've been reading this book series recently--an historical fiction set in the late 1890s--where the author focuses greatly on society and the roles of women in that society.
ReplyDeleteStill, I can see the "fantasy world" that some people want to live in. It's just their way of recreating that romanticized life of the "Southern Lady."
People will always cling to the past. It gives them a connection to the world that did not previously exist by traveling back in time. It's not racist, the "southern lady" is from a time where slavery existed, but is not directly associated with slavery. If it's not your thing, don't do it. I'm glad I live in a place where I can choose.
ReplyDeleteI agree with RK on this one. I think these girls just want to dress up for attention and live in fantasy land...not commemorate "good old days". Or maybe they are just following their mom's and grandma's foot steps? Traditional and superficial connotations seem to be more of a plausible explanation than some undertone of a total patriarchal hierarchy system with submissive females and overbearing dads.
ReplyDeleteIf we put our feministic beliefs aside, I think its evident that men and women's personalities are, for the most part, psychologically different from one another to be more or less submissive/adaptive. So then how can we ever do away with the patriarchal society completely?
You make a really good point with the personality issue. I do agree with you on that. I really do think they're just playing dress up. I know as a child I loved to play dress up. This is as much their fantasy world as it was mine as a child. I don't believe they are trying to make a political/religious statement by what they're doing. If you're looking to be insulted or offended, you will be. I don't agree with what they're doing because I think it's silly, but we can't just assume that what they're doing is negative, either.
ReplyDeleteThis is my first time ever hearing of these Azalea Trail Maids? And reading about them and reading what others comments concerning them, I agree to a certain extent that there is nothing really wrong with it. It is just a bunch of girls playing dress up. But as an African-American I can understand why other African-Americans (i.e., NAACP) note a bit of controversy and are upset. I'm not offended by the Azalea Trail Maids, but I do get why others are. It is perfectly normal and justifiable for some of them to feel offended.
ReplyDelete