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The Belle Gone Bad examines the "bad belle" as a pervasive archetype in white Southern women's literature from the antebellum period to the present. By juxtaposing the traditional Southern ideal of ladyhood with the seductive power of the femme fatale, Entzminger demonstrates how writers have used this character to subtly indict their culture from within. The study follows the evolution of the bad belle—from early domestic novelist E.D.E.N. Southworth to modern authors such as Kaye Gibbons—and shows how representations of the figure have changed alongside Southern society. Even authors dismissed as overly domestic employed the bad belle to challenge southern institutions and reshape conceptions of race, class, and gender through narrative strategy and symbolic destruction of corrupt or presumptive belles.
First publish date: 2002
Genre: History/Modern History
Authors: Betina Entzminger
★ ★ ★ ★ ★ 5.0 (1 community ratings)

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The belle gone bad by Betina Entzminger

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