The Magnolia and Womanhood

Contemporary Literature PresentationMeridian by Alice Walker

By Jessica Humphreys, Seiyeon Kim and Victoria Mayhall

History of the Southern Belle

• French term belle-beautiful• Antebellum Era (1820-1860)• American Old South Upperclass

women • 4 Cardinal Virtues:

– Piety– Purity– Submission– Domesticity

(“The Cult of True Womanhood: 1820-1860” by Barbara Welter, 1966)

• Civil War Era (1860-1877)– Women take on men’s roles– Slave women

• Shift during WWII (1939-1945)– Women start working in

factories• Civil Rights Movement

(1956-1971)– Black Southern women

become leaders

History of the Southern Belle

Modern Day Southern Belle

• Pop culture terms: “Ya Ya Sisters,” “GRITS” (Girls Raised in the South), “Sweet Potato Queens”

• Delicate like magnolias, strong as steel • Hospitable, intelligent, pure, polite• Southern stereotypes of women played out in Steel

Magnolias:– The good girl– The Southern lady– The steel magnolia– The conjure woman– The pageant queen– The belle from Hell– The New South bitch – Your mama

(“Finding Friendship in the Company of Women: Reading Beyond Stereotypes in Designing Women and Steel Magnolias” by Chestnut, Eastering and Richardson)

Connecting the

Southern

woman’s

transformation to

Alice Walker’s

Meridian

Magnolia in Meridian• The Sojourner magnolia tree

• “There was, in the center of the campus, the largest magnolia in the country. It was called The Sojourner. Classes were sometimes held in it; a podium and platform had been built into its lower branches, with wooden steps leading up to them. The Sojourner had been planted by a slave on the Saxon plantation- later of course, Saxon college…” (31).

• “They had long ago dubbed The Sojourner ‘The Music Tree,’ and would not stand to have it cut down, not even for a spanking new music building that a Northern philanthropist- unmindful that his buildings had already eaten up most of Saxon’s precious greenness- was eager to give. The tree was spared, but the platform and the podium were dismantled, and the lower branches and steps- which had made access to the upper reaches of the tree so delightfully easy- were trimmed away. And why? Because students- believing the slaves of a hundred fifty years ago- used the platform and who knows, even the podium, as places to make love. Meridian had made something approaching love there herself. And it was true, she had not been seen” (34).

The Sojourner and Motherhood

• “So many tales and legends had grown up around the Sojourner that students of every persuasion had a choice of which to accept. There was only one Sojourner ceremony, however, that united all the students at Saxon-the rich and the poor, the very black-skinned (few though they were) with the very fair, the stupid and the bright- and that was the Commemoration of the Fast Mary of the Tower” (35).

• “Then, as if by mutual agreement- though no words were spoken- the pallbearers picked up the casket and carried it to the middle of the campus and put it down gently beneath The Sojourner, whose heave, flower-lit leaves hovered over it like the inverted peaks of a mother’s half-straightened kinky hair. Instead of flowers the students, as if they had planned it, quickly made wreaths from Sojourner’s fallen leaves, and The Sojourner herself, ever generous to her children, dropped a leaf on the chest of The Wild Child,, who wore for he first time, in her casket, a set of new clothes” (38)

The Sojourner and Comfort

• “The tall red brick towers, the old courtyards, the giant trees- especially the greatest tree of them all, The Sojourner. This tree filled her with the same sense of minuteness and hugeness, of past and present, of sorrow and ecstasy that she had known at the Sacred Serpent. It gave her a profound sense of peace (which was only possible when she could feel invisible) to know slaves had found shelter in its branches. When her spirits were low, as they were often enough that first year, she would sit underneath The Sojourner and draw comfort from her age, her endurance, the stories the years told of her, and her enormous size. When she sat beneath The Sojourner, she knew she was not alone” (93).

• “That night, after The Wild Child was buried in an over-grown corner of a local black cemetery, students, including Anne-Marion, rioted on Saxon campus for the first time in its long, placid, impeccable history, and the only thing they managed to destroy was The Sojourner. Though Meridian begged them to dismantle the President’s house instead, in a fury of confusion and frustration they worked all night, and chopped and saw down, level to the ground, that mighty, ancient, sheltering music tree” (39).

The Sojourner

• Final image of the Sojourner: Truman noticed “a blank sheet of paper and, next to it, forming the end of the line, a photograph of an enormous bull’s eye. When he stood up close to it he discovered…that it was not a bull’s eye at all but a giant tree stump. A tiny branch, no larger than his finger, was growing out of one side. […] [The paper] contained one line: ‘Who would be happier than you that The Sojourner did not die?’ She had written…‘perhaps me,’ but then had half-erased it” (239).

The “Southern woman” in Meridian

“You Southern girls lead such sheltered lives,” Lynne said, affecting a Southern belle accent and twirling a lock of her unwashed, rather oily hair around her finger, “I declare I’d just be bored to death. That’s why your men come North, sugah, looking for that young white meat that proves they have arrived. You know? Tell me, how does it feel to be a complete flop” (this said with a Bette Davis turn of her wrist) “at keeping your men?” (Lynne to Meridian p. 161)

Final Thoughts

• No longer is the “Southern woman” a white upper-class woman who stays at home to cook, clean and care for the children.

• Stereotypes and boundaries still exist and define expectations for Southern females, but they have transformed since the Antebellum Era.

• While there still remains a “branch” of the “Southern belle” ideal, writers like Alice Walker portray the changing definitions of what it means to be Southern and a woman.