allowing the South of the novel to be a ‘generally a safe world inhabited by "righteous" people’. 247 This view of the South from ‘Gone with the Wind’, ‘is one that is most deeply embedded in American Culture’ and formed the basis of American popular memory of the Old South. 248 This basis of the Old South mythology on popular novels is also seen in Novels such as ‘Huckleberry Finn’ and through the work of authors such as William Faulkner and Tennessee Williams. Sean O’Hagan argues that the depiction of the South in these numerous works has ‘colonised our collective imagination as a place apart, even a state of mind’. 249 These novels of the South are all seen to have similarities in how they cast the Old South. Most notably this is seen within their characters. These included at least one of the following: ‘the cavalier gentlemen, who became transformed into a planter, and the Southern belle, a reincarnation of the damsel of the castle’. 250 This image of the Southern belle has been highlighted and exaggerated in many forms of culture and although undergoing modification throughout the years, it was still seen as a part of Southern life up to the 1920s. Consequently, many Southern women have found a pressure to live up to the myth of the Southern lady, and those 247 Feminist.com, Romanticizing the Old South: Historical Analysis of Gone With the Wind, < http://www.feminist.com/resources/artspeech/remember/rtl8.html> [date of access 29/04/15] 248 Ibid. 249 Sean O’Hagan, Myth, Manners and Memory: Photographers of the American South , The Guardian, (October 2010), <http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2010/oct/03/myth- manners-and-memory-review> [date of access 29/04/15] 250 Smith, p14.
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