endowed with the outward qualities have been celebrated. 251 This pressure to be seen as a Southern Belle is argued by Anne Scott ‘as being defined with a precision that made it almost legal’. 252 For many this ‘link between history and fiction’ has moulded the idea of ‘womanhood’ with the notion of the ‘Southern Belle’ whilst few embody her essential qualities subsequently creating a myth that is no longer able to be recreated into reality. 253 On the other hand, media and culture have also allowed reality to come crashing down on the myth of the Old South in more modern interpretations of the South. Walker Evans's photographs of the American south, taken between 1935 and 1938 during the Depression, for the Farm Security Administration, are among the most celebrated images of the 20th century due to their realistic and hard-hitting images of poverty and the ‘real’ South. For many they changed the way America viewed the south, and the way the south saw itself. 254 These modern views of the Old South come with the change attributed during the Second World War, and where the myth of the Old South started to fade away due to people’s memory of a simple life being erased due to the new opportunities of an urbanised South. However, images of the Old South, such as ‘Gone with the Wind’ still depict popular images of the Old South that are widely accepted as fact. Smith sees the use of 251 Anne Firor Scott, Myth and Southern History: The New South, ed, Patrick Gerster and Nicholas Cords, (Urbana, University of Illinois Press, 1989) p.84. 252 John Hope Franklin, Myth and Southern History: The New South, ed, Patrick Gerster and Nicholas Cords, (Urbana, University of Illinois Press, 1989) p.104. 253 Sara M. Evans, Myth and Southern History: The New South, ed, Patrick Gerster and Nicholas Cords, (Urbana, University of Illinois Press, 1989) p.150. 254 O’ Hagan
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