SOURCE: “Progress and Prescription: Ellen Gilchrist's Southern Belles,” in Southern Quarterly, Vol. 31, No. 3, Spring, 1993, pp. 69-78.

In the following essay, Larue traces the common features of Gilchrist's female protagonists and complains that they take no positive action to better their own lives.

Kathryn Lee Seidel describes the southern belle in the American novel as young, unmarried, skilled in the equestrian arts and in music, and the daughter of a landed (therefore aristocratic) father. Exuberant, vain and naive, she feels she deserves a “gallant cavalier” (10). Certainly that characterization of the southern belle appears in varying disguises in the work of many southern writers from John Pendleton Kennedy and John William De Forest to Ellen Glasgow and Gail Godwin. These characters range in degree of self-awareness from total obliviousness in the holes of their own logic to states of epiphany. One of the most modern treatments of the southern woman...