Volume 28, Number 13 · August 13, 1981
In the Southern Camp
By William Styron
Mary Chesnut's Civil War
edited by C. Vann Woodward
Yale University Press, 886 pp., $29.95
Southern women of all classes, probably more than women anywhere else, have for generations been valued for their physical beauty to the exclusion of any other quality. The ethos of the plantation, with its stress on male dominance, allowed, generally speaking, very little room for the development of women's intellectual capacities, except in a closeted way and then only with vast condescension on the part of the men. Generation after generation of this form of acculturation produced droves of famously beautiful women, but also—in combination with a diminished emphasis on education—a kind of endemic regional dumbness too well known and too persistently remarked upon to be dismissed.
Review, 3347 words
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