I try to not be one of those people.
One of those people who take offense easily. One of those people without a sense of humor. The kind who obsesses about the starving children in the Third World, and constantly brings up how we slaughtered the Native Americans.
But I will confess: The name of the band “Lady Antebellum” really bugs me.
I don’t listen to country music, but the band is really popular and they’ve won all kinds of awards, so I know who they are. And the name really didn’t spark any kind of reaction at all from me, initially.
This page notes that the name originates from publicity shoot using a Southern mansion as a scenic backdrop. In this case, it’s a reference to Antebellum architecture, but let’s break this down a little.
- Ante (before) + bellum (war).
In America, it’s a phrase used to refer to the period after the Revolutionary War and the establishment of the United States up through the beginning of the Civil War. Southern plantation mansions made use of styles like Greek Revival or Federal and featured those massive columns, balconies and porches.
You know what else those Southern plantation mansions made use of? Slaves.
When people make reference to the Antebellum South, they usually think of an elegant society, much like is shown in the book and film Gone with the Wind, which mourns the passing of that age (as did Birth of a Nation). This was an agrarian region; cotton was a huge part of the economy. About one-third of whites owned slaves; cotton production depended on their labor. About one-third of the total population in the South were black slaves.
In my thoughts on this topic, I am hugely influenced by Ta-Nehisi Coates, who has been writing about the Civil War and the institution of slavery for the past few years (all of the relevant posts have been helpfully collected in one place). In a recent piece struggling with the idea of a slave-owning society, he wrote this:
…in the Old South, all white men were expected to aspire to be gentlemen, and all white women were expected to aspire to be ladies. Black people were expected to aspire to give all their labor to their masters, and to stay right with God. (The two were very often linked.) A gentleman was expected to lord over an estate, supervise his slaves and superintend their Christian enlightenment, and — from the battlefield to the horse track — bring honor to his family name. A lady, as the historian Steven Stowe writes, was expected to be “ornamental,” to be “mild, loving and beautiful.”
In a post on “Southern antebellum ladyhood,” Coates notes that any notion of a “lady” in the Antebellum period explicitly disqualified black women. Whiteness didn’t just denote beauty, but was also a sign of one’s higher morality and aristocratic state. In order to achieve a milky state, an Antebellum lady would avoid the sun, bleed herself with leeches and eat white chalk or arsenic.
I’ll now quote, at length, from the epilogue of The Education of the Southern Belle: Higher Education and Student Socialization in the Antebellum South by Christie Anne Farnham.
Evocative of medieval gallantry, [the ideal of the Southern belle] affirmed white supremacy, now in an analogy to whites over blacks rather than planters over slaves. The romantic vision of the Southern belle had a special resonance during a half-century of unstable race relations following the Civil War when whites struggled to reinstate the control they had exerted in slavery by means of peonage, disenfranchisement, terrorism, and segregation. The traits idealized by the Southern belle were brought into sharper relief by mainstream society’s view of the African-American woman, who, in terms of the late nineteenth-century racist ideology, could never be represented in those terms.
In such disruptive times, the societal ideal of the Southern belle became a source of stability, a concept relevant to the entire society, not just to young white women. Indeed, it became an even more highly prized ideal, because it served to encode the value of white supremacy and traditional Southern culture.
The members of the group Lady Antebellum seem like very nice people. Like most musicians, I’m sure they chose the name primarily because it sounded cool. It might be different if they were trying to make some sort of statement – perhaps celebrate the Old South, as many country acts do, or be ironic about the image of the Southern belle – but they don’t seem to have any notion of deeper meaning.
The more I hear that name, the more it resonates with me. The more I hear it, the more it evokes another age, a time of a corrupt society built on quicksand.
But I try to not be one of those people.
7 Responses
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Nora Carrington Says:
Nicely done, pjrodriguez.
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Nora Carrington Says:
Oh, one question I forgot to add: can you say something more about the portrait at the top? It’s very beautiful, and the woman looks vaguely like a Virginia Randolf.
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The Pop View Says:
Apparently, this was a popular piece of mass-produced artwork in the South. Some owners have reported finding the following text on the back of lithographs.
“Erich Correns was born at Cologne in 1821 and after studying jurisprudence at Bonn, went to the Academy at Munich and became an accomplished portrait painter and lithographer. ‘Southern Belle’ by Correns depicts a pre-Victorian beauty – the daughter of a rich jeweler. Correns, one of the romantic painters of the early part of last century, made portrait lithographs after the art of original lithography was invented. His keen draftsmanship is revealed in this dignified composition. The original hangs in the Municipal Gallery of Munich where it is one of the main attractions. Erich Correns died at the city of Munich in 1877.”
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TheRaven Says:
Nicely done.
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The Pop View Says:
I checked with the Städtische Galerie and they do have the original painting in their collection. It is listed in their inventory with the title “Frl. Stefanie Simmerlein” (Miss Stefanie Simmerlein). The title “Southern Belle” was used for a print published by Morris & Bendien, New York. It was originally painted around 1865.
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The Pop View Says:
I just discovered a couple relevant posts from the blog What Tami Said.
First, Tami beat me to this subject by at year, with her post Lady Antebellum and the glorification of the pre-Civil War South. Lots of excellent points made; check the comments as well.
Second, she adds more detail to how tough life was for a lady in the Antebellum era in this post: The fairer sex.
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The Pop View » Don’t worry; he’s one of the good ones. Says:
[...] I mentioned in my recent post about the name of the band Lady Antebellum, I’ve become quite sensitized to depictions of the [...]