Scarlett and Blanche

In mid-twentieth century popular culture, the charming and flirtatious belle is the classic template for privileged fictional white Southern American womanhood. Ironically, it was an English actress, Vivien Leigh (1913–67), whose screen performances as Scarlett O’Hara in Gone with the Wind (1939) and Blanche DuBois in A Streetcar Named Desire (1951) helped to crystallise the belle aesthetic in mid-twentieth-century America. When she was cast as Scarlett in David O. Selznick’s film version of Margaret Mitchell’s 1936 bestselling novel after a two-year search, the story was presented as a rags-to-riches cliché — the ‘ingénue… plucked out of anonymity by a master Pygmalion and refashioned into a star’, as feminist film historian Molly Haskell puts it (Haskell 2009, p. 71). In truth, as Haskell notes, Leigh was an ambitious and experienced actor determined to land the role of a lifetime. She carefully engineered a meeting with top theatrical agent Myron Selznick — producer David’s elder brother — to ensure she was in the right place at the right time to get noticed.

In Gone with the Wind, the zenith of Hollywood cinema’s pre-Second World War Golden Age, Scarlett’s personal existential struggle plays out against the epic backdrop of the American Civil War. Tennessee Williams also links the destruction of the Southern belle with the decline of the Old South; Scarlett’s passion for Tara is equalled by Blanche’s nostalgia for Belle Reve before its decline. As Haskell argues, it is widely believed that ‘Williams had Leigh in mind when he wrote Streetcar and created the other great Southern belle of the twentieth century’ (p. 80). When casting the 1951 film, director Elia Kazan rejected Jessica Tandy, who originated the role of Blanche on Broadway in 1947, as not a big enough box-office name for the movie. Instead he chose Leigh, who had starred in the inaugural London stage production. Moreover, beyond her track record as the Oscar-winning breakout star of ‘the most famous film ever made’, Leigh’s cultural identification with Scarlett, the ultimate belle, brought a richly ironic intertextual complexity to her embodiment of Blanche.