“Tomorrow is Another Day.” The Depiction of Women and Slavery in Margaret Mitchell’s Gone With the Wind and Robert Hicks’ The Widow of the South

This B.A. thesis looks at the novels Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell and The Widow of the South by Robert Hicks. It takes a close look at the portrayal of women and slavery, what similarities and differences can be seen in the protagonists pertaining to, among other things, their education and upbringing, as well as how the women’s lives were affected by living in a society which condoned slave ownership. The Civil War brought about changes in the women’s lives both during its course and in its aftermath. Not only were the lives of the women affected, but that of the slaves as well. The authors, through their writing, depicted aspects of the institution of slavery; how did the slave hierarchy work and what made one slave “better” than the next? Through the authors and their characters a broader picture of life in the South during and after the Civil War comes to light, yet the seventy years between the writing of the two novels give a distinctive slant to the world the authors are depicting