From Oct. 30 to Nov. 12, guest speaker Dr. Susanna Delfino of the University of Genoa in Italy will be lecturing to UT as part of the university’s Ready for the World program. Her lectures, delivered to undergraduate students, depict how women of the old South were represented in historical literature and American movies.
    
During her lecture on Wednesday, Nov. 2, Delfino held a captive audience, as she began by describing the superiority of the old South compared to the new, maintaining that “the old South was a metaphor of a society’s ability to resurrect from the ashes of war.”
    
“It’s very interesting to be taught about the South from an Italian woman” Kelley Ellis, senior in psychology, said. “It’s such a different perception.”
    
Due to movies such as 1939’s “Gone with the Wind,” the “mistresses of the plantation” are often perceived as capricious or eccentric, while the slaves’ parts infer loyalty to their owners. The owners seem to treat their slaves well and with respect, and in return they receive workers who were glad to be working in those conditions, so unlike those of the rival North’s factory workers.
    
In the 1938 movie “Jezebel,” Bette Davis plays Julie Marsden, a typical New Orleans Southern belle who creates scandal by wearing a red dress instead of the white worn by unmarried women. Her played-up sex appeal costs her the man she loves, sending the message that women should not take too much advantage of their beauty because her lover will most definitely leave her.
    
Women of that day, though depicted by sinful characters in the above movies, were expected to be devoted wives and dedicated mothers, never daring to cause such a scene. The movies of that time, as Delfino explains it, “refrain from discussing women of lascivious nature and action.”
    
Delfino said that this idea continued until the 1950s and ’60s, when cinema tried to present different faces of Southern history, when historians started to study black history, slaves and women. This new cinema destroyed the romanticizing depiction of the old South and showed how unhappy and mistreated slaves actually were.
    
With a new cinema came a new audience. Suddenly blacks were at the center stage, as they tried to balance both interpretations of the old South. Both white and black women came forward as victims, as a master would fall in love with his slave, leaving his wife to feel betrayed, thus pitting white and black women against each other.
    
Plantation and slavery seemed to be the only real themes. With the loss of its romanticized charms it did not appeal to audiences, leaving the subject abandoned by the mid-’60s.
    
“Looking at the history and this reference is so fascinating to see the subtle but significant changes throughout history,” graduate student Kyle Stevens said.
    
This subject will be explained in greater detail in Delfino’s next lecture on Tuesday, Nov. 8. For more information, contact professor Flavia Brizio-Skov.