Controlling the Narrative: How the United Daughters of the Confederacy Shaped Collective Memory Through Romance Novels

While existing scholarship on the United Daughters of the Confederacy (UDC) reveals the immense influence the organization wielded in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, I assert that their legacy has had a broader and more insidious reach than previously believed. Through close analysis of two foundational romance novelists’ works published during the rapid escalation of the genre’s popularity, I contend that the rhetoric of the UDC shaped generations of Southerners as demonstrated through repetitions and parallels of the Lost Cause ideology found in UDC publications and sponsored materials within romance novels written by white Southern women who came of age at the height of the Daughters’ power. To foreground this, in Part One I provide historical background on the UDC, its ideology, and the Lost Cause, paying particular attention to their written works. In Part Two, I contextualize the romance novel and its history, demonstrating that its popularity in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries did not merely appear from thin air; instead, romance novels have a rich history that is intertwined with and provides windows into the historical moments within which they were produced. Finally, with the historical and contextual foundations laid, I dedicate Part Three to performing literary analysis of Kathleen Woodiwiss’s Ashes in the Wind (1979) and Jennifer Blake’s Southern Rapture (1981), carefully dissecting each novel for evidence of Lost Cause rhetoric as originating from and promoted by the Daughters. In doing so, I argue that the evidence of the UDC’s influence in shaping collective memory extends far beyond that of memorials and into seemingly unrelated literature that was and continues to be read by millions of readers. Advisor: Kenneth Price