ABSTRACT
This chapter describes the fallen South, as George Gordon Byron used to describe fallen Rome. It is a land that is crushed, mutilated, degraded Niobe of Nations! Childless and crownless in her voiceless woe! The quote is from Byron's Childe Harold's Pilgrimage. Niobe comes up twice in the novel. Augusta Jane Evans refers to Niobe in Beulah, the woman who boasted about her progeny of six sons and six daughters and then the gods punished her pride by taking her children. When she returned to her home, she was turned into a rock on Mt. Sipylus, weeping as the snow melts over it. Macaria is an important novel because it gives voice to the effects of war on women, but it is not just about the Civil War; it is about gender warfare. Homestead theorizes that the women in Macaria become symbols of the South, resisting the tyranny of the North; whereas the North symbolizes marriage.
