Meanings
alternative moonlight-and-magnolias
- not comparableOf or relating to romanticized historical portrayals of the American South, often depicting slavery in a positive light.
Here the myth of a moonlight-and-magnolia South founders on dry empirical realities.
2013, David Chinitz, Which Sin to Bear?, page 342 more examples
The romantic South of myth and legend, the “moonlight and magnolia” South with which plantation epics captured the national imagination in the era of the Lost Cause, has acquired a nightmarish quality; […]
2014, Cynthia Stretch, Cristina Alsina Rísquez, Innocence and Loss, page 33If a white employer could take so much interest in the child of a black employee, in whom he had no property interest, that would illustrate—as did Hentz's other fiction—the moonlight and magnolia world of Southerners' concern for their slaves.
2016, Alfred L. Brophy, University, Court, and Slave, page 84
Cite this entry
moonlight-and-magnolia. (n.d.). In WatkinsX Dictionary. Retrieved November 5, 2026, from https://dictionary.watkinsx.com/word/moonlight-and-magnolia
“moonlight-and-magnolia.” WatkinsX Dictionary, https://dictionary.watkinsx.com/word/moonlight-and-magnolia. Accessed November 5, 2026.
WatkinsX Dictionary, s.v. “moonlight-and-magnolia,” accessed November 5, 2026, https://dictionary.watkinsx.com/word/moonlight-and-magnolia.
Source: moonlight-and-magnolia on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.