Sally Carrol is southern because she clings to the past and is a bit mournful about it. She takes her beau, Harry Bellamy, to the cemetery in her Georgia town and looks at the grave of a woman named Margery Lee, who died at age 29. Sally Carrol imagines the way Margery Lee looked, wearing hoop skirts. Margery Lee lived during the Civil War, and Sally Carrol imagines that she had plenty of beaux who never returned to her because they died in the war. Sally Carrol also takes Harry to see the part of the graveyard dedicated to the Confederate soldiers who died during the Civil War. She says, "they died for the most beautiful thing in the world—the dead South." She still believes in the dream of the South, even long after the Civil War, and she still honors the past and doesn't want to move on from...
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"The Ice Palace" is one of Fitzgerald's most well-loved stories and one that portrays the author's fascination with the culture of the South and Southern women in particular. Sally Carroll has many things about her that typify her origins and the story relates these by making her the focual point of the story, and by bringngher back to her original Southern location at the end which captures the languorous, lazy mood of the hot day. The fact that Sally Carroll loves her own name which is composed of two names, but "hates" it when people call her "Sally" is one example of a Southern attitude, a certain old world formality among those with "good breeding" that dispenses with nicknames. She is also portrayed as being imaginative and romantic, as when she fantaszies about the life of Margery Lee, the woman whose name appears on a gravestone they encounter. Her dislike of cold weather is exemplified in the terror she feels when she becomes temporaily lost in the ice palace, when she screams "Take me home!" again and again and even the love an concern of Harry is not enough to console her. Her return to her Southern environs at the end suggests she will never find life in the Northeast, or indeed anywhere else, suitable.