7 thoughts on “A Letter”

  1. I’ve neither watched nor read Gone With The Wind, aside from the odd clip shown on TV. Is it really that bad?

  2. one of the experiences I’d most like to erase from my brain is being dragged to a movie theater showing of GWTW when I was 12 years old…

  3. I wasn’t that impressed with the article. It turns out mostly to be about the trials and tribulations of the author of that dreadful “sequel” to the Gone With The Wind novel. I’ve never been able to take the idea of “The Wind Done Gone” (oh really now) ever since reading Florence King’s devastating takedown of the whole thing. Basically, she says that Ms. Randall missed the whole point of the novel and basically just wrote an amateurish parody. I haven’t read it, but from the descriptions of it it sounds a whole lot of what they call “fix fic” in fan-fiction circles. (Don’t like the way your favorite tv series or book series turned out? Write your own version — say, have Fox Mulder and Agent Skinner get gay-married instead of Mulder running off with Scully at the end of the X-Files. Publish it on your Livejournal or Fanfiction.net. There, you’ve fixed it!)

    Anyway, the real GWTW book isn’t bad, but it’s long, and has boring (to me) passages (especially the section where Scarlett is married to Frank Kennedy. Snore). A lot of people seem to hate the novel without actually knowing anything about it — they just heard that it’s full of racist white slave owners and obedient black slave characters and it’s racist racist racist! Or some people are offended by the obvious elegiac tone towards pre-Civil War Southern culture. But it’s mainly a character and cultural study in the guise of a novel. What surprised me most was how Latin the culture was. The fiery-tempered macho men, the super-feminine women, the obsession with honor, the female morbidity, the divisions of society into aristocratic and peasant classes, etc.

    Another thing people don’t seem to get is that Scarlett O’Hara isn’t the heroine of the novel. If anything the heroine in the classic sense is Melanie, who suffers like a saint without ever losing her temper (actually not much like a saint from what I’ve read but never mind). Scarlett is an anti-heroine, and the book’s portrait of her faults is acute and pitiless. But most people expect a book’s main character to be someone we are supposed to support, so readers come away from the novel feeling like they’ve been had.

  4. Oops. I meant to say “I’ve never been able to take the idea of “The Wind Done Gone” seriously,” and comparing Melanie to the saints I should have said “actually [she wasn’t]… much like a saint from what I’ve read about them.” A lot of saints seem to have been what we’d call these days “jerkasses.”

  5. What surprised me most was how Latin the culture was. The fiery-tempered macho men, the super-feminine women, the obsession with honor, the female morbidity, the divisions of society into aristocratic and peasant classes, etc.

    That’s not Latin — it’s a mixture of the Cavaliers from southwest England (the losers of the English civil war) who settled the Tidewater area and Piedmont, and the Scots-Irish who settled the southern Appalachians, who comprised the culture of the antebellum south. It was a culture of honor and chivalry. And violence. The War Between the States was basically a war between the Cavaliers (e.g., Bobby Lee) and rednecks versus the Quakers and Puritans, the four British strains that settled America.

  6. Weren’t the Cavaliers Roman Catholic? By “Latin” I meant old Spanish, not modern “Hispanic,” by the way.

    In any case despite the fact that people associate the South with Protestantism, especially Baptists, there was a strong Catholic, Romanesque aspect to Southern culture, at least in the coastal areas. And in the book Scarlett is Catholic — her father is an Irish Catholic and her mother a daughter of an old French aristocratic family. I think this was played way down in the movie. I haven’t been able to watch more than a few short scenes so I have no idea.

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