Gone With the Wind/Rebecca

[shmeep]

I thought this was interesting, so I stuck it in its own thread over here in the book section:

greenbeing said:

I really didn't like Scarlett, I think. This is looking back over several years, but I thought she was spoiled and pretentious. I can't say I liked Rhett much, either. Their whole family dynamic was off... The way they treated each other... I think I remember being very peeved over how they treated the death of their child. They just had very little respect for each other. It's a frustrating movie when you have no empathy for the heroine. I certainly hope the Dunbars wouldn't end up like them!

But I will put GwtW on my book list. I'll check it out sometime. I finally read Rebecca and was very pleased, despite it being a slow read. I don't know why I'm associating the two--I think someone once told me there were similarities... Hmm. ?

--GB

What you're saying about GWtW is precisely why I DID love it. Scarlett O'Hara is one of the most fascinating heroines I've ever come across because she starts off shallow and spoiled, goes through hell, ends up taking care of everyone in her life and doing good things right and left--all with selfish motives--and comes out with almost no personal growth in the end. That's not what you expect going in and I think it's brilliant. Of course she and Rhett are completely dysfunctional and of course their relationship is frustrating. It's supposed to be. They're just a bit out of sync, never realizing how they love each other at the same time.

Read the book if you like, but I doubt if you'll find it less frustrating than the movie if you don't like Scarlett. While the movie cuts out a lot (including two of Scarlett's children), Vivian Leigh did a great job capturing the essence of the character.

And Rebecca! That's another of my all-time favorite books. I'm very curious about what the similarities could be between Rebecca and GWtW. The heroines are certainly nothing alike, nor are the stories. I found Rebecca gripping from beginning to end. Great stuff. The movie is also wonderful. Laurence Olivier, Joan Fontaine. Hey, here's something it has in common with GWtW! The second Mrs. de Winter (how cool is it that the protagonist is never given a name?) is played by Joan Fontaine, sister of Olivia de Havilland, who plays Melanie in GWtW.

[maggiethecat]

Where to start? I could talk about GWTW all day long, since, like Shmeep, I too read it first at the age of about twelve or thirteen, and have reread it periodicaly and passionately ever since.

I polished off the entire thing in about three days the first time because I carried it around with me, to the bathroom, to the dinner table, and since I come from a family of readers this was actually encouraged and not thought of as rude. There's a family story that my grandfather was on a business trip the year the book came out, and he settled down with it after dinner in his hotel room . . . the next thing he knew Atlanta was burning and the sun had come up.

I also think you cannot try to analyze a whacking great piece of what is essentially 19th century fiction with phrases like "family dynamic." etc., but that's just me. Part of what keeps you so absorbed is that Scarlett and Rhett are never in sync, and to me, Margaret Mitchell wrote Bonnie's death beautifully, and heartbreakingly. She knew -- because she was a smart woman and had lived a little when she wrote the book -- that in times of crisis people do not behave as we want them to, but as their natures dictate. Rhett was devastated, broken. Scarlett was so filled with rage and grief she couldn't see straight, and she lashed out. Worked for me.

What I also treasure about the book versus the movie is all the characters that, for the sake of length and a cohesive script, never made it to the screen. Beatrice Tarleton, mourning a paddock empty of horses as much as she mourned her four sons. John Wilkes, Ashley's father, in the book such a fine and lovely gentleman, in the movie no more than a walk-on part. Will Benteen, the gentle Southern Cracker who understood the O'Hara's better than they understood themselves, and loved Tara as much as Scarlett did. Miz Meade and Miz Merriweather and all the old trouts in The Society for the Beautification of the Graves of the Glorious Dead, who looked down on Scarlett as a betrayer for doin' bidness with them damned Carpetbaggers. Some screen time in the movie, but they were much more important in the book.

And dear God! did Margaret Mitchell know her canvas right down to the last detail. What they ate, what they wore, how they did their hair. I have a friend who is a respected costume historian, and one of her favorite passages in the book is when Scarlett first comes to Altanta and goes to the dance in her widow's weeds -- the description of the gowns and jewels and flowers Scarlett is drooling over is dead right.

And, on that note, Walter Plunkett did a masterful job with the costumes for the movie. Until Merchant & Ivory came along, period costuming and make-up in movies invariably reflected what was fashionable at the time the movie was made. (I could give a thousand examples and bore you all to death, but here's just one: Kate Winslett's matte-finish terra cotta lipstick in Titanic just screams THE NINETIES.) Anyway, Plunkett got it right, right down to the sort of gaudy, overdone arriviste frocks Scarlett wore after she married Rhett and went a little crazy at the dressmakers.

The one exception, of course, is the famous Green Velvet Curtains dress, but I understood why it had to be so eye-popping for the film (he really did a great job with the curtain fringe for the hat). In the book, of course, it was far more simple -- the point being, only, that it had to look new so Scarlett wouldn't look as dead broke as she was. But if Plunket hadn't designed what he did, then we wouldn't have had Carol Burnett coming down that staircase in "Went with the Wind." Let's say the line, all together now: "Thank you . . . I just saw it in the window and couldn't resist."

Enough for now. But I could go on forever.

[shmeep]

I guess I haven't read it in a few years, come to think of it. Thanks, Mags, for bringing so many wonderful characters from the book to life for me again. I wouldn't say I've forgotten them, but they aren't as fresh in my mind as they used to be. I think I know why. I wore my copy out and the first fifty or so pages have fallen out so every time I go to reread, I remember that I need a new copy and I put it off. Well, I'll have to rectify that soon because now I'm in the mood to read it again.

I love what you said about Margaret Mitchell having lived a little before writing the book. You're absolutely right about the way people react when faced with tragedy. It isn't logical, but it does ring true and this book captured that element of human nature.

The first time I read GWTW, I thought it was sooooo long and it seemed to take me forever. I enjoyed it even if I was too young to fully appreciate what was going on. I kept thinking, surely this is as bad is it could possibly get for Scarlett--and I was always proven wrong because something worse always happened and she overcame it all right up to the moment when she lost Rhett. And then that wonderful moment of going back to her old self--the one that had learned absolutely nothing. I'll think about it tomorrow. And she's comforted by that.

I've noticed that each time I read it, I get more out of it and can better understand the thought processes of the characters. I think this is because of my own life experience and how I've grown over the years. I always feel that I'm coming back to a new story because there is so much between the lines and so much truth to be found that I missed in earlier readings.

And Mags...thanks for mentioning the Carol Burnett drapery dress. That's still one of the funniest moments ever captured on television. Just thinking about it makes me want to giggle.

[maggiethecat]

admin said:

Scarlett O'Hara is one of the most fascinating heroines I've ever come across because she starts off shallow and spoiled, goes through hell, ends up taking care of everyone in her life and doing good things right and left--all with selfish motives--and comes out with almost no personal growth in the end.

Ooh, you have me thinking. (As Glinda said, waving her hand in front of her face, "What a smell of sulphur.")

I think Scarlett experiences amazing and life-altering personal growth, but it all comes in the last chapter. It's only when she's standing at Melanie's deathbed that it all hits her, like a bomb: that Melanie, this gentle and frail woman she always dismissed as weak was anything but, that her strength was far more than Scarlett's and that she was a shield between her and the world for years: that Ashley, her childhood dream Hero, is not only in reality a sad, broken middle-aged man, but someone else she will now have to take care of, another burden; and that Rhett was her rock all along.

But of course, because she is headstrong old Scarlett, she believes all she has to do is run home and tell Rhett she loves him and everything will be hunky-dunky. But even then, in that stunning last scene, she is able to see clearly, if only for a minute, the toll she and the years have taken on him.

Maybe the tragedy of Scarlett -- and I think she is a tragic figure -- is that wisdom comes to her too late. We are left with the classic question: Will Scarlett get Rhett back?

Margaret Mitchell would only say this, "I don't think she did, but it probably made her a better person."

BTW, for all you GWTW junkies out there, I highly recommend a book called The Gone With the Wind Letters, correspondence between Miz Margaret and the rest of the world about the publishing of the book and the making of the movie. It gives us glimpses into the wicked humor and style of this tiny little unprepossessing women.

She had so little faith in the manuscript that after she'd given it to a man from Macmillan Publishers -- who took the suitcase full of manuscript and read it in the train back to New York -- that she tried to get it back. Too late. He was hooked.

Originally, Scarlett's name was Pansy. Eeeuw.

[shmeep]

maggiethecat said:

I think Scarlett experiences amazing and life-altering personal growth, but it all comes in the last chapter. It's only when she's standing at Melanie's deathbed that it all hits her, like a bomb: that Melanie, this gentle and frail woman she always dismissed as weak was anything but, that her strength was far more than Scarlett's and that she was a shield between her and the world for years: that Ashley, her childhood dream Hero, is not only in reality a sad, broken middle-aged man, but someone else she will now have to take care of, another burden; and that Rhett was her rock all along.

I can't entirely disagree with that. Now you made me think. Shame on you!

I guess I didn't consider all those shattering epiphanies to be growth, but the fact that she had them at all when she had certainly never allowed such insight to enter her mind before shows that something had to have changed within her. So...does epiphany=growth? I don't know. Maybe.

I was always struck by the difference between what others perceived to be Scarlett's growth based upon her actions when judged on the surface and what her base motivation behind each action really was. She had a selfish motive for every kind deed she did. Melanie only saw the good and Rhett saw the selfishness and both were, in a way, right.

Now I have a brand new copy of the book. I can't wait to see what new insights I get out of it this time around, since it has been a few years.

[hoosier]

One summer I read GWTW at least 3 times in a row--as soon as I finished it I got right back in it. It belongs to my mom and it is definitely worn because she bought her's when it first came out. I can remember reading where Margaret Mitchell reserched it so thoroughly she almost ruined her eyesight! I loved the richness of her descriptions--you could just see Tara and the other plantations, the clothes , the people, everything in your head! They don't write them like that anymore! And I had absolutely no desire to read the sequel that they hired someone else to write--it just would not have been the same!

[maggiethecat]

hoosier said:

I had absolutely no desire to read the sequel that they hired someone else to write--it just would not have been the same!

I'll save you from that impulse, hoosier, should it ever pop up again. The sequel was called Scarlett, I think, and I got it out of the library and made it to about page 20, where Scarlett was trying to vamp Rhett in a rowboat in a baby blue ruffledy-puffledy outfit. Baby blue? Scarlett, who, when the chips were down, always wore green because it made her eyes look greener? That was it for me. Back it went to the library. And it was very badly written.

But as for the original, you're absolutely right -- they don't write 'em like that anymore.

[maggiethecat]

admin said:

Now I have a brand new copy of the book. I can't wait to see what new insights I get out of it this time around, since it has been a few years.

I can't wait for those insights . . . and I'm wondering if we should start a new book thread. Books we are compelled to re-read every few years, coming back to them like old friends. I'm always amazed when I run into someone who doesn't re-read favorite books. After all, we watch movies more than once, right? Not to mention repeated viewings of a certain tragically cancelled television show.

Off the top of my head?

Gone with the Wind (of course)
Time and Again by Jack Finney
On Writing by Stephen King
Gaudy Night by Dorothy L. Sayers
The Great War and Modern Memory by Paul Fussell
September by Rosamund Pilcher
The Narnia Chronicles by C. S. Lewis
Just about anything by Tony Hillerman
Just about anything by P. D. James

And that's just for starters . . . .

[shmeep]

Here I am in an old old thread that had been in the archives for quite a long time. I didn't re-read GWtW right off as I had intended. It got set aside and then I got distracted and forgot about it. I'm reading it now, though. Mags—and anyone else who has an interest in this—I hope you're still up for a discussion because I'm ready to talk!

maggiethecat said:

I can't wait for those insights . . .

I'm not quite finished, but I'm getting near the home stretch. Rhett has just proposed to Scarlett on the day of Frank's funeral and Scarlett has just accepted him, although she had planned on saying "no" all along.

I used to be able to read this and, Yankee though I am at heart, I'd find myself accepting that the Southerners were the injured party here and that the freed blacks were dangerous and that it was a shame the old South was destroyed. Now I find myself more disturbed by the general world view of the Southerners. I get to thinking about WHY the freed slaves were dangerous and who had made an entire class of people into a society that didn’t know how to be free. I find myself feeling truly sad for Mammy and Dilcey and Big Sam and Uncle Peter and all the other former house slaves who just went on being slaves because they were as attached to the old ways as their masters were.

At the same time, I find the Yankee treatment of the ex-slaves fascinating as well. On the one hand, they treated them as equals and tried to give them the vote while on the other hand, they feared them and their wives wouldn’t trust a black person to care for their children. I’m sure there was a lot of this type of hypocrisy in the north and that they did use the freed slaves as a way to further oppress the defeated South and to gain even more power politically. Hearing all of this from the perspective of the South is so interesting. History is written by the victors, which is possibly what makes a novel like GWtW feel so different. It’s a take we seldom get. I don’t like all of it and I find it appalling that a saint like character such as Melly, who allowed a white murderer to live in her basement, would say (when she thought she was going to have to move to New York) that she could never send her children to school with Yankee and black children, but it is true to the time and the place.

I find myself with much more sympathy for Scarlett this time around. Her mind is simple and her goals are clear. I see now that she doesn’t just act out of selfishness and that she does gradually grow as a person along the way, but she never completely changes despite that. Everything she does at Tara during the last part of the war and after was done so they could all survive. Then her savage need for money and the fear of starving takes over during her marriage to Frank. She’s kind of an Id character. She goes to the most basic level and lives there, allowing almost everything else to float right over her head. She thinks she’s like Rhett, but Rhett is a complex character with intuition and education and depth that Scarlett can never begin to understand. Throughout the book, Rhett will quote something or make a particularly deep statement and each time Scarlett doesn’t even register what was said. She also doesn’t try to understand what Ashley says, despite claiming to love him. Rhett is actually as deep as Ashley—if not more so—but he is a survivor while Ashley is someone who can never belong to the post-war world.

Scarlett often refers to the Southerners who refuse to change with the times as fools and, this time around, I kind of agree with her in some cases. I can at least understand how they look from her perspective. And as horrible as Scarlett’s motives sometimes are and as many bad things as she does, I now believe that Melly knows the truth the entire time and still loves and respects Scarlett because she also sees the side of the truth that Scarlett hides from herself until her epiphanies at the end; that Scarlett really does love her and that everything she did was for the survival of many people.

I think that is quite enough for now. I really could go on and on, but I’ll spare you. For now.

On a different note…I want to tell you about something funny I found in my parents’ garage once. They have a huge deepfreeze out there and it is always completely packed with food. Once I noticed a cardboard sign on it that said, in huge letters, “As God is my witness, I’ll never be hungry again!” I couldn’t figure out who had done that because my mom, while a GWtW fan, would never think of it. Turns out it was my dad and that was a shocker because I never even thought he was awake during that movie.

[maggiethecat]

Oh, yay . . . but you have given me so much to digest that I shall have to go away and think (As Glinda said, "What a smell of sulfur!") and then respond to some of your excellent points, Shmeep.

Yes, the antebellum South was definitely a way of life economically based on the slave trade, but may I point out here on behalf of my ancestors (who never owned a slave in their lives, by the way) that this was not the only slave-based culture. Sometimes I do think that most people think only those nasty Southerners ever owned slaves. Not so.

Whatever. To me, the central tragedy of the book is that a civilization has vanished, and in a very short amount of time: through arrogance and blind faith, but still, vanished. As much as I love the first part of the book, I think where this book stands head and shoulders above so many others is in Margaret Mitchell's depiction of Reconstruction. To me, some of the most successful and interesting characters in the book are the ancillary characters and how they handle Reconstruction: Mrs. Merriweather and Mrs. Meade, the ultimate Steel Magnolias, and Rene Picard, the ultimate dandy, cheerfully driving a pie wagon. Their kind just gets on with it -- they endure. That's why I love Scarlett, as exasperating as she is -- she does what she has to do to get through the day and feed her kin and shoulder the weary load. She doesn't stop and think about what she's doing, because she's just not a thinker: she's a doer. I wish to God I could be more like that (but it's probably very hard on those around you!). She certainly wasn't raised to be anything but pampered and adored and spoiled, which makes her achievements all the more remarkable. Everything falls away, and she keeps going. It's the Ashleys of this world who can't cope with change, and it's Ashley's tragedy that he knows this about himself.

Many historians feel that Reconstruction would have been entirely different had Lincoln not been assassinated (and by a Southern sympathizer). There are also many historians who think, believe it or not, that emancipation was not the most intelligent way to go; manumission, which is the gradual and natural elimination of slavery, is kinder both to those being freed and also smarter economically (sort of like what happened in Cuba in the 1880s). Whatever the motives and the history, once the country was reunited, how intelligent was it, really, to grind the South into economic submission for decades?

As for why the Southerners didn't like the Yankees, so much so that the gentle Melly would not want her children raised up Nawth? Chile, where do I start? You want a bunch of cranky unmannered people who put the Rs on the end of every word tellin' you how to run your life? Heh. All States Rights really means, in the end, is get out of my face and mind your own damned business.

Well, Miss Mitchell, it's clear that your book can spark discussions that go on forever . . .

[maggiethecat]

Sept 24, 2010 18:24:43 GMT -5 maggiethecat said:

Sept 23, 2010 18:09:32 GMT -5 maggiethecat said:

I know I'm in the minority here but I found these books to be an odd combination of boring and creepily violent . . . .which is why I bailed in favor of my annual summer rereading of Gone with the Wind.

Now there, dammit, was a book. And may I say that no less a literary light than than Reynolds Price pointed out that Margaret Mitchell did something that no one other than Herman Melville had accomplished with Moby Dick and the whaling novel . . . she invented the genre and retired it in one book! You can never again write the 1,000-page Civil War novel: every feisty heroine will be compared to Scarlett, ever mammy to Mammy, every suave hero to Rhett. Forget the movie, as good as Vivien Leigh is, and remember that the novel won the Pulitzer in 1936.

I know, wa-a-a-a-ay off point!

Don't want to be a thread-killer. ;D

Speaking of which, don't we already have a GWTW thread on this board? Must go on a hunt.

Found the thread and it's a honey . . . lovely thought-provoking sentiments expressed here, so much so that I hope we have new contributions.