Gone with the Wind

In order to answer the research question; to what extent did Hollywood during the 1930"s reinforce, reinvent of challenge national values and identity in the United States? Four films will be analysed including; City Lights 1931) 1 & Modern Times (1936) 2 directed by Charlie Chaplin, and The Wizard of Oz (1939) 3 & Gone with the Wind (1939) 4 directed by Victor Fleming. Through an exploration of these films and their common leitmotifs of home, industrialisation, and mechanisation this extended essay will seek to understand how Hollywood motion pictures during the 1930s" represented the idea of home and its connection to change and/or industrialisation. In the films City Lights and Modern Times Charlie Chaplin utilises the monochrome scheme as well as no or little dialogue to show his unwillingness to fuel change and the idea of the industrialisation by using modern technological cinematic elements such as Technicolor. On the other hand Victor Fleming reinforces mechanisation and industrialisation through his expensive spectacles and Technicolor films such as The Wizard of Oz and Gone with the Wind. Fleming

A szakdolgozat középpontjában Margaret Mitchell Elfújta a szél című regénye és a belőle készült filmváltozat áll. Laura Mulvey Vizuális élvezet és narratív film című tanulmányán keresztül azon narratívpoétikai technikák megvalósításának módjait vizsgálja, melyek a tradicionális női szerepkonstrukciók és a vizuális hierarchia modelljének felülírásához vezetnek.

Abstract: Mitchell’s work has given birth to rewritings and retellings of all kinds: parodies, sequels, prequels, movie adaptations, etc. This article seeks to interrogate the end to which retelling is used. Of primary interest are indeed the doubled discourses that have surrounded the afterlife of Gone with the Wind: 75 years after its initial publication and when considering the endurance of Gone with the Wind’s appeal, do we privilege Mitchell’s own words that good plots always endure retellings of all sorts? Do we recognize instead, and despite the continued fame of Mitchell’s novel, that the numerous sequels, revisions, and parodies of Gone with the Wind (that is, retellings) encourage the “correction” (to use Craig’s own editor) or the “transforming or remodeling (of) previous texts” (Hutcheon xiv). To address these questions, I will be treating a popular and unauthorized parody of Gone with the Wind, Alice Randall’s The Wind Done Gone (2001). By pointing to scripts, voices, and disruptive gazes (that had been kept hidden in the official narrative), Randall produces what Michael Kreyling describes as metanarratives that touch “on crucial moments where the official narrative is made or problematically redirected” (ix, in. Yaeger 34). To what end and to what effect should the parodist problematize the ideals and icons of a Southern classic, as we shall see, remains another matter.

Abstract (in French): L’œuvre de Margaret Mitchell, dont le succès n’est aujourd’hui plus à prouver, a inspiré des réécritures et réécritures de toutes sortes: des parodies, des suites, des préquels, des adaptations à l’écran, etc. Cet article vise à interroger le but de la réécriture, particulièrement lorsqu’il s’agit d’une œuvre d’une telle importance culturelle et idéologique. Autour d’ Autant en emporte le vent se dessinent en effet deux types de discours : 75 ans après sa publication et lorsque l’on parle de réécriture, nous faut-il privilégier ce que disait Mitchell qui affirmait qu’une bonne intrigue pourrait supporter toute ‘redite’? Malgré la renommée du roman de Mitchell, nous faut-il, au contraire, croire que les nombreuses suites, les révisions et les parodies d’ Autant en emporte le vent encouragent la nécessaire « correction », la « transformation ou de rénovation (de) textes précédents » (Hutcheon xiv). Pour répondre à ces questions,  j’explore ici la parodie non autorisée écrite par Alice Randall en 2001, The Wind Done Gone. En forçant à la surface du récit des discours, des voix et des regards (que la version officielle aurait peut-être aimé nous dissimuler), Randall produit ce que Michael Kreyling décrit comme ces méta-récits qui mettent l’accent sur « des moments cruciaux où la version officielle est redirigée de façon problématique » (ix, dans . Yaeger 34). Dans quel but et à quel effet le parodiste se plait-il/elle à problématiser les idéaux et les icônes d'un classique du Sud ? Ceci, comme nous le verrons, demeure une énigme.

Though very little of Gone with the Wind focuses on the marriage of Gerald O’Hara and Ellen Robillard, their union is a crucial component of the novel and of Scarlett’s character development. Margaret Mitchell employs the marriage between Gerald and Ellen O’Hara to promote the incorporation of white ethnics into the fabric of American citizenry. In fact, she goes so far as to suggest that this incorporation is necessary for Americans to survive the modern world. I contrast Scarlett and the dark-featured Rhett Butler with the weaker, inbreeding
Wilkes/Hamilton families. Finally, I illustrate how the racial
politics of the novel, while portraying the assimilation of white ethnics and the interracial relations of nonwhite ethnics, nevertheless increase the imagined distance between whites and nonwhites. This discussion includes an analysis of the film version of the novel as well as the mixed race character of Dilcey. Through her Civil War novel, Mitchell prescribes a code of acceptable intermarriage (and thus assimilatory) practices for
her contemporary culture.

At the time of its publication most liberal and left intellectuals found many reasons to despise Gone With the Wind. Lacking any apparent commitment to social responsibility, the novel did not meet current standards of good literature, and was accused of offering only mere entertainment as an escape from the contemporary crisis.

“Gone with the Wind” will endure because it is a true work of art, an unforgettable tale that transcends the pettiness of contemporary politics. Author Margaret Mitchell deals with the universal reality of the human condition, in the same way that Homer, Dante, and Tolstoy did.

The performance of femininity—what Joan Rivière would name the masquerade of femininity—has contributed largely to illuminate the artificiality of power networks within patriarchal society. What is startling in Rivière’s perception of femininity is the belief that there would be no original, for “womanliness and masquerade are one and the same”. Of course, and justly so, we may wonder what place is then left to authenticity if femininity, as Rivière sees it, is thus to be conceived as a performance.  Such is precisely the subversive issue that Scarlett O’hara raises when confessing that “[she is] tired of everlastingly being unnatural and never doing anything [she] want[s] to do... [and that she is] tired of pretending [she doesn’t] know anything”, Scarlett here leads us to reflect on the question of gender in the antebellum South, gender that is performed—even parodied—through masquerade. It is because she is unnatural, because she silences what she knows, that she acts the part, dresses the part and works out the theatricality of the idealized Southern Belle who, as McPherson reminds us, “functioned as the pivot around which th[e] mythical mise-en-scène, or th[e] sham of Southerness, unfolded.  In this instance, Mitchell reveals the imitative structure of gender itself: If as Butler argues, femininity is indeed “an exterior force that affects and limits a fully, human, and natural interior” (Salih 2006, The Judith Butler reader), the gender role, Mitchell suggests, is first and foremost a form of parody.  How far, however, should the masquerade be confined to women’s performance of femininity? This question is even more relevant in a culture which, as many historians and critics have emphasized, was, if anything, a masquerade culture itself.

According to the Collier's Encyclopedia, 6, Library of Congress, page 516, the Civil War is ''the conflict between the American Union and the eleven Southern states which seceded to form the Confederate States of America. The climatic event of nineteenth century American history, it was, measured by numbers engaged and casualties in proportion to population, the biggest of American wars.(...) Its most important consequences were to preserve and strengthen the American nation, to speed the rise of industrial capitalism, and to bring about the end of chattel slavery. It has also appealed to the popular imagination far more than any other war the United States has fought.''

The immense popularity of Gone with the Wind, over eighty years after being published, is now often tarnished by accusations of rampant racism. The character of Mammy, especially, has been criticized as stereotypical and perpetuating historically inaccurate ideas of the role of black Mammies. With the double-fold intention of giving a voice to black characters mostly silent in Gone with the Wind and counteracting these accusations of a negative portrayal of African-Americans, the Margaret Mitchell Trust commissioned an authorized sequel recounting Mammy's story, Ruth's Journey, by Donald McCaig. This article analyzes the image of Mammy Ruth's Journey presents, and considers whether it has successfully fulfi lled these goals.

Margaret Mitchell's Gone with the Wind not only presents us with two comparable representations of slavery, but allows us to begin to understand and dissect the ways in which American slavery was morally justified by the American South, in a real life context.

Gerald O’ Hara’s butler Pork was won in “all night poker game.” Blacks were seen as property to be bought and sold, to be bet upon and exchanged like material goods. Gerald was soft-hearted and after repeated pleas, he bought his wife Dilcey and his daughter Prissy, from the Wilkes’ estate for three thousand dollars. This is the only time that price of the blacks is mentioned. This kindness shown by Gerald was used by the writer to portray how the white’s were large hearted and treated them correctly. The money spent by Gerald though didn’t cause a hole in his pocket but still led him to say “Never again will I let a darky on this place marry off.” Pork and Dilcey’s marriage was a very romanticised view offered by the author as most blacks were forced to “breed” with each other and were usually separated after wards. Slave owners often dictated the sexual activity of the blacks.

The author refers to several modern mystics, to today's major esoteric societies, and to my interpretative method, which he applies to reveal messianic - eschatological symbols in the world famous movie 'Gone with the Wind'.
https://greeksoftheorient.wordpress.com/2017/07/21/franz-bardon-%CF%83%CE%B9%CF%89%CE%BD%CE%B9%CF%83%CF%84%CE%AD%CF%82-%CE%B9%CE%B7%CF%83%CE%BF%CF%85%CE%90%CF%84%CE%B5%CF%82-%CE%BC%CE%B1%CF%83%CF%8E%CE%BD%CE%BF%CE%B9-%CF%8C%CF%83%CE%B1-%CF%80/

Part of Cornell Department of Architecture graduate student seminar Gastro•porn, a class-curated digital exhibition launched in May 2015. The full exhibition available online as funded and hosted by Cornell's College of Art, Architecture, and Planning (see the attached links to the entire exhibition as well as my essay where, in the latter, you will find links to the videos referenced in the article text available for download here).

Although Margaret Mitchell’s Civil War era heroine Scarlett O’Hara has long been seen as a representative of Southern womanhood in regional literature, recent works by women writers such as Julia Elliott, Jillian Weise, and Karen Russell subvert traditional notions of Southern femininity. Their fiction and poetry depict women who are part machine and part beast, living in the near future or a parallel universe. Meanwhile, their stories are firmly set in Southern landscapes and mindscapes.  In this essay, using Mitchell’s character as a reference point, I will show how these writers employ elements of genre fiction to move beyond the belle, and how their genre-bending and bold experimentation are refreshing Southern Literature. In particular, I intend to examine Weise's novel The Colony, about a one-legged woman who joins a scientific colony and engages in an attempt to regenerate her missing leg; Elliott’s short story, “LIMBs,” which concerns a disabled woman resident of a South Carolina nursing home who is the subject of a scientific experiment and Russell’s novel Swamplandia! in which two girls are left alone to defend their family’s Florida alligator theme park.

On February 29, 1940, Gone with the Wind the sweeping cinematic tale of the American Civil War and of the old South made its own history. The film, now considered a classic, was adapted from the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel of the same name written by Margaret Mitchell. Gone With The Wind won in ten Academy Award categories, and took home eight Oscar statuettes including the Best Supporting Actress category, which was awarded to Hattie McDaniel for her role as “Mammy.” McDaniel’s February 29, 1940 win was historic because she was the first African American to be nominated and win the Academy Award, which was even more exceptional considering the racist overtones in both the book and movie and Hollywood’s attitude toward African American actors in the industry. In 1940, years before the civil rights movement altered the nation’s perceptions of African Americans, McDaniel’s win was groundbreaking in white Hollywood. However, it would not be enough to shatter the prevalent racial stereotypes.

In Marked Men, White Masculinity in Crisis, Sally Robinson explains that much work on theorizing and analyzing white hegemonic masculinity takes it as a starting point that hegemonic masculinity and whiteness retain their powers as signifiers and normative practices because they are invisible, that is opaque to analysis. “White male power,” she claims, “has benefited enormously from keeping whiteness and masculinity in the dark”
(1). Pierre Bourdieu says as much in La Domination Masculine:
La force de l’ordre masculin se voit au fait qu’il se passe de justification: la vision androcentrique s’impose comme neutre et n’a pas besoin de s’énoncer dans des discours visant à la légitimité (15).
[The strength of masculine social order is apparent in the fact that it does not require justification: the andro-centric worldview has imposed itself as neutral and has no need to legitimate itself overtly through discourse.]
To be unmarked, disembodied and non-performative is, we understand, a necessary condition for the perpetuation of male dominance. To be unmarked, Robinson claims, is essentially to be the self-evident (meaning, transhistorical) standard against
which all differences and all visible and problematic “others” are measured (blacks, women, minorities, the enslaved, the colonized, etc.). The argument goes “one cannot question, let alone dismantle, what remains invisible from view” (1).
With specific attention to the constructions of masculinity mentioned above, my line of argument will precisely attempt to problematize the doxa of invisible/visible binaries, using identity-shattering moments as “markers” that, I believe, can make
masculinity “visible” in ways that can be both progressive and reactionary. By focusing on the staging of masculinity in Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind, I will argue that the portrayal of gender performance creates tensions, ambiguities, and double meanings that assist in the questioning, denaturalizing and contesting of an hegemonic model of Southern masculinity. As I wish to suggest, the constructed nature of gender, as best
exemplified in the portrayal of a revitalized—yet deviant and all but too visible—male body like Rhett Butler’s, ultimately challenges the perceived authenticity of seemingly natural and inherent “gentleman” authority

Benet, Vicente José. Valencia, 27.6.1962. Historiador de cine. Redactor Jefe desde 1991 de la revista Archivos de la Filmoteca, dedicada a los estudios sobre historia y teoría del cine y editada por el Institut Valencià de la Cinematografía Ricardo Muñoz Suay. Su libro El tiempo de la narración clásica: los films de gansters de Warner Bros (1930-1932) (1992) proveniente de su tesis doctoral, pone de manifiesto dos intereses que perduran en su trabajo: el cine clásico surgido del Hollywood de los años treinta y la narratología fílmica, que Benet aborda sobre todo a partir del tratamiento surgido de la llamada escuela “neoformalista” norteamericana.

French :
Le discours, Judith Butler nous le rappelle, est un outil remarquable de la fabrique sociale du genre. Derrière une apparente évidence et neutralité, la mise en mots, la nomination et le récit de soi (ou de l’autre) participent d’une catégorisation qui révèle généralement la domination du masculin et la dimension énigmatique du féminin. Le secret ou l’hystérie sont autant de modalités représentatives et langagières adoptées face aux zones d’ombre du féminin (Alexandra Olivero-Alvarez).  De fait, on ne peut que souligner l’intérêt potentiel d’une critique et d’une transformation de la suprématie d’un « dire du féminin », à dessein de révéler voire de contester la hiérarchie des identités sexuées. Dans Autant en Emporte le Vent, et comme l’explique cet article, Margaret Mitchell souligne la nécessité de réviser ce qui est dit, vu ou su du féminin. Dans une perspective résolument féministe qui transcende le cadre du roman historique traditionnel, Mitchell insère un autre signifié dans son texte, celui de l’oralité et de l’écoute aux portes : la voix de ceux qui se révèlent et se confessent (et que rejoint celle de l’auteur) jette le discrédit sur la représentation et l’écriture traditionnelle de la belle du Sud.  Le discours sur le féminin, par le féminin, et avec/sans le masculin, réalise, par le biais de l’écoute aux portes—une forme de réécriture—un autre réel à la fois possible et plausible.
English :
The cult of true womanhood in the South emphasized and upheld specific gender roles that restricted women to the private sphere while allowing men free movement to explore and perform in the public world. Not only do these gender prescriptions specify what women are like, but they also dictate norms about how women should behave.  This prescription of normative gender roles, of course, raises one fundamental question: through what channel(s) of opportunity could women seek their own identity? Mitchell suggests channels of opportunity for women (and men alike), I believe, by resorting to the eavesdropping scenes found in her novel, Gone with the Wind; scenes which contribute to the structural dynamics of the plot. By definition the act of eavesdropping turns the secret witness into one that unintentionally or deliberately acquires pieces of information that were not meant to be disclosed. The eavesdropped thus runs the risk of having his or her secrets fall into the “wrong” ears. Eavesdropping or overhearing also implies a particular placement of a listener in space; a space that transgresses the binaries of public and private areas and one that actually makes the relations between gender, identity, narrative and social agency more complex than what society and ideology often dictated. Although a number of critics have examined issues of gender, femininity and masculinity in Mitchell’s novels, none has considered specifically how eavesdropping (and its attendant anxiety/desire to protect or disclose secrecy) helps shape the story and comments on its ideological implications. As I would like to argue, eavesdropping could serve as a female (and male) liberating  experience, an opportunity that could be sought, not in transgressing the boundaries between private and public/business spaces (from which Scarlett gets so much condemnation) but in the very same gendered space that both men and women were often confined to.

Literature of the U.S. South. Our focus in the American Literature seminar this year will be on the long, grand, and problematic tradition of U.S. Southern literature, especially fiction in both comic and tragic modes as it developed after the Civil War to the present. The South has given the U.S. some of its greatest writers, while also enacting perhaps more powerfully than any other region the nation's ongoing internal debate regarding the nation's ideals vs. its realities, equality vs. rampant inequities, an obsession with the past and yet also a propulsive drive to seize the future. Most well known for a focus on the paradoxes of "race" in both the individual and national psyche, southern literature also exemplifies imaginative writers' concerns with regional history and memory; oral story-telling as a source of inspiration for textual experiment; and a long tradition of understanding that local, regional, ethnic, and racial identities are always marked by global connections and crossings-especially the U.S. South's deep cultural connections to "other" tropical Souths in the Caribbean and Latin American that also experienced plantation slavery, colonialism, civil wars, and nationalism.

Text re-constructed from two novels; Austin Clarkes ‘Twice Round the Black Church: Early Memories of England and Ireland’ (1962) and Mary Margaret Mitchells ‘Gone With The Wind’ (1936) commissioned on the occasion of the exhibition 'It is Not On Any Map, True Places Never Are', Youghal, 2014. Curated by Maria Tanner. http://www.itisnotonanymaptrueplacesneverare.eu/

Frankly, my dear, I don't give a damn." As Rhett Butler had said to Scarlett as he leaves her in despair. Not only was Scarlett left in despair in this film, but also the thousands of African Americans that were historically a part of the Civil War. The film itself claims it to be accurate to history as the depiction of the Civil War between the North and the South. However, it failed to deal with the underlying issue of slavery and racism. The war itself was over the fight for slave states versus free states, and many slavery supporters in the south claims the war as "The Northern Aggression." The production of this film was in the Golden Age of Hollywood, but with that comes the blanketing of important social issues regarding the key players of the Civil War and key citizens of the country, the African Americans. Gone With the Wind was a classic Hollywood film, but also extremely racist and historically diluted.

This chapter discusses the relationship between classical music and regional identity in literature about the U.S. South in the nineteenth and early-to-mid-twentieth century. It features a spotlight on classical music and the South in James Weldon Johnson's "Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man."

De curând s-a deschis și la noi o polemică destul de contondentă pe tema rasismului, stârnită de un scurt-metraj al lui Radu Jude. Montajul, în pofida simpatiei (critice) pe care o am pentru cineast, mi se pare discutabil, din mai multe motive, pe care n-o să le comentez aici, mai ales că polemica, provocatoare și excesivă (vezi aici și aici), a prilejuit și lovituri colaterale dintre cele mai nedrepte.

Es la película más famosa de todos los tiempos, la cumbre del Hollywood dorado y del sistema de estudios. Lo que el viento se llevó es la película perfecta y la favorita de mucha gente. El cómo fue posible algo tan majestuoso y legendario constituye la producción y el rodaje más emblemáticos de la Historia del Cine. La compra de derechos del libro, las candidatas al papel de Escarlata O´Hara, la alternancia de directores, los guiones solapados, las duras negociaciones para poder contar con Clark Gable, la dirección artística, la colosal música de Max Steiner, el impresionante vestuario de Walter Plunkett, las influencias…

Este libro celebra el ochenta aniversario de esta obra maestra a través de la mirada de varios autores de prestigio que la analizan desde múltiples perspectivas.

Despite its widespread familiarity, Max Steiner’s Tara theme from Gone With the Wind has received only occasional attention from scholars. This chapter offers the first historical investigation of the theme itself, including its emergence in strikingly different films written for a different studio. Study of these thematic prototypes shows the Tara theme to be a creative reconciling of conflicting tensions over film narrative (in particular, the musical characterization of race and second-generation immigrants) and professional circumstances (Steiner’s ambivalent attitude towards his competing employers).
Close study of Steiner’s reliance upon assistant composers in Gone With the Wind further reveals that the theme’s placement in the film reflects sensitivity to narrative trajectory and differing views of the theme’s role in Gone With the Wind. Featuring original research of production documents and manuscript scores, this study shows that Tara’s theme carries considerable baggage.