by William Thornton » Sun Feb 02, 2014 7:48 am
I have just completed Margaret Mitchell's one and only book, one of the most popular books of all time, Gone With The Wind. I've had an old copy on my shelf for some time (no, not a first edition or you would have seen that for sale here and elsewhere), pulled it down and read it, all 700 pages of it, two columns per page. In other editions GWTW comes out to fully 1000 pages, vastly more than Fox would attempt to read, but I take it that he has hit the Wiki summary of it.
Fie on fictional Yoknapatawpha, I'm sticking with nearby, and quite real, Clayton County, GA, and the imaginary Tara. Look, scads of Japanese make the trek to Atlanta, Mitchell's home and GWTW Mecca, looking for hoop skirts and stays (Scarlett had a 17 inch waist when so dressed and lamented having a 20 inch waist after bearing children), Southern Belles, and plantations. God surely has a sense of humor in that in the popular culture ground zero for slavery, plantations, white columned antebellum plantation houses is Georgia and that the same location is also ground zero for MLK, Jr and the Movement.
What strikes me first is that no publisher would touch GWTW these days, since it is rife with the "n" word - "n" this, and "n" that, "free issue n...s", "house n...s", "field n...s", and more. Even the lesser offending terminology might make modern editors uncomfortable - pickaninny, darkie, etc.
Critics slam the stereotypes, the stout and always present, Mammy "Oh, Miss Melly, it been awful! An' it's gwine be wuss, an' folks gwine talk sumpin' scan'lous." The shifless and indolent Prissy, "Fo' Gawd, Miss Scarlett! We's got ter have a doctah, Ah - Ah - Miss Scarlett, Ah doan know nuthin' 'bout bringing' babies." Toss in Big Sam, oversized field hand, various house slaves, Pork and Uncle Peter, drunken Irish, Gerald O'Hara.
Presumably, references to evil Yankees and assorted carpetbaggers and scalawags are still acceptable.
Mitchell, as seen in the above quotes, uses the actual pronunciations when slaves or freed slaves talk. In my years in Georgia I hear the same vocabulary: 'gwine' for 'going', 'sot' for 'set', etc.
The other thing that strikes me about the book is that all of my impressions about the characters, Tara, Atlanta are forever calibrated to the movie with Vivien Leigh and Clark Gable as Scarlett and Rhett; Hattie McDaniel, who won an Oscar for Mammy; Butterfly McQueen as Prissy. Try as I may, even with the book's authentic dialogue (no not "Frankly my dear, I don't give a ****" but rather "My dear, I don't give a ****." The mental fixation on the movie personalities is why I avoided Mel Gibson's "The Passion of the Christ." I'd rather form my own mental images of Jesus, the Crucifixion and Resurrection, than be stuck with Gibson's.
GWTW is safely in the popular culture and references to it pop up everwhere.
My stray thoughts on SBC stuff may be found at my blog,