The Wind Is Never Gone: Sequels, Parodies and Rewritings of Gone with the Wind

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The Wind Is Never Gone

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The Wind Is Never Gone Sequels, Parodies and Rewritings of Gone with the Wind M. CARMEN GÓMEZ-GALISTEO

McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers Jefferson, North Carolina, and London

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGUING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

Gómez-Galisteo, M. Carmen, ¡982– The wind is never gone : sequels, parodies and rewritings of Gone with the wind / M. Carmen Gómez-Galisteo. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-7864-5927-8 softcover : 50# alkaline paper ¡. Mitchell, Margaret, 1900 –1949. Gone with the wind. 2. Mitchell, Margaret, 1900–1949.—Parodies, imitations, etc.— History and criticism. 3. Mitchell, Margaret, 1900–1949.— Adaptations. 4. Mitchell, Margaret, 1900–1949.—Influence. 5. African Americans in literature. 6. Slavery in literature. 7. Plantation life in literature. I. Title. PS3525.I972G68275 2011 813'.52 — dc23 2011017368 BRITISH LIBRARY CATALOGUING DATA ARE AVAILABLE

© 2011 M. Carmen Gómez-Galisteo. All rights reserved No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying or recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. Front cover image: Clark Gable as Rhett Butler and Vivien Leigh as Scarlett O’Hara in Gone with the Wind, 1939 (MGM/Photofest) Manufactured in the United States of America

McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers Box 6¡¡, Je›erson, North Carolina 28640 www.mcfarlandpub.com

To my parents and sister, with love

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Table of Contents Preface

1

Introduction: I Have Been Unfaithful to Thee, Scarlett!

3

1. Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell

15

2. To Be Continued: Scarlett by Alexandra Ripley and the Failed Sequels Commissioned to Emma Tennant and Pat Conroy

36

3. Copyright Not Gone with the Wind

55

4. The Gone with the Wind Parodies: The Wind Done Gone by Alice Randall and “Frankly, Scarlett, I Do Give a Damn” by Beverly West and Nancy Peske

79

5. Rhett Butler’s Side of the Story: Rhett Butler’s People by Donald McCaig

107

6. Gone with the Wind Fan Fiction

124

7. The Gone with the Wind Canon

155

Conclusion: Is It Gone with the Wind?

173

Bibliography

183

Index

203

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Preface With the spirit of her people who would not know defeat, even when it stared them in the face, she raised her chin. She could get Rhett back. She knew she could. There had never been a man she couldn’t get, once she set her mind upon him. “I’ll think of it all tomorrow, at Tara. I can stand it then. Tomorrow, I’ll think of some way to get him back. After all, tomorrow is another day.”1

Three quarters of a century after its original publication in 1936, Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell has never fallen out of print. It has become an icon of American culture and it has met with similar success abroad, enjoying immense popularity in Japan, Russia and post–World War II Europe. Millions of readers worldwide have alternately been frustrated and encouraged by the novel’s open ending — will Scarlett get Rhett back? Even if he did not give a damn, countless readers certainly did. Because of the ambiguous ending as well as Mitchell’s refusal to give an answer as to what happened next, this question has been a heated topic of discussion for decades and was the starting point for two authorized sequels commissioned by Mitchell’s heirs. However, these are not the only fictional works that have attempted to resolve the end of Gone with the Wind. The nineties saw the publication of a controversial parody and, more recently, a multitude of fan fiction stories has appeared on the internet. There is a large number of books devoted to Gone with the Wind from very different perspectives— the writing of the novel, the filming of the movie, Mitchell’s biography, Mitchell’s relationship with her second husband, the historical accuracy of the novel, the language of the novel from a discourse analysis approach, the psychology and characteristics of Gone with the Wind fans, the merchandising. Even though there are several articles on The Wind Done Gone, most of which have focused on the court case that threatened it, there is no serious academic work analyzing the continuations of Gone with the Wind. This book examines not only the two authorized sequels, Scarlett by Alexandra Ripley and Rhett Butler’s People by Donald McCaig, as well as the unauthorized parody The Wind Done Gone by Alice Randall, but also the numerous Gone with the 1

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Wind fan fiction stories and a humorous, politically correct parody. The following chapters analyze the ending of Gone with the Wind and its call for a sequel, the perceived need to publish an authorized sequel, the impetus for an African American writer to write a novel from the perspective of the slaves, the legal battles to determine who may re-write Gone with the Wind and under what circumstances, the commissioning of a second authorized sequel and Gone with the Wind fan fiction. In dealing with these texts, I examine a number of topics such as race relations, gender roles, the portrayal of motherhood, the interrelationship between the concepts of womanhood and masculinity, and other matters that are raised by Gone with the Wind and its continuations. Considerations such as historical circumstances, changing moral values, or restrictions imposed by genre conventions are taken into account to reveal how all these texts redefine or challenge our understanding of Gone with the Wind.

Notes 1. Margaret Mitchell, Gone with the Wind, special commemorative 60th-anniversary edition (New York: Warner Books, 1999), chapter LXIII. Because of the many editions of the novel, I indicate chapter numbers to make locating the quotations easier.

Introduction: I Have Been Unfaithful to Thee, Scarlett! I don’t think [Gone with the Wind] will sell because it’s about a woman who is in love with another woman’s husband and they do nothing about it, and because there are only four Goddamns and one dirty word in it.1 I have forgot much, Cynara! gone with the wind, Flung roses, roses riotously with the throng, Dancing, to put thy pale, lost lilies out of mind; But I was desolate and sick of an old passion, Yea, all the time, because the dance was long: I have been faithful to thee, Cynara! in my fashion.2

There are very few works in the history of literature that have generated the enthusiasm and enduring popularity worldwide as Gone with the Wind. At the seventy-fifth anniversary of its publication in 1936, the novel remains immensely popular and is still in print. Its appeal has been compared to that of Charles Dickens’ works in Victorian England, with politicians, teachers, scholars, journalists, social commentators and preachers all making reference to Gone with the Wind.3 Many a minister spoke from his pulpit about the novel and the lessons to be learned from it, which is surprising considering that it does not deal with religion at all despite the religious revival that the South experienced during the Civil War. 4 Estimates contend that there are at least 185 editions of the novel, much to the delight of diehard fans who devote large portions of their time and money to track them down. Because of Mitchell’s customary refusal to sign autographs, the most valued and highly priced copies are the autographed ones, estimated to number around 3,500 copies. While Clark Gable and Vivien Leigh appearing on American editions is rare, mostly limited to editions commemorating the filming of the cinematographic adaptation, most of the foreign editions of Gone with the Wind have Gable and Leigh on the cover. Even the 2009 German edition of Rhett Butler’s People (titled Rhett), published by Hoffman and Campel, 3

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features on its cover the scene where Rhett is about to leave Scarlett on her way to Tara after fleeing a burning Atlanta. More than thirty million copies have been sold worldwide, a figure increasing every year, for it still sells more copies than many current best-sellers. It all began when former local Atlanta journalist Margaret Mitchell (1900 – 1949), though reluctant to publicly acknowledge the existence of the novel on which she had been working for a decade (notorious in the woman who, as a young lady, had enjoyed scandalizing the conservative Atlanta society), somewhat hesitantly submitted her yet untitled manuscript to Macmillan editor Harold Latham, then visiting Atlanta. The rest is (publishing) history. When the novel appeared in June 1936, after a lengthy editing process, it became the biggest American best-seller up to then (and most probably, the fastest one, too), which has stained the book’s critical standing (which was further stained by the success of the eponymous movie).6 George Goodwin, Pulitzer Prize–winning author, described the fascination that Gone with the Wind generated: “All the girls were busy reading. You can’t imagine how that thing swept Atlanta in the summer of 1936. There were just lots of stories of people who stayed up all night to read it. I finally got a copy of it and I can understand why. Damn hard to put down.”7 Older women, men and schoolchildren read it, too, much to Mitchell’s dismay because of the information about childbirth it contained. 8 As New York Times critic Frank S. Nugent put it, “You had to read it in self defense, if for no other reason.”9 Even more surprisingly, an all–American novel, dealing with such a specifically American topic as the War Between the States, succeeded in appealing not only to Northern and Southern American readers alike but to foreign readers as well. It turned out that the Southern myth was not only the American myth, but a universal tale of survival.10 In Mitchell’s lifetime, Japanese pirate editions were a source of constant worry for her, while in Nazi-occupied France the novel became for the French a symbol of resistance against oppressive government. The Nazi government had at first allowed and even encouraged the reading of Gone with the Wind, believing that the French would readily identify the Yankees with the Allies and consequently reject American help. However, they early on found out that the French regarded themselves as poor Confederates oppressed by Nazis instead of Yankees. In the French people’s minds, such a genuinely American organization as the Ku Klux Klan, portrayed in the novel as an organization to restrain gone-out-of-hand former slaves turned thieves and rapists, came to parallel the French Resistance; actually, the French publisher of Gone with the Wind was a collaborationist. Realizing their mistake too late, Nazi authorities banned the book in all the territories under their control until the end of the war, but even that did not prevent it from circulating on the black market.11 This is not to say that Gone with the Wind did not appeal to the Germans

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themselves, for it was a favorite book in Germany, too. Hitler’s lover, Eva Braun, listed Mitchell as one of her favorite authors.12 In Germany the film was released in 1953, running for two and a half years in East Berlin to an audience of 600,000 viewers. Though the Spanish Civil War had virtually nothing to do with the American Civil War (a military uprising against the democratically elected government after the flight of the royal family and the subsequent instauration of the Republic), foreign soldiers fighting on both sides read the novel at night in their campsites, finding it to be representative of their own struggle.13 Because of Hollywood’s boycott of those countries that had assisted Germany during the Second World War, the movie was not released in Spain until 1950 and in the midst of controversy — Melanie’s speech at the bazaar was suspected of being a defense of the Spanish Communist armies on the grounds of director George Cukor’s support and admiration for the Communist leader Dolores Ibarruri, “La Pasionaria.” With this, Gone with the Wind joined the ranks of Hollywood films accused by Franco’s government of having taken the side of the Republicans. 14 Once the war was over, the European sales of Gone with the Wind increased, which Mitchell mentioned in a letter in 1949, explaining that “the demand is now greater than before the war because almost every country in Europe knows what it means to be … besieged by an enemy.”15 In the Soviet Union, in spite of being forbidden, it continued to be a favorite read, even though Communist thinkers attacked the novel as fascist for its glorification of a slavery-based economic system that favored the existence of a small number of vast plantations and the creation of social inequality.16 Mitchell credited the sustaining popularity of the novel to its theme: If the novel has a theme it is that of survival. What makes some people able to come through catastrophes and others, apparently just as able, strong and brave, go under? It happens in every upheaval. Some people survive; others don’t. What qualities are in those who fight their way through triumphantly that are lacking in those who go under…? I only know that the survivors used to call that quality “gumption.” So I wrote about the people who had gumption and the people who didn’t.17

The novel’s mythical qualities or its combination of “the time-tested ingredients of successful popular literature — adventure, war, social upheaval, romantic passion”— have been mentioned as a reason for its popularity as well as “the big yet comfortably familiar theme that Miss Mitchell has chosen.”18 John Marsh, Mitchell’s husband, credited the success of the novel to the fact that it contained “all the great elemental experiences of life: birth, love, marriage, death, hunger, jealousy, hate, greed, joy and loneliness.”19 A further reason for the popularity of Gone with the Wind is that it offered information on a vast array of aspects of American life during the nineteenth century such as the Civil War itself, history, medicine, psychology, sociology, and more, appealing to a number of readers and professionals.20

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Although less kind critics have, instead, credited its vast appeal to the novel’s “amorphous quality” (and, therefore, anyone’s ability to relate to it), it is almost impossible to find a person who has never watched the movie or read the novel or who, at the very least, is not familiar with its protagonist, Scarlett O’Hara.21 No longer just a literary character, Scarlett O’Hara has become a part of the cultural imagination of people around the world. Gone with the Wind has generated a multitude of byproducts. All the details concerning the book and cinematographic adaptation have been dutifully recorded, both by the contemporary press and by later scholarly books. There are books chronicling the three-day premiere in Atlanta and the commemorative events organized around it and cataloguing Gone with the Wind memorabilia and merchandising products.22 Several biographies of Mitchell have been published and even Mitchell’s relationship with her second husband has been the topic of a book, Margaret Mitchell and John Marsh: The Love Story Behind Gone with the Wind by Marianne Walker (1993), written partially out of Mitchell’s family-in-law’s dissatisfaction with the way in which the Marshes’ marital relationship had been portrayed.23 The process of writing the novel and the consequences of its subsequent and immediate success for Mitchell’s life have been the inspiration of a TV movie, A Burning Passion: The Margaret Mitchell Story (1994), starring 90210-famous actress Shannen Doherty and featuring Clark Gable’s posthumous son. Selznick’s battle to have Gone with the Wind turned into a movie was also dramatized by Ron Hutchinson in Moonlight and Magnolias, which played in London.24 Additionally, there are several books that contain references to Gone with the Wind or Scarlett in their titles, some more or less closely related to Gone with the Wind, others having nothing to do with the novel at all. Thus, we have Helen Taylor’s Scarlett’s Women: Gone with the Wind and Its Female Fans (1989), which needs no explanation thanks to its title; the autobiography of Evelyn Keyes, who played Suellen O’Hara, Scarlett O’Hara’s Younger Sister: My Lively Life in and Out of Hollywood (1977); and the scholarly Scarlett Doesn’t Live Here Anymore: Southern Women in the Civil War Era (2000) by Laura F. Edwards or Scarlett’s Sisters: Young Women in the Old South (2007) by Anya Jabour, an analysis of the lives of Southern women who had very little to do with Mitchell’s portrayal of Scarlett. Another scholarly work making reference to Gone with the Wind is Tara Revisited: Women, War and the Plantation Legend (1996)— whose author, Catherine Clinton, incidentally, was later one of the personalities signing a public letter supporting Alice Randall’s right to publish The Wind Done Gone.25 Though Rhett Butler might not, readers frankly do give a damn about what happened after he left and have longed to know if tomorrow is another day in which Scarlett O’Hara will get her estranged husband back. Mitchell was constantly besieged by requests to write another novel, or at least an additional chapter, putting these questions to rest, which she always turned

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down. She died in 1949, thirteen years after the publication of the novel, leaving the lovers apart. In the nineties, however, Mitchell’s heirs decided to have a sequel to Gone with the Wind written in which the lovers were to be reunited. A pool of writers was selected, and finally the choice was Alexandra Ripley, a Southern-born romance writer. The choice was controversial from the very beginning and criticisms grew harsher after the romance quality of the sequel, Scarlett, became evident. Moreover, the negative reception of Scarlett inevitably took its toll on the critical consideration of Gone with the Wind. The making of the television miniseries based on Scarlett, with its wellpublicized worldwide search for the new Scarlett O’Hara, revived old questions about the seriousness of a book read and enjoyed by millions of people around the world. “Scarlett O’Hara was not beautiful, but men seldom realized it when caught by her charm as the Tarleton twins were,” and neither have her readers failed to appreciate her charm, which does not relent its grip after the novel’s ending.26 For Mitchell, the love story between Rhett and Scarlett ended where the novel ended and she claimed to know nothing else. Her readers, though, wanted to know more. Gone with the Wind is unique in that not one but two sequels have been authorized, with the second in contradiction to the first. While Ripley had as her only goal to let Scarlett win Rhett back, Donald McCaig, the writer of Rhett Butler’s People, had not read Gone with the Wind before he was commissioned by Mitchell’s heirs to write the second sequel and faced a tough challenge. McCaig, who focused on the Civil War to explore Rhett’s perspective on the events narrated in Gone with the Wind, found Mitchell’s treatment of slavery disturbing from a twenty-first-century point of view and decided to change Mitchell’s sweet and mild picture of slavery into a more realistic one, such as he had in his previous novel, Jacob’s Ladder. Apart from the effects that the passing of time has had in the critical evaluation of the novel and its literary quality, time has also brought about major changes in the reconsideration of African Americans. A lot of things have changed in regards to African Americans’ rights since Mitchell wrote her novel. In Gone with the Wind, slaves are presented as childlike, stupid creatures in need of constant guidance and supervision, and Mrs. O’Hara instructs Scarlett to treat the slaves as she would treat children. Alice Randall, a newcomer to literature who had had some hits as a country songwriter, only turned to writing fiction when she found something not told before in Gone with the Wind and which she felt the need to tell: what had happened with the mulatto children of Tara? What were the feelings, emotions, and thoughts of Tara’s dutiful slaves, relegated to the margins in Gone with the Wind? Randall tried to answer these questions and other issues in The Wind Done Gone, but she is not the only one wanting to rewrite Gone with the Wind. More recently, fan fiction writers have also taken the opportunity to have their say about what happened to Rhett and Scarlett, not only after the ending of Gone with the Wind, but also in

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new episodes at different points of the Gone with the Wind chronology or even in Scarlett. Upon opening a book, readers already have certain expectations not only about literary conventions but also about what they might find in terms of structure, characteristics, and so forth.27 With sequels, readers already have an additional number of expectations in regard to characters, setting, tone, and plotline, among other considerations. Because sequels capitalize on stories and plotlines rather than on other literary aspects, sequels are the kind of works favored by readers who value the storyline over stylistic concerns. Novelist E. M. Forster characterized this novel-reader type in the following terms: “What does a novel do? Why, tell a story of course, and I’ve no use for it if it didn’t. Very bad taste on my part, no doubt, but I like a story. You can take your art, you can take your literature, you can take your music, but give me a good story. And I like the story to be a story, mind, and my wife’s the same.”28 Sequel writers have vindicated the worth of their works, pointing out that a sequel is more than a what-happened-next continuation and often abhorring the term “sequel” itself because of the negative connotations attached to it. Thus, Susan Hill, author to the first sequel to Rebecca by Daphne Du Maurier, Mrs. De Winter, claimed that “a sequel is not simply a continuation of the plot — how dull that would be. The plot is always the least important part of any novel. A sequel is a valid novel by a novelist which takes over where the previous writer left off but then develops in very much its own way, its own style and has an existence entirely independent of its original.”29 While most sequels have been critically snubbed, if not attacked, a few sequels are celebrated as honest continuations of the original novels such as Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys (Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë) or Michael Cunningham’s The Hours (Virginia Woolf ’s Mrs. Dalloway). Some authors such as Emma Tennant have earned themselves a reputation as authors of sequels. Tennant, who though she has written some wellregarded original novels, has a penchant for writing sequels, among them the failed sequel to Gone with the Wind (see chapter 2). The heterogeneity of Tennant’s literary production testifies to the different kinds of works she has continued —Sense and Sensibility and Pride and Prejudice (the latter with two sequels) by Jane Austen, The Aspern Papers by Henry James, Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë, and Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson. In general terms, sequels are born out of a perceived absence in the original work — a character left unexplored, an ending deemed unsatisfactory, plotlines not conveniently explained, or characters’ past experiences being too vague. The majority of sequels are written to make amends to unsatisfactory endings because they are too open or too unhappy. Because Gone with the Wind’s ending is both, we have many continuations of Mitchell’s only novel, fleshing out things half-mentioned or half-hidden. For Gérard Genette, “the sequel … continues a work not in order to bring it to a close but, on the contrary, in order to take it beyond what was initially considered to be its end-

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ing. The motive is generally a desire to capitalize on a first or even a second success.” 30 Because of this commercial orientation, sequels are very often accused of being a way to make a quick buck, as has been the case with Mitchell’s heirs for reasons explained in chapter 2. The question of whether a sequel denotes a lack of creativity (using characters already invented) on the part of the sequel writer or if sequel writing is rather a literary challenge (making characters already well known come alive again in a credible manner) has been in the air for a while.31 Intertextual readings of texts try to reveal the connections existing between all texts. Genette in Palimpsestes pointed out that intertextuality between two or more texts can take place as quotation, plagiarism, or allusion.32 Sequels are somewhere in between. For Michel de Certeau, “readers are travellers; they move across lands belonging to someone else, like nomads poaching their way across fields they did not write, despoiling the wealth of Egypt to enjoy it themselves.”33 Although Certeau spoke of readers, sequel writers also poach texts, aware that the potential readers of sequels are not so much interested in the literary aspects of the sequel but in the continuation of an already known (and well-loved) plot. Finally, the democratization of the internet has made it possible for any reader to become an author and rewrite or expand the plot of his favorite novel. To clarify the terminology I will be using, I must say a few words. When I speak of Gone with the Wind as the original novel, I am not passing judgment on the originality of the plot or the characters of Gone with the Wind, but, instead, I use the term “original” with the meaning of Gone with the Wind being the genesis for subsequent writings more or less based on it. In this sense, “originality” to the Renaissance meant “going back to origins,” not warbling your native woodnotes wild. It was only with Edward Young’s eighteenthcentury Conjectures on Original Composition that the emphasis on novelty became linked, in a way many moderns find axiomatic, with a creativity that supposedly owed little to imitation and the great models of the past. But canon formation as we know it might well be regarded as the quest for the perfect sequel.34

Following with my terminology, I will refer to Scarlett and Rhett Butler’s People as “authorized sequels.” Despite the controversial aspect of whether The Wind Done Gone is a parody or a sequel (discussed in chapters 3 and 4), for clarity’s sake, I will refer to it as parody, since that was the label the court finally applied to it and under which it is published. To refer to Scarlett, Rhett Butler’s People, The Wind Done Gone and the several fan-fiction stories as a whole, I use the all-encompassing term “continuations” since The Wind Done Gone was deemed a parody and not a sequel and to avoid confusion with the authorized sequels. I am aware that fan-fiction stories sometimes do not continue the storyline of Gone with the Wind after Mitchell’s ending but, rather, expand an existing scene in Gone with the Wind or create a free-standing

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episode that could conceivably be worked into the original Gone with the Wind narrative, but, for clarity’s sake, I have preferred to label all these texts continuations. Chapter 1 examines Gone with the Wind from literary and sociological perspectives, paying special attention to its open ending, which has called forth the writing of a number of continuations. Chapter 2 analyzes Scarlett by Alexandra Ripley, the first authorized sequel to Gone with the Wind. It also comments on the process that led to Ripley being chosen as the best candidate for writing the continuation of Gone with the Wind and the appalling reviews the novel received. It also explains the reasons why the Margaret Mitchell Trust felt compelled to commission yet another sequel that culminated with the publication of the second authorized sequel, Rhett Butler’s People, in 2007 after a decadelong process. Chapter 3 analyzes the legal battle surrounding the publication of The Wind Done Gone, focusing on the Trust’s efforts to quash it in court. It was not the first time a re-writing of Gone with the Wind was taken to court, but this time the ensuing legal feud tried not only to determine the legality of Alice Randall’s publishing her own version of Gone with the Wind but also to determine if the resulting work was a sequel or a satire (both illegal unless authorized by the copyright holders) or a parody (legal under the fair use provision). Legal scholars, publishers, journalists, writers and academics tried to answer if history and fiction can be rewritten and, if so, who is entitled to rewrite them, taking into account current copyright protection terms, revisionist literary practices, the literary value of The Wind Done Gone, the necessity for positive portrayals of African Americans in fiction, the re-evaluation of slavery in nineteenthcentury America and the questions of whether minorities are allowed to redress when it comes to harmful (even if literary) depictions of them. An issue at the core of the debate was the fact that, although other novels or even history books have presented a harsher and bleaker picture of slavery, this has not diminished the popularity of Mitchell’s novel, with its demeaning opinions of African Americans included. Because Gone with the Wind is far more popular than many other (though more historically accurate in terms of the evils of slavery) literary works, its pernicious effects on perceptions of African Americans were at stake. Chapter 4 studies two parodies of Gone with the Wind: The Wind Done Gone and “Frankly, Scarlett, I Do Give a Damn” by Beverly West and Nancy Peske. To a certain extent, all later African American novels set in the nineteenth-century South can be regarded as a reaction to the flattering portrayal of slavery as a benevolent and paternalistic institution that Gone with the Wind helped perpetuate more than any other (fiction or non-fiction) book. The Wind Done Gone, rather than using the antebellum “good ole days” as the thrust of its attacks, specifically had the depiction of slavery as conveyed in Gone with the Wind as its focus. It is not slavery at large or the generality of African Americans’ conditions under slavery that Randall targets but, rather, how Mitchell

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described these in her novel. That Gone with the Wind was thus singled out for criticism is indicative of its pervasiveness in the collective memory when it comes to our mental images of what the South was like. The second part of chapter 4 focuses on West and Peske’s brief parody of Gone with the Wind. This does not concentrate on the picture of slavery but, instead, on Rhett and Scarlett’s relationship seen through the lens of twenty-first-century notions such as couples’ communication skills, mutual sexual pleasure, self-esteem issues and political correctness. Chapter 5 examines the figure of Rhett Butler in the light of Donald McCaig’s sequel, Rhett Butler’s People. Our assessment as well as our mental image of the character of Rhett Butler are so intimately tied to Clark Gable’s performance that, as British novelist Angela Carter put it, “if you can’t see what’s so irresistible about Clark ‘Jug Ears’ Gable of the Jack o’Lantern grin, then much of the appeal of Gone with the Wind goes out of the window.”35 We fail to realize the fairly stereotypical manner in which Mitchell wrote Rhett, mostly a figure of mystery and an enigma until the very end of the book. It was against this backdrop that Donald McCaig had to make his own Rhett come alive as a flesh-and-bone man of action. While Gone with the Wind is the Civil War as seen by Scarlett O’Hara, Rhett Butler’s People is Rhett’s take on the war and his relationship with Scarlett. At the same time, McCaig created a more politically correct version of Mitchell’s Rhett, whitening the darker aspects of Rhett’s figure Gone with the Wind hinted at. By concentrating on the “male stuff,” McCaig, in turn, sacrificed the female characters, who come out as weak, unappealing and dull, devoid of life and almost of all interest. Chapter 6 deals with the fan fiction stories posted on the internet. Away from copyright infringement lawsuits, spared from judicial dictations on issues such as plagiarism, fair use, copyright protection or unauthorized sequels, fan fiction stories proliferate on the World Wide Web. Internet posting allows authors to hone their writing skills by writing stories featuring their favorite characters. That Rhett and Scarlett are out of character or that they closely resemble Mitchell’s depiction is altogether a secondary matter; sometimes they do not even live in nineteenth-century Atlanta but are in a high school setting in 2009 or in Nashville, Tennessee, in 1963. They quarrel, they love each other (or other people), they hate each other, they relive key episodes in Gone with the Wind or take a different turn, going in directions Mitchell never had them taking, they follow the course of Scarlett or they challenge (and even mock) it. The important thing in fan fiction is that these stories explore other aspects of these well-loved characters, or even create new personality traits for them, following their authors’ likes and dislikes or twenty-first-century trends and habits. Chapter 7 analyzes the Gone with the Wind canon, with the peculiarity that there are two authorized sequels— one in contradiction with the other, with the second denying the first sequel’s sequence of events after the original

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Introduction

novel. The picture is further complicated with the inclusion of The Wind Done Gone, which offers an alternative version of Scarlett O’Hara’s family background — as well as yet another ending to Rhett and Scarlett after Mitchell’s ending. Beverly West and Nancy Peske’s short story rereads the protagonists’ relationship in a politically correct manner. And, finally, a great number of fanfiction stories perform different goals— some reinterpret Gone with the Wind, others expand it, a few add additional episodes, most continue it after the end, some other stories place Rhett and Scarlett in such different settings as twentyand twenty-first-century locales or even have them meet Mulder and Scully (of The X-Files), Bones and Booth (Bones), and Laurie Lawrence and Amy March (Little Women). The conclusion compiles several examples of the lasting influence of Gone with the Wind in several high and popular culture texts (Flannery O’Connor’s short stories, Toni Morrison’s novels, The Simpsons) and offers some conclusions and afterthoughts about the pervasiveness and the enduring impact of Gone with the Wind in the American imagination.

Notes 1. Margaret Mitchell quoted in Anne Edwards, Road to Tara: The Life of Margaret Mitchell, Author of Gone with the Wind (1983; London: Orion, 1996), 8. 2. Ernest Dowson, “Non Sum Qualis Eram Bonae Sub Regno Cynarae.” 3. Edwin Granberry, “The Private Life of Margaret Mitchell,” in Gone with the Wind as Book and Film, ed. Richard Harwell (1983; New York: Paragon House, 1987), 51. 4. Ralph McGill, “Little Woman, Big Book: The Mysterious Margaret Mitchell,” in Harwell, Gone with the Wind as Book and Film, 76. 5. “Gone with the Wind: The Legend Lives On as a Musical of the Novel Hits the West End,” The Independent, March 24, 2008, independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/theatre-dance/features/gonewith-the-wind-the-legend-lives-on-as-a-musical-of-the-novel-hits-the-west-end-799744.html (accessed January 19, 2010); Marianne Walker, Margaret Mitchell and John Marsh: The Love Story Behind Gone with the Wind (Atlanta: Peachtree Publishers, 1993), 253; John Wiley, Jr., “Everything Scarlett,” BIBLIO Magazine (1997), gwtwbooks.com/EverythingScarlett/scarlett.htm (accessed December 15, 2009). 6. Edward Wagenknecht in Robert E. May, “Gone with the Wind as Southern History: A Reappraisal,” The Southern Quarterly 17 (1978): 51. 7. Quoted in “The Story Behind Gone with the Wind,” Margaret Mitchell Trust, gwtw.org/ gonewiththewind.html (accessed February 6, 2008); see Robert Drake, “The Book, the Movie, the Dream,” Mississippi Quarterly 44, no. 2 (1991): 183 –192, for the author’s personal recollections of how the Gone with the Wind phenomenon gripped America in the thirties. 8. Edwards, Road to Tara, 245. 9. Quoted in Roland Flamini, Scarlett, Rhett, and a Cast of Thousands: The Filming of Gone with the Wind (New York: Macmillan; London: Collier Macmillan, 1975), 13. 10. Jerome Stern, “Gone with the Wind: The South as America,” Southern Humanities Review 6 (1976), 5. 11. Margaret Mitchell, Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind Letters, 1936 –1949, ed. Richard Harwell (New York: Macmillan; London: Collier Macmillan, 1976), 395; Finis Farr, Margaret Mitchell of Atlanta: The Author of Gone with the Wind (New York: William Morrow, 1965), 216; Dieter Meindl, “A Reappraisal of Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind,” Mississippi Quarterly 34, no. 4 (1981): 414. 12. Mitchell, Letters, 381; Meindl, “Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind,” 414; Patricia Storace, “Look Away, Dixie Land,” The New York Review of Books 38, no. 21 (1991): 24.

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13. Meindl, “Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind,” 414. 14. Evangelina Rodríguez Cuadros, “La escenografía histórica de un mito: Sociedad y literatura en Gone with the Wind de Margaret Mitchell,” in Studies in American Literature: Essays in Honor of Enrique García Díez, ed. Antonia Sánchez Macarro (Valencia: Servei de Publicacions de la Universitat de València, 1991), 158; “Lo que el viento se llevó,” promotional pamphlet, special showing of Gone with the Wind, April 26, 2010 (Cine Callao, Madrid, Spain); Flamini, Cast of Thousands, 228; Pablo León Aguinaga, “State-Corporate Relations, Film Trade and the Cold War: The Failure of MPEAA’s Strategy in Spain, 1945 –1960,” Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television 29, no. 4 (2009): 486. 15. Quoted in Meindl, “Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind,” 414. 16. Farr, Margaret Mitchell of Atlanta, 131; Meindl, “Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind,” 414. 17. Quoted in “Margaret Mitchell and Her Novel Gone with the Wind,” promotional material issued by Macmillan (New York: Macmillan, 1936), etext.virginia.edu/railton/popfiction/gwtwpromo. html (accessed January 22, 2010). 18. Marian J. Morton, “‘My Dear, I Don’t Give a Damn’: Scarlett O’Hara and the Great Depression,” Frontiers 5, no. 3 (1981): 52; O. Levitski and O. Dumer, “Color Symbolism and Mythology in Margaret Mitchell’s Novel Gone with the Wind,” Americana: The American Popular Culture Online Magazine (September 2006), americanpopularculture.com/archive/bestsellers/mitchell .htm (accessed February 27, 2008); Helen Deiss Irvin, “Gea in Georgia: A Mythic Dimension in Gone with the Wind,” in Recasting: Gone with the Wind in American Culture, ed. Darden Asbury Pyron (1983; Miami: University Press of Florida, 1984), 68; Crowley quoted in María Rosa Cabellos Castilla, Estudio de las formas de tratamiento y de la cortesía en la novela Gone with the Wind, de Margaret Mitchell (Alcalá de Henares: Servicio de Publicaciones de la Universidad de Alcalá, 2005), 63. 19. Quoted in Edwards, Road to Tara, 137. 20. Cynthia Marylee Molt, Gone with the Wind on Film: A Complete Reference (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 1990), xi–xii. 21. Storace, “Look Away, Dixie Land,” 24. 22. Herb Bridges, Gone with the Wind: The Three-Day Premiere in Atlanta (Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 1999); Herb Bridges, “Frankly, My Dear…”: Gone with the Wind Memorabilia (Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 1996). 23. Walker, Margaret Mitchell and John Marsh, ix. 24. “Gone with the Wind: The Legend Lives On.” 25. Ben H. Bagdikian, et al., “Letter of Support,” houghtonmifflinbooks.com/features/randall _url/letter.shtml (accessed January 25, 2010). 26. Mitchell, GWTW, chapter 1. 27. Peter J. Rabinowitz, “The Turn of the Glass Key: Popular Fiction as Reading Strategy,” Critical Inquiry 11, no. 3 (1985): 420. 28. Quoted in LaTourette Stockwell, “Best Sellers and the Critics: A Case History,” The English Journal 44, no. 1 (1955): 17. 29. Susan Hill, “Mrs. de Winter,” The Books, susan-hill.com/pages/books/the_books/mrs_ de_winter.asp (accessed January 12, 2009). 30. Quoted in Marjorie Garber, “‘I’ll Be Back’: Review of Part Two: Reflections on the Sequel” London Review of Books 21, no. 16 (1999) lrb.co.uk/v21/n16/marjorie-garber/ill-be-back/print (accessed January 19, 2010). 31. Marianne Brace, “‘Last Night I Dreamt I Went to Manderley Again…’ and Again and Again,” The Independent, September 29, 2001, independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/reviews/rebeccastale-y-sally-beauman-752125.html (accessed January 9, 2009); Philip Hensher, “What Rebecca Did Next, If You Care,” The Observer, 23 September 2001, guardian.co.uk/books/2001/sep/23/fiction.features (accessed January 9, 2009). 32. Robert Stam, “From Text to Intertext,” in Film Theory: An Introduction (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000), 201. 33. Quoted in Henry Jenkins, Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture (New York and London: Routledge, 1992), 24. 34. Garber, “I’ll Be Back.” 35. Angela Carter, “The Belle as Businessperson,” in Shaking a Leg: Journalism and Writings (London: Chatto & Windus, 1997), 377.

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1 Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell Scarlett O’Hara was not beautiful, but men seldom realized it when caught by her charm as the Tarleton twins were. In her face were too sharply blended the delicate features of her mother, a Coast aristocrat of French descent, and the heavy ones of her florid Irish father. But it was an arresting face, pointed of chin, square of jaw. Her eyes were pale green without a touch of hazel, starred with bristly black lashes and slightly tilted at the ends. Above them, her thick black brows slanted upward, cutting a startling oblique line in her magnolia-white skin—that skin so prized by Southern women and so carefully guarded with bonnets, veils and mittens against hot Georgia suns.1

The year 1934 saw the publication of a novel dealing with a family saga during the American Civil War that immediately became a best-seller. It got excellent reviews with a sole exception and was reprinted twenty times in 1935 alone, the same year that its cinematographic adaptation was released. No, we are not referring to Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell, but to So Red the Rose by Stark Young. Because of the many similarities between the two novels, Mitchell’s husband did not allow her to read So Red the Rose, out of fear that this would provoke her into another writer’s block and dissatisfaction with her own manuscript. This had often happened to her after reading other Civil War works such as the Pulitzer Prize winner John Brown’s Body (1928) by Stephen Vincent Benét.2 Although Young, like Mitchell, felt that his book, rather than a Civil War novel, was “a comment on civilization and living questions and the life of the affections and social standards, not a historical affair,” both So Red the Rose and Gone with the Wind have been primarily identified as Civil War novels.3 To a certain extent, a foundation for the popularity of Gone with the Wind had already been laid by a number of well-liked Civil War novels published in the thirties, when Southern novelists became very popular. Their works, in which they tried to redefine what Southern culture and Southern literature were, can roughly be divided into, on the one hand, Civil War novels trying to rehabilitate the image of the South, a genre that did not fall out of 15

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fashion till well into the sixties, and, on the other hand, novels reflecting the most sordid aspects of the contemporary South, such as Tobacco Road by Erskine Caldwell.4 One of these respected Civil War novels certainly was So Red the Rose, which soon fell into oblivion because of the formidable success of Mitchell’s novel and because its cinematographic adaptation, like all Civil War movies filmed between The Birth of a Nation and Gone with the Wind, was a commercial failure. Civil War novels apart, historical novels in general were very much in vogue during the thirties, as a sign of the nation’s willingness to be swept away by a comforting past from which to derive strength in the face of a distressing future. Non–Civil War best-selling historical novels in the period included, for instance, Anthony Adverse by Hervey Allen and Guns Along the Mohawk by Walter D. Edmonds.5 Mitchell’s writing career up to then, other than her unpublished fiction writings, was limited to her time as a journalist for the Atlanta Journal Magazine. At first Mitchell happily enough claimed that her husband had encouraged her to write a novel of her own once she ran out of books to read from the local library during her convalescence from a broken ankle. All the same, later, angered by some rumors that proclaimed John as the true author of Gone with the Wind, Mitchell denied any help from him whatsoever, afraid of having her authorship challenged or questioned. She stated that the decision of writing a novel came solely from herself, without any suggestion from her husband, although most of her biographers still credit him with having had an important role. Rumors circulated that the author of Gone with the Wind was Mitchell’s father, her brother and even novelist Sinclair Lewis, but she continued claiming that she had written it on her own and exclusively for herself and her husband to read, with no plans to ever attempt publication, for the novel had “precious little obscenity in it, no adultery and not a single degenerate, and I couldn’t imagine a publisher being silly enough to buy it.”6 There are conjectures that Mitchell might have been toying with the idea of writing a Civil War novel since as early as 1907, after having been brought by her mother to visit the former family plantation. Though young Margaret was reportedly precocious, it is a bit premature to claim that a seven-year-old could have begun imagining a novel with the complexity and length of Gone with the Wind at such a tender age, regardless of the influence of the Civil War stories she heard from her parents and relatives. Mitchell began the novel in 1926 and it was almost finished by the end of 1929, some further work being done between 1930 and 1931, with only occasional and minor contributions later on.7 In 1936 Lois Dwight Cole, a friend of Mitchell’s by then working at Macmillan, encouraged editor Harold Latham, touring the South in search for new talents, to call on Mitchell during his visit to Atlanta and ask for the manuscript of the novel on which she had been working for years— even though she had always refused to go into particulars about what it dealt with or in what state of completion it was.

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When the book in its final form turned out to be longer (and therefore, more expensive to produce) than expected, Mitchell’s royalties had to be lowered — a source of distrust and future conflicts between the author and her publisher. Because “$3 … was more than anybody had ever heard of paying for a novel,” Macmillan saw it as a potential threat to its marketability in such rough financial times. Nevertheless, it seemed to stop nobody from buying the novel.8 Immediately after its publication in June 1936, the book became the biggest American best-seller up to then, selling as many as 50,000 copies a day, with one million copies sold by December that year. It stayed on The New York Times best-seller list for over two years, to which it has returned twice since: in 1986, for its fiftieth anniversary, and in 1991, when its first authorized sequel, Scarlett, was published. A popular joke at the time cracked that there were more Gone with the Wind readers than Herbert Hoover voters in 1932.9 Mitchell herself was baffled by these sales and declared that “I cannot figure what makes the thing sell so enormously.”10 In the thirteen years going from the publication of her only novel in 1936 to her premature death at the age of forty-eight in 1949, Mitchell often bitterly complained about how the tremendous success and popularity of her novel had shaped the rest of her life. In an attempt to preserve her private life, she turned down all requests of giving autographs and only gave one interview during her lifetime. In contrast, it is estimated that Mitchell wrote around 20,000 letters to her admirers (she abhorred the term “fan”), which provided a detailed insight into the author’s opinions and feelings.11 For her biographer Anne Edwards, despite her statements to the contrary, Mitchell did try to keep interest in herself alive, given that she had no other book in progress and was unwilling to renounce her fame. Publicly, she never stopped loathing the attention she received and, in a letter to writer Herschel Brickell, she confided that “I’m sure Scarlett O’Hara never struggled harder to get out of Atlanta or suffered more during her siege of Atlanta than I have suffered during the siege that has been on since publication day.”12 The popularity of the novel was such that it generated all kinds of memorabilia in a country that was just going through the Great Depression. There were collectibles and merchandising of all sorts, including bookmarks, postcards, framed stills, pins, lockets, buttons, dolls (beginning with Madame Alexander’s in 1937 to Barbie), plates, Christmas tree decorations, T-shirts, fabric, postcards, figurines, toys, games, chocolates, bows, puzzles, stamps and even drinks.13 Americans found in the novel not only encouragement to cope with the financial distress of the present but also a glorious past characterized by traditional values that were being lost: It was a fine book to come out in the midst of America’s worst depression. Many Americans had lost their social and economic security, and deeply sympathized with the dispossessed Southern aristocrats. But the affinity of the American to the Southerner’s idea of one’s family having a glorious past is deeper and more pervasive than the circumstances of any particular depression. An enormous

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The Wind Is Never Gone number of Americans manifest the rather unegalitarian feeling that their families at one time had more status than they do now. They search through genealogies to discover not their peasant origins but their illustrious forebears; their families once had chateaux or castles, or ships at sea.14

The novel helped encourage the population out of the Depression and spoke about the love for the land at a time when many Americans were leaving the cities to go back to their hometowns.15 Critical acclaim soon followed, comparing Gone with the Wind with such literary classics as William Thackeray’s Vanity Fair and The Memoirs of Barry Lyndon, Esq., Daniel Deronda by George Eliot and Lev Tolstoy’s masterpieces Anna Karenina and War and Peace. Mitchell found some of these comparisons amusing and repeatedly stated that she had been working on Gone with the Wind for already seven years by the time she eventually read Vanity Fair and had never read War and Peace¸ even though during her childhood her mother had tried to force her to.16 The highbrow New York Sun critic Edwin Granberry claimed that “this novel has the strongest claim of any novel on the American scene to be bracketed with the work of the great from abroad — Tolstoi, Hardy, Dickens, and the modern Undset,” being considered “the finest historical novel ever written by an American.”17 Stephen Vincent Benét wrote Mitchell in a letter she treasured that “the story moves and has fire in it, and the reader sits up, wanting to know what happens next. There are lots of books like that when you’re young.… There aren’t so many, now. I admire and respect the serious, high-minded, case histories…. But fiction is still fiction — and when a book keeps going on in your mind, even when you’re not reading it, you don’t need anybody to tell you it’s good. It was that way with ‘GWTW’ [Gone with the Wind].”18 Southern novelist Ellen Glasgow’s review spoke of the novel in the most praising terms, characterizing it as “absorbing. It is a fearless portrayal, romantic yet not sentimental, of a lost tradition and a way of life.”19 J. D. Adams of the New York Times declared it the “best Civil War novel ever written,” Mrs. Franklin Delano Roosevelt commended it in her column, and Yale professor William Lyon Phelps declared it the best novel of 1936.20 In 1937 Gone with the Wind won the American Booksellers Association prize (now called the American Book Award) as well as the Pulitzer Prize, beating, among others, William Faulkner’s Absalom! Absalom!, also set during the Civil War.21 There are several similarities between the two novels other than their publication date and their common theme, with the characters of Quentin Compson and Rhett Butler being employed to reflect their respective authors’ views on miscegenation. Nevertheless, whereas Gone with the Wind exemplifies the conventional historical interpretation of the Reconstruction period, Absalom, Absalom!, written later than Mitchell’s novel, is representative of the reinterpretation of this particular historical moment taking place during the thirties. It is unlikely that Faulkner ever read Gone with the Wind for he had a dislike for long novels, arguing that “no story takes 1000 pages to tell.” Faulkner, who

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did not publish any best-selling novel until 1962, was little known before he won the Nobel Prize, in contrast to Mitchell’s international fame. What is more, Faulkner resented that the cinematographic adaptation of his The Unvanquished was part of the negotiations for the Gone with the Wind filming; actually, screenwriter Sidney Howard abandoned the screenplay to turn to the Gone with the Wind screenplay and The Unvanquished was never filmed.22 Mitchell’s portrayal of the stubborn and brave Scarlett O’Hara owed much to her own personality, though without going so far as to declare that Scarlett is Mitchell’s fictional ego. Although there are obvious autobiographical parallelisms between her own life and some of the events and characters in her novel, Mitchell always vehemently denied a one-to-one correspondence. What is more, Mitchell found, much to her displeasure, that people commented that she looked like Melanie but in personality was more like Scarlett.23 Mitchell, like Scarlett, is said to have been unaware of her being in love with John Marsh, her second husband, by the time that she first married, ironically, to Marsh’s best friend and sometime roommate. But by placing her heroine in the Civil War historical context, she was trying to hinder any possible attempt to identify her with her protagonist.24 Mitchell, who regarded herself as “a product of the Jazz Age, of those short-haired, hard-boiled young women who preachers said would go to Hell or be hanged before they were thirty,” had already written a novella about a flapper in the twenties that she burned after completion. With Gone with the Wind, she was in a way trying to cope with her own life and condition as a Southern woman living in the twenties— the novel is certainly set during the Civil War but it was written from the perspective of the twenties, especially when it comes to women and the changing gender roles in the period.25 In the same manner that The Red Badge of Courage, published in 1895, is more a testimony of the 1890s than of the actual situation in the 1860s, Gone with the Wind tells more about the feelings of the lost generation than of nineteenth-century Southerners. At the time, Mitchell’s novel was so unconventional and challenging because of her portrayal of gender relations and women’s roles: although literary myths and gender roles in the nineteenthcentury South still mar her progress, Scarlett violates a number of contemporary sex and gender values as well as social conventions.26 The revolution Gone with the Wind caused in women’s perception of their own role in the face of a patriarchal system was compared to the social revolution that Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë had caused in England a century earlier.27 With her depiction of the Civil War, Mitchell conflated the War between the States with the War between the Sexes and gender roles. We still should bear in mind that Mitchell wanted to speak about the South, not only about womanhood — Scarlett does not have any kind of gender consciousness or make any demand of political rights for women now that the former slaves are getting them. This constitutes a telling omission, for Mitchell’s mother was a renowned suffragette.28 Yet, Scarlett has had a decisive influence on twentieth-century

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women. The famous advice columnist Ann Landers wrote, “I immediately identified with Scarlett’s determination not to let customs, proprieties, people or events dictate the terms and quality of her life.”29 In the fifties and sixties, Scarlett also posed a role model for women who wanted to be the New Age woman.30 Southern novelist Pat Conroy has acknowledged the weight of Gone with the Wind on women’s liberation, even crediting Mitchell’s influence over his mother, who thought that Gone with the Wind was the best novel ever written, in his becoming a novelist.31 Talking about the upcoming cinematographic adaptation and who was the best performer for each role became a favorite parlor game, dominating private conversations around the country ever since it was known that a film was in the making. The intense press coverage also contributed to generate a sense of expectation.32 Soon enough, who was to play Rhett Butler was decided after fan letters sent to the studio by the thousands and a magazine poll showed that 99 percent of the respondents saw Clark Gable as the best and only possible candidate for the role — despite Gable’s own reluctance. He threatened to walk out of the project several times during negotiations and a few more once filming had already began.33 To test public opinion, in June 1938 Selznick spread the rumor that Scarlett O’Hara and Rhett Butler were to be played by Norma Shearer and Clark Gable. It soon became evident that the public did want Gable and nobody else but the fierce public disapproval she received made Shearer withdraw from the role. Rumors went so far as to far as to claim that Mitchell had actually modeled Rhett Butler after Clark Gable; nothing was further from the truth, for Gable’s casting as Rhett Butler was met with Mitchell’s displeasure. She famously stated that she would have rather had Groucho Marx — though it seems that she later changed her opinion after the Atlanta premiere.34 The casting of Scarlett, however, was a long and arduous process, with most of Hollywood actresses fighting for the role and with tabloids claiming that Mitchell herself was to play her heroine. A widely circulated joke went that every actress whose age ranged from Shirley Temple’s to May Robson’s had auditioned for the role. Thousands of actresses auditioned during two years, a casting that cost more than $92,000 and which subsequently became the plot for a TV movie, The Scarlett O’Hara Wars (1980). The choice of English actress Vivien Leigh could not be less than controversial. Southern fans threatened to picket the movie if Leigh did not deliver while admitting that an English actress was still preferable to a Yankee, in the words of a Daughter of the Confederacy.35 These fears soon proved unfounded, for Leigh took upon herself the task of having the novel faithfully followed, much to producer David O. Selznick’s and director Victor Fleming’s exasperation in spite of the fact that Selznick himself was a firm believer that the cinematographic adaptations of classic literary works should be as faithful to the original as possible.36 Less talked about, but equally important were the constant problems with the screenplay, in which Mitchell refused to collaborate, afraid that significant changes and divergences

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from her novel would make of her a public enemy in the eyes of her millions of readers. For the complex task of turning the novel into a movie, a total of fifteen writers were hired, including Sidney Howard, Jo Swerling, Oliver H. P. Garrett, John Van Druten, Ben Hecht, Winston Miller, Francis Scott Fitzgerald (who wrote in a letter to his daughter Scottie that “it is a good novel — not very original, in fact leaning heavily on The Old Wife’s Tale and Vanity Fair and all that has been written on the Civil War”), and Edwin Justus Mayer, among others, without forgetting Selznick’s active participation.37 However, it was Howard who was given the credit and awarded the corresponding Academy Award. Advertised by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer as “The Greatest Motion Picture Ever Made,” Gone with the Wind was released on December 15, 1939, and before January 1, 1940, it had already sold $1,000,000 in tickets.38 It grossed $390 million, which, adjusted to inflation, amounts to $6 billion (in contrast to Titanic’s earnings of $2.4 billion, also adjusted to inflation). These figures are even more record-breaking after adjusting ticket prices to U.S. gross domestic product per head, which makes Gone with the Wind’s earnings $26 billion in today’s standards. More than 200,000,000 tickets were sold when the U.S. population at the time was just 130 million.39 It won eight Oscars for Best Picture, Best Director, Best Leading Actress, Best Supporting Actress, Best Cinematography in color, Best Film Editing, Best Screenplay, and Best Art Direction as well as two honorary Oscars.40 As a curiosity, newspapers were given the results before the actual ceremony with the agreement that they would not be published until the following day, a rule broken when a newspaper hurried to announce the sweeping victory of Gone with the Wind in its evening edition; since then, newspapers learned of the results at the same time as the rest of the world. Gable, who was a nominee, believed he was not awarded the Oscar because the publicity department of MGM did not champion him. By June 1944, over sixty million people in the United States and Canada had watched the movie. Its first television run broke all records, with CBS paying $35,000,000 for a twenty-year run. It has been theatrically re-released in 1954, 1961, 1967, 1989, and 1998. Gone with the Wind caused a revival of Civil War–themed Hollywood movies, a genre inaugurated with The Birth of a Nation by D. W. Griffith (1915), and until then considered box office poison. Warner Bros. decided to film a Southern-themed movie to capitalize on the public’s interest on the topic. The result was Jezebel (1938), starring Bette Davis, one of the actresses who had fought to get the role of Scarlett O’Hara (she was Mitchell’s favorite candidate) and, for some, a more credible Southern belle than Leigh. There were so many obvious parallelisms between Jezebel and Gone with the Wind that at least one scene had to be deleted from the final print of Jezebel to avoid a lawsuit.41 An “impending cycle of dixie-drawling films” was produced in response to the success of Jezebel, ending with Band of Angels (1957), a very loose adaptation of the eponymous novel, in which Clark Gable played again a Rhett Butler–like character. The novel was thoroughly changed when it was adapted for the screen,

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making the most of the Gone with the Wind connection by means of Gable. This time, Gable played a wealthy man who buys a stubborn Southern belle who after her father’s death and her sudden discovery that her late mother had been a slave discovers that she is legally a slave, being dispossessed of her inheritance and sold South. The film received poor reviews, which, along with the increasingly stronger racial protests about the negative cinematographic portrayal of African Americans, led to the demise of the Civil War–themed Hollywood movies.42 So far Gone with the Wind has sold over 30,000,000 copies worldwide and been translated into thirty-two languages, making it “probably the most widely read — and loved — novel ever written.” Gone with the Wind is the biggest best-selling book in history, second only to the Bible, with no other American novel having sold as many hardback copies.43 Sometimes considered to be a counterattack to Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, the popularity of Gone with the Wind now greatly exceeds that of Stowe’s novel.44 Uncle Tom’s Cabin generated a new genre in nineteenth-century Southern letters, the anti– Tom literature, but it went out of print in the United States immediately after the end of the war (though it continued being widely read in Europe and Russia), and was not printed again until 1948. Still, Stowe’s novel remained America’s best-selling novel till the forties, when Gone with the Wind replaced it. Gone with the Wind’s fame is such that Donald McCaig claimed that, in this regard, its “parallels are Sherlock Holmes and the Bible.”45 Writing in 1937, history professor L. D. Reddick was already warning that “this novel has had and will have an unusual influence in shaping, re-shaping and emphasizing the patterns in the public mind as these relate to the Civil War, Reconstruction and subsequent period. To many persons, who seldom read a history book, Gone with the Wind will represent the true account in fictionalized form of what actually happened” while acknowledging that “this book, no doubt, is honestly written. It is, though, at the same time, written with a passionate sectional and racial bias.”46 Whether teaching about the American Civil War through reading Gone with the Wind is an effective technique or not is a controversial matter. For some, Mitchell does not really deal with the Civil War itself but rather focuses on Scarlett O’Hara’s love pursuits and life experiences, with the Reconstruction period being reduced to just another obstacle Scarlett must overcome; this, however, was a matter of praise for Samuel Tupper, Jr., in his review in 1936 for the Atlanta Journal, among others. It has also been pointed out that Gone with the Wind focuses on Atlanta and its surroundings exclusively, paying no attention to the rest of the South. Yet, because it is far more popular than any other Civil War novel, many people learn about the Civil War through the life experiences of Scarlett O’Hara, “the consummate Civil War heroine.”47 Despite the fact that in the novel the war is just the historical background and does not occupy much space in the narrative, many criticisms against Mitchell’s work

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centered on the fact that in it “the Old South and its Lost Cause were glamorized, sanitized, and merchandised.”48 Nevertheless, Mitchell does not romanticize the Confederacy at all: “far from a glorious military adventure or a sacred episode of purposeful sacrifice, the war became in Mitchell’s rendering an ‘inferno of pain.’ Her heroine, Scarlett, never understood its aims, ‘never gave a damn about the … Confederacy.’”49 For Rhett, “All wars are sacred,” he said. “To those who have to fight them. If the people who started wars didn’t make them sacred, who would be foolish enough to fight? But, no matter what rallying cries the orators give to the idiots who fight, no matter what noble purposes they assign to wars, there is never but one reason for a war. And that is money. All wars are in reality money squabbles. But so few people ever realize it. Their ears are too full of bugles and drums and the fine words from stay-at-home orators. Sometimes the rallying cry is ‘Save the Tomb of Christ from the Heathen!’ Sometimes it’s ‘Down with Popery!’ and sometimes ‘Liberty!’ and sometimes ‘Cotton, Slavery and States’ Rights!’”50

Gone with the Wind constitutes a singular type of Civil War novel in that it abhors the war while Southern Civil War novels ever since the nineteenth century had sanctioned and glorified it. In spite of the novel’s lukewarm endorsement of the Confederacy, several forebears of Mitchell had fought the Civil War in the Confederate lines, including her paternal grandfather, wounded in Antietam, as she often proudly mentioned in her correspondence. Her own family history and role during the Civil War had helped her model the O’Haras’ sufferings. Mitchell often recounted childhood memories of listening to tales of the Confederacy and the South from relatives for hours. She used to jokingly add that, because of these glorious stories, she did not learn that the South had lost the war till she was ten years old. Instead of the memory of the Civil War as “a white masculinist conflict” put forward in “conventional” Civil War novels, Mitchell chose a female protagonist and her novel focuses on how women survive the war.51 Historian Henry Steele Commager, reviewing the novel, determined that Mitchell “presents the myth without being taken in by it or asking us to accept it.”52 It is paradoxical that many readers’ approach to the Civil War comes from a novel that does not endorse the Confederate Cause at all, least of all Scarlett herself, who finds the war an annoyance and is not too concerned about the general good as long as she and her family survive the war. Rhett and Scarlett do not particularly care about the war; actually, Rhett is from the very beginning sure that the Confederacy is a lost cause (although the fact that he eventually enrolls vindicates the Cause to some extent) while Scarlett mulls over whether the price to pay is not too high.53 But it is precisely Rhett and Scarlett’s attitude toward the war which makes them such likable characters, in a way that a historical figure like Robert E. Lee could not deliver. They are not fuelled by blind patriotism and a strong faith in the Confederacy, as is the case of Melanie, for instance. Because Rhett’s views on the war are shared by Ashley, as he expresses

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them in his letters from the battlefield or even before this at the Twelve Oaks barbecue, Mitchell shows the soundness of Rhett’s assessment of the war, in spite of his reputation as renegade and friend of the Northerners.54 At the same time, Ashley is thus given tragic stature because of his understanding of the situation and of his own failings.55 Despite the heroic portrayal of the South and the negative view of the much-hated and despised Yankees, Northerners and Southerners embraced the novel with equal enthusiasm, to Mitchell’s own amazement. This was rather surprising given that Uncle Tom’s Cabin went out of print because of the post– Civil War tension between North and South56: The South came to symbolize, for all America, the lost glorious past which has been a part of the American popular imagination since Sir Walter Scott if not since the Old Testament. And though we know that the old South of myth did not exist, historical accident and the romantic trapping attributed to Southern life made it our most viable myth, the myth the country from east to west could believe in.57

This fascination could be due to the fact that Scarlett, an archetypal Southern belle, “the most exportable, highly praised and consistently sentimentalized of Dixie products,” still has some Yankee virtues (such as greediness or hard work) that “redeemed” her in the eyes of the novel’s Northern readers.58 Readers’ interest in the Civil War can be explained “because the story of the Civil War is the common heritage of all Americans,” which makes of Gone with the Wind “perhaps … one of the last books to be openly patriotic and popular in our time” without endorsing politics: “an entertainment like Gone with the Wind fell somehow in the vast round between Left and Right and the social poles of Elites and Masses, on that preserve of the very bourgeois getter-and-spenders celebrated in the novel and addressed by the publishers.”59 Because of Mitchell’s creation of a national epic for the country as a whole and her portrayal of the coming to an end of an era, her novel has been favorably compared to the Iliad or the Aeneid.60 Moreover, the South became the Garden of Eden for the nation as a whole, for even Northerners wanted to recover the ideal of aristocratic manners that the Southerners had believed they were preserving in the face of the materialism and vulgarity of the North.61 Mitchell’s achievement can be considered analogous to that of Augusta Jane Evans’ novel Macaria, which during the Civil War was smuggled beyond Northern lines to give moral encouragement to wounded or imprisoned Confederate soldiers and to undermine the Northern support, but which became immensely popular among Southerners and Northerners. On the grounds of this cross-section popularity, the novel has been said to embody the genuine American values, with every character reflecting the uniqueness of the American people. Notwithstanding her image as a Southern belle, Scarlett is an American heroine, not just a Southern one.62 The concept of Southern womanhood was one central to the very idea of Southern identity

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and yet, many draw their concept of Southern womanhood from Mitchell’s novel, which features a heroine who certainly is no lady. Whereas Melanie is the paragon of the true lady, Scarlett fails to fulfill all the proper, prescribed roles expected from a Southern lady.63 Mitchell might have regarded Melanie as the true heroine of her novel, but everybody has subsequently failed to realize this, being swept away by the fascinating charm of Scarlett.64 Had Gone with the Wind been a truly nineteenth-century Victorian novel, Melanie would have been the heroine, without a doubt. But being written and read in the twentieth century, it is Scarlett who steals the show, a difference made the most of in the movie, since Melanie in the book is certainly more courageous and stronger than her cinematographic counterpart. Scarlett, the traditional bad woman in Victorian novels, is reinterpreted in Gone with the Wind in more positive terms, with Mammy providing the key as to how Scarlett’s moral stature is to be evaluated — she might be immoral but she has a justification because of the trials she has gone through. Despite the praising reviews that the novel got upon being first published, Mitchell’s journalistic prose style (owing to her admiration for Hemingway’s style) was viciously attacked along with her lack of a definite style, and, above all other considerations, because of the popularity of her novel. Mitchell, aware of the criticisms on the grounds of her prose style, contended that “I was brought up to write English simply — so simply, as my Mother said, ‘that it could be easily read from a galloping horse.’ … I felt that if a story and characters won’t hold up under a bare style, then it’s just as well to junk the story.”65 Writer H. G. Wells defended the novel, arguing that “one hardly dares say it, but I believe Gone with the Wind is better shaped than many of the revered classics,” at the same time that he acknowledged the novel’s status as a guilty reading because of the critical snubbing closely tied to its popularity.66 Mitchell’s lack of style and her favoring of story over other literary aspects was not necessarily regarded as something negative by early reviewers, and thus, Joseph Henry Jackson, reviewer for the San Francisco Chronicle, praised that Gone with the Wind was “a book that is all story.”67 In a similar manner, Herschel Brickell wrote that “one of the heartening things about the book to me is that it tosses out of the window all the thousands of technical tricks our novelists have been playing with for the past twenty years and goes straight back to honest story-telling and to writing that anybody can understand.”68 Even as a child, Mitchell had valued story over style, judging the latter as inconsequential if the plot was not strong enough.69 Her modest claim that her novel was “basically just a simple yarn of fairly simple people” has been taken at face value and may have had a damaging effect on the critical standing and reputation of Gone with the Wind, ignoring the fact that that it encompasses such philosophical concepts as the Götterdämmerung.70 Drake, though aware that the novel lacked the literary depth to be found in the works of other Southern novelists such as Stark Young, Faulkner, or Robert Penn War-

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ren, recommended that we concentrate on the fact that the novel is “primarily a story” and its “epic treatment of an epic theme.” Yet, for others, Gone with the Wind was not so much a literary work as an accurate portrayal of life and survival in difficult times; Commager stated that Gone with the Wind, “if not a work of art, [is] a dramatic recreation of life itself.”71 Gone with the Wind and Coca-Cola are probably the two most important contributions of Atlanta to the world and, accordingly, the city of Atlanta loved the novel from the very beginning with a passion. Gone with the Wind was “Margaret Mitchell’s valentine to Atlanta,” her native city, but, still, Mitchell was afraid that her depiction of a ruthless Atlanta neighbor would earn her the enmity of her neighbors.72 She was soon proved wrong for Atlanta only found pride in their famous “forebear.” The novel was a hit in the city, which took the defense of the novel’s status almost as a civic duty. Rumors that the premiere might not take place in Atlanta almost ignited the second Battle of Atlanta. December 15, 1939, the day of the world premiere in Atlanta, was a municipal half-holiday, the State Capitol declared the following day a state holiday, and the event was surrounded by a three-day celebration.73 Even nowadays the citizens of Atlanta still regard the novel with pride and it is available on the shelves of bookstores at the Atlanta airport. This process of mythologizing the Civil War began soon after its ending, with realistic writers of the war being ignored in favor of those mythologizing it. In the same manner, the South fell prey to a number of idealized depictions. Mitchell, who wanted to portray North Georgia realistically, saw with distress that she was regarded as one of the perpetuators of the white-columned plantations and moonlight-and-magnolias romance begun with John Pendleton Kennedy’s Swallow Barn (1832).74 To ensure that the movie did not perpetuate the myth, although she refused to have anything to do with the cinematographic production, she maneuvered to have two friends of hers hired as historical consultants. Still, Mitchell saw, to her chagrin, that her Tara did not match the movie’s Tara even though she made it very clear in Gone with the Wind that Tara was not so much a plantation but a farm. She was somehow puzzled as to why she was considered a revivalist of the Southern plantation myth and complained in a letter to the editor of the Richmond Times-Dispatch: We Southerners could write the truth about the antebellum South, its few slaveholders, its yeomen farmers, its rambling, comfortable houses just fifty years away from the log cabins, until Gabriel blows his trump — and everyone would go on believing in the Hollywood version…. People believe what they like to believe and the mythical Old South has too strong a hold on their imaginations to be altered by the mere reading of a 1,037 page book.75

In any case, despite Mitchell’s best efforts, Louis D. Rubin, Jr., considered Gone with the Wind “the culmination of a popular ‘local color’ sub-genre, ‘Plantation Fiction,’ that goes back at least to the 1830s, and that attained its greatest pop-

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ularity after the Civil War”; critic Malcolm Cowley called it “an encyclopedia of the plantation legend” and Brooks, Lewis, and Warren credit Mitchell as one of the creators of the plantation romance. Moreover, Mitchell’s protagonist, though longing for the values of being a lady that the Old South held (embodied by her mother and also by the perfect gentleman whose love she covets), has more of the New South values within herself than of the Old. The same applies to Rhett, who, at the end of the novel, however, states his intention to go back to the gentility he so forcefully rejected in his youth.76 While the movie reflects to some extent the values of Roosevelt’s New Deal policies and the novel rather depicts the twenties, critics have been keen on regarding Mitchell as a Great Depression writer. Consequently, in her A Jury of Her Peers: American Women Writers from Anne Bradstreet to Annie Proulx, Elaine Showalter still speaks of Mitchell as such, since her novel “spoke to the universal uncertainties of the twentieth century as well as to the particular struggles of the Confederate past.”77 Because of the publishing timing of the novel in the midst of the Great Depression, sociological interpretations rang rife shortly after it came out. For critic Blanche Gelfant, Gone with the Wind talked “about the American ’30s— about dispossession and loss, homelessness, hunger, the collapse of a society and its miraculous recovery.”78 Many people came to read it as a parallel to the Great Depression, but Mitchell never intended her novel to say anything about the Great Depression and she actually wrote it earlier on. Mitchell made it clear that she was particularly referring to Civil War, unaware that their own world was about to collapse, as the antebellum South had, despite her mother’s warnings that it might happen someday. Mitchell credited the family stories about the Civil War, the panics of 1873, 1893 and 1907 as the reason “why I wrote a book about hard times when the country was enjoying its biggest boom.” Mitchell’s own fear of poverty also made its way into the novel, very much in tune with her readers’ present sensibility. Still, because of the similarities between the historical upheaval of the Civil War and the changing times when the novel was published, reviewer Edward Weeks claimed that 45 percent of the success of Gone with the Wind was due to its timeliness.79 Gone with the Wind certainly did say something to people facing the Great Depression, as it meant a lot for those living in war-torn Europe in the thirties and forties. Still, this does not mean that the novel was written with that particular audience in mind, as Mitchell had begun writing it during the Roaring Twenties. Mitchell was bedazzled that the novel fostered so many interpretations and was praised for things she had not born in mind at all while writing it. She publicly wondered, “Why will people persist in reading strange meanings into the simplest of stories? Is it not enough that a writer can entertain for a few hours with a narrative without being suspected of ‘significances’ or symbolisms or allegories or ‘social trends’?”80 She further complained that reviewers

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The Wind Is Never Gone point out a number of things I didn’t do, a number of obvious lacks in the book. Some of them want more propaganda (don’t ask me for what!), some think I miss the great sociological and economic feeling of the day, some say — oh, never mind! But I ask you, when you are trying to see an era, day by day, incident by incident through the eyes of a woman who was not an analyst, when you try to record what she saw and thought and felt, not what you would see and think and feel — then how are you going to work in propaganda and sociology and “mass movements”? Poor Scarlett’s lil ole brain would sure have busted had she tried to think of “mass movements”!

Even Scarlett’s “lil ole brain” mechanisms have been analyzed and declared “like Margaret Mitchell, … a masochistic personality.” Macmillan joined Mitchell in rejecting these interpretations and they stated that “their ‘sole and innocent intention’ was to make ‘a few honest dollars.’”81 Unaware of possible reinterpretations of her novel, Mitchell’s biggest concern was for historical accuracy. Her father, Eugene M. Mitchell, was president and co-founder of the Atlanta Historical Society. Her mother, Maybelle, was also an authority in Southern history while her brother Stephens was the editor of the Atlanta Historical Bulletin. Mitchell painstakingly made sure every historical detail, no matter how minute, was correct.82 Her preoccupation with historical accuracy, far from denoting a lack of self-confidence in her literary skills, as some critics have contended because of her journalistic prose style, testifies to her interest in producing a vivid and historically accurate picture of that particular period in American history to the point that “Mitchell’s fact accuracy makes this a worthwhile book for students of history to read.”83 Gone with the Wind was praised for achieving a degree of historical authenticity comparable to that of history books, the only mistakes having to do with pyronomics and the speed at which cotton burns down.84 Whereas most best-sellers’ authors are charged with having no interest in facts, Mitchell panicked at the possibility of historians finding her book at fault when it came to historical accuracy. She wrote and re-wrote the historical events in the novel over years, feeling “guilty” that in a book about the Civil War, there were but two chapters and a half dealing with the war itself. In spite of Mitchell’s keen interest in history, Gone with the Wind has conventionally been labeled as a romance because of the love story between Rhett and Scarlett. Nevertheless, its ending could not be further from being anything like the conventional happy ending of romance novels.85 Professor C. W. Everett of Columbia University, who was hired to assess the novel’s literary value, remarked in his several-page report that “the end is slightly disappointing, as there may be a bit too much finality about Rhett’s refusing to go on,” being but the first one of millions of readers who had similar qualms about it.86 Jane Austen’s nephew, Edward Leigh-Austen, described in his Memoir of Jane Austen how his famous aunt, when asked to, was fond of telling her curious audience what happened to her characters after the end but she is an exceptional case of a writer so freely talking about the future of her characters beyond the pages

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of their book. Mitchell certainly did not share this habit of Austen’s, for she refused to answer any question about what she thought happened next after the end of Gone with the Wind. She was so convinced that that was the right ending, without continuing it, without letting readers know what happened with Rhett and Scarlett, that the first thing in the novel she wrote was the last chapter and then, she continued writing from chapter one onwards. Mitchell’s life was plagued by constant requests as to what happened next, readers being left unsatisfied with her “I simply don’t know.” A widespread rumor had it that Macmillan would send an extra chapter written by Mitchell herself to anyone sending a dollar.87 Writers changing endings to satisfy editors’ or readers’ expectations is not an uncommon phenomenon in literary history. Charles Dickens, for example, was persuaded to change the somewhat unhappy ending of Great Expectations to a happier one. Mitchell, however, refused to do such a thing. In her only recorded declaration as to whether Rhett and Scarlett would be reunited, Mitchell wrote in a letter to Latham dated July 27, 1936, that “I think she gets him in the end” and further expressed her willingness to “hint as much a little more strongly” although “my own intention when I wrote it was to leave the end open to the reader. (Yes, I know that’s not a satisfactory way to do!).” Finally, she concluded, “I’ll change it any way you want, except to make it a happy ending.”88 This was the only time she said anything in that sense, for during the rest of her life she claimed that she did not have any clue as to what eventually happened between Rhett and Scarlett. Mitchell blamed the administrative and legal problems she was having for her inability to write any more: “even if I wanted to continue it, I would not have the opportunity or the time. I have had no leisure in which to do any writing at all, as the success of my book has brought such a multitude of problems.” Reviewers encouraged her to write a novel set in the post–Reconstruction South, but she politely turned down all requests. She reportedly had plans of resuming writing in 1949 but not the sequel in which the lovers would be forever reunited that her fans wailed for.89 In Gone with the Wind, the ending leaves out the female protagonist’s happily-ever-after with her hero, to, instead, concentrate on land. For all her professions that she will get Rhett back, Scarlett’s most immediate plans include going back to Tara, not running after Rhett, marking Gone with the Wind not as a romance novel, but as a historical-political one.90 Most critics have also commonly failed to notice that Scarlett, more than realizing the true object of her love, is changing her illusion from Ashley to another man, this one being Rhett, a possibility that Rhett himself fears. Just like Ashley never was the man Scarlett longed for, Rhett, embittered and torn by his failed marriage and the death of his only daughter, is no longer the man Scarlett could have fallen in love with during the Civil War days. Accordingly, fan-fiction authors often have Rhett afraid of being just the new object of Scarlett’s affection, and so does Scarlett.91

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It has conventionally been agreed that Mitchell’s ending was designed to punish Scarlett at the end of the novel for her violations of the morals of society, gender roles, etc., but this idea is far from being unanimous.92 For Gaillard, the novel is “a bildungsroman about a woman who was successful in breaking away from the life of self-effacement her mother had lived.” According to this interpretation, Rhett leaves so that Scarlett can grow up and stop being considered a child, first of all by Rhett. This agrees with the development of Scarlett, for it is then when Scarlett matures and becomes a responsible mother, much to Rhett’s surprise when they are eventually reunited. If Gone with the Wind is a Bildungsroman, with Rhett leaving, Scarlett can become a strong, independent woman, her true self.93 British novelist Angela Carter reads Gone with the Wind as a Bildungsroman, too: “so Scarlett wins out; off goes Rhett, thank goodness, and tomorrow is another day. Now Scarlett can get on with amassing a great estate and bankrupting small businessmen, for which activity breaking hearts must always have been an inadequate substitute.”94 Because Scarlett eventually survives, despite all her losses (the last one being the love of both Ashley and Rhett), the novel’s ending is more optimistic than that of other novels dealing with the end of an era, though this has been obscured by the film’s slightly different ending.95 In contrast to Gaillard’s interpretation of Gone with the Wind as a Bildungsroman, others deny that Scarlett has changed at all or learned any lesson from her past mistakes. The ending of Gone with the Wind is “the revenge dream of a control freak” because of Scarlett’s confidence in her ability to draw Rhett back, determined to continue using her old ways rather than learn anything from the lesson that could be extracted from Rhett’s departure. For Scarlett, the resolution to do something is her way to master her fears.96 Like Madame Bovary or Anna Karenina, Scarlett is punished for her passionate nature, testimony of the maleness of our literary culture, in which female heroines cannot survive and thrive at the end, their hard work being only recompensed with failure. Had Gone with the Wind been a Victorian novel, Scarlett would have been more harshly punished but Scarlett, like Becky Sharp of Thackeray’s Vanity Fair, and unlike Emma Bovary and Anna Karenina, does not meet death as a punishment for her wrongdoings and the novel fails to provide any moral lesson to be extrapolated.97 In any case, regardless of how we might interpret Rhett’s departure and Scarlett’s fierce determination to get him back, the following chapters show that, for readers and writers alike, the ending to Gone with the Wind merits its rewriting or its continuation.

Notes 1. Margaret Mitchell, Gone with the Wind, special commemorative 60th-anniversary edition (New York: Warner Books, 1999), chapter I. 2. George Garrett, “Preface,” in So Red the Rose, by Stark Young (1934; Nashville: J. S. Sanders,

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1992), ix; Anne Edwards, Road to Tara: The Life of Margaret Mitchell, Author of Gone with the Wind (1983; London: Orion, 1996), 159; Margaret Mitchell, Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind Letters, 1936 –1949 (New York: Macmillan; London: Collier Macmillan, 1976), 59. 3. Quoted in Garrett, “Preface,” xv. 4. Mary Condé, “Some African-American Fictional Responses to Gone with the Wind,” The Yearbook of English Studies 26 (1996): 210; Richard Harwell, “Gone with Miss Ravenel’s Courage: or Bugles Blow So Red. A Note on the Civil War Novel,” The New England Quarterly 35, no. 2 (1962): 253; Jack Temple Kirby, Media-Made Dixie: The South in the American Imagination (Baton Rouge & London: Louisiana State University Press, 1978), 64; Helen Taylor, “Gone with the Wind: The Mammy of Them All,” in The Progress of Romance: The Politics of Popular Fiction, ed. Jean Radford (London and New York: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1986), 109 –120; L. D. Reddick, “Educational Programs for the Improvement of Race Relations: Motion Pictures, Radio, the Press, and Libraries,” The Journal of Negro Education 13, no. 3 (1944): 376; Amanda Adams, “‘Painfully Southern’: Gone with the Wind, the Agrarians, and the Battle for the New South,” Southern Literary Journal 40, no. 1 (2007): 58. 5. Garrett, “Preface,” ix; Edwards, Road to Tara, 192; Kirby, Media-Made Dixie, 70; Serge Mafioly, Vivien Leigh: El alma de Scarlett. [Vivien Leigh. D’air et de feu. Trans. José Luis Sánchez] (1991; Barcelona: Grijalbo, 1992), 127; Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, “Scarlett O’Hara: The Southern Lady as New Woman,” American Quarterly 33, no. 4 (1981): 392; Dieter Meindl, “A Reappraisal of Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind,” Mississippi Quarterly 34, no. 4 (1981): 417; Marian J. Morton, “‘My Dear, I Don’t Give a Damn’: Scarlett O’Hara and the Great Depression,” Frontiers 5, no. 3 (1981): 53; Howard Tillman Kuist, “Reflection of Theology from Gone with the Wind,” in Gone with the Wind as Book and Film, ed. Richard Harwell (1983; New York: Paragon House, 1987), 100. 6. Finis Farr, Margaret Mitchell of Atlanta: The Author of Gone with the Wind (New York: William Morrow, 1965), 78; María Rosa Cabellos Castilla, Estudio de las formas de tratamiento y de la cortesía en la novela Gone with the Wind, de Margaret Mitchell (Alcalá de Henares: Servicio de Publicaciones de la Universidad de Alcalá, 2005), 60; Edwards, Road to Tara, 141, 167; Anne Goodwyn Jones, Tomorrow Is Another Day: The Woman Writer in the South, 1859 –1936 (1981; Baton Rouge and London: Louisiana State University Press, 1982), 316; Marianne Walker, Margaret Mitchell and John Marsh: The Love Story Behind Gone with the Wind (Atlanta: Peachtree Publishers, 1993), xii, 147–148, 179; quoted in Leonard J. Leff, “Gone with the Wind and Hollywood’s Racial Politics,” The Atlantic Monthly 284, no. 6 (1999): 106 –114, theatlantic.com/past/docs/issues/99dec/9912leff.htm (accessed March 5, 2010). 7. Cabellos Castilla, Estudio de las formas, 60; Farr, Margaret Mitchell of Atlanta, 86. 8. Robert Drake, “The Book, the Movie, the Dream,” Mississippi Quarterly 44, no. 2 (1991): 183. 9. Edwin McDowell, “Sequel to Auction of ‘Gone with the Wind’ Sequel,” The New York Times, April 27, 1988, query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=940DEEDC1230F934A15757C0A96E948260 (accessed January 25, 2008); “Margaret Mitchell and Her Novel Gone with the Wind,” promotional material issued by Macmillan (New York: Macmillan, 1936), etext.virginia.edu/railton/popfiction/ gwtwpromo.html (accessed January 22, 2010); Molly Haskell, Frankly, My Dear: Gone with the Wind Revisited (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2009), 23. 10. Quoted in Blanche H. Gelfant, “Gone with the Wind and the Impossibilities of Fiction,” Southern Literary Journal 13, no. 1 (1980): 4. 11. Richard Harwell, “Introduction,” in Mitchell, Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind Letters, 1936 –1949, xxvii, 116 –117; “Gone with the Wind: The Legend Lives on as a Musical of the Novel Hits the West End,” The Independent, March 24, 2008, independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/theatredance/features/gone-with-the-wind-the-legend-lives-on-as-a-musical-of-the-novel-hits-the-westend-799744.html (accessed January 10, 2010); Edwards, Road to Tara, ix, 315. 12. Quoted in Edwards, Road to Tara, 218. 13. Cynthia Marylee Molt, Gone with the Wind on Film: A Complete Reference (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 1990), 456; L. D. Reddick, “Review of Pro-Slavery Thought in the Old South and Gone with the Wind,” The Journal of Negro History 22, no. 3 (1937): 365; Helen Taylor, Scarlett’s Women: Gone with the Wind and Its Female Fans (London: Virago Press, 1989), 2; David Anderson, “‘Print the Legend’: Gone with the Wind as Myth and Memory,” ERAS Journal 3, arts.monash.edu.au/publications/eras/edition-3/anderson.php (accessed May 5, 2010). 14. Louis D. Rubin, Jr., “Scarlett O’Hara and the Two Quentin Compsons,” in The South and Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha: The Factual and the Apocryphal, ed. Evans Harrington and Ann J. Abadie (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1977), 187; Haskell, Frankly, My Dear, 11; Jerome Stern, “Gone with the Wind: The South as America,” Southern Humanities Review 6 (1976): 6 –7.

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15. Harwell, “Gone with Miss Ravenel’s Courage,” 259; see Thomas H. Pauly, “Gone with the Wind and The Grapes of Wrath as Hollywood Histories of the Depression,” Journal of Popular Film 3, no. 3 (1974): 203 –218; Morton, “My Dear, I Don’t Give a Damn,” 52. 16. Mitchell, Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind Letters, 19, 36. Edwards, Road to Tara, 35; Harriett Hawkins, Classics and Trash: Traditions and Taboos in High Literature and Popular Modern Genres (Toronto and Buffalo: University of Toronto Press, 1990), 151–152; see Paul Pickrel, “Vanity Fair in America: The House of Mirth and Gone with the Wind,” American Literature 59, no. 1 (1987): 37–57 for the parallelisms between Gone with the Wind and Vanity Fair; Edward F. Nolan, “The Death of Bryan Lyndon: An Analogue in Gone with the Wind,” Nineteenth-Century Fiction 8, no. 3 (1953): 225 –228. 17. Quoted in Farr, Margaret Mitchell of Atlanta, 128. Rubin, “Scarlett O’Hara and the Two Quentin Compsons,” 168. 18. Quoted in Harwell, “Introduction,” xxvii. 19. Quoted in Mitchell, Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind Letters, 57. 20. John Unsworth, “Twentieth-Century American Bestsellers: Gone with the Wind,” 20th-Century American Bestsellers, www3.isrl .illinois .edu/~unsworth/courses/bestsellers/search .cgi?title=Gone+ with+the+Wind (accessed January 22, 2010). Farr, Margaret Mitchell of Atlanta, 136, 140. 21. Quoted in Rubin Jr., “Scarlett O’Hara and the Two Quentin Compsons,” 170 –171; Floyd C. Watkins, “Gone with the Wind as Vulgar Literature,” Southern Literary Journal 2, no. 2 (1970): 91; Ben Railton, “‘What Else Could a Southern Gentleman Do?’: Quentin Compson, Rhett Butler, and Miscegenation,” Southern Literary Journal 35, no. 2 (2003): 62. Kirby, Media-Made Dixie, 51. 22. Railton, “What Else Could a Southern Gentleman Do?” 54; Joel Williamson, “How Black Was Rhett Butler?” in The Evolution of Southern Culture, ed. Numan V. Bartley (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1988), 102–103. 23. Fox-Genovese, “Scarlett O’Hara,” 395, 407; Gavin Lambert, “The Making of Gone with the Wind,” The Atlantic Monthly 231, no. 2 (1973): 37–51, theatlantic.com/past/docs/issues/73feb/gone. htm (accessed March 9, 2010); Taylor, “GWTW: The Mammy of Them All,” 117; Richard Harwell, “Preface,” in Mitchell, Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind Letters, 1936 –1949, xxiii; Haskell, Frankly, My Dear, 35 –36, 39. See Lambert, “The Making of GWTW,” and Pickrel, “Vanity Fair in America,” 51–52, for more parallelisms between Mitchell’s life and Gone with the Wind. 24. Farr, Margaret Mitchell of Atlanta, 56; Fox-Genovese, “Scarlett O’Hara,” 394; Drew Gilpin Faust, “Clutching the Chains That Bind: Margaret Mitchell and Gone with the Wind,” Southern Cultures 5, no. 1 (1999): 6. 25. Quoted in Edwards, Road to Tara, 7; Taylor, “GWTW: The Mammy of Them All,” 117; Michael P. Foley, “Manliness Unmasked,” The Catholic Social Science Review 13 (2008): 259 –260; Alice Fahs, “The Feminized Civil War: Gender, Northern Popular Literature, and the Memory of the War, 1861– 1900,” The Journal of American History 85, no. 4 (1999): 1465; M. Carmen Gomez-Galisteo, “Gone with the Wind,” The Literary Encyclopedia, May 5, 2008, litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true& UID=4925 (accessed May 6, 2008). 26. Haskell, Frankly, My Dear, xii; Harriett Hawkins, “The Sins of Scarlett,” Textual Practice 6, no. 3 (1992): 491; Vicki Eaklor, “Striking Chords and Touching Nerves: Myth and Gender in Gone with the Wind,” Images: A Journal of Film and Popular Culture (2002), imagesjournal.com/2002/features /gwtw/ (accessed June 26, 2008); Dawson Gaillard, “Gone with the Wind as Bildungsroman: Or Why Did Rhett Butler Really Leave Scarlett O’Hara?” The Georgia Review 28, no. 1 (1974): 15. 27. Cabellos Castilla, Estudio de las formas, 63. 28. R. Z. Sheppard, “Frankly, It’s Not Worth a Damn,” Time, October 7, 1991, time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,973976,00.html (accessed January 20, 2010); Jones, Tomorrow Is Another Day, 339–340, 317; Justine Larbalestier, “The Problem with Gone with the Wind,” December 1, 2009, justine larbalestier.com/blog/2009/12/01/the-problem-with-gone-with-the-wind/ (accessed February 23, 2010). 29. Quoted in Hawkins, “The Sins of Scarlett,” 492. 30. Molly Haskell, “The Lady and the Vamp,” Town and Country, February 1, 2009, Academic Research Library, via ProQuest. 31. “Declaration of Pat Conroy,” SunTrust Bank v. Houghton Mifflin, houghtonmifflinbooks.com/ features/randall_url/pdf/Declaration_Pat_Conroy.pdf (accessed December 15, 2009); Jonathan D. Austin, “Pat Conroy: ‘I was raised by Scarlett O’Hara,’” CNN, February 4, 2000, knowsouthernhistory.net/Culture/Literature/pat_conroy.htm (accessed February 18, 2008). 32. Willie Lee Rose, Slavery and Freedom, expanded edition (Oxford, New York, Toronto, Mel-

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33

bourne: Oxford University Press, 1982), 131; Reddick, “Review of Pro-Slavery Thought in the Old South and GWTW,” 365; Roland Flamini, Scarlett, Rhett, and a Cast of Thousands: The Filming of Gone with the Wind (New York: Macmillan; London: Collier Macmillan, 1975), 13; Reddick, “Educational Programs for the Improvement of Race Relations,” 376. 33. David Bret, Clark Gable: Tormented Star (2007; Cambridge, MA: Da Capo Press, 2008), 109, 140; David Denby, “The Real Rhett Butler,” The New Yorker 85, no. 15 (May 25, 2009), Academic Research Library via ProQuest (accessed February 22, 2010); Lambert, “The Making of GWTW.” 34. Farr, Margaret Mitchell of Atlanta, 184, 186, 156; Juan Pando, Hollywood al desnudo: la cara oculta del cine y sus estrellas, 4th ed. (Madrid: Espasa Calpe, 1999), 112; Haskell, Frankly, My Dear, 61; Mafioly, Vivien Leigh, 123 –124; Bret, Clark Gable, 140; Bill Pope, “Gable Took Atlantans by Storm,” Atlanta Constitution, November 18, 1960, foronceinmylife.info/cactus_st/article/article147.html (accessed May 18, 2010). 35. David O. Selznick, “Gone with the Wind: The Search for Scarlett. Chronology,” November 1938, Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin, hrc.utexas.edu/exhibitions/web/ gwtw/scarlett/ (accessed April 7, 2008); Mafioly, Vivien Leigh, 124; Farr, Margaret Mitchell of Atlanta, 156; Emanuel Levy, And The Winner Is…: The History and Politics of the Oscar Awards, new expanded edition. (1987; New York: Continuum, 1990), 76; Bethsa Marsh, “In Search of Rhett and Scarlett,” The Saturday Evening Post, September 1, 2009: 65. 36. Mafioly, Vivien Leigh, 131–132; Harriett Hawkins, “Shared Dreams: Reproducing Gone with the Wind,” in Novel Images: Literature in Performance, ed. Peter Reynolds (London and New York: Routledge, 1993), 134; Haskell, Frankly, My Dear, 1. 37. Quoted in Flamini, Scarlett, Rhett, and a Cast of Thousands, 204; Farr, Margaret Mitchell of Atlanta, 183. 38. Margot Morgan, “Scarlett O’Hara Returns from Hollywood: Correcting the Misinterpretations of Mitchell’s Political Novel, Gone with the Wind,” paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Political Science Association, Marriott, Loews, Philadelphia, and the Pennsylvania Convention Center, Philadelphia, PA, August 31, 2006, allacademic.com/meta/p152591_index.html (accessed February 2, 2010); Catherine Clinton, “Gone with the Wind” in Past Imperfect: History according to the Movies, ed. Ted Mico, John Miller-Monzon, and David Rubel (New York: Henry Holt, 1995), 133. 39. Tony Jackson, “Frankly, My Dear, That Record Has Gone with the Wind,” Financial Times, January 11, 2010, ProQuest (accessed February 22, 2010); David Mermelstein, “Why We Give a Damn about Scarlett. As It Turns 70, Gone with the Wind Still Stirs Complicated feelings, Which Is Part of the Movie’s Allure,” Wall Street Journal, December 12, 2009, eastern edition, Academic Search Premier via ProQuest (accessed February 22, 2010). 40. Levy, And the Winner Is, 13, 295; L. D. Reddick, “Educational Programs for the Improvement of Race Relations,” 376. 41. Kirby, Media-Made Dixie, 72; “GTWT: The Legend Lives On”; Lambert, “The Making of GWTW”; Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., “Time, Alas, Has Treated Gone with the Wind Cruelly,” The Atlantic Monthly 231, no. 3 (1973): 64, theatlantic.com/past/docs/issues/73mar/schles.htm (accessed March 9, 2010); Flamini, Scarlett, Rhett, and a Cast of Thousands, 52. 42. Clinton, “Gone with the Wind,” 135; quoted in Richard F. Selcer, “Home Sweet Movies: From Tara to Oz and Home Again,” Journal of Popular Film and Television 18, no. 2 (1990): 57; Flamini, Scarlett, Rhett, and a Cast of Thousands, 4. 43. Harwell quoted in Cabellos Castilla, Estudio de las formas, 66; Gelfant, “GTWT and the Impossibilities of Fiction,” 3. 44. Edmund Wilson, Patriotic Gore: Studies in the Literature of the American Civil War (1962; New York and London: W.W. Norton, 1994), 3–4; Meindl, “A Reappraisal of Margaret Mitchell’s GWTW,” 414. 45. Quoted in Jill Vejnoska, “Rhett Is Kind of a Mysterious Character,” The Atlanta JournalConstitution, November 3, 2007, foronceinmylife.info/cactus_st/article/article178.html (accessed January 13, 2010). 46. Reddick, “Review of Pro-Slavery Thought in the Old South and GWTW,” 365 –366. 47. Fahs, “The Feminized Civil War,” 1490; Robert E. May, “Gone with the Wind as Southern History: A Reappraisal,” The Southern Quarterly 17 (1978): 56 –57; Railton, “What Else Could a Southern Gentleman Do?” 56; Roger Ebert, “Gone with the Wind,” Chicago Sun Times, June 21, 1998, rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/19980621/REVIEWS08/401010323/1023&template =printart (accessed March 25, 2010); “The Book of the Month: Reviews” in Harwell, Gone with the Wind as Book and Film, 16; James Michener, “The Company of Giants,” in Recasting: Gone with the

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Wind in American Culture, ed. Darden Asbury Pyron (1983; Miami: University Press of Florida, 1984), 77. 48. G. Glenwood Clark, “Review of Gone with the Wind,” William and Mary College Quarterly Historical Magazine 17, no. 1 (1937): 132. 49. J. V. Ridgely quoted in Condé, “Some African-American Fictional Responses to Gone with the Wind,” 208; May, “GWTW as Southern History,” 58; Faust, “Clutching the Chains That Bind,” 6. 50. Mitchell, GWTW, chapter XII. 51. Earl F. Bargainnier, “ ‘Moonlight-and-Magnolias’ Myth,” in Encyclopedia of Southern Culture, ed. Charles Reagan Wilson and William Feriss (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1989), 1137; Fahs, “The Feminized Civil War,” 1493. 52. Henry Steele Commager, “The Last of Its Genre,” in Harwell, Gone with the Wind as Book and Film, 197. 53. Helen Taylor, “GWTW: The Mammy of Them All,” 125 –126. 54. Patricia Storace, “Look Away, Dixie Land,” The New York Review of Books 38, no. 21 (1991): 26; Mitchell, GWTW, chapter XI, VI. 55. Clinton, “Gone with the Wind,” 132; Jane Thomas, “Margaret Mitchell (1900 –1949),” The New Georgia Encyclopedia, September 27, 2004, georgiaencyclopedia.org/nge/ArticlePrintable.jsp?id=h2566 (accessed January 29, 2008); Storace, “Look Away, Dixie Land,” 25. 56. Mitchell, Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind Letters, 50; Wilson, Patriotic Gore, 11; see “A Few Notes on Adopting Orientalistic Fiction,” November 30, 2009, Cry Havoc & Unleash the Kaigou of War, kaigou.dreamwidth.org/332403.html?#cutid1 (accessed March 8, 2010), for how the Yankees helped create the myth of the South. 57. Stern, “GWTW: The South as America,” 6. 58. Clare Boothe, “Introduction to Kiss the Boys Good-bye,” in Harwell, Gone with the Wind as Book and Film, 95; Haskell, Frankly, My Dear, 38. 59. Richard Dwyer quoted in Adams, “Painfully Southern,” 61; Harwell, “Gone with Miss Ravenel’s Courage,” 254; Watkins, “GWTW as Vulgar Literature,” 97. 60. Charles Rowan Beye, “Gone with the Wind, and Good Riddance,” Southwest Review 78, no. 3 (1993), EBSCOhost, search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=aph&AN=9402084185&site=ehost-live (accessed March 5, 2010); Robert Y. Drake, Jr., “Tara Twenty Years After,” Georgia Review XII (1958): 149 –150. 61. Rose, Slavery and Freedom, 134; Stern, “GWTW: The South as America,” 6; F. Garvin Davenport, Jr., “Thomas Dixon’s Mythology of Southern History,” The Journal of Southern History 36, no. 3 (1970): 351; Wilson, Patriotic Gore, 438. 62. Melissa Howard, “Margaret Mitchell’s Landmark Novel: A Review of Gone with the Wind,” Suite 101, September 19, 2008, americanfiction.suite101.com/article.cfm/margaret_mitchells_landmark_novel (accessed January 22, 2010); Rubin Jr., “Scarlett O’Hara and the Two Quentin Compsons,” 187; Egenriether quoted in Cabellos Castilla, Estudio de las formas, 73. 63. Nagueyalti Warren and Sally Wolff, “Introduction,” in Southern Mothers: Fact and Fictions in Southern Women’s Writing, ed. Nagueyalti Warren and Sally Wolff (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1999), 4 –5; Anya Jabour, Scarlett’s Sisters: Young Women in the Old South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007), 1; Eaklor, “Striking Chords and Touching Nerves.” 64. Drake, “The Book, the Movie, the Dream,” 186; Edwards, Road to Tara, 132, 180; Mitchell, Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind Letters, 14 –15, 123 –124; Juan M. Company, “La roja tierra de Tara,” Contracampo 15 (1980): 16; Hawkins, “Shared Dreams,” 137. 65. Mitchell, Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind Letters, 49, 180. 66. Quoted in Farr, Margaret Mitchell of Atlanta, 202. 67. Quoted in “Margaret Mitchell and Her Novel GWTW.” 68. Quoted in “Margaret Mitchell and Her Novel GWTW.” 69. Watkins, “GWTW as Vulgar Literature,” 89 –90. 70. Frank Goodwyn, “The Ingenious Gentleman and the Exasperating Lady: Don Quixote de la Mancha and Scarlett O’Hara,” Journal of Popular Culture 16, no. 1 (1982): 55; Morgan, “Scarlett O’Hara Returns from Hollywood.” 71. Quoted in Cabellos Castilla, Estudio de las formas, 64. 72. Hawkins, “The Sins of Scarlett,” 491; Keith Runyon, “Mr. Mitchell Remembers Margaret,” in Harwell, Gone with the Wind as Book and Film, 78. 73. Blair Rouse, “Gone with the Wind— But Not Forgotten,” Southern Literary Journal 10, no. 2 (1978): 176; Anderson, “Print the Legend”; Farr, Margaret Mitchell of Atlanta, 1.

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74. Mitchell, Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind Letters, 359; Bargainnier, “Moonlight-andMagnolias’ Myth,” 1136; Rouse, “GWTW— But Not Forgotten,” 174 –175; Marsh, “In Search of Rhett and Scarlett,” 54; “Affidavit of Louis Rubin, Jr.,” SunTrust Bank v. Houghton Mifflin, houghtonmifflinbooks.com/features/randall_url/pdf/Affidavit_Louis_Rubin.pdf (accessed February 17, 2010); Cleanth Brooks, R. W. B. Lewis, and Robert Penn Warren, American Literature: The Makers and the Making I (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1973), 268; Leah Rawls Atkins, “High Cotton: The Antebellum Plantation Mistress and the Cotton Culture,” Agricultural History 68, no. 2 (1994): 93 –94; Adams, “Painfully Southern,” 59. 75. Quoted in Adams, “Painfully Southern,” 63; Haskell, Frankly, My Dear, 193 –194. 76. Goodwyn, “The Ingenious Gentleman and the Exasperating Lady,” 63. 77. Quoted in Steve Coates, “Scarlett O’Hara: A Hero for Our Times?” New York Times, March 9, 2009, papercuts.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/03/09/scarlett-ohara-a-hero-for-our-times (accessed January 22, 2010); Selcer, “Home Sweet Movies,” 53; Company, “La roja tierra de Tara,” 16. 78. Quoted in Coates, “Scarlett O’Hara: A Hero?” 79. Edwards, Road to Tara, 213; Mitchell, Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind Letters, 115; Meindl, “A Reappraisal of Margaret Mitchell’s GWTW,” 417–418; Storace, “Look Away, Dixie Land,” 26; quoted in Walker, Margaret Mitchell and John Marsh, 30; Kuist, “Reflection of Theology from GWTW,” 99. 80. Walker, Margaret Mitchell and John Marsh, 29; Mitchell, Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind Letters, 88; Selcer, “Home Sweet Movies,” 56. 81. Mitchell, Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind Letters, 41; Dave Kelly, Self-Sacrificing Personality Type, November 24, 2009, ptypes.com/self-sacrificing.html (accessed January 27, 2010). 82. Cabellos Castilla, Estudio de las formas, 57–58; Reddick, “Review of Pro-Slavery Thought in the Old South and GWTW,” 365; Edwards, Road to Tara, 156. 83. Howard, “Margaret Mitchell’s Landmark Novel.” 84. L. D. Reddick, “Review of Pro-Slavery Thought in the Old South and GWTW,” 363; Meindl, “A Reappraisal of Margaret Mitchell’s GWTW,” 428; Watkins, “GWTW as Vulgar Literature,” 94. 85. Meindl, “A Reappraisal of Margaret Mitchell’s GWTW,” 416; Morgan, “Scarlett O’Hara Returns from Hollywood”; Hawkins, “The Sins of Scarlett,” 492; Taylor, “GWTW: The Mammy of Them All,” 131 (see chapter 7). 86. Quoted in Edwards, Road to Tara, 167. 87. Quoted in Robert L. Groover, “Margaret Mitchell, the Lady from Atlanta,” Georgia Historical Quarterly 52 (1968): 68; Farr, Margaret Mitchell of Atlanta, 155. 88. Quoted in Edwards, Road to Tara, 168 –169; David Lodge, “Ambiguously Ever After: Problematical Endings in English Fiction,” in Working with Structuralism: Essays and Reviews on Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century Literature (Boston, London and Henley: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1981), 145 –146. 89. Mitchell, Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind Letters, 235; Farr, Margaret Mitchell of Atlanta, 227. 90. Faust, “Clutching the Chains That Bind,” 14 –15; Taylor, “GWTW: The Mammy of Them All,” 131. 91. Meindl, “A Reappraisal of Margaret Mitchell’s GWTW,” 421. 92. Gaillard, “GWTW as Bildungsroman,” 11; Ebert, “Gone with the Wind.” 93. Gaillard, “GWTW as Bildungsroman,” 15, 18. 94. Angela Carter, “The Belle as Businessperson,” in Shaking a Leg: Journalism and Writings (London: Chatto & Windus, 1997), 379. 95. Beye, “GWTW, and Good Riddance”; Haskell, Frankly, My Dear, 2–3. 96. Gareth Higgins, “Selective Storytelling,” Sojourners Magazine (January 2010): 41; Morgan, “Scarlett O’Hara Returns from Hollywood”; Haskell, Frankly, My Dear, 66. 97. Chieko Irie Mulhern, “Japanese Harlequin Romances as Transcultural Woman’s Fiction,” The Journal of Asian Studies 48, no. 1 (1989): 58; Joanna Russ quoted in Gaillard, “GWTW as Bildungsroman,” 15; Haskell, Frankly, My Dear, 96–97; Michener, “The Company of Giants,” 80; Trisha Curran, “Gone with the Wind: An American Tragedy,” in The South and Film, ed. Warren French (Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 1987), 55; Morgan, “Scarlett O’Hara Returns from Hollywood.”

2 To Be Continued: Scarlett by Alexandra Ripley and the Failed Sequels Commissioned to Emma Tennant and Pat Conroy Ashley. He was the center and the symbol of Scarlett’s ruined life. For love of him she’d ignored the happiness that had been hers for the taking. She’d turned her back on her husband, not seeing his love for her, not admitting her love for him, because wanting Ashley was always in the way. And now Rhett was gone.1

Margaret Mitchell was often besieged by thousands of letters from her admirers about clarification or explanations concerning her rather inconclusive and somewhat puzzling ending. In a letter explaining her reasons behind favoring such an ending she revealed that “my idea was that, through several million chapters, the reader will have learned that both Pansy [the name that Mitchell had originally given to her protagonist] and Rhett are tough characters, both accustomed to having their own way. And at the last, both are determined to have their own ways and those ways are very far apart. And the reader can either decide that she got him or she didn’t.”2 According to Pyron, Mitchell was forced by her publishers to add the coda, for the novel ended originally with Rhett’s line “My dear, I don’t give a damn.” This later addition “weakens the drama and … undermines the impression that Scarlett has grown and evolved.”3 Coda and all, Scarlett’s coming of age is debatable and subject to interpretation. It could very well be that the very point of Gone with the Wind is to show that Scarlett has not evolved at all from beginning to end and she is still the same stubborn teenage girl mooning after a man who won’t have her but determined with an iron will to get him — the very starting point of Gone with the Wind, only that the object of her desire is now Rhett instead of Ashley.4 Be the ending up to the reader’s choice, as Mitchell contended, or imposed by her publishers, it has remained largely unsatisfactory for the majority of its 36

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vast readership. So strong was the public interest in having a sequel to Gone with the Wind published that fans even volunteered to write one, given Mitchell’s own reluctance to do so and her complaints about her lack of time to resume writing, being too busy handling Gone with the Wind–related business matters and legal affairs.5 Sequels are born out of the perceived need to have a more conclusive (and more often than not, happier) ending to a rather “inconclusive” novel.6 In the case of Gone with the Wind, it is clear that fans craved for a happy ending in which Rhett and Scarlett were reunited and that was to be more unequivocal than the original one, which had left the lovers apart with Rhett’s promise of returning periodically to visit and dispel rumors and with Scarlett’s fierce determination to get him back. Audiences who were lucky enough to attend the 1939 previews of Gone with the Wind unanimously wrote in their report cards that they wanted the ending to be as the novel put it, despite Louis B. Mayer’s suggestions favoring a happy ending. The film’s ending is somewhat more optimistic than the novel’s, for it provided, according to producer David O. Selznick, “a tremendous lift at the end…. [Otherwise] we might have ended on a terrifically depressing note.” Still, Gone with the Wind fans wanted a sequel with a much happier resolution.7 Though they are more often than not critically snubbed, publishers enthusiastically embrace sequels, for which there is already a more than willing audience. Given this strong economic component behind sequel writing, sequels have been defined as “a creative decision made by an accountant” or even a greedy kidnapping of somebody else’s characters.8 The best-selling figures of Gone with the Wind and its steady sales made the prospect of having a sequel commissioned a very attractive commercial venture. The first project of having a sequel to Gone with the Wind was not to be a literary sequel but a cinematographic one to the 1939 movie. Ironically enough, Gone with the Wind ran in London theaters for 232 consecutive weeks during the Second World War, but it stopped its run in war-torn America. Theater owners deemed the movie too harsh at a time when Americans were going through another war and it was not till the end of it that Gone with the Wind made it back to movie theaters. When it was first re-released in 1954, Selznick began toying with the idea of having a sequel filmed on the tails of the success of the re-release.9 These plans, however, were put to a halt and were not resumed till three decades later. In 1978 the project of a cinematographic sequel to Gone with the Wind was revived. Anne Edwards, a writer with the biographies of Vivien Leigh and Katharine Hepburn, among others, to her credit and with experience in writing for television, was hired by producers Richard Zanuck and David Brown to write a novel that would subsequently be the basis for the cinematographic adaptation. The project, financed by Universal Pictures and Metro-GoldwynMayer, resulted in a manuscript titled Tara: The Continuation of Gone with the Wind, which James Goldman next turned into a screenplay. The Margaret Mitchell Trust sued, alleging that although the rights to Gone with the Wind

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the movie did indeed belong to Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, the Trust still held the rights to any sequel to Gone with the Wind, including a movie sequel on the grounds that when selling the movie rights, Mitchell had retained the rights of approval to a future sequel.10 The publication of sequels to a novel whose cinematographic rights had already been sold had a legal precedent when Warner Bros. tried to prevent writer Dashiell Hammett from publishing more Sam Spade stories since he had already sold them the movie rights to The Maltese Falcon. The court eventually allowed Hammett to continue writing and publishing more Sam Spade stories, though, with Bros. Pictures, Inc. v. Columbia Broadcasting System determining that “the characters were vehicles for the story told, and the vehicles did not go with the sale of the story.” The same doctrine was applied to Gone with the Wind and after a three-year litigation the court ruled in favor of the Trust. When the plans of the movie were quashed, so was the novel and Edwards was legally forbidden to attempt to have it published.11 The research she had carried out, though, served her for later writing a biography of Mitchell, ironically titled Road to Tara. Ever since the publication of Gone with the Wind to the end of her life, Mitchell was constantly besieged with requests that she write a sequel to her novel, one in which readers would know whether Rhett Butler gave Scarlett O’Hara another opportunity or not. Mitchell refused to do such a thing, repeatedly claiming in interviews as well as privately that, for her, the novel ended where it ended and she had no clue as to whether Scarlett managed to get her husband back. Her statement that “for all I know, Rhett may have found someone else who was less— difficult” did not sit well with her readers.12 A very private person who bitterly resented the intense media and fan attention she received, Mitchell specified in her will that she wanted no sequel to her work. Mitchell left her rights to her husband John R. Marsh, who in turn left them to her brother Stephens Mitchell in his will. First her husband and then her brother honored her wishes and never allowed for the publication of a sequel during their lifetimes. Stephens Mitchell, in an interview, turned down all possibilities of ever commissioning the writing of the sequel. As he saw it, “the theme of the book, which a lot of people don’t really catch, is that many a woman has a good man but doesn’t know it until it’s too late. And then the book ends, of course. You don’t go beyond the closing of the theme.”13 It was after Stephens Mitchell’s death that the new holders of the rights to Gone with the Wind, his two sons, decided to commission the writing of a sequel. Mitchell’s heirs tried to present their decision to have a sequel to their famous aunt’s novel written as a treat for readers who had for decades been eager to know what happened next after the end. They further argued that this decision was prompted by their fear that, once Gone with the Wind entered the public domain, anyone could write a sequel that may well be distasteful to the heirs or to the readers at large. The lesser of two evils, then, was having a sequel in which the plot developed in a way deemed appropriate by Mitchell’s heirs—

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thus very conveniently forgetting that Mitchell wanted no sequel whatsoever.14 While most heirs of great literary heritages have fought hard and long and even in court to have sequels not published (such as the descendants of Victor Hugo, who do not even own the copyright to Les Misérables by express desire of their writer ancestor), Mitchell’s heirs took the rather surprising decision to have Gone with the Wind continued. The new heirs of Mitchell, Eugene and Joseph Mitchell, seemed to be more the heirs of a multi-million dollar enterprise than the guardians of a literary heritage. They were far from being the first literary heirs in having another writer hired to write a sequel to a famous novel. In 1990 Susan Hill, who had already tried her hand at the Gothic genre with The Woman in Black, was rather unexpectedly commissioned by the Daphne Du Maurier estate, in the hands of the late author’s three children, to write a sequel to her most famous work, Rebecca.15 The result was Mrs. De Winter, which appeared in 1993, two years after the authorized Gone with the Wind sequel came out. The Mitchell Trust’s decision is akin to the resolution of V. C. Andrews’ heirs of, after the writer’s death, copyrighting her name as a trademark and employing another author to continue writing new novels using her name. While the first V. C. Andrews® novels were similar in style and storylines to the ones penned by the real Andrews, new novels have focused on the lives of four female teenagers, making of Andrews® an author whose target audience is different from her original readers. Looking for the appropriate sequel writer was as painstaking as the search for the movie’s Scarlett O’Hara (an arduous process to be repeated when the second sequel was projected). Rumors had it that at some time novelist Sydney Sheldon had been considered. The author eventually chosen for the formidable feat of continuing Gone with the Wind was Alexandra Ripley, who up to then was credited with several romance novels set in the South that had sold well enough. Actually, her first novel, Charleston (1981), had at the time of publication been advertised as “a Gone with the Wind flavored with rice and pluff rather than upland cotton and red clay.”16 Ripley, a Charleston native, boasted a Confederate uncle who had died of dysentery during the war, which had qualified her to receive a college scholarship to Vassar granted by the United Daughters of the Confederacy. The official story goes that Ripley was chosen in 1983 after a personal interview with Mitchell’s heirs. However, it was the three-member committee of lawyers appointed by Stephens Mitchell to take care of all the decisions pertaining Gone with the Wind (be they related to legal aspects or not) that hired Ripley, with the heirs being informed of this choice just two days before the public announcement was made. Ripley later explained that she had undertaken this daunting task because “I can’t resist it, and as soon as this is done I will be able to write anything I want to,” namely a novel about Joseph of Arimathea, whose writing she had been planning since 1973.17 The first authorized sequel to Gone with the Wind, Scarlett by Alexandra

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Ripley, was finally published in 1991. Scarlett was the result of a five-year process, the first of them devoted to legal issues and another year and a half for Ripley’s archival research and documentation.18 The novel proved disappointing for those Gone with the Wind readers interested in Southern history. American history in the span of years covered by Scarlett (1873 –1878) is remarkable enough, with the economic crisis as the most outstanding event in the period. It would have been certainly appealing to see how Scarlett, a woman whose character was tested by the war deprivations and the financial penuries of the aftermath of the war, met the challenges of yet another period of economic upheaval. Ripley acknowledged the upcoming crisis in her novel but only to have Scarlett guaranteed by her banker that Rhett’s sound and shrewd investments have allowed both of them to go virtually unscathed (Rhett Butler’s People has Scarlett recklessly and stupidly investing heavily on a number of companies that are bankrupted by the Panic, in sharp contrast to Scarlett’s reputation as a shrewd businesswoman in Gone with the Wind or even in Scarlett).19 Ripley argued that after researching it thoroughly, American history in the period covered by her novel was not exciting enough to hold readers’ interest and she took the easy way out, choosing to move the action of Scarlett to Gerald O’Hara’s native Ireland. So much for an author chosen for having “the right amount of Southernness,” in Ripley’s own words, to have her then move Scarlett to Ireland!20 The novel began well enough. Scarlett, as the quotation above illustrates, opens with a Scarlett O’Hara very much in the mood in which Gone with the Wind ended — regretful of having dismissed Rhett’s true love in favor of her childish infatuation with her neighbor Ashley Wilkes. Actually, during the first pages, Ripley made a deliberate effort to emulate Mitchell’s writing style (she copied long excerpts from Gone with the Wind in long hand to grasp it), which she later altogether dropped. Abandoned by Rhett, Scarlett initially goes to Tara, as was her original plan, after Melanie’s funeral. Far from finding there the peace of mind she needed to get her energies back, Scarlett finds a dying Mammy whom she nurses till her death. Rhett briefly shows up to promise Mammy in her deathbed that he will take care of Scarlett, a promise he does not intend to honor at all. Back in Atlanta, leaving her children Wade and Ella behind in Suellen’s care, Scarlett waits for Rhett’s visit, which finally takes place after a lonely Christmas.21 With Melanie’s death and his realization that it was she and never Scarlett whom he truly loved, gone are Ashley’s former charm and allure. Ashley is conveniently absent from Scarlett except for a very few chapters at the beginning of the novel. He is no longer a figure of fascination to Scarlett, now that her eyes have been opened to his flaws and his true character. Instead of a dashing love pursuit, he is old, worn out, and pitiful and has become for Scarlett a financial and emotional burden whose weight she feels acutely and is only too happy to pass on to India Wilkes, while taking care of Ashley’s financial well-being herself: “their glance sealed the bargain that the protection of Ashley Wilkes

2. To Be Continued

41

from a too harsh world was passing from one woman to another and that Ashley’s masculine pride should never be humbled by this knowledge.” This secrecy was necessary given that “maintaining the facade of male supremacy was central to the Southern way of life.”22 Ashley’s later marriage proposal to Scarlett, out of propriety after Rhett’s indecorous divorce, does not provoke any love feelings in her: There was a time when I would have traded my soul for those words, Scarlett thought, it’s not fair that now I hear them and don’t feel anything at all. Oh, why did Ashley have to do that? Before the question was formed in her mind, she knew the answer. It was because of the old gossip, so long ago it seemed to be now. Ashley was determined to redeem her in the eyes of Atlanta society. If that wasn’t just like him! He’ll do the gentlemanly thing even if it means tearing up his whole life. And mine, too, by the way. He didn’t bother to think of that, I don’t suppose. Scarlett bit her tongue to keep from unleashing her anger on him. Poor Ashley. It wasn’t his fault he was the way he was. Rhett said it: Ashley belonged to that time before the War. He’s got no place in the world today. I can’t be angry or mean. I don’t want to lose anyone who was part of the glory days. All that’s left of that world is the memories and the people who share them. “Dearest Ashley,” Scarlett said, “I don’t want to marry you. That’s the all of it.”

Even Ashley’s second marriage to an Englishwoman that Scarlett maneuvers from Ireland is presented as a decision sparking from practical matters (the need to keep appearances) rather than from a romantic spirit.23 While expecting Rhett’s second promised visit in vain, Scarlett becomes a heavy drinker until she decides that, tired of waiting to see if Rhett will make good on his promise to periodically visit her so as to keep gossip down, she will go to Rhett’s native Charleston herself. In Charleston, Scarlett endorses Mrs. Eleanor Butler’s help (while earning Rhett’s spinster sister’s hatred) in the sight of Rhett’s indifference. For Ripley, Rhett is still a mystery and a puzzle for the scarcely analytical Scarlett to try to figure out. Like in Gone with the Wind, we are not privy to his real thoughts or feelings, which he only willingly reveals to Scarlett (and to readers) at the end of the novel, very much as in the final chapter of Gone with the Wind. Such being the case, new misunderstandings based on each of the protagonists’ misreading of the other’s feelings or motivations are bound to happen. Ripley is fond of having Rhett show off his formal education and classical learning in contrast to Scarlett’s rudimentary education but his witty lines from Gone with the Wind are replaced by wordy phrases.24 If at the end of Gone with the Wind many readers are disappointed with Rhett’s final decision to go back to his roots and adopt the lifestyle of a conventional Charlestonian gentleman, the same kind of life he had seen his brother pursuing and which he abhorred, Ripley seems to be comfortable enough with having Rhett as such.25 Despite Rhett’s professed renewal of his condition as a rogue (“You are such a child, Scarlett. You’ve known me all these years, and

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yet, when you want to, you can forget all you’ve learned. It was a lie. I lied to make a dear old woman’s last moments happy. Remember, my pet, I’m a scoundrel, not a gentleman”), he happily enough restores the old family’s plantation, entertains his mother’s aged friends, observes social rules with such a zeal that he is afraid that Scarlett may carelessly ruin it all for him.26 Ripley presents Rhett’s return to the proper society in Charleston as smooth enough, which for some readers and fan-fiction writers alike is hard to believe, given Charleston’s rigid and unforgiving social character. At the end of Scarlett, however, Rhett has already left Charleston for good, admitting that this was an unwise move: He had tried, he’d told himself that he wanted the stability of family and tradition. But in the end, he began to feel the nagging pain where his wings had been clipped. He couldn’t fly. He was earthbound, ancestor-bound, Saint Ceciliabound, Charleston-bound. He loved Charleston, God, how he loved it — its beauty and its grace and its soft-scented breezes and its courage in the face of loss and ruin. But it wasn’t enough. He needed challenge, risk, some kind of blockade to be. Scarlett breathed a quiet sigh. She hated Charleston, and was sure Cat would, too.27

Despite this more or less plausible start, from the shipwreck into which Rhett and Scarlett get involved (and after which their daughter Cat is conceived) onwards, critics and readers alike stared in disbelief at the course that Scarlett took. The shipwreck scene itself, to begin with, was considered to read like a cheap supermarket romance.28 After their passionate lovemaking (which Rhett argues meant nothing but an eager celebration of their survival after their ordeal) and Rhett’s hasty departure from Charleston, Scarlett, hurt, decides to leave the city as well. This marks the starting point of a somewhat erratic journey of Scarlett, who goes with her aunts Eulalie and Pauline to her mother’s family home in Savannah, Georgia, to visit her grandfather Pierre Robillard, and eventually to Ireland with her newly found O’Hara cousins. If Rhett could come in and out of Scarlett’s life anytime he pleased and without giving notice in Gone with the Wind, this is not a realistic possibility for Southern women at the time: “Rhett urges on her a life like his own — that of male outsider, wanderer, rogue; he shows little sensitivity to the dangers that path offers for a woman. To be an outcast belle is a far more serious fate; there is no way a Scarlett doing just as she wishes, with whom, could ever again be received in the homes of Atlanta and Charleston (as Rhett can). No, to follow his path is to become what Belle Watling is.” Accordingly, in Scarlett, she is punished for her trip to Ireland as it provokes Rhett to divorce her, unaware that Scarlett has just discovered she is pregnant, and he marries local girl Anne Hampton while she is abroad. 29 With Rhett lost to Anne, Scarlett decides to stay in Ireland to buy the former O’Hara lands from its English landlords. Since Tara this time around is not the place where Scarlett can find her strength but rather a place fraught with domestic tensions because of the way in which Suellen currently

2. To Be Continued

43

runs it, home is to be found somewhere else and what better place to search for it than the homeland? This way, the family’s plantation is replaced by the English-owned family’s hometown of Ballyhara. Because of the improbability of the plot, with an all-American girl like Scarlett O’Hara moving to Ireland and grieving for Rhett, reviewer Molly Ivins recommended potential readers (and buyers) in the New York Times Book Review that “if you must, borrow it from a friend, skim the early chapters, read the Charleston part and flip through the pages of the Irish section until you find Rhett again.”30 By moving the action to Ireland, Ripley was accused of forgetting the rich social issues that permeated Gone with the Wind, such as the African Americans’ situation or the Ku Klux Klan. If African Americans in Gone with the Wind appear in the margins, in Scarlett they are entirely missing from all-white Ireland. Yet, Ripley’s treatment of Scarlett nursing Mammy dutifully till her death (with Suellen competing with her to be the one taking care of her!) can be said to be part of the same image of the domestic institution as a benevolent one, with masters worrying about the health of their slaves up to the point of personally nursing them, perpetuated by the original novel. In having a stupid maid, Pansy, who is afraid of Spanish moss that looks like ghosts, Ripley was making use of the stereotype of the superstitious African American child. To avoid the trouble Mitchell found for calling African Americans, in consonance with nineteenth-century usage, “darkies,” Ripley referred to them as “black,” which would have been deemed an insult in the period. Scarlett, who did not give a damn about the African Americans’ situation, now is too concerned with the cruel treatment received by the oppressed Irish tenants. That Scarlett followed Gone with the Wind’s neglect of African Americans suggests that Mitchell’s heirs did not see the development of African American characters as a priority for them, not even as part of the scope of the Gone with the Wind canon — a point that later came into contestation in SunTrust Bank vs. Houghton Mifflin Company.31 If Gone with the Wind had its share of controversial political opinions in its defense of the valuable labor that the Ku Klux Klan did in protecting white women from African Americans gone wild after the Reconstruction, Scarlett supports the Fenian Brotherhood. In Gone with the Wind we learn in passing about the Irish O’Hara boys’ counter-government activities while in Ireland, which ultimately force two of Gerald’s brothers to move to America; in Scarlett, Scarlett gets very much involved with the nationalistic fight for Irish independence from British rule.32 Where Gone with the Wind shows no advocacy for any cause (not even the Confederacy), Scarlett justifies the Fenian Brotherhood and has Scarlett condone it and even financially back it up. The destruction of Sherman’s army is compared to the English evicting the Irish, with Ireland closely resembling Clayton County. Yet, this is not a black and white picture of the Irish situation: some good English landowners have been caught up in riots, such as Scarlett’s friend Sir John Morland, who never evicted anyone from his

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lands. But if Ripley runs away from the problems derived from the financial panic that is hitting the United States just as Scarlett leaves for Ireland, Ripley again has Scarlett on the run when troubles in Ireland get out of control. Seeing Gone with the Wind as a love story above all other considerations, once Rhett and Scarlett are finally reunited, gone and forgotten are the problems of a riottorn Ireland.33 In order to strengthen the connection between Gone with the Wind and Scarlett, Ripley drew a number of secondary characters that were more or less resonant of characters in the original work. Thus, Eleanor Butler’s depiction resounds of Ellen O’Hara’s, Scarlett’s newly found O’Hara relatives are very much like the Tarletons, her cousin Colum O’Hara reminds her of her father and occasionally of Rhett, Edward Cooper resembles Ashley greatly, and Anne Hampton is a kind person, similar to Melanie, a resemblance so striking that even Scarlett comments on it: Scarlett seated herself next to Anne Hampton. She liked being extra nice to the shy young girl because Anne was so much like Melanie. It made Scarlett feel that in some way she was making up for all the unkind thoughts she had had about Melly all the years that Melly was so resolutely loyal to her. Also, Anne was so openly admiring that her company was always a pleasure. Her soft voice was almost animated when she complimented Scarlett on her hair. “It must be wonderful to have such dark, rich-looking color,” she said. “It’s like the deepest black silk. Or like a painting I saw once of a beautiful, sleek black panther.” Anne’s face shone with innocent worship, then blushed for her impertinence in making such a personal remark.34

In having Rhett marry Anne, however, Ripley was giving another twist to Rhett’s respect for Melanie. Wade Hampton Hamilton and Ella Lorena Kennedy, Scarlett’s children by her marriages to Charles Hamilton and Frank Kennedy who did not make it to the cinematographic version, exist in Ripley’s novel but she soon enough gets rid of them. Even though they hardly appear in Gone with the Wind, they are always living with Scarlett, in her home, and one of her goals when she gets rich is that her children do not lack anything at all: She thought of Wade and the secret she had carried silently for some days. No, she didn’t want her children raised in this welter of hate and uncertainty, of bitterness and violence lurking just below the surface, of poverty and grinding hardships and insecurity. She never wanted children of hers to know what all this was like. She wanted a secure and well-ordered world in which she could look forward and know there was a safe future ahead for them, a world where her children would know only softness and warmth and good clothes and fine food.35

Scarlett, who longed to provide her children with the very best (money, an education, food, clothes), would not let them be buried alive in Tara with little or no schooling when she wanted Wade to go to Harvard University like his father. Gone with the Wind’s depiction of Scarlett was very revolutionary at the time

2. To Be Continued

45

in having a heroine who, far from cherishing motherhood, abhors it, casting her children (especially the two eldest) aside while she devotes herself to other pursuits, be it the fun-seeking of the war days in Atlanta or her business ventures. Scarlett, in the eyes of Atlanta, unsexes herself: All of his life, Frank had been under the domination of the phrase “What will the neighbors say?” and he was defenseless against the shocks of his wife’s repeated disregard of the proprieties. He felt that everyone disapproved of Scarlett and was contemptuous of him for permitting her to “unsex herself.” She did so many things a husband should not permit, according to his views, but if he ordered her to stop them, argued or even criticized, a storm broke on his head.36

This unsexing of Scarlett, or, rather, her masculinization, was a process began when she became the head of Tara, assuming her father’s role.37 In Scarlett, she is this time the head of the whole O’Hara clan in Ireland but even this role is indicative of her feminization, for she is now a matriarch stepping into her grandmother’s shoes. In contrast to Scarlett’s daring assertion that she does not enjoy having children or the so-called joys of motherhood, Ripley has Scarlett as a doting mother who embraces the joys of motherhood that her fourth child, Cat, teaches her. Cat is but a replacement for Bonnie: if Rhett admitted to Scarlett that he would have stayed with her for Bonnie’s sake, Cat is the glue that now will keep them together. For Hawkins, Ripley was reproducing a trendy late-twentiethcentury plotline of Harlequin/Silhouettte/Mills and Boon romance fiction that has a single mother fighting against all odds to take care of her baby, born after a night of passion with a stranger, but who will find love (preferably with the baby’s father’s) at the same time that she discovers the joys of motherhood. Because of this sugarcoated version, Ripley’s portrayal of motherhood was heavily attacked: these “irresponsible and socially harmful fantasies about the sheer bliss and erotic appeal of motherhood solely for the purpose of lining their own pockets is damnably mendacious.” Wade and Ella are but excuses for Mitchell and so is Cat for Ripley to a very large extent. For all the pleasures of motherhood that Cat’s birth inspires in her, Scarlett is still a rather careless mother, letting Cat wander on her own even though she is still a baby.38 Scarlett leaves Cat on her own to roam freely around the town very much like she ignored her first child, Wade, in Gone with the Wind: “a widow with a child was at a disadvantage with these pretty minxes, she thought. But in these exciting days her widowhood and her motherhood weighed less heavily upon her than ever before. Between hospital duties in the daytime and parties at night, she hardly ever saw Wade. Sometimes she actually forgot, for long stretches, that she had a child.”39 Whereas in Gone with the Wind Scarlett pays little attention to Rhett’s comings and goings (she might enjoy his company and miss him during his prolonged absences, but she is not counting the days since she last saw him), in Scarlett she mopes and waits for Rhett, making plans for his return. Scarlett

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telling Rhett her love at the drop of a hat, making a fool of herself, humiliating herself, results in the unbelievable. Scarlett is only ready to move on with her life once Rhett sets her free, even though he is already married: “in Rhett’s caring words, she knew, there had also been sadness and farewell. In the middle of the night Scarlett O’Hara woke in her luxurious scented room on the best floor of the best hotel in Dublin and wept with racking convulsive sobs. ‘If only…’”40 Scarlett is presented clinging to Rhett and does not have a real life of her own till she realizes that she has lost him forever to Anne and their new baby. Ripley’s Scarlett behaves in an out-of-character manner, in ways inconsistent with Mitchell’s Scarlett. Thus, Scarlett happily gives all her profits from the houses to Colum to support the Fenian Brotherhood because money is no longer so important for her! For a woman who never turned to religion in her distress and who regarded God as the maker of small favors in exchange of small sacrifices on her part, she goes to church to confess her happiness at the news of Anne’s miscarrying Rhett’s child.41 She also becomes a restless and heartless flirt while in Charleston, going way too far out of bounds, endangering her reputation and the Butler family’s good name in the process. With Rhett buried in Charleston and lost for Scarlett, the former belle of five counties needed another romantic lead, which Ripley provides by means of the figure of Luke Fenton, the evil English lord of the neighboring estate. If Rhett was an outcast whom Atlanta society detested, Fenton is almost the very personification of the devil for Scarlett’s Irish cousins and tenants. The description Ripley makes of Fenton resembles to a certain extent the dark hero conventions that Mitchell used to characterize Rhett. He shares with Rhett his fascination and his ways with children, too: “Fenton was the last man on earth she would have expected to love children, and yet he seemed to be fascinated by Cat. He was treating her exactly right, too, taking her seriously, not condescending to her because she was so small. Cat had no patience with people who tried to baby her. Somehow Luke seemed to sense that and respect it. Scarlett felt tears fill her eyes. Oh, yes, she could love this man. What a father he could be to her beloved child.”42 Scarlett in Gone with the Wind often wondered if Rhett’s behavior might be a sign of his falling in love with her (only to have this thought soon dismissed): Frequently he was out of town on those mysterious trips to New Orleans which he never explained but which she felt sure, in a faintly jealous way, were connected with a woman — or women. But after Uncle Peter’s refusal to drive her, he remained in Atlanta for longer and longer intervals…. He did not call at the house now…. But she met him by accident almost every day…. She wondered occasionally if these meetings were not more than accidental. They became more and more numerous as the weeks went by and as the tension in town heightened over negro outrages. But why did he seek her out, now of all times when she looked her worst? Certainly he had no designs upon her if he had ever had any, and she was beginning to doubt even this. It had been months since he made any joking references to their distressing scene at the Yankee jail. He never men-

2. To Be Continued

47

tioned Ashley and her love for him, or made any coarse and ill-bred remarks about “coveting her.” She thought it best to let sleeping dogs lie, so she did not ask for an explanation of their frequent meetings.43

In Scarlett, she wonders the same about Fenton: She concluded that Luke showed all the symptoms of a man who was falling in love against his will. It made her happy. He’d be a wonderful father for Cat…. Scarlett touched her bruised lips carefully, with the tip of a finger. And he was a very exciting man…. Luke was very much on Scarlett’s mind during the following weeks. She was restless, and on bright mornings she raced alone over the routes they’d followed together. When she and Cat decorated the tree, she remembered the pleasure of dressing up for dinner the night he first came to Ballyhara. And when she pulled the wishbone of the Christmas goose with Cat, she wished that he would return from London soon. Sometimes she closed her eyes and tried to remember the way it felt to have his arms around her, but every attempt made her tearfully angry, because Rhett’s face and Rhett’s embrace and Rhett’s laughter always filled her memory instead. That was because she’d known Luke such a short time, she told herself.44

As expected, Scarlett became an immediate bestseller. The day the novel was released, September 25, 1991, some bookstores opened at midnight to welcome eager buyers. Scarlett broke Barnes and Noble’s one-day selling records and dispatched 6,000,000 copies worldwide (4,000,000 of them in hardback). It stayed on The New York Times best-seller fiction list for thirty-four weeks and the Publishers Weekly best-seller list for thirty-one weeks and Ripley toured the country signing copies. It further provoked Gone with the Wind to go back for several weeks to the best-seller lists, for readers of Scarlett wanted to know how it had all began.45 Despite all the expectations put on Ripley, her novel is a conventional romance that failed to capture Mitchell’s taste, especially by having most of the novel taking place in places foreign to Mitchell’s Scarlett such as Charleston, Savannah and eventually Ireland (Scarlett does visit her relatives in Charleston and Savannah in Gone with the Wind with baby Wade and Prissy in tow before moving to Atlanta, but they are mentioned briefly, almost in passing).46 Scarlett was more of a romance than a historical novel, a circumstance not totally unexpected, given Ripley’s previous writing career as a romance writer. The Trust came to regard the soundness of the publication of Scarlett with mixed feelings— despite its best-selling figures, reviews were far from flattering and stained the Trust’s regard for Ripley’s novel. Publicly, they have never stopped endorsing Scarlett and even boast about it. Paul Anderson, Jr., lawyer of the Trust, went as far as to state that “the trust was very pleased with the reception of Scarlett. Miss Ripley wrote well and the trust had nothing to complain of.”47 Already upon learning of news of a possible sequel, voices had forcefully been raised against it: “so what if they commission a sequel? Margaret Mitchell’s work is a completed action, and the only way you could resurrect it is, quite literally, to resurrect the author herself.” If the true Southern woman is

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Mitchell’s focus, then Melanie’s death is the end of Gone with the Wind, a sequel being unnecessary. Ripley had anticipated some censure for her boldness in continuing Gone with the Wind and tried to brace herself in preparation for them but the virulence of the attacks overwhelmed her. Criticism was so fierce that for years after the novel’s publication Ripley was afraid of the possibility of having fans stalking or even outright attacking her, to the point that she admitted living out of Charlottesville but refused to give further, more specific, information lest angry fans track her down. Ripley had an option in her contract to write a sequel to Scarlett, but she refused to, given the appalling criticism.48 Scarlett was called an example of “cultural materialism at its worst” and the general feeling was that the Trust had done a disservice to both Mitchell and Scarlett; Ivins succinctly summarized it in the following terms: “Poor Margaret Mitchell. Poor Scarlett. They both deserved better.” Others were still harsher, not sparing insults for Ripley: “Scarlett, the fearless act of cultural cannibalism that dares to dust off these famously star-crossed lovers and thrust them forward into the worlds of ‘Dallas,’ daytime soap opera and Judith Krantz.” Even worse, accusations of the publisher not acting bona fide towards reviewers rang rife, for reviewers did not receive advance copies ahead of publication, as is general practice. Positive reviews were very few and almost all of them published in Southern newspapers.49 As was inevitable, Scarlett was mercilessly compared to Gone with the Wind, accentuating the weaknesses of Ripley’s work when juxtaposed with the novel it was supposed to continue. The sensation that many got after reading Scarlett was that Ripley’s biggest merit was to make us appreciate Gone with the Wind even more and they hoped that Scarlett soon fell into oblivion. If Mitchell’s style was considered journalistic and poor, Ripley’s was regarded as a “witless, ponderous prose.”50 For Lozano Moreno, Gone with the Wind and Scarlett are as dissimilar as the original Don Quixote and its apocryphal continuation by an anonymous writer, known as Avellaneda’s Quixote.51 If Ripley had secondary characters closely resembling those of Gone with the Wind, in turn she was accused that her Scarlett was not Mitchell’s Scarlett and reviewers went as far as to claim that “Scarlett O’Hara isn’t here.” Some critics even envied Mammy’s dying delirium, for in it “she imagines she is back with the real Scarlett at the real Tara — back in the real book,” not with this excuse of Scarlett.52 Lozano Moreno’s hope that “Scarlett —as most books which appear in parity with Gone with the Wind —will not survive more than a decade, while Mitchell’s book has been reprinted over and over and all the world over since it appeared in 1936” has been proved wrong for the Trust, dreadful as Scarlett critically was, will not let it die and re-issued it on the occasion of the publication of Rhett Butler’s People— presenting two sequels to Gone with the Wind which do not match each other and could well be another act of commercial cannibalism.53 Scarlett was even regarded as an unintended parody with a comic side to it while its plot was dismissed as a story of girl chasing boy without “any his-

2. To Be Continued

49

torical context, any psychological insight, any irony or tension.”54 Scarlett read like a too-conventional romance for such an unconventional heroine and the maturity process of Scarlett was deemed as unbelievable, at best, or even making her unlikable and dull. The Scarlett O’Hara who fought a war on her own now limits her rebelliousness to stopping wearing corsets. Ripley, as fan-fiction writers also do, was intent on making Scarlett undergo a change (and in a mere matter of months) that Mitchell stubbornly refused her. Scarlett, from the beginning to the end of Gone with the Wind, does not change at all. If in chapter two we are already warned that “to the end of her days she would never be able to understand a complexity” because she is “the least analytic of people,” so she is in the coda even after Rhett has deserted her. For Ripley, Scarlett was a “a thoroughly loathsome character…. Her ruthlessness I found appalling.” So she completely created a new Scarlett. Ivins wrote that “there are episodes of ‘Gilligan’s Island’ with more probable plot lines” than Scarlett.55 For Jim Cullen, author of The Civil War in Popular Culture: A Reusable Past, if Scarlett succeeded it was because it appealed to “middle-aged white female readers for whom clothes, shopping, and travel are relevant matters,” activities Scarlett engages in for a long part of the novel.56 If the publication of Scarlett involved a most aggressive publicity campaign, marketing also helped publicize the miniseries into which the book was turned long before the actual filming began. With a $45,000,000 budget (nine of which corresponded to securing the book’s rights), it was the most expensive TV miniseries to date. The search for the right actress to play Scarlett O’Hara once again churned out an international publicity campaign, with a thousand women worldwide being auditioned for six months. As it had happened with Vivien Leigh, an accidental discovery reportedly helped cast the protagonist when producer Robert Halmi, Sr., saw Joanne Whalley-Kilmer (also an English actress) on television. Scarlett the miniseries did not fare much better than the novel itself, although it was, especially once Scarlett moves to Ireland, rather loosely based on Ripley’s work. While Ripley was by contract requested not to include any explicit sex scene in her novel and she proudly claimed, “I’m a three-dot writer,” this clause did not apply to the miniseries, which featured Rhett and Scarlett’s passionate lovemaking after the shipwreck. Additionally, since the movie version of Gone with the Wind denied the existence of Scarlett’s children by her two first marriages, so did the miniseries. A reviewer called it “a pitiful joke,” recalling the awful criticisms of the novel.57 The ending of Scarlett, a novel that was conceived to put an end to millions of readers’ doubts about Rhett and Scarlett’s lives, is deliberately quite open, with Rhett and Scarlett along with their daughter finally reunited, but unsure as to their next destination or the turn that their new relationship should take. This opened the door for a second sequel, for which Ripley had an option and rejected. The critical failure and the appalling reviews that Scarlett received, as well as the economic windfall it brought to Mitchell’s heirs, moved the Trust

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to immediately commission the writing of a second authorized novel. On the one hand, it was to repeat the commercial success of Ripley’s novel; on the other, they were seeking to have a novel that would receive more critical acclaim. In 1995 Antonia Fraser, author of several well-regarded historical novels, was approached to write it. She declined, recommending British writer Emma Tennant instead, much to Tennant’s surprise. Tennant’s work would be regarded, her contract stipulated, as work for hire, with the novelist receiving royalties worth $3,000,000, according to estimates. Tennant was forced to sign a fifteenpage contract imposing, among other clauses, the need to “maintain the essential features,” not to include any “acts or references to incest, miscegenation, or sex between two people of the same sex” as well as being requested to secrecy in regards to the plot. Tennant devoted the next two years of her life to the manuscript, which, unaware of the previous history of Anne Edwards’ failed Tara, she also titled Tara. Tennant judged Ripley’s portrayal of Rhett and Scarlett as lifeless and planned to bring them back to life. Her novel began where Ripley left it, explaining what happened in Rhett and Scarlett’s new relationship after their reconciliation. In an interview, Tennant “described how the book picks up with Scarlett and Rhett in Paris; the terrible fight that follows; what they do next; what happens to their children; what happens to Tara, the plantation, and how Scarlett and Rhett become entangled with (among others) the nefarious Boss Tweed, the Reconstruction-era President Rutherford B. Hayes and the everlurking Ashley Wilkes.” 58 Tennant’s 575-page manuscript, delivered four months earlier than expected, met with a response in the form of an 89-page memo explaining, in a manner Tennant found profoundly offensive, her failure to capture the Americanness of Gone with the Wind.59 Tennant ended up resigning from the task, feeling incapable of carrying out so many changes, despite the support of some of the European publishing houses that had already bought the rights to her sequel, whose release was originally planned for 1997. Tennant declared, “I’ve never had this experience before, where I put heart and soul into a book and it wasn’t published. The most awful feeling was just seeing the book sitting there like a lump.” Confirmed rumors had it that Ripley, who faced a number of difficulties herself when it came to her creative freedom, almost walked out too after her first draft was considered not marketable enough.60 Stephen King referred to the Trust and the publisher’s dealings as “a combination made in hell.” The Trust’s selection process of a writer was labeled “a saga of literary puppeteering with few parallels outside a cold war Ministry of Propaganda.”61 The next writer approached was Southern novelist Pat Conroy, author of the much-admired The Prince of Tides and Beach Music and who had written a praising introduction to the sixtieth-anniversary edition of Gone with the Wind.62 For almost three years, the Trust and Conroy were involved in talks during which, in his own words, Conroy “felt like a Yankee at the first Battle

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of Manassas.” Eventually he walked out in late 1998, stating, “I went through more negotiations with this Gone with the Wind than the Germans did in World War I with all the clauses at Versailles.”63 The Trust denied having tried to coerce Conroy’s artistic creativity or editorial freedom; Conroy, however, claimed that he had been forbidden to include homosexuality, miscegenation or even killing off Scarlett. Years later, Conroy went public about his dealings with the Trust when he testified in favor of Alice Randall in SunTrust Bank vs. Houghton Mifflin. Conroy explained, “I duly forewarned all the agents and lawyers and editors and publishers that Paul and Hal had defended the honor of the Mitchell estate with the bloodthirstiness of Caligula.”64 Conroy was well aware that writing a sequel to such a critically demoted work as Gone with the Wind (not to mention the bad reputation of sequels in general) might be a career hindrance and an unwise decision, but it was a risk well worth taking for him since he wanted to honor his mother, a big Gone with the Wind fan: “I thought I was going to do a work of art, that I could contribute something to the genre of sequel by taking this with utter seriousness as if my life depended on it.”65 The capitalist tendency of the Trust has often been mentioned, with Conroy bitterly complaining that the lawyers for the Trust never mentioned the word “literature” in their several-year-long negotiations. Conroy’s novel, tentatively titled The Rules of Pride: The Autobiography of Capt. Rhett Butler, C.S.A., opened with the first line, “In Atlanta, most people remember me because of my wife.” The novel was to focus on Rhett’s side of the story and Conroy planned to feature Scarlett O’Hara’s death in a manner resembling the pathos of Anna Karenina’s, although he was willing to give up this idea if absolutely necessary, given the Trust’s resistance to have Scarlett dead — and, thus, unable to live new experiences in potential sequels to come. In Conroy’s original idea, “[Rhett] would have killed Scarlett O’Hara while she was still beautiful.”66 The second authorized sequel to Gone with the Wind, Rhett Butler’s People, did not appear until 2007, and only after a lengthy court process with African American writer Alice Randall to determine who is entitled to rewrite Gone with the Wind.

Notes 1. Alexandra Ripley, Scarlett: The Sequel to Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind (London, New York, Sydney, Toronto: BCA, 1991), 5. 2. Quoted in Molly Haskell, Frankly, My Dear: Gone with the Wind Revisited (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2009), 140. 3. Haskell, Frankly, My Dear, 140. 4. Dieter Meindl, “A Reappraisal of Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind,” Mississippi Quarterly 34, no. 4 (1981): 421. 5. Marianne Walker, Margaret Mitchell and John Marsh: The Love Story Behind Gone with the Wind (Atlanta: Peachtree Publishers, 1993), 334. 6. Marjorie Garber, “‘I’ll Be Back’: Review of Part Two: Reflections on the Sequel,” London Review of Books 21, no. 16 (1999), lrb.co.uk/v21/n16/marjorie-garber/ill-be-back/print (accessed January 19, 2010).

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7. Quoted in Richard F. Selcer, “Home Sweet Movies: From Tara to Oz and Home Again,” Journal of Popular Film and Television 18, no. 2 (1990): 61; Harriett Hawkins, “Shared Dreams: Reproducing Gone with the Wind,” in Novel Images: Literature in Performance, ed. Peter Reynold (London and New York: Routledge, 1993), 122, 136–137. 8. Garber, “I’ll Be Back”; Eleanor Robinson, “Once Upon a Time … A Happy Ending for the Unauthorised Sequel?” The New Zealand Law e-Journal 4 (2006): 1–21, nzpostgraduatelawejournal. auckland.ac.nz/PDF%20Articles/Issue%204%20(2006)/EleanorONCE%20UPON%20A%20TIME.pdf (accessed June 29, 2009), 1; Celia Brayfield, “Now Discontent Is Our de Winter: Mrs. De Winter— Susan Hill,” The Independent, October 10, 1993, independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/book-review— now-discontent-is-our-de-winter-mrs-de-winter — susan-hill-sinclairstevenson-1299-pounds1509933.html (accessed May 25, 2009); Laura Shapiro, “Manderley Confidential,” The New York Times, October 14, 2001, ny times.com/2001/10/14/books/manderley-confidential.html?pagewanted=print (accessed May 25, 2009). 9. David Bret, Clark Gable: Tormented Star (2007; Cambridge, MA: Da Capo Press, 2008), 198– 199; Catherine Clinton, “Gone with the Wind,” in Past Imperfect: History According to the Movies, ed. Ted Mico, John Miller-Monzon, and David Rubel (New York: Henry Holt, 1995), 133. 10. Anthony Gardner, “Gone with the Wind, the Never Ending Story,” The Sunday Times, October 28, 2007, entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/books/article2744279.ece (accessed March 2, 2010); Anne Edwards, Road to Tara: The Life of Margaret Mitchell, Author of Gone with the Wind (1983; London: Orion, 1996), 235. 11. Jasmina Zecevic, “Distinctively Delineated Fictional Characters That Constitute the Story Being Told: Who Are They and Do They Deserve Independent Copyright Protection?” Vanderbilt Journal of Entertainment and Tech. Law 8, no. 2 (2006): 371–372; Gardner, “GWTW, the Never Ending Story”; Myrna Oliver, “Alexandra Ripley, autora de la continuación de Lo que el viento se llevó,” El País, January 28, 2004, elpais.com/articulo/agenda/Ripley/_Alexandra/Alexandra/Ripley/autora/continuacion/viento/ llevo/elpepigen/20040128elpepiage_9/Tes/ (accessed March 18, 2010); R. Z. Sheppard, “Frankly, It’s Not Worth a Damn,” Time, October 7, 1991, time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,973976,00.html (accessed January 20, 2010). 12. Margaret Mitchell quoted in H. N. Oliphant, “People on the Home Front: Margaret Mitchell,” in Gone with the Wind as Book and Film, ed. Richard Harwell (1983; New York: Paragon House, 1987), 63. 13. Edwards, Road to Tara, 328, 338; quoted in Keith Runyon, “Mr. Mitchell Remembers Margaret,” in Gone with the Wind as Book and Film, ed. Richard Harwell (1983; New York: Paragon House, 1987), 81. 14. Gardner, “GWTW, the Never Ending Story.” 15. Susan Hill, “Mrs. de Winter,” Susanhill.com, susan-hill.com/pages/books/the_books/mrs_de_ winter.asp (accessed January 12, 2009). 16. Sheppard, “Frankly, It’s Not Worth a Damn”; John Unsworth, “Twentieth-Century American Bestsellers: Scarlett,” 20th-Century American Bestsellers, www3.isrl.uiuc.edu%2f~unsworth%2fcourses %2fentc312%2ff02%2fsearch.cgi%3ftitle%3dScarlett (accessed February 21, 2008); quoted in Helen Taylor, Scarlett’s Women: Gone with the Wind and Its Female Fans (London: Virago Press, 1989), 156. 17. Unsworth, “Scarlett”; Taylor, Scarlett’s Women, 156; Gardner, “GWTW, the Never Ending Story”; quoted in Kenneth N. Gilpin, “Alexandra Ripley, ‘Scarlett’ Author, Dies at 70,” The New York Times, January 27, 2004, query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9405E2DB1438F934A15752C0A9629C8B63 (accessed January 25, 2008); Stephen Harriman, “It’s a Long Way from Scarlett to Biblical Joseph of Arimathea,” The Virginian-Pilot, September 11, 1996, scholar.lib.vt.edu/VA-news/VA-Pilot/issues /1996/vp960911/09110033.htm (accessed January 25, 2008). 18. Eleanor Blau, “Do Scarlett and Rhett Discover Love Anew? A Sequel Reveals All,” The New York Times, September 25, 1991, query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9D0CE4DC1738F936A1575AC 0A967958260 (accessed January 25, 2008). 19. Donald McCaig, Rhett Butler’s People (London: Macmillan, 2007), 361–362. 20. Unsworth, “Scarlett”; Quoted in Taylor, Scarlett’s Women, 156. 21. Blau, “Do Scarlett and Rhett Discover Love Anew?” 22. Margaret Mitchell, Gone with the Wind, special commemorative 60th-anniversary edition (New York: Warner Books, 1999), chapter LXI; Morton quoted in María Rosa Cabellos Castilla, “Estereotipos masculinos y femeninos en Gone with the Wind, de Margaret Mitchell: El ejemplo de Scarlett O’Hara y Ashley Wilkes,” in Género, lenguaje y traducción, ed. José Santaemilia (Valencia: Universitat de Valencia / Dirección General de la Mujer, 2003), 251.

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23. Ripley, Scarlett, 574, 704. 24. Sheppard, “Frankly, It’s Not Worth a Damn.” 25. Haskell quoted in “Race, Gender Roles in Gone with the Wind,” Weekend All Things Considered, 14 March 2009, proquest.com (accessed February 22, 2010) 26. Ripley, Scarlett, 24. 27. Ibid., 757. 28. Unsworth, “Scarlett.” 29. Taylor, Scarlett’s Women, 118, 152. 30. Quoted in Unsworth, “Scarlett.” 31. Harriett Hawkins, “The Sins of Scarlett,” Textual Practice 6, no. 3 (1992): 493–494; Ripley, Scarlett, 102; John D. Stevens, “The Black Reaction to Gone with the Wind,” Journal of Popular Film 2, no. 4 (1973): 370; Stephen L. Carter, “Almost a Gentleman,” The New York Times, November 4, 2007, nytimes.com/2007/11/04/books/review/Carter-t.html (accessed January 24, 2008); Richard Schur, “The Wind Done Gone Controversy: American Studies, Copyright Law, and the Imaginary Domain,” American Studies 44, no. 1–2 (2003): 32. 32. Mitchell, GWTW, chapter III. 33. Ripley, Scarlett, 432, 443, 740; Hawkins, “The Sins of Scarlett,” 494; Carter, “Almost a Gentleman.” 34. Ripley, Scarlett, 107–108, 354, 386, 119, 198. 35. Mitchell, GWTW, chapter XXXVII. 36. Ibid., chapter XXXVI. 37. Helen Taylor, “Gone with the Wind: The Mammy of Them All,” in The Progress of Romance: The Politics of Popular Fiction, ed. Jean Radford (London and New York: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1986), 127. 38. Hawkins, “The Sins of Scarlett,” 492–495. 39. Mitchell, GWTW, chapter XVIII. 40. Ripley, Scarlett, 662. 41. Ibid., 576, 630, 641. 42. Ibid., 716. 43. Mitchell, GWTW, chapter XXXVIII. 44. Ripley, Scarlett, 717. 45. Esther B. Fein, “Another Day, Lots of Dollars as Scarlett Returns to Tara,” The New York Times, October 3, 1991, query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9D0CE6D61538F930A35753C1A967958260 (accessed January 25, 2008); Unsworth, “Scarlett”; Clinton, “Gone with the Wind,” 132. 46. Mitchell, GWTW, chapter VII. 47. Gardner, “GWTW, the Never Ending Story.” 48. Robert Drake, “The Book, the Movie, the Dream,” Mississippi Quarterly 44, no. 2 (1991): 192; Mary Condé, “Some African-American Fictional Responses to Gone with the Wind,” The Yearbook of English Studies 26 (1996): 209; Ripley quoted in Oliver, “Alexandra Ripley, autora de la continuación de Lo que el viento se llevó”; Unsworth, “Scarlett”; Harriman, “Long Way from Scarlett to Joseph of Arimathea”; Sheppard, “Frankly, It’s Not Worth a Damn”; Sarah Lyall, “At Home with: Emma Tennant; It’s Hard to Keep a Good Sequel Secret,” The New York Times, May 4, 1995, query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=990CEEDD1F3EF937A35756C0A963958260&sec=&spon=&pagewanted=all (accessed February 19, 2008). 49. Hawkins, “The Sins of Scarlett,” 496; quoted in Unsworth, “Scarlett”; Janet Maslin, “In ‘Scarlett,’ Only the Names Are the Same,” The New York Times, September 27, 1991, query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9D0CE7DF123EF934A1575AC0A967958260 (accessed January 25, 2008); Brad Miner, “Dog Bites Man—Marketing of Scarlett: The Sequel to Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind,” National Review, November 4, 1991, findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1282/is_n20_v43/ai_11523387 (accessed January 25, 2008); Fein, “Another Day, Lots of Dollars as Scarlett Returns to Tara.” 50. Hawkins, “The Sins of Scarlett,” 491, 494, 496. 51. Susana Lozano Moreno, “Romance & Melodrama: Feminine Genres Reputed as Trash: Gone with the Wind: The Study of a Case,” The Grove: Working Papers on English Studies 5 (1998): 66–67. 52. Maslin, “In ‘Scarlett,’ Only the Names Are the Same.” 53. Lozano Moreno, “Romance & Melodrama,” 67. 54. Sheppard, “Frankly, It’s Not Worth a Damn”; Patricia Storace, “Look Away, Dixie Land,” The New York Review of Books 38, no. 21 (1991): 37; Sheppard in Unsworth, “Scarlett”; J. O. Tate quoted in Unsworth, “Scarlett.”

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55. Quoted in Lyall, “At Home with: Emma Tennant”; Hawkins, “The Sins of Scarlett,” 491, 493; Mitchell, GWTW, chapter II; quoted in Blau, “Do Scarlett and Rhett Discover Love Anew?” 56. Quoted in Ann Fabian, “Review of the Civil War in Popular Culture: A Reusable Past by Jim Cullen,” The American Historical Review 102, no. 1 (1997): 193. 57. Quoted in Blau, “Do Scarlett and Rhett Discover Love Anew?”; Ginia Bellafante, “Tomorrow Is Another Yawn,” Time, time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,163257,00.html (accessed January 25, 2008); quoted in Justin Hughes, “‘Recoding’ Intellectual Property and Overlooked Audience Interests,” Texas Law Review 77 (1999), fanlore.org/wiki/Legal_Analysis (accessed January 11, 2010). 58. Lyall, “At Home with: Emma Tennant”; quoted in Sarah Lyall, “Book Sequel Creates a New Civil War,” The New York Times, June 3, 1996, query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9E0CE7DC1F39F930 A35755C0A960958260 (accessed February 21, 2008); Gardner, “GWTW, the Never Ending Story.” 59. Lyall, “At Home with: Emma Tennant”; Lyall, “Sequel Creates War”; Jill Vejnoska, “Rhett’s Back, Hoping That We Still Care,” The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, October 28, 2007, geocities.com/ cactus_st/article/article177.html (accessed February 19, 2008). 60. Sheppard, “Frankly, It’s Not Worth a Damn.” 61. Quoted in Gardner, “Gone with the Wind, the Never Ending Story.” 62. Jonathan D. Austin, “Pat Conroy: ‘I was raised by Scarlett O’Hara,’” CNN, February 4, 2000, knowsouthernhistory.net/Culture/Literature/pat_conroy.htm (accessed February 18, 2008). 63. Quoted in Jill Vejnoska, Bill Rankin, and Don O’Briant, “Parody or Theft?” Atlanta JournalConstitution, gwtwmemories.com/forums/bbfaye/messages/712.html (accessed February 18, 2008); quoted in Gardner, “GWTW, the Never Ending Story.” 64. Motoko Rich, “Rhett, Scarlett and Friends Prepare for Yet Another Encore,” The New York Times, May 16, 2007, nytimes.com/2007/05/16/books/16book.html?_r=3&oref=slogin&pagewanted=print (accessed January 24, 2008); Martin Arnold, “Rhett (and Pat Conroy) Aim to Have the Last Word,” The New York Times, November 5, 1998, query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9F03E2D71F3FF936A 35752C1A96E958260 (accessed February 18, 2008); “Declaration of Pat Conroy,” SunTrust Bank v. Houghton Mifflin, houghtonmifflinbooks.com/features/randall_url/pdf/Declaration_Pat_Conroy.pdf (accessed December 15, 2009). 65. “Declaration of Conroy”; quoted in Arnold, “Rhett (and Pat Conroy) Aim to Have the Last Word.” 66. Quoted in Austin, “I was Raised by Scarlett O’Hara”; “Declaration of Conroy”; Arnold, “Rhett (and Pat Conroy) Aim to Have the Last Word.”

3 Copyright Not Gone with the Wind Mammy always called me Chile. She never called me soft or to her softness. She called me to do things, usually for Other, who she called Lamb. It was “Get dressed, Chile” and “What’s mah Lamb gwanna wear?”1

The immense popularity of Gone with the Wind has had a negative side effect in that it has fallen prey to an endless string of imitators, parodists or plagiarists, all taking advantage of it for their own profit. Already during Margaret Mitchell’s lifetime, cartoonist Al Capp was found guilty of having infringed the copyright of Gone with the Wind; he was forced to print an apology and transfer the copyright of the cartoons to Mitchell.2 In 1989, French author Régine Deforges was found guilty by a French court of having plagiarized Gone with the Wind in her novel The Blue Bicycle (1982). The first book in a trilogy collectively titled “The Blue Bicycle,” Deforges’ book recounted a love affair in Nazi-occupied France during the Second World War. The court determined that it copied “the general intrigue, plot development and narrative progression and the physical and psychological characteristics of the main characters” as well as “the composition and expression of numerous scenes and key dramatic moments” of Mitchell’s work.3 Deforges contended that she had never denied that the first seventy pages of The Blue Bicycle bore a strong resemblance to Gone with the Wind, even before the lawsuit. Having previously acknowledged it or not, Deforges was sentenced to pay more than $330,000 in damages to Mitchell’s heirs, the Stephens Mitchell Trust, controlled and represented by SunTrust Bank. However, the following year, an appeals court reversed this decision and cleared Deforges while sentencing the Trust to pay the court costs involved. Curiously, a similar lawsuit against the American edition of The Blue Bicycle had been turned down by a California court in 1988, a year before the first sentence in France.4 Far from the Trust’s negotiations to have an authorized sequel to Gone with the Wind commissioned, the year 1996 saw the publication of an unauthorized sequel, My Beloved Tara, whose authors, Jocelyn Mims and 55

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Melanie Pearson, printed it out of their own pocket. They were forced to withdraw the book, so copies of it are almost non-existent. Summaries report that it focused on Rhett rather than on Scarlett and that it was poorly written.5 In spite of these precedents, the most prominent litigation concerning Gone with the Wind has been the SunTrust Bank vs. Houghton Mifflin lawsuit that between March and October 2001 tried to determine if African American writer Alice Randall was entitled to publish The Wind Done Gone, her own version of Gone with the Wind with a new take on the race issues.6 News of the imminent publication of Randall’s book prompted immediate legal action by SunTrust Bank, which owns and controls the copyright of Gone with the Wind, charging Randall of copyright and trademark infringement as well as deceptive trade practices.7 The question of what constitutes legitimate parody and what is downright “piracy,” as Judge Charles A. Pannell, Jr., called it, was in the air. To whom does a novel belong? Can anyone use well-known characters, and, if so, with what goals? Is borrowing a large number of settings and characters, easily identifiable scenes as well as dialogue lines acceptable?8 In short, is Scarlett O’Hara a piece of popular culture in the public domain or a copyrightable element? The ensuing lawsuit tried to determine questions such as what intellectual property and popular culture are, who is to be entitled to write or re-write history, whether fiction has to be historically accurate or not, and the legitimate use of characters that are already part of public culture. Precedents to the case were scarce, being almost limited to Campbell v. Acuff-Rose Music, Inc., which dealt with the use the rap band 2 Live Crew had made of Roy Orbison’s song “Oh, Pretty Woman” for their own “Pretty Woman”; the court eventually authorized 2 Live Crew’s version on the grounds that that they had transformed the original, creating a new, original song in the process.9 Mitchell’s portrayal of slavery was the main objection against the novel raised by Alice Randall, who did not feel comfortable with the way slavery was fictionalized in Gone with the Wind. An African American Harvard graduate, Randall wondered whether miscegenation had existed in Tara when her teenage daughter began reading the novel. She claimed having fallen in love with Gone with the Wind when she first read it at age twelve, in spite of the fact that “it was a troubled love from the beginning. I had to overlook racist stereotyping and Klan whitewashing to appreciate the ambitious, hard-working, hard-loving person who is Scarlett.” She decided to re-write Gone with the Wind after visiting an exhibition of the movie’s customs in Nashville, where Randall was a country songwriter. It was then that Randall asked herself, “Where are the mulattoes on Tara? Where is Scarlett’s half-sister? Immediately, I knew I had to tell her story.”10 The opinion on the issue of miscegenation in Southern plantations of Mary Chestnut, the wife of a Southern planter and Confederate soldier who left a famous and widely reprinted Civil War diary recounting her experiences, is

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well-known: “any lady is ready to tell you who is the father of all the mulatto children in everybody’s household but her own. Those, she seems to think, drop from the clouds.”11 Miscegenation, in Mitchell’s rendering, was not a completely unheard-of occurrence by the residents of Clayton County, as Scarlett’s neighbor, Grandma Fontaine, acknowledges: Hah! They [the Yankee soldiers] promised all the black wenches silk dresses and gold earbobs— that’s what they did. And Cathleen Calvert said some of the troopers went off with the black fools behind them on their saddles. Well, all they’ll get will be yellow babies and I can’t say that Yankee blood will improve the stock.… Don’t pull such a shocked face, Jane. We’re all married, aren’t we? And, God knows, we’ve seen mulatto babies before this.12

Randall decided to tell Tara’s story again, but this time from the point of view of one of those mulatto children that must surely have existed. Randall was thus taking upon herself the task of denouncing miscegenation in Tara, a common occurrence in the nineteenth-century South, but to which Mitchell, much like those wives Chestnut criticized, had remained oblivious with the exception of one single reference. But was Randall entitled to make use of Gone with the Wind in her denunciation of miscegenation, even if the image of African Americans in the novel was harmful? The debate over the influence and moral duty of literature is far from being new. Should novels teach and preach or just entertain? For instance, fictional writing was banned in Puritan America, where any literary writing had to have a moral purpose literature was supposed to lack. Taking into account the opposing views of slavery posed by The Wind Done Gone and Gone with the Wind, should literature be historically accurate? Should the historical background of novels be realistic or is artistic license acceptable? Despite the inaccurate portrayal of slavery conditions in Gone with the Wind, the novel has been repeatedly praised for its historical meticulousness in other matters, which makes it harder to appreciate its bias.13 In specifically tackling the issue of miscegenation and the mulatto children fathered by the wealthy, white landowners with their slave women, Randall’s goal was the depiction of the true slavery conditions in the South, somewhat sugarcoated, Randall contended, in Gone with the Wind. Though largely overlooked at the time of publication except for some left-wing and Communist reviewers (whose criticisms rather filled Mitchell with joy and pride), nowadays Mitchell’s portrayal of slavery is a matter of fierce controversy.14 Time has caused, apart from the critical devaluation of the novel, major changes in the reconsideration of African Americans. Slavery, called “the most damning lie America has ever told itself ” by writer James Carroll, is benevolent in Mitchell’s depiction: masters are kind to their slaves, for the most part, and abuses do not occur. Slavery in the novel is presented as a paternalistic institution and slaves as childlike creatures. Mrs. O’Hara, the perfect Southern lady, admonishes Scarlett to treat slaves as she would treat children: “time and again

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Ellen had said: ‘Be firm but be gentle with inferiors, especially darkies’” or “‘always remember, dear,’ Ellen had said, ‘you are responsible for the moral as well as the physical welfare of the darkies God has intrusted to your care. You must realize that they are like children and must be guarded from themselves like children, and you must always set them a good example.’”15 Just as the popularity of the movie of Gone with the Wind has legitimated the social class organization it presents, the same has also happened to the racial terms that the novel portrays to certain extent.16 Some elements in Gone with the Wind are certainly disturbing: Does no one notice that Rhett, supposedly a figure of romance, is a murderer of black men? Does no one notice that Tony Fontaine, the flower of Clayton County youth, kills a black man naturally for making a sexual approach to a white woman? And what is the invincible Scarlett’s response to this? “What can we do with devils who’d hang a nice boy like Tony just for killing a drunken buck and a scoundrelly Scallawag to protect his women folks? … there were thousands of women like her, all over the South, who were frightened and helpless.”17

Most criticisms about Mitchell’s depiction of African Americans have pointed out that her African American characters are stereotypical, almost caricatures, characterized as loyal as dogs. For instance, “Sam galloped over to the buggy, his eyes rolling with joy and his white teeth flashing, and clutched her outstretched hand with two black hands as big as hams. His watermelon-pink tongue lapped out, his whole body wiggled and his joyful contortions were as ludicrous as the gambolings of a mastiff.”18 Pat Conroy, who felt uncomfortable with this view of slavery, commented that “the portrait of slavery done by Margaret Mitchell is one of the most smiley-faced and happy darkies in the field we have in American literature.”19 In general, literary depictions of African Americans at the time Gone with the Wind was written presented them as “feeble-willed noble savages, comically musical minstrel figures, and dehumanized brutes.”20 Because literature is supposed to reflect a given historical moment and its society (no matter its historical setting), Gone with the Wind reflects the image of African Americans as perceived in the twenties.21 If Mitchell drew criticisms from her portrayal of Big Sam as a dog happy to see its owner, this was a common image in the literature of the moment, when “authors stressing the mutual affection between the races looked upon the Negro as a docile mastiff. In the Reconstruction this mastiff turned into a mad dog. ‘Damyanks,’ carpetbaggers, scalawags, and New England schoolmarms affected him with the rabies.”22 Columbia professor C. W. Everett, commissioned by Macmillan to assess the novel’s value, had already cautioned in his report that “the author should keep out her own feelings in one or two places where she talked about the negroes.” He was especially uncomfortable when Mitchell talked of Mammy’s ape-like face and her black paws. Mitchell agreed in having these expressions changed although she had “meant no disrespect to Mammy for I

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have heard so many negroes refer to their hands as ‘black paws’ and when an old and wrinkled negro woman is sad there is nothing else in the world she looks like except a large ape. But I had not realized how differently this sounded in type.”23 The Communist Daily Worker called the novel “vicious,” “reactionary,” “inciting to race hatred,” “slander of the Negro people,” and “justifying Ku Klux Klan.” For the Chicago Defender, Gone with the Wind was a “weapon of terror against black America.” The movie did not fare much better and the New York branch of the Communist Party complained that Gone with the Wind revives every foul slander against the Negro people, every stock-in-trade lie of the Southern lynchers. While dressed in a slick package of sentimentality for the old “noble” traditions of the South, this movie is a rabid incitement against the Negro people. The historical struggle for democracy in this country which we have come to cherish so dearly is vilified and condemned. The great liberator, Abraham Lincoln, is pictured as a tyrant and a coward. Not only is this vicious picture calculated to provoke race riots, but also to cause sectional strife between the North and the South just when the growth of the labor and progressive movement has made possible the increasing unity of Negro and white, in behalf of the common interest of both.

Moreover, African American organizations organized protests and pickets in the theaters playing the movie, endorsing the support of some trade unions. Most of these activities were held in Northern cities, with a few smaller protests in Southern cities. All of them, however, were largely unsuccessful, for the most part.24 Still, some changes had to be done to the movie in regards to the novel’s treatment of African Americans due to the pressure put by the NAACP. 25 Selznick insisted in having all references to the Klan removed, acknowledging the negative public reaction against The Birth of a Nation, a story about the origins of the Klan based on Thomas Dixon’s novels, a few years earlier. He commented in a memo to screenwriter Sidney Howard dated January 6, 1937, that here we come to a very touching point and I am hopeful that you share my feelings on it…. I personally feel quite strongly that we should cut out the Klan entirely. It would be difficult, if not impossible, to clarify for our audiences the difference between the old Klan and the Klan of our times. A year or so ago I refused to consider remaking The Birth of a Nation, largely for this reason. Of course we might have shown a couple of Catholic Klansmen, but it would be rather comic to have a Jewish Kleagle; I, for one, have no desire to produce any anti–Negro film either. In our picture I think we have to be awfully careful that the Negroes come out decidedly on the right side of the ledger, which I do not think should be difficult.26

Mitchell responded to these accusations of racism arguing that “as far as I can see, most of the negro characters were people of worth, dignity and rectitude — certainly Mammy and Peter and even the ignorant Sam knew more of decorous behavior and honor than Scarlett did,” overlooking the fact that while the nar-

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rator does comment on Scarlett’s character flaws when it comes to morality and her own personal values, her views on slavery as better than the chaos caused by Reconstruction are not corrected by the narrator and remain unchallenged.27 Mitchell further contended that “Heaven knows I had and have no intention of ‘insulting the Race’” and alleged that “Nigger” and “darkies” were the common terms employed back then.28 In turn, in the movie African Americans were called “darkies” or alternatively “inferiors,” but never “nigger.” In her private life, Mitchell was a secret patron of Morehouse College, funding several scholarships for African American students’ education at medical schools, a labor continued by Mitchell’s heirs (a $51,500,000 donation funded the Margaret Mitchell Chair). Nevertheless, Mitchell and the president of the college, Benjamin Mays, kept this agreement secret until 1946 out of fear of criticisms.29 Upon realizing that the Atlanta private hospitals would not treat African American patients, Mitchell, reluctant to have her lifelong African American employee go to a hospice, maneuvered with the nuns running a Catholic private hospital to have her maid accepted, a generous “anonymous” donation making it possible for the nuns to overlook the fact that her maid did not meet the requirements of being destitute and without any family member. She next became the main advocate for the creation of a private hospital for African Americans in Atlanta. Bessie, the Marshes’ cook, wrote in the Atlanta Journal that “I wish I could tell the many good things that Mr. and Mrs. Marsh have done for me, but it would take the whole of Sunday’s paper.”30 Writer Donald Spoto goes as far as to claim that “there is absolutely no doubt that she would have supported the Civil Rights movement.”31 Gone with the Wind is not an attempt to be an accurate historical account for it is far too biased a picture of the South’s side, as Mitchell admitted, puzzled by its warm reception in the North. Nevertheless, the novel has cast a large influence on popular culture and thought about what the Civil War was like as well as about other matters, such as race relations in the antebellum South. Gone with the Wind is not only extremely popular and has come to occupy a prominent place in America’s culture but, as Randall remarked, G.W.T.W. [Gone with the Wind]— the book, the movie, the costume, the quips— has reached the status of myth in our culture. G.W.T.W. is integrated into the fabric of our culture. It is more powerful than history because it is better known than history. Unfortunately, G.W.T.W. is an inaccurate portrait of Southern history. It’s a South without miscegenation, a South without whippings, a South without families sold apart, a South without free blacks striving for their education, a South without Booker T. Washington and Frederick Douglass. G.W.T.W. depicts a South that never, ever existed.32

The historical veracity of novels dealing with the Old South has frequently been questioned by those having a different opinion on the matter of slavery. Harriet Beecher Stowe’s historical accuracy was attacked so fiercely that she felt compelled to publish her Key to Uncle Tom’s Cabin in 1853, a year after the

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publication of Uncle Tom’s Cabin. A group of ten black critics called forth a rectification of the historical mistakes in The Confessions of Nat Turner by William Styron.33 Mitchell never wrote a historical companion to Gone with the Wind, although she was urged to on the grounds that she was not a professional historian; nevertheless, she did specify her references in thousands of letters to her fans, claiming that “my bibliography runs into the thousands of volumes.”34 History writing and who is to write history were issues at the core of the The Wind Done Gone controversy, which is somehow surprising if we take into account that both The Wind Done Gone and Gone with the Wind are fictional works, regardless that they are set against the historical backdrop of the Civil War and the Reconstruction. While The Wind Done Gone attempts to pass as history, as a real journal, Mitchell stressed over and over again that hers was an entirely fictional account, a product of her imagination and she made sure there was no real-life person who was named as the characters in her book. Randall wanted to challenge and dispel the image of slavery as a happy time that is even shared by some African Americans. To achieve this, Randall, who came to regard herself as a “revisionist historian,” followed an approach very similar to what Alex Haley did with Roots (1976): the use of fiction to write enriched history. With this, she was positioning herself as heiress of African American authors trying to reflect history accurately by the means of fiction, a trend in African American letters ever since the author of the first novel by an African American published in the United States, William Wells Brown, considered that his Clotel was not fiction but a true testimony of the conditions of African Americans in general and of the mulatto in particular.35 Still, though Randall did seek to correct an episode in American history often omitted from American letters such as miscegenation, because she was writing fiction and not history, The Wind Done Gone is but “the articulation of desire rather than the outcome of empirical investigation.”36 For all of Randall’s claims of her rewriting History, Gone with the Wind is fiction and so is ultimately The Wind Done Gone. In Gone with the Wind as much as in Roots or in Thomas Dixon’s pro–Ku Klux Klan novels that were the inspiration of the very popular The Birth of a Nation (a favorite of Mitchell’s) or Uncle Tom’s Cabin, although their authors did have a strong historical basis to back up their words, “the common fault of selective omission runs through all of them, accounting for the dramatic story line, the simplicity of the emotional appeal, and the literary accessibility through so wide a range of readers. This may in fact be the historical interface of the division that exists between popular culture and high culture.”37 Beginning with the title of her novel, Randall showed her intention to rewrite Mitchell’s story from the slaves’ point of view. “The wind done gone” is non-standard, African American English for “gone with the wind.” Though it took her a decade to complete her only novel, Mitchell only chose the title when she had already sold the rights to Macmillan and it was about to go into

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print. She eventually found it in a line of the poem “Non Sum Qualis Eram Bonae sub Regno Cynarae” by Ernest Dowson —“I have forgot much, Cynara! gone with the wind.” (The claim that Mitchell took her novel’s title from James Clarence Mangan’s poem “Gone in the Wind” seems improbable and most scholars favor Dowson’s poem as the source of inspiration for Mitchell’s title.)38 Randall’s protagonist, called Cynara, like the protagonist in Dowson’s poem, is the daughter of Planter (Gerald O’Hara) and Mammy, and, therefore, halfsister of Other (Scarlett O’Hara). For Randall, Mammy was not just a black mammy — she had been Planter’s mistress and his true love.39 That way, though falling into another stereotype (that of the black concubine of the white planter), Mammy becomes more of a real woman. She is not just the woman who takes care of the white children — she can also be a sexual being and have children of her own. After being sold to another Southern planter when Planter developed an inappropriate interest in her and later sold again in Charleston, Cynara ends up working as a maid at Beauty’s (Belle Watling’s) brothel in Atlanta. There Cynara meets R. (Rhett Butler), who buys her and makes her his mistress before he marries Other. R. is desperately in love with his wife, who, in turn, loves Dreamy Gentleman (Ashley Wilkes), married to Mealy Mouth (Melanie Hamilton Wilkes). When Precious (Bonnie), R. and Other’s only daughter, dies, Cynara decides to take her chance to get R. and beat Other. Other characters from Gone with the Wind that make their way into The Wind Done Gone included Ellen O’Hara (Lady), Mammy (Mammy / Pallas), Pork (Garlic), Dilcey (Mrs. Garlic), Prissy (Priss), Carreen O’Hara (Kareen), Stuart and Brent Tarleton (Twins S. and B.), Jeems (Jeems), Philippe Robillard (Feelepe) and India Wilkes (China). A parody is a work, largely derivative of a previous cultural work (be it a literary, musical or cinematographic composition), which by means of this imitation tries to highlight certain elements or issues in the original, often in a humorous way. Though parodies are thought as having solely a comical goal, they do not necessarily need to have making fun as their main or sole objective; the true goal of parodies is to raise awareness on issues or events usually ignored or taken by granted. Some parodies, because of the sensitive issues they point out, are more likely than others to be perceived as offensive.40 Parody is a Greek term from par (against or counter) and ody (ode), sometimes translated as counter-song. The genre is as old as writing itself —for instance, the epic The Iliad was parodied in Batrachomuomachia (meaning “battle between frogs and mice”). In some cases, the parody becomes far more popular than the original. Who reads knight errant tales nowadays? But Don Quixote, written with the intention to mock these popular books and its readers, continues being a world literature classic. For some, a parody is yet another stage in the cultural lifespan of a given genre, such as Scary Movie (and its sequels) in regards to the proliferation of horror teenage movies in the nineties.41 As defined by the U.S. Supreme Court, parody “is the use of some elements of a prior author’s com-

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position to create a new one that, at least in part, comments on that author’s works.” Parody, as defined by Campbell v. Acuff-Rose Music, Inc., “needs to mimic an original to make its point, and so has some claim to use the creation of its victim’s (or collective victims’) imagination, whereas satire can stand on its own two feet and so requires justification for the very act of borrowing.” Therefore, in legal terms, parody is different from satire although parodies might contain certain satiric elements.42 The case received extensive media attention and prompted legal and scholarly discussion about the boundaries of free speech, the rewriting of history, intellectual property, plagiarism, and reinterpretation. The trial furthermore gave rise to questions as to the interpretation and the limits of the First Amendment, which reads, “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.” Given that the right to produce parodies is legal, this raised the issue of whether the constitutional protection of copyright was meant to trump the First Amendment or not.43 One of the key points was that Gone with the Wind was an American icon and if, as such, it deserved being retold from another perspective, given that the point of view of African Americans was missing in the original work. The controversy soon moved beyond the realm of fiction and into considerations about history writing and the right of historical redress of minorities. Under these premises, The Wind Done Gone was, according to Houghton Mifflin, its publishing house, “a book that gives a voice to those whom history has silenced.”44 African American Nobel Prize winner Toni Morrison, endorsing Randall’s side, asked publicly, “Who controls how history is imagined? Who gets to say what slavery was like for the slaves?”45 On the other hand, the lawyer for the Trust, a First Amendment lawyer, Martin Garbus, backed their case with literary scholars’ opinion that Randall’s novel only existed thanks to its dependence on Mitchell’s novel and that, as proved by Morrison herself among many other African American writers, it was not necessary to use Gone with the Wind to attack slavery. Actually, since the publication of Gone with the Wind, many books dealing with miscegenation had been published and, therefore, Randall’s exposé of this phenomenon was not new at all. Garbus further argued that “the racial issues— namely that Margaret Mitchell’s book is being attacked as racist and the fact that it is Randall, who is black, writing this … obscured the copyright issues.”46 The SunTrust v. Houghton Mifflin case also led to a debate among legal scholars about the length of copyright, which has often been questioned whenever it has come into conflict with academic research. At the time of the publication of Gone with the Wind, the law granted authors fifty-six years and, consequently, Mitchell’s novel would have gone into the public domain in 1992.47 The first U.S. copyright act in 1790 granted authors just a fourteen-year copyright (that could

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be extended for an additional fourteen-year period), but it has successively been extended until reaching the current seventy years after the author’s death. Under present laws, the seventieth anniversary of Mitchell’s death and the subsequent end of her copyright falls in 2019. Some authors have schemed ways to extend their copyright so that they could continue receiving a financial benefit from works whose copyright was about to expire. For example, Mark Twain, because laws were at the time only giving authors a forty-two-year period of copyright protection, tried to avoid letting his works go into public domain during his lifetime. In order to continue receiving royalties, Twain issued new, expanded editions of Huckleberry Finn and Tom Sawyer (by adding portions of his unpublished autobiography) so as to get a new forty-two-year period on these works. Twain was also known as a firm advocate for a stronger copyright protection after he discovered that his works were being pirated.48 Similarly, Mitchell and her husband, John Marsh, spent most of their time during the years following the publication of Gone with the Wind fighting to have their copyright asserted. Because American authors did not enjoy international copyright protection unless their novels were simultaneously printed in Great Britain, which had subscribed to international copyright protection agreements, the Marshes fought to have it recognized. Mitchell, who blamed part of her pickiness with copyright issues on her family’s law tradition, vigorously fought pirate editions as well as unauthorized newspaper serializations of the novel in Cuba, the Netherlands, China, Greece, Japan, and other countries.49 Court cases about copyright abound nowadays, making it a profitable branch of law.50 Courts often have a hard time trying to determine issues related to intellectual property rights. Because they are not as visible or tangible as material property, intellectual property rights are hard to ascertain and it is even harder to determine what is one’s lawfully and what is not.51 The law itself has qualms about seeing intellectual property as property and, actually, the term “theft” is restricted to physical property whereas intellectual property cannot be stolen; it is a case of infringement.52 Judge Pannell, in hearing the case, set aside the issues about Mitchell’s portrayal of slavery or African Americans and concluded that “the question before the court is not who gets to write history, but rather whether Ms. Randall can permeate most of her new critical work with copyrighted characters, plot and scenes from Gone with the Wind.” Not only was it being judged whether Randall could re-write Gone with the Wind but also if people other than Mitchell’s heirs could publish their own sequels to Gone with the Wind, without the Trust’s consent or even knowledge. For Judge Pannell, The Wind Done Gone could replace other Trust-endorsed sequels, thus endangering Mitchell’s heirs’ “ability to continue to tell the love story of Scarlett and Rhett” and blocked the publication of The Wind Done Gone. Interestingly, if Fisher v. Dees (1986) had limited the copyright infringement of parodies solely to a supplantation of the original work, Pannell did not allude to Gone with the Wind itself but to its potential new, authorized sequels.53

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This stood in marked contrast with courts’ tendency to authorize parodies, assuming that the room covered by parodies is one that copyright owners are unlikely to develop — or authorize. Randall herself, because of her treatment of miscegenation and homosexuality, was denied by the Trust a license on the grounds that they considered that these themes were off-topic for a Gone with the Wind–based text, refusing to develop them by themselves or by other authors. Houghton Mifflin appealed and the case was heard again in a federal court of appeals. With both the district court and the Eleventh Circuit agreeing that Randall was extensively borrowing from Gone with the Wind, the matter at hand was whether it was illegal (copyright infringement) or legal (fair use). This, in turn, raised the question of how original The Wind Done Gone really was, for “originality is the touchstone of copyright law.”54 An issue at the center of the controversy and legal battle surrounding The Wind Done Gone was whether Randall’s intention was to comment on and denounce the situation of African Americans during the antebellum and postbellum periods using Gone with the Wind to make her point more forceful (satire), if she was making fun of Gone with the Wind (parody) or if she had just cannibalized Gone with the Wind, her goal being the mere rewriting of Mitchell’s novel — and, therefore, unlawful taking and illegal plagiarism. In Randall’s words, “My subject is the novel Gone with the Wind. It’s not American slavery, it’s slavery as it was depicted in Gone with the Wind.”55 To ascertain to which extent a work has been copied, courts use the extrinsic test, comparing the plot, characters, setting, and dialogue, among other aspects. Yet, it is controversial how much material a parody is allowed to take. Elsmere v. National Broadcasting Co. accepted that an extensive use could still constitute “fair use, provided the parody [contributes] something new for humorous effect or commentary.”56 While it is acceptable for parodies to borrow as much material as necessary to draw their commentary upon, the Trust contended that the extent of Randall’s borrowings was disproportionate.57 Complicating matters further, courts do not seem to have a straightforward definition of what legitimate parody is and what constitutes plagiarism. In general, parody has enjoyed a legal protection that satire has usually been denied.58 In 1956, Benny v. Loew’s Inc. sustained that parody was just copyright infringement, whereas Berlin v. E.C. Publications, Inc. (1963) concluded that parody and satire should be allowed to exist. Walt Disney Productions v. Air Pirates similarly established that parodies fell within fair use. Justice Souter in Campbell v. Acuff-Rose set the limits in that “parody, which is directed toward a particular literary or artistic work, is distinguishable from satire, which more broadly addresses the institutions and mores of a slice of society.”59 While allowing for some satirical elements in parody (or some parodic elements in satire), courts, following Campbell v. Acuff-Rose, have defined parody as targeting a given work, while satire targets society at large.60

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A problem concerning this definition was that it presupposed that judges are literary scholars, which they are not, and that lawyers are able to discern literary subtleties. Actually, before Campbell, parody and satire were interchangeable terms in legal matters and copyright owners were as likely to sue whether the infringement fell under the category of satire or parody. In common parlance, parody is more often than not associated with a humorous content whereas it is supposed that satire has the noble goal of denouncing abuses and appealing to the truth.61 However, because of courts’ leniency toward parody and their harsh judgments and bans against satire, now writers prefer to label their works as parodies so as to receive protection against potential lawsuits. Following Campbell, this kind of book was no longer marketed as satire but as parody and, therefore, Houghton Mifflin identified The Wind Done Gone as parody to try to avoid legal action against them.62 Randall sought to define her position in the following terms: I think anyone who is involved in our chat now has access to many dictionaries and literary works. I won’t even attempt to define it, but I’ll say that an element of parody is absurdity. Also, an element of parody is exaggeration. Those are two of the elements of parody that are most evidenced in my work. One thing I’d like to note, which is harder to look up, is that the tradition of American parody is vital to the African American experience. There’s a dance called the cakewalk, and it’s a dance I allude to in my parody, The Wind Done Gone. It mocks the dancing of the white folks. It appears to be one thing, and it’s another…. For those who are wondering about parody and my novel, they should be reminded that my original title was The Wind Done Gone: A Meaningful Parody. I also use many symbols to alert the reader to different aspects of the parody, including the mention of cakewalks.63

Fair use takes into account if the derivative work is likely to cause a financial harm to the copyrighted work, how much from the original work is copied, etc. The important point is that the new derivative work does not significantly harm the market for the original work. One of the issues discussed in the media was the negative and unflattering depiction that Randall offered of such a mythical character as Scarlett O’Hara. However, judges have made clear that the majority’s opinion or personal likes and dislikes have no room in court. 64 Accordingly, that the Trust, Gone with the Wind readers, or anyone might not like The Wind Done Gone should not weigh in a judicial decision. But it is not simply a question of who controls which literary work or whether the sequel is a positive or a negative rewriting. At the core of the debate is the idea of who is to control social meaning and exercise censorship; because of this, “if The Wind Done Gone convinces the public that Gone with the Wind is a racist or racialized text, that is not the same as pirating the story even if it diminishes the value of Gone with the Wind,” just like a bad review is protected by free speech, even if it might harm the owner’s potential sales. Another issue that became central in the court of appeals to determine if Randall’s work fell under fair use was that Randall dealt with miscegenation and homosexuality, both

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banned in authorized sequels and, subsequently, unlikely to be developed in the future.65 In contrast to the secrecy that has characterized the Trust’s dealings with the prospective authors of the authorized sequels, Houghton Mifflin made the most of the public endorsement of American scholars and writers Randall received, widely publicizing their support and then posting online the documents regarding the judicial process. Randall was backed by writers Toni Morrison, Pat Conroy, Harper Lee, and John Berendt, critic Henry Louis Gates, Jr., and historians Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., and Shelby Foote as well as corporations including Microsoft, The New York Times Company, the Dow Jones and organizations such as the National Coalition against Censorship and the PEN American Center.66 Henry Louis Gates, Jr., African American scholar and author of an authoritative and well-regarded book on the African American use of parody, considered The Wind Done Gone a classic example of parody, and declared in court that “a parody is a work, belonging to a long literary tradition, which imitates another work and in doing so comments on that work, usually in order to ridicule it or to suggest its limitations.” With his court statement, Gates was providing a definition of parody in consonance with Campbell v. Acuff-Rose Music, Inc.67 Morrison argued that Randall, in not being allowed to publish her novel, was denied the artistic freedom that Mitchell enjoyed to portray African Americans as stereotypes and in racist terms. By using this argument, the case resonated with echoes of democratic rights and an author’s personal autonomy: Randall’s retelling of this story, given the central role it plays in American culture by masking what she perceives to be a central truth in her experience as an African American woman and the central role it played in her childhood in defining her alienation from American society, is central to her autonomy. Moreover, Mitchell’s autonomy is directly pitted against the democratic commitment to airing the widest range of views expressed in the terms that their speakers find most effective to convey their message.

Besides, Morrison alleged that what Randall covered (the lives of slaves) had been left untouched in Gone with the Wind and emphasized “the pain, humiliation and outrage [Gone with the Wind’s] ahistorical representation has caused African Americans.”68 Experts from the Trust were not so well-known. They included science fiction writer Kevin J. Anderson; Gabriel Motola, a parody and satire professor; Joel Conarroe, a poetry scholar; Louis Rubin, Jr., an expert on Southern literature; and Alan Lelchuck, a literary scholar. Conarroe considered The Wind Done Gone neither satire nor parody but plagiarism and mentioned authors such as Toni Morrison who condemned and denounced the African Americans’ situation under slavery without having to make use of Gone with the Wind.69 Other novels dealing with slavery and Reconstruction before The Wind Done Gone are, for instance, Margaret Walker’s Jubilee (1966), Sherley Anne Wil-

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liams’s Dessa Rose (1986) or Morrison’s Beloved (1987). Hazel Carby had already considered Jubilee as “a particular response to the dominant ideologies of the popular imagination embodied in Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind”; moreover, the cover of Jubilee already boasted having “a heroine to rival Scarlett O’Hara.”70 Lelchuck’s declaration stressed the heavy dependence of The Wind Done Gone on Gone with the Wind, deeming the former as “a subliterary parasitical work, dependent on its publication solely on its relation to Gone with the Wind, and having little or no literary value. It has no literary voice, no substantial style or character to remember, and its storytelling is very weak indeed. There are no enduring literary qualities in this attempted failed novel.” He denied any originality in Randall’s book and he further argued that other writers had denounced slavery or racial stereotypes without having made use of Gone with the Wind.71 Rubin Jr., saw The Wind Done Gone as a rewriting of Gone with the Wind, not a parody, and he appealed to readers’ knowledge that Gone with the Wind is not “historically realistic” when it comes to interracial relationships in the South at the time. He also claimed that Randall set out to exploit Gone with the Wind, not to mock it, and that her plot was melodramatic, not humorous.72 In his declaration, Anderson stressed his condition of writer of sequels or spinoffs, but always with the authorization of the copyright owner, emphasizing that this was not the case with Randall. For Anderson, “Ms. Randall has obviously written her novel with the intent of changing the underlying work” and he complained about Randall’s use of Mitchell’s characters and the effect thereof in other possible sequels yet to come. One of the points that Anderson noted was that of dilution, an issue covered by the Federal Trademark Dilution Act, which, while allowing for legitimate parodies, tries to prevent that famous trademarks are tarnished; Anderson stressed that Randall should not be allowed to re-write Gone with the Wind because the original had not been “diluted” yet.73 The Wind Done Gone is likely to attract readers different from those of Gone with the Wind or, at least, readers who are looking for something different.74 SunTrust Bank vs. Houghton Mifflin noted that the Trust had already licensed the publication of authorized sequels to Gone with the Wind and concluded that The Wind Done Gone was a legitimate parody under fair use provisions; hence, printing could be resumed for its immediate commercialization. Moreover, because Randall got her copyright on The Wind Done Gone legally established, hers is also the right to decide on a cinematographic version of her novel.75 For Wendy Strothman, executive vice-president of Houghton Mifflin Company, [this] decision is an absolute victory for both the First Amendment and for the fair use doctrine of the Copyright Act, both crucial to American culture and freedom of expression. We are grateful to the Court for its swift action as well as to the many prominent authors, corporations, media companies and First Amendment advocates who supported our position. We are particularly pleased

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that the American public will now be able to judge Alice Randall’s parody for themselves.76

Eventually, instead of appealing again, the Trust reached an out-of-court settlement with Houghton Mifflin: the warning “an unauthorized parody” would be printed in the book cover and Houghton Mifflin would make a financial contribution to Morehouse College.77 The debate over the portrayal of slavery in Gone with the Wind (and its counterpart in The Wind Done Gone) is far from being over, though. Civil War novels are often moved by the author’s perceived need to make amends to a former portrayal of the Civil War or, more specifically, slavery. Thomas Dixon, who wanted to correct Uncle Tom’s Cabin, called for the separation of blacks and whites, while claiming his sympathy for the former and his intention of writing a moral book, in the midst of harsh criticisms (including from his own brother and father). Gone with the Wind swept audiences in a way similar to Uncle Tom’s Cabin and Mitchell stated that she was glad that her novel corrected the impression of the South given by Stowe, a misleading vision that Mitchell explicitly condemned in her novel78: Accepting Uncle Tom’s Cabin as revelation second only to the Bible, the Yankee women all wanted to know about the bloodhounds which every Southerner kept to track down runaway slaves. And they never believed her when she told them she had only seen one bloodhound in all her life and it was a small mild dog and not a huge ferocious mastiff. They wanted to know about the dreadful branding irons which planters used to mark the faces of their slaves and the cat-o’-ninetails with which they beat them to death, and they evidenced what Scarlett felt was a very nasty and ill-bred interest in slave concubinage. Especially did she resent this in view of the enormous increase in mulatto babies in Atlanta since the Yankee soldiers had settled in the town.79

Additionally, Mitchell defended the Ku Klux Klan, alleging that “one of the earliest purposes of the Klan was to protect women and children. Later it was used to keep the Negroes from voting eight or ten times at every election. But it was used equally against the Carpetbaggers.”80 These were conventional views of the Klan as a mechanism to protect white people (especially women) from violent African Americans and carpetbaggers and scallawags, notions very much in vogue while she was writing Gone with the Wind (Dixon’s novels take a similar approach) and which were not historically disputed until the fifties and sixties, when Mitchell was already dead.81 Yet, in spite of being a novel that deals with the Civil War and its outcome, Gone with the Wind does not deal at length with slavery, which is discussed in just a few occasional comments. The consequences of the Civil War, as well as its aftermath, do play a major role in the novel — because of the war, the O’Hara family almost loses their plantation, Scarlett is forced to become a cotton picker, the family is forever ruined, she sees no way out other than marrying her sister’s fiancé after unsuccessfully offering herself up to Rhett Butler as his mistress,

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etc. Still, even though the loss of slaves is the cause of all of their subsequent disgraces, slaves (or former slaves) are not paid much attention in the novel. They are, for the most part, stereotypes— the good mammy, the gone-wild former slaves with no direction and no idea about what to do with their freedom (this being a pervasive Reconstruction myth), and the noble slave who refuses to leave the family who took good care of him.82 Mitchell’s negative image of African Americans was especially relevant because “Gone with the Wind, prior to Roots, had a greater bearing upon the American public’s perception of the Old South, the Civil War, and Reconstruction … than any other single piece of literature or media.”83 Randall wanted to give a voice to Tara’s slaves, showing that they were more than stereotypes. The paradox of Gone with the Wind, or maybe actually the key to its success and its appeal to readers worldwide throughout the years, is that, though we know that slavery was not so good-natured, still we tend to forget it and let ourselves be swept by the novel. This is a characteristic of “popular texts, [which,] like traditional sources of ‘scandal,’ allow for a level of emotional distance not possible in a more direct confrontation with these same issues.”84 According to African American writer Pearl Cleage, Gone with the Wind “as a piece of pro-slavery propaganda … is effective because it puts forward such a dynamic main character in Scarlett that you have to remember that she’s a slaveowner, otherwise you’ll be sucked into the story and not hold her responsible.”85 Gone with the Wind is so effective as a piece of sociological propaganda because it does not attempt to explain the Civil War or slavery or the antebellum South but simply presents, as Mitchell put it, a simple story.86 For instance, Roots is a more realistic and historically accurate depiction of slavery than Gone with the Wind, with its harsh depiction of the sufferings and torture undergone by African slave Kunta Kinte and its first broadcasting in 1977 had a bigger audience than Gone with the Wind in November the previous year. But still, Gone with the Wind has remained far more popular in general terms.87 Historians during the sixties tried to offer a darker and more realistic picture of slavery in the South, getting rid of the sentimental image that had been preserved by novels and films for decades, but all of this has been to little avail when it comes to the seemingly never-ending popularity of Gone with the Wind. Prominent African Americans have voiced their opposition to Mitchell’s portrayal of the South, among them James Baldwin or Malcolm X. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s response to Gone with the Wind was not recorded, though he attended, as a child, the Atlanta premiere of the movie in 1939. His father, Martin Luther King, Sr., was heavily criticized for attending and allowing his church’s choir to perform during the events organized to celebrate the world premiere. Opposition or not, Gone with the Wind’s first television broadcasting in November 1976 (divided into two parts due to its length) was watched by record audiences, regardless of new historical research about the true conditions of slavery.88 In the words of Patricia Yaeger, Gone with the Wind

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is a long book with print so tiny that it makes me squint, a book whose racial politics are absolutely abhorrent. And yet, as reader, I find myself completely at odds with my own position as a liberal academic — empathizing with the Klan after they’ve brutalized the inhabitants of shantytown, identifying with Scarlett as she abuses convict labor, admiring Melanie Wilkes, who is afraid to go North because her son might have to go to school with “pickaninnies.”89

Lise Fox expressed herself in similar terms about the movie: It is racist, sexist and twee. The slavery, links with “the Klan,” the treatment of Blacks and women (especially the black women) go against all of my political beliefs, and I wince inwardly. But — my love of the cinema in general will not let me forget that technically it’s brilliant and a great achievement in cinema history. It is a good piece of work…. I will still defend it wholeheartedly. I regard it as a private vice almost, because I am active in so-called “left-wing” activities such as CDN [Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament] etc; and have always regarded myself as a feminist.90

The notion of suspended disbelief is a central component when it comes to our sanctioning (or, at the very least, overlooking) Gone with the Wind’s racial or sexual politics. This explains why there is an implicit approval of what the novel portrays even by people who do not necessarily support the values or the opinions conveyed in the novel, including African American readers. Several groups (women, African Americans, the common soldiers) have “reclaimed a past of their own creation” when it comes to the Civil War. The Wind Done Gone is part of this phenomenon, with Randall defining her novel as “an antidote to a story that has hurt generations of African Americans.”91 The Wind Done Gone has been largely deemed as a counterattack to pernicious representations of African Americans in the media, which have a large impact in creating, reproducing and maintaining stereotypes of cultural or racial minorities.92 Because audience’s response is an important part of African American culture, The Wind Done Gone is part of a larger pattern of African American responses to mainstream cultural icons, which includes, for instance, Black Bart (for Bart Simpson), Black Man (instead of Batman) or Buds MacSensie (for Spuds Mackenzie). African American art itself, by definition, is a response to mainstream culture.93 Randall declared that I wrote The Wind Done Gone as a parody of Gone with the Wind, that is, as a book that uses characteristic elements of Gone with the Wind and imitates them in a way that makes them appear ridiculous. I made Gone with the Wind the target of my parody because that book, more than any other work I know, has presented and helped perpetuate an image of the South that I, as an African American woman living in the South, felt compelled to comment upon and criticize. It is an image of a world in which blacks are buffoonish, lazy, drunk and physically disgusting, and in which they are routinely compared to “apes,” “gorillas” and “naked savages.”94

Race liberation movements have stressed the need to claim the memory of blacks because of deeply ingrained ideas among blacks themselves of their

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being an inferior race resulting from their subjugation during slavery.95 It is not so much a question of erasing memories, given the loss of identity that this might cause but of transforming difference from “an ideological means to the ends of economic exploitation and political domination” to a more positive vision. Randall’s rewriting of Tara’s story from the point of view of slaves was regarded as similar to Jean Rhys’ revisionist work Wide Sargasso Sea.96 Randall believed that not only had Gone with the Wind helped perpetuate racist stereotypes, but these images still have currency in influencing present-day issues such as affirmative action or the placement of the Confederate flag.97 Randall was thus putting the finger on the inability of minorities, the working class and women to relate to history textbooks because these groups are underrepresented — if represented at all, a circumstance worsened because history textbooks are rarely corrected.98 Did Randall conceive The Wind Done Gone as a sequel with her revision of the status quo at Tara and her continuing the plot of Gone with the Wind after Rhett has left Scarlett? Randall’s argument that neither she nor her publisher intended The Wind Done Gone as a sequel to Gone with the Wind, as was evident from its modest initial printing run of 25,000 copies, does not hold.99 Houghton Mifflin knowing enough about the publishing business, it is unlikely that they would have been so naïve as to market The Wind Done Gone as a Gone with the Wind sequel, having seen the precedent of Mitchell’s heirs’ tight control over Scarlett. The district court had perceived The Wind Done Gone as a sequel to Gone with the Wind for the following reasons: It is largely an encapsulation of Gone with the Wind that exploits its copyrighted characters, storylines and settings as the palette for a new story. The issue, however, is that she does not simply add these historical facts to a new story but, rather, reintroduces these historical elements to an existing story, Gone with the Wind, and then retells that story with the same characters, plots and scenes, from the perspective of a person, Cynara, who could appreciate these historical elements. Then, having retold the story of Gone with the Wind by repeating famous scenes and liberal use of plot summaries, the author takes Cynara on new adventures with the older works’ characters, all of which seems to fit well within the definition of a sequel.100

Once the court of appeals’ decision regarding The Wind Done Gone as a parody was made public, not all literary scholars and judicial experts agreed with it. There were problems with the definition of parody generally entertained by courts, defining parody as a humorous piece because “The Wind Done Gone … does not obviously proceed as ridicule.” The district court found that The Wind Done Gone was a satire because its lack of humor failed to identify it as parody but this requirement was quashed by the court of appeals on the grounds of African American humor.101 It is ironic that its close dependence on Gone with the Wind was one of the key elements in accepting The Wind Done Gone as a parody. The further it had departed from Gone with the Wind’s descriptions,

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the more difficult it would have been to accept it as a parody and not as a case of plagiarism: “to permit publication of the original expression in The Wind Done Gone, the court had to imply that this original expression was in fact quite limited, confined merely to targeting easily parodied aspects of Gone with the Wind, such as its racism and stereotypical, “flat,” “one-dimensional” black characters.” To claim that The Wind Done Gone attacked “the domestic institution” would have meant that it qualified as satire (not parody, which focuses exclusively on one given work), which does not fall under the protection of fair use doctrine. For The Wind Done Gone to qualify as a parody, the court of appeals had to expand and re-define the very concept of what parody is102: For purposes of our fair-use analysis, we will treat a work as a parody if its aim is to comment upon or criticize a prior work by appropriating elements of the original in creating a new artistic, as opposed to scholarly or journalistic, work. Under this definition, the parodic character of TWDG [The Wind Done Gone] is clear. TWDG is not a general commentary upon the Civil-War-era American South, but a specific criticism of and rejoinder to the depiction of slavery and the relationships between blacks and whites in GWTW. The fact that Randall chose to convey her criticisms of GWTW through a work of fiction, which she contends is a more powerful vehicle for her message than a scholarly article, does not, in and of itself, deprive TWDG of fair-use protection. We therefore proceed to an analysis of the four fair-use factors.

This definition itself was the target of a number of criticisms, being called “circuitous,” “scholastic,” or “subjective” in that it was based on ellipses, footnotes and obsolete British law.103 Motola, quoting the definition of parody by J. A. Cuddon and using his own expertise for having taught college courses on satire and parody, had already claimed that because of its extensive use of Gone with the Wind, The Wind Done Gone was a sequel, breaching the boundaries between parody and plagiarism: “it seems very clear indeed, therefore, that The Wind Done Gone has plagiarized its literary ancestor so as to capitalize on and thus benefit from the resulting notoriety that will accrue to it as the reading public makes the inevitable comparison to Gone with the Wind which has become and remains a popular classic since its publication.”104 All in all, some deemed that “it is largely coincidental that The Wind Done Gone could be perceived as a parody. The court might plausibly not have reached this conclusion, just as the district court found that Randall’s overall purpose, even taking into account the transformation and criticism, was to create a sequel and to comment on the antebellum South rather than to attack the underlying work.”105 The Wind Done Gone set a precedent in determining that parodic fair use was legitimate. This, however, does not mean that determining the legality of sequels or allowing the publication of new takes on well-known literary works are clear-cut matters. Some sequels have recently been banned from publication, as has been the case of Catcher in the Rye and its projected sequel. 106 J. D. Salinger’s love/hate relationship with the media lived a new episode when news

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broke in 2009 of the imminent publication of 60 Years Later: Coming Through the Rye, an unauthorized sequel retelling the life of Holden Caulfield (who is identified as “Mr. C.” in the book) by Swedish writer Fredrik Colting. On June 17, 2009, federal judge Deborah Batts set a precedent by claiming that a single character from a single novel was under the protection of copyright.107 Who knows if this new court decision, in turn, will prevent the publication of new works featuring Scarlett O’Hara in the future, at least in the United States.

Notes 1. Alice Randall, The Wind Done Gone (Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2001), 5. 2. Finis Farr, Margaret Mitchell of Atlanta: The Author of Gone with the Wind (New York: William Morrow, 1965), 214. 3. Quoted in Alan Riding, “Court Finds French Author Plagiarized ‘Gone with the Wind,’” The New York Times, December 7, 1989, query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=950DEFD9133EF934A35 751C1A96F948260&sec=&spon=&pagewanted=print (accessed February 21, 2008). 4. “An Author Is Cleared of Plagiarism Charges,” The New York Times, November 22, 1990, query. nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9C0CE5D6103FF931A15752C1A966958260&sec=&spon=&page wanted=print (accessed February 21, 2008); Riding, “Court Finds French Author Plagiarized ‘GWTW.’” 5. Kathleen Marcaccio, “Do You Know Anything about a Sequel Called My Beloved Tara?” scarlettonline.com/faq13.htm (accessed February 19, 2008). 6. Margot Morgan, “Scarlett O’Hara Returns from Hollywood: Correcting the Misinterpretations of Mitchell’s Political Novel, Gone with the Wind,” paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Political Science Association, Marriott, Loews, Philadelphia, and the Pennsylvania Convention Center, Philadelphia, PA, August 31, 2006, allacademic.com/meta/p152591_index.html (accessed February 2, 2010); Steve Coates, “Scarlett O’Hara: A Hero for Our Times?” New York Times, March 9, 2009, papercuts.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/03/09/scarlett-ohara-a-hero-for-our-times (accessed January 22, 2010). 7. SunTrust v. Houghton Mifflin Court of Appeals Opinion, October 10, 2001, United States Court of Appeals, Eleventh Circuit, edwardsamuels.com/copyright/beyond/cases/gonewindappnew.htm (accessed January 25, 2008). 8. Jay Flemma, “Parody as Fair Use II: The Wind Done Got Away with It,” 2002, alanberg man.com/parody.pdf (accessed March 1, 2010). 9. Bruce P. Keller and Rebecca Tushnet, “Even More Parodic Than the Real Thing: Parody Lawsuits Revisited,” TMR 94 (n.d.): 979–1016. tushnet.com/EvenMoreParodicarticle.PDF (accessed January 11, 2010). 10. Quoted in Karen Grigsby Bates, “A Through-the-Looking-Glass Version of Gone with the Wind,” Journal of Blacks in Higher Education 33 (2001): 126; Richard Schur, “The Wind Done Gone Controversy: American Studies, Copyright Law, and the Imaginary Domain,” American Studies 44, no. 1–2 (2003): 18. 11. Quoted in Anne Goodwyn Jones, Tomorrow Is Another Day: The Woman Writer in the South, 1859 –1936 (1981; Baton Rouge and London: Louisiana State University Press, 1982), 27. 12. Margaret Mitchell, Gone with the Wind, special commemorative 60th-anniversary edition (New York: Warner Books, 1999), chapter XXVI. 13. See chapter 1. 14. “Margaret Mitchell’s Renewed Role as Benefactor of Morehouse College,” The Journal of Blacks in Higher Education 36 (2002): 58. “Gone with the Wind: The Legend Lives on as a Musical of the Novel Hits the West End,” The Independent, March 24, 2008, independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/theatredance/features/gone-with-the-wind-the-legend-lives-on-as-a-musical-of-the-novel-hits-the-west-end799744.html (accessed January 19, 2010); Helen Taylor, “Gone with the Wind: The Mammy of Them All,” in The Progress of Romance: The Politics of Popular Fiction, ed. Jean Radford (London and New York: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1986), 121; L. D. Reddick, “Educational Programs for the Improvement of Race Relations: Motion Pictures, Radio, The Press, and Libraries,” The Journal of Negro Education 13, no. 3 (1944): 377.

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15. Mitchell, GWTW, chapter XXV, XXVIII. 16. Richard Butsch, “Legitimations of Class Structure in Gone with the Wind,” Qualitative Sociolog y 2, no. 2 (1979): 63. 17. Patricia Storace, “Look Away, Dixie Land,” The New York Review of Books 38, no. 21 (1991): 34. 18. Mitchell, GWTW, chapter XLIV; Terry Teachout, “Entitlement Publishing,” National Review, August 20, 2001, thefreelibrary.com/_/print/PrintArticle.aspx?id=76915721 (accessed January 26, 2010); Drew Gilpin Faust, “Clutching the Chains That Bind: Margaret Mitchell and Gone with the Wind,” Southern Cultures 5, no. 1 (1999): 13. 19. “Declaration of Pat Conroy,” SunTrust Bank v. Houghton Mifflin, houghtonmifflinbooks.com/ features/randall_url/pdf/Declaration_Pat_Conroy.pdf (accessed December 15, 2009). 20. William Van Deburg quoted in Helen Taylor, Scarlett’s Women: Gone with the Wind and Its Female Fans (London: Virago Press, 1989), 189. 21. See chapter 1 for how Gone with the Wind reflects views and values of the twenties in spite of being set in the nineteenth century. 22. Sterling A. Brown, “Negro Characters as Seen by White Authors,” The Journal of Negro Education 2, no. 2 (1933): 191–192. 23. Quoted in Anne Edwards, Road to Tara: The Life of Margaret Mitchell, Author of Gone with the Wind (1983; London: Orion, 1996), 168. 24. Quoted in Reddick, “Educational Programs for the Improvement of Race Relations,” 377; Leonard J. Leff, “Gone with the Wind and Hollywood’s Racial Politics,” The Atlantic Monthly 284, no. 6 (1999): 106–114, theatlantic.com/past/docs/issues/99dec/9912leff.htm (accessed March 5, 2010). 25. Reddick, “Educational Programs for the Improvement of Race Relations,” 376–377; Leff, “GWTW and Hollywood’s Racial Politics.” 26. Quoted in Frank Diller, “Mammy Dearest: The Depiction of African American House Servants in The Birth of a Nation, Gone with the Wind, and Song of the South,” MA thesis, August 1999, xroads. virginia.edu/~ma99/diller/mammy/ (accessed February 22, 2010). 27. Dieter Meindl, “A Reappraisal of Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind,” Mississippi Quarterly 34, no. 4 (1981): 428; quoted in Marianne Walker, Margaret Mitchell and John Marsh: The Love Story Behind Gone with the Wind (Atlanta: Peachtree Publishers, 1993), 357; Leff, “GWTW and Hollywood’s Racial Politics.” 28. Margaret Mitchell, Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind Letters, 1936 –1949 (New York: McMillan; London: Collier MacMillan, 1976), 273; Robert E. May, “Gone with the Wind as Southern History: A Reappraisal,” The Southern Quarterly 17 (1978): 54. 29. “GWTW: The Legend Lives On”; “Margaret Mitchell’s Renewed Role as Benefactor of Morehouse College,” 58. 30. Quoted in Farr, Margaret Mitchell of Atlanta, 160. 31. Quoted in “GWTW: The Legend Lives On.” 32. “The Wind Done Gone: A Reader’s Guide,” 2003, houghtonmifflinbooks.com/readers_guides/ wind_done_gone/ (accessed April 21, 2008). 33. Thomas F. Haddox, “Alice Randall’s The Wind Done Gone and the Ludic in African American Historical Fiction,” MFS: Modern Fiction Studies 53, no. 1 (2007): 122. 34. Mitchell, Letters, 53, 336. Willie Lee Rose, Slavery and Freedom. Expanded edition. (Oxford, New York, Toronto, Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1982), 119–120. 35. Mary Getchell, “‘Founded in Truth’: William Wells Brown and the Parable of Clotel,” in Assimilation and Subversion in Earlier American Literature, ed. Robin DeRosa, 83–97 (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2006); Bates, “A Through-the-Looking-Glass Version of GWTW,” 126; Haddox, “Alice Randall’s TWDG and the Ludic in African American Historical Fiction,” 121; Jack Temple Kirby, Media-Made Dixie: The South in the American Imagination (Baton Rouge & London: Louisiana State University Press, 1978), 167. 36. Elias quoted in Haddox, “Alice Randall’s TWDG and the Ludic in African American Historical Fiction,” 122. 37. Taylor, Scarlett’s Women, 59–60; Rose, Slavery and Freedom, 120. 38. Ernest Dowson, “Non Sum Qualis Eram Bonae Sub Regno Cynarae.” 39. Curiously, Joan Collins’ daughter’s name is Tara Cynara. Taylor, Scarlett’s Women, 5; Randall, The Wind Done Gone, 47–48. 40. Keller and Tushnet, “Even More Parodic Than the Real Thing.” 41. Ironically, the movie that began the fad for horror movies in the nineties was Scream, which parodied seventies’ horror movies.

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42. Quoted in Anupam Chander and Madhavi Sunder, “Everyone’s a Superhero: A Cultural Theory of ‘Mary Sue’ Fan Fiction as Fair Use,” California Law Review 95 (2007): 615. 43. David D. Kirkpatrick, “Court Halts Book Based on Gone with the Wind,” The New York Times, April 21, 2001, query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9C01EFD81030F932A15757C0A9679C8B63 &sec=&spon=&pagewanted=print (accessed February 18, 2008); “Gone With the First Amendment,” The New York Times, May 1, 2001, query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=940DEEDA1638F932A35 756C0A9679C8B63 (accessed January 25, 2008); SunTrust v. Houghton Mifflin. 44. Quoted in Marjorie Garber, “‘I’ll Be Back’: Review of Part Two: Reflections on the Sequel,” London Review of Books 21, no. 16 (1999), lrb.co.uk/v21/n16/marjorie-garber/ill-be-back/print (accessed January 19, 2010). 45. “Declaration of Toni Morrison,” SunTrust Bank v. Houghton Mifflin, houghtonmifflinbooks. com/features/randall_url/pdf/Declaration_Toni_Morrison.pdf (accessed December 15, 2009). 46. Kirkpatrick, “Court Halts Book”; Teachout, “Entitlement Publishing”; quoted in David D. Kirkpatrick, “‘Wind’ Book Wins Ruling in U.S.,” The New York Times, May 26, 2001, query.ny times.com/ gst/fullpage.html?res=9D0CEEDC163CF935A15756C0A9679C8B63&partner=rssnyt&emc=rss (accessed January 25, 2008). 47. Alistair McCleery, “Dead Hands Keep a Closed Book,” The Times Higher Education, June 5, 2008, timeshighereducation.co.uk/story.asp?storycode=402227 (accessed June 6, 2008); Lawrence Lessig, “Let the Stories Go,” The New York Times, April 30, 2001, query.ny times.com/gst/fullpage.html? res=950DEED81039F933A05757C0A9679C8B63 (accessed January 25, 2008); Yochai Benkler, “Through the Looking Glass: Alice and the Constitutional Foundations of the Public Domain,” Law & Contemp. Probs. 66, no. 173 (2003): 199–200. 48. McCleery, “Dead Hands Keep a Closed Book”; Schur, “TWDG Controversy,” 12. 49. Edwards, Road to Tara, 243; Mitchell, Letters, 302. 50. Justin Hughes, “‘Recoding’ Intellectual Property and Overlooked Audience Interests,” Texas Law Review 77 (1999), fanlore.org/wiki/Legal_Analysis (accessed January 11, 2010). 51. Jasmina Zecevic, “Distinctively Delineated Fictional Characters That Constitute the Story Being Told: Who Are They and Do They Deserve Independent Copyright Protection?” Vanderbilt Journal of Entertainment and Tech. Law 8, no. 2 (2006): 377. 52. Peter Ludlow, “Property Rights, Piracy, etc.: Does Information ‘Want to Be Free’?” in High Noon on the Electronic Frontier: Conceptual Issues in Cyberspace, ed. Peter Ludlow (Cambridge, MA, and London: The MIT Press, 1996), 3. 53. Quoted in Kirkpatrick, “Court Halts Book”; quoted in Nick Gillespie, “Tomorrow Is Another Day in Court,” Reason ( July 2001), thefreelibrary.com/_/print/PrintArticle.aspx?id=76447019 (accessed January 26, 2010); Michael A. Einhorn, “Miss Scarlett’s License Done Gone! Parody, Satire, and Economic Reasoning,” Cardozo Arts and Entertainment Law Journal 20, no. 3 (2002): 11, papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=332721 (accessed January 26, 2010). 54. Jeannie Suk, “Originality,” Harvard Law Review 115 (2002), papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm? abstract_id=1136322 (accessed March 1, 2010). 55. Quoted in “Alice Randall, Author of The Wind Done Gone,” CNN, June 22, 2001, archives.cnn. com/2001/SHOWBIZ/books/06/22/randall.cnna/index.html. (accessed January 27, 2010). 56. Zecevic, “Distinctively Delineated Fictional Characters That Constitute the Story Being Told,” 366; quoted in Einhorn, “Miss Scarlett’s License Done Gone!” 10. 57. SunTrust v. Houghton Mifflin Court of Appeals Opinion, October 10, 2001, United States Court of Appeals, Eleventh Circuit, edwardsamuels.com/copyright/beyond/cases/gonewindappnew.htm (accessed January 25, 2008). 58. Einhorn, “Miss Scarlett’s License Done Gone!” 9–11. 59. Quoted in ibid., 14. 60. Ibid.; Keller and Tushnet, “Even More Parodic Than the Real Thing.” 61. Bernard W. Bell, The Afro-American Novel and Its Tradition (Amherst: The University of Massachusetts Press, 1987), 137. 62. Keller and Tushnet, “Even More Parodic Than the Real Thing.” 63. “Alice Randall, Author of TWDG.” 64. Chander and Sunder, “Everyone’s a Superhero,” 615; Schur, “TWDG Controversy,” 32. 65. Hughes, “‘Recoding’ Intellectual Property and Overlooked Audience Interests”; Schur, “TWDG Controversy,” 32; Keller and Tushnet, “Even More Parodic Than the Real Thing”; Suk, “Originality.” 66. “Information about SunTrust Bank v. Houghton Mifflin,” houghtonmifflinbooks.com/features/

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randall_url/courtpapers.shtml (accessed January 28, 2010); Kirkpatrick, “Court Halts Book Based on Gone with the Wind.” 67. “Declaration of Henry Louis Gates, Jr.,” SunTrust Bank v. Houghton Mifflin, houghtonmifflin books.com/features/randall_url/pdf/Declaration_Henry_Louis_Gates.pdf (accessed December 15, 2009); Suk, “Originality.” 68. Benkler, “Through the Looking Glass,” 195–196; “Declaration of Morrison.” 69. “Affidavit of Joel Conarroe,” SunTrust Bank v. Houghton Mifflin, houghtonmifflinbooks.com/ features/randall_url/pdf/Affidavit_Joel_Conarroe.pdf (accessed February 17, 2010). 70. Quoted in Walker, Down from the Mountaintop, 17; quoted in Claire Davis, “Review: The Wind Done Gone: A Mild Breeze,” CNN, edition.cnn.com/2001/SHOWBIZ/books/06/29/review.wind.done. gone/index.html (accessed December 18, 2009). 71. “Affidavit of Alan Lelchuck,” SunTrust Bank v. Houghton Mifflin, houghtonmifflinbooks.com/ features/randall_url/pdf/Affidavit_Alan_Lelchuk.pdf (accessed February 17, 2010). 72. “Affidavit of Louis Rubin, Jr.,” SunTrust Bank v. Houghton Mifflin, houghtonmifflinbooks. com/features/randall_url/pdf/Affidavit_Louis_Rubin.pdf (accessed February 17, 2010). 73. “Declaration of Kevin J. Anderson,” SunTrust Bank v. Houghton Mifflin, houghtonmifflinbooks. com/features/randall_url/pdf/Declaration_Kevin_Anderson.pdf (accessed February 17, 2010). 74. “Information about SunTrust v. Houghton Mifflin.” 75. Chander and Sunder, “Everyone’s a Superhero,” 616; Einhorn, “Miss Scarlett’s License Done Gone!” 16. 76. Quoted in Matthew Rimmer, “Gone with the Wind: Copyright Law and Fair Use,” ALIA (April 2003), alia.org.au/publishing/incite/2003/04/wind.gone.html (accessed July 7, 2009). 77. “ Margaret Mitchell’s Renewed Role as Benefactor of Morehouse College,” 58. 78. Rose, Slavery and Freedom, 127, 131; Mitchell, Letters, 217. 79. Mitchell, GWTW, chapter XXXVIII. 80. Mitchell, Letters, 162. 81. Taylor, Scarlett’s Women, 54–55. 82. Brown, “Negro Characters as Seen by White Authors,” 183. 83. May, “GWTW as Southern History,” 51. 84. Henry Jenkins, Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture (New York and London: Routledge, 1992), 85. 85. Tray Butler, “The House Is on Fire: The Margaret Mitchell House Wants to Be the Heart of the South’s Literary Community, but Does Its Racial Stigma Stand in the Way?” Creative Loafing Atlanta, February 27, 2002, atlanta.creativeloafing.com/gyrobase/Content?oid=oid%3A8132 (accessed February 9, 2010). 86. Butsch, “Legitimations of Class Structure in GWTW,” 64–65; Frank Goodwyn, “The Ingenious Gentleman and the Exasperating Lady: Don Quixote de la Mancha and Scarlett O’Hara,” Journal of Popular Culture 16, no. 1 (1982): 55. 87. Kirby, Media-Made Dixie, 166–167. 88. Storace, “Look Away, Dixie Land,” 24; Kirby, Media-Made Dixie, 166; Greg Brian, “Rhett Butler’s People and the Continuing Greatness of the Gone with the Wind Saga,” November 9, 2007, associatedcontent. com/article/443332/rhett_butlers_people_and_the_continuing.html?cat=38 (accessed April 30, 2010). 89. Patricia Yaeger, “Race and the Cloud of Unknowing in Gone with the Wind,” Southern Cultures 5, no. 1 (1999): 21. 90. Quoted in Taylor, Scarlett’s Women, 40. 91. Tony Horwitz quoted in Alice Fahs, “The Feminized Civil War: Gender, Northern Popular Literature, and the Memory of the War, 1861–1900,” The Journal of American History 85, no. 4 (1999): 1464; quoted in David D. Kirkpatrick, “Court Asked to Stop ‘Gone with the Wind’ Rewrite,” The New York Times, March 28, 2001, query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9E07E0DD1F3CF93BA 15750C0A9679C8B63 (accessed January 25, 2008). 92. Carlos Cortés, “A Long Way to Go: Minorities and the Media,” Media and Values 38 (1987), medialit.org/reading_room/article231.html (accessed January 11, 2010). 93. Peter Parisi, “‘Black Bart’ Simpson: Appropriation and Revitalization in Commodity Culture,” Journal of Popular Culture 27, no. 1 (1993): 126–127, 130. 94. “Declaration of Alice Randall,” SunTrust Bank v. Houghton Mifflin, houghtonmifflinbooks. com/features/randall_url/pdf/Declaration_Alice_Randall.pdf (accessed December 15, 2009). 95. Bright Molande, “Rewriting Memory: Ideology of Difference in the Desire and Demand for Whiteness,” European Journal of American Culture 27, no. 3 (2008): 173 –174.

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96. Molande, “Rewriting Memory,” 178. 97. “Declaration of Randall”; Randall in Lamaretta Simmons, “Parody on Trial: Alice Randall Writing In-Sanity,” F News Magazine (September 2001), fnewsmagazine.com/2001-september/septfeatures5.html (accessed February 8, 2010). 98. James Loewen, Lies My Teacher Told Me (New York: Simon & Schuster Trade, 2007), d155.org/ cls/Faculty/barnesj/documents/LiesMyTeacherToldMeIntroduction.pdf (accessed December 18, 2009). 99. “Supplemental Declaration of Alice Randall,” SunTrust Bank v. Houghton Mifflin, U.S. District Court, Northern District of Georgia Atlanta Division, houghtonmifflinbooks.com/features/randall_url /pdf/Supplemental_Declaration_Alice_Randall.pdf (accessed February 4, 2010). 100. Quoted in Flemma, “Parody as Fair Use II.” 101. Keller and Tushnet, “Even More Parodic Than the Real Thing.” 102. Suk, “Originality”; Flemma, “Parody as Fair Use II.” 103. “Information about SunTrust v. Houghton Mifflin.” 104. “Affidavit of Gabriel Motola,” SunTrust v. Houghton Mifflin, houghtonmifflinbooks.com/features/ randall_url/pdf/Affidavit_Gabriel_Motola.pdf (accessed February 17, 2010). 105. Suk, “Originality.” 106. Ibid. 107. Andrew Albanese, “Temporary Restraining Order Issued in Salinger Case,” Publishers Weekly, June 17, 2009, publishersweekly.com/index.asp?layout=articlePrint&articleID=CA6666016 (accessed June 18, 2009).

4 The Gone with the Wind Parodies: The Wind Done Gone by Alice Randall and “Frankly, Scarlett, I Do Give a Damn” by Beverly West and Nancy Peske I was born May 25, 1845, at half-past seven in the morning into slavery on a cotton farm a day’s ride from Atlanta. My father, Planter, was the master of the place; my mother was the Mammy. My half-sister, Other, was the belle of five counties. She was not beautiful, but men seldom recognized this, caught up in the cloud of commotion and scent in which she moved. R. certainly didn’t; he married her. But then again, he just left her. Maybe that means something to me. Maybe he’s just the unseldom one who do recognize.1 Scarlett O’Hara was not beautiful but men seldom realized it when caught by her charms, her keen intellect, her independent spirit, and her considerable depth of character, all of which men valued far more than a pretty face or a seventeen-inch waist.2

Parody has long been established as a natural, inevitable literary development in the lifespan of any popular cultural text. The more well-known a text, the more likely it is to generate a number of imitations and, ultimately, a parody. Because of its vast popularity, it is not surprising at all that Gone with the Wind has fallen easy prey to a great variety of parodies of all sorts— TV sketches, show episodes, gags, jokes, cartoons, and songs. This chapter analyzes two literary Gone with the Wind parodies, The Wind Done Gone by Alice Randall and the very short piece “Frankly, Scarlett, I Do Give a Damn” by Beverly West and Nancy Peske. Each of them focuses on two completely different aspects of the novel — the portrayal of African Americans and the depiction of love relationships, respectively.

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The Wind Done Gone Literary depictions of African Americans in American letters have frequently been reduced to stereotypes, the most profitable of them being the happy darkie, the freeman, the clown, the brute, the tragic mulatto, the figure of local color and the exotic primitive (or a combination of two or more of the types above). Providing faithful representations of African Americans has been an arduous task, particularly for Southern writers, always running the risk of falling into sentimentalized idealizations. Even antislavery writers, concerned as they were with trying to present likable and positive portrayals of African Americans, fell into the use of stereotypes, believing them to be not facile generalizations but useful to provide a better understanding of African Americans.3 The literary neglect of African American females was even greater, almost to the point of banishment. The trend of nineteenth-century novels rarely presenting African American female characters or, exceptionally, using familiar and worn-out stereotypes, was replicated in Gone with the Wind, where female African American characters are constricted to the loyal Mammy and the stupid girl Prissy, that is, the faithful servant and the superstitious child.4 To counteract what she deemed to be pernicious depictions of African Americans in Gone with the Wind, Alice Randall wrote The Wind Done Gone in the form of a recovered diary found among the possessions of a recently deceased African American woman who unsuccessfully attempted to have it published. Despite the multiplicity of Civil War diaries authored by Confederate and Union wives, nurses, and young girls (not to mention soldiers), there exist no diaries penned by slaves (or former slaves) since teaching them to write and read was a punishable crime in the South.5 Since writing and power are closely interconnected, writing constitutes a powerful tool for the ones in power to subject those in a position of inferiority, who are denied literacy. Anthropologist Levi-Strauss wrote: The only phenomenon with which writing has always been concomitant is the creation of cities and empires, that is the integration of large numbers of individuals into a political system, and their grading into castes or classes…. It seems to have favored the exploitation of human beings rather than their enlightenment…. My hypothesis, if correct, would oblige us to recognize the fact that the primary function of written communication is to facilitate slavery.6

Writing was regarded as an indicator of reason and one closely related to African Americans’ intellectual capacity. Thus, James Weldon Johnson’s The Book of American Negro Poetry (1922) asserted that “the status of the Negro in the United States is more a question of national mental attitude toward the race than of actual conditions. And nothing will do more to change that mental attitude and raise his status than a demonstration of intellectual parity by the Negro through the production of literature and art.”7 For Cynara, because words have the power to buy or sell people, as she realizes upon seeing the documents that

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prove her existence and her slave status, “after some of the things I’ve read, I know if God had loved me, I’d a been born blind.” Cynara understands that literacy is power, that the capacity of naming involves the prerogative to create and, thus, “[R.] taught me how to read and write, and it was as if he created me.”8 In Barbara Chase-Riboud’s novel Sally Hemings (1979), the eponymous protagonist ended up burning her diaries and, thus, silencing her story forever, leaving it for others to rewrite and re-interpret according to their own agendas.9 Cynara’s diary, in contrast to the fictional Hemings’, is a document to be preserved, transmitted and recovered, testimony of her need “to write her way into sanity, as well as into being.” The Wind Done Gone is fiction passing off as lost history now being recovered and, accordingly, it is appended by a preface asserting the veracity of the following narrative, a literary device used by Harriet E. Wilson in Our Nig (1859).10 As already mentioned, Cynara is Planter and Mammy’s illegitimate daughter and the half-sister of Other but, apart from this premise, The Wind Done Gone contained other scandalous or controversial issues apart from its treatment of miscegenation. An especially harmful element for the Trust was that Scarlett, who is immortal, or so the writers of the authorized sequels forced to comply with, dies in The Wind Done Gone. Other controvertible events include that R. leaves Other because he is in love with Cynara or that Dreamy Gentleman, the object of Other’s affection, turns out to be homosexual and had had an affair with a slave. For Randall, both miscegenation and homosexuality had been left out from Mitchell’s novel: not only had slaves been confined to the margins of Mitchell’s narrative, homosexuals had been entirely blotted out as well.11 When it comes to homosexuality or, rather, its absence, in Gone with the Wind, critics have for long noted the latent homosexuality in Gone with the Wind. Not only is Scarlett’s first husband scarcely virile or her second husband a fussy, old maidenish man, also Ashley, in sharp contrast to Scarlett’s masculinized self, is feminine and, for some, a stereotypical latent homosexual.12 Randall took this even further by presenting her Dreamy Gentleman as definitely homosexual. But despite her treatment of homosexuality, it was the revision of African Americans’ lives under slavery that interested Randall the most and which attracted most attention. Historians have traditionally held that the absence of rebellions in the South during the antebellum period denoted the slaves’ tacit acceptance of their situation. However, more recent studies have shown that, despite the pervasive image of the happy darkies, entirely satisfied with their lot and even thankful to their master, slaves did engage in resistance activities. This is consistent with James Scott’s theories about the “weapons of the weak,” claiming that slaves, instead of outright resistance, employed less visible but more effective ways to rebel against their masters on a daily basis. What is more, slaves’ rebelliousness increased as the Civil War went on and it was clear whose side was going to be victorious, a fact generally omitted in Southern recollec-

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tions of the war.13 In The Wind Done Gone there are no passive slaves, but active agents— the faithful valet Garlic got his previous master drunk so that Planter could win him at a poker game because he had realized that Planter was an ignorant simpleton whom he could control. The dominant view of slavery is presented as mistaken — Dreamy Gentleman “believed [Mammy] to be a loving beast of burden without sex or resentment” when the truth is that “Mammy used [Other] to torment white men” as well as killing the white, male babies because with a sober master she and Garlic would not have been able to continue running Cotton Farm.14 According to abolitionist writers, another resistance method was that black female slaves purposefully seduced their masters not only to forge attachment ties that would prevent their being sold but also with the utter goal of mining the whites’ health by means of sexual exhaustion.15 According to Randall, Mammy seduced Planter and fulfilled his sexual needs in a way Lady could not. The existence of African American families is a central concern in African American studies, for slaves’ erotic, reproductive and family relations were curtailed by slavery. Although African Americans were not allowed to legally get married, they “jumped the broom,” thereby creating alternative family models to which most white observers remained oblivious. Given that family ties between slaves were not taken into account when it came to selling slaves, families were often separated. In the nineteenth century, there sparked an interest in slaves’ sexuality, religion and family structure, absent from the writings and the thinking of slaveholders during the previous centuries. The Victorian family became the model for the social organization of the plantation and slavery during the nineteenth century came to be known as a “domestic institution.” Slaves were the children — dutiful and thankful to their parents (that is, their masters), with slave owners regarding themselves as fathers to their slaves, whom they disciplined and protected from harm and illnesses. This model for describing slavery and the ties between slaves and masters proved very profitable and useful for explaining it but at the same time it obscures and fails to describe, because of its very simplicity, the complex web of (inter)relationships during the antebellum days at the same time that it helped create the pervasive image of African American promiscuity.16 Randall is careful to stress which bonds make a real family so as to vindicate the non-traditional family of Planter and Mammy versus that of Planter and Lady, the latter losing legitimacy in turn. Randall presents a Mammy who was the master’s true love. Because Mammy owns the O’Haras and feels morally entitled to make her opinions known (especially when they stand in opposition to the whites’) Southern viewers of Gone with the Wind complained that in the film Mammy was too familiar with Scarlett, going beyond the line. This was far from being the rule, though: “if the servility of blacks in Gone with the Wind strikes some as offensive, it is closer to the reality of the period than Mammy’s overweening strength and authority.”17 With her strong resemblance to Scarlett O’Hara, the description of Cynara

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owes much to the characterization of the beautiful mulatto, an archetype in African American literature ever since the publication of the first novel by an African American writer, William Wells Brown, in 1853. The first African American writers, to make their white readers empathize with their African American heroines, designed them according to white morals and manners. Therefore, in Clotel the female protagonist is fashioned after white ideals and beauty standards. Because the mulatto blurs and subverts the boundaries between whites and slaves, their very existence was a scandal and a sin against racial categories. The law determined that mulattos’ status was to be the same as their mother’s, thus putting an end to the quandary of the legal situation of the children of slave women fathered by white men. This, however, did nothing to prevent the feelings that the mulatto stirred, being a figure of fascination and disgust simultaneously.18 This racial crisis posed a threat to white identity at the same time that it was a source of identity confusion for the mulatto. The tragic mulatto woman was a stock figure in nineteenth-century American fiction, much more recurrent than the mulatto man, “the difference … [being] a product of the difference attributed to male and female bodies: not the different morphology but the different mythology of flesh separating the bodies of men and women.” Even more than men’s, slave women’s bodies, subject to sexual abuse, constituted “unique sites of domination under slavery.” Additionally, the racial/identity confusion was even more tragic for the female mulatto, for her white features exposed her to undesired whites’ sexual attention. Female mulattoes’ or octoroons’ aspirations were limited to their becoming mistresses to white men, as the novel Old Creole Days put it.19 Yet, despite this recurrence of the topic, only rarely did any nineteenth-century work approve of interracial love, even those with a clear abolitionist aim. Louisa May Alcott’s “M.L.” (published in 1863, before the success of Little Women) is an exceptional case. In Werner Sollors’s findings, mulatto suicide was the most common outcome for interracial relationships in American letters, a fate only avoided in the case of those quadroons or octaroons who fled to Europe with their white partners to pass as white. The tragic mulatto figure was especially exploited by antislavery authors, always ready to denounce illicit sex in the South and vindicate the potential of African Americans, provided they were given education, taught good manners, etc.20 An important point in the characterization of the mulatto was the stress on her physical attributes. African American novels such as Clotel or Iola Leroy (1892) by Frances Harper feature beautiful mulatto heroines— beautiful because they could pass as white.21 To challenge conventional beauty standards, Randall took “the icon of Southern beauty away from Scarlett, not giving it to Other but to my new character, Cynara.” Other, according to Cynara, is beautiful to R. because she looks like her, but while he can marry Other, he cannot marry a mulatto. Whereas nineteenth-century literature usually credited the mulattos’ merits to their white blood (although more often than not the mulatto was per-

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ceived as the recipient of each race’s flaws without any positive points), Cynara rejects R.’s proposal of marrying him and passing as white in Europe and chooses to live in an African American neighborhood, much to R.’s chagrin. Moreover, Randall has Cynara finally coping with her mixed ancestry by revealing that most of the white characters in the novel have some African blood in them. At the end of The Wind Done Gone, there are almost no purely white characters— Lady was partly black, an inheritance passed to her children, unaware of their condition, and even Planter has something African in his love for the land.22 The idea of interracial relationships, though notably absent in Gone with the Wind, is something that had been in Mitchell’s mind for years, even if she never included it in her only novel. Before beginning to write Gone with the Wind, Mitchell had already explored interracial love in her ’Ropa Carmagin. This novella recreated the impossible love story between Europa “’Ropa” Carmagin, the daughter of the owner of a Georgia plantation, and a young mulatto who is killed, whereas ’Ropa is banished from the county. Mitchell considered publishing the novella shortly after the publication of Gone with the Wind, when publishers and readers alike were begging her for a new piece of her writing. Macmillan had at first showed a great interest in publishing anything also written by the author of Gone with the Wind, even if it had been written before her novel. However, when they read the manuscript, though they liked the story, they recommended Mitchell to make it longer, for it was not marketable in its current length. Mitchell, however, never got to lengthen her novella into novel form, despite the scandalous amounts of money that she was being offered for anything from her pen. Mitchell specified in her will that all her documents, writings, and literary production should be burned after her death including the original manuscript of Gone with the Wind, of which she only consented to save an excerpt long enough to prove her authorship, should this be challenged in the future (though Edwards casts doubts on the veracity of this request).23 ’Ropa Carmagin was among the papers burned by her faithful secretary, so we only know about its contents from her secretary’s notes. Mitchell’s husband’s dislike for the topic of miscegenation and for her inaccurate portrayal of the mulatto might have influenced her decision to have the novella burned and unpublished.24 Given her interest in the topic, had the twenties and the thirties been more progressive decades, Mitchell might have explored miscegenation in Gone with the Wind or, at least, tried to have ’Ropa Carmagin published. Mixed blood still is a controversial and rarely discussed topic in American letters and even nowadays very few novels or films portray a successful outcome for interracial relationships.25 It was one of the issues that Conroy wanted to tackle in his novel and, once the negotiations had been broken, he bitterly joked that the first line in his novel would have been, “After they made love, Rhett turned to Ashley Wilkes and said, ‘Ashley, have I ever told you that my grandmother was black?’”26

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One of the main charges that abolitionists leveled against the preservation of slavery was the pernicious effects it had on morality and sexual mores. Abolitionists claimed that “illicit intercourse” between the masters and their female slaves constituted a key element of life in Southern plantations, so much that, in their view, “the sixteen slave States constitute one vast brothel,” as the Liberator newspaper denounced in 1858.27 For the abolitionists, the whites had been tainted by the corruption of the slaves as a consequence of white and African American children playing together.28 Although interracial sex seems to have been a rarer occurrence than abolitionists maintained because of the slave women’s resistance and the masters’ concern for preserving slave families, antislavery works paid a close attention to miscegenation and the resulting mulattoes. Since the first steps of the American identity, this enslaved population became a trope for writers to reflect on issues such as the distinctive American character, the body, the soul, their historical circumstances, morality, freedom and bondage, religion, power relations, and social organization. V. F. Calverton went even further and in An Anthology of American Negro Literature (1929) he claimed that the distinctive, true American character and the origin of American letters came from African American culture in opposition to the imitation of European models that marred American literature in its beginnings. By displacing the themes that affected white society into this ubiquitous other, writers found parallel or alternative selves on which to play out the problems that plagued them.29 Following this tradition, her African American characters serve Mitchell as counterparts and psychological doubles for her white characters. Prissy’s “studiedly stupid look” is not too different from the way Southern belles have to pretend to be naïve fools until they are married and it is too late for their husbands to realize their mistake. Also, Mammy often compares Scarlett with a field hand (in the light of Randall’s rewriting, we could say that it is Scarlett’s African American heritage showing). Though the evils of slavery and the hard work of slaves are not directly presented in Gone with the Wind, Mitchell’s language reveals how slavery has decisively shaped Southern society and thus, “in her manipulations of other white southerners, particularly men, Scarlett embraces the notion of all human relationships as calculated transactions.”30 If Gone with the Wind was accused of solely presenting the female side of the Civil War and the subsequent Reconstruction period, with no battle scenes and not much political analysis as a result of its protagonist’s disinterest in political affairs, we still have to remember that, like Little Women, Gone with the Wind offers a picture of white womanhood, with merely a few glimpses of African American womanhood. Mitchell, though aware of the limitations that antebellum notions about ladyhood imposed on upper-class women, did not touch upon the issue of race matters, failing to register the parallelisms existing between slaves and ladies. Women and slaves were equally uneducated and suf-

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fered a situation of “civil death” since white women were as subjected to their husbands (or fathers) as were slaves. Many white women were certainly aware of this, up to the extent that they used the metaphors of bondage and slavery to refer to their own matrimonial circumstances. To begin with, the very basis of the concept of the Southern lady (pure, almost virginal, untouchable) depended on the existence of slavery, or, rather, available slave women, for slave owners believed that white women’s purity and virginity could only be maintained at the expense of slave women for the master and his sons to enjoy.31 White women and female slaves shared a common degradation, as Chesnut wrote: I wonder if it be a sin to think slavery a curse to any land. Men and women are punished when their masters and mistresses are brutes, not when they do wrong. Under slavery, we live surrounded by prostitutes, yet an abandoned woman is sent out of any decent house. Who thinks any worse of a Negro or mulatto woman for being a thing we can’t name? God forgive us, but ours is a monstrous system, a wrong and an iniquity! Like the patriarchs of old, our men live all in one house with their wives and their concubines; and the mulattoes one sees in every family partly resemble the white children. Any lady is ready to tell you who is the father of all the mulatto children in everybody’s household but her own. Those, she seems to think, drop from the clouds. My disgust sometimes is boiling over. Thank God for my country women, but alas for the men! They are probably no worse than men everywhere, but the lower their mistresses, the more degraded they must be.32

Despite their awareness to this situation of social inequality, few women involved themselves in how their husbands ran their plantations or how they (mis)treated slaves. British actress Fanny Kemble was a notable exception in that she published her Journal of a Residence on a Georgian Plantation in 1838 – 1839 in 1863, denouncing her brutal husband’s abuses against the slaves. When Mammy laces up Scarlett’s corset as tight as possible, this daily task is symbolic of the way in which white women and slave women are oppressed by the very same social system, with both categories of women being responsible or, at the very least, complicit of the other group’s bondage.33 Scarlett, permanently unanalytical, is unaware of this, but not Mitchell, who “tells us that ‘Mammy’s victories over Scarlett were hard won and represented guile unknown to the white mind.’ In these stereotypically racist comments, Mitchell makes the connection between slave and female.” This parallelism between ladies and slave women is further explored in Randall’s work. In The Wind Done Gone, with slaves having the upper hand, Lady is the true victim of Southern patriarchy. As the antebellum South had it, “all women are niggers. For sure, every woman I ever knew was a nigger — whether she knew it or not.” Even though Other ignores it, “she was a slave in a white woman’s body.”34 Much less noticed and commented upon is the circumstance that not only is Scarlett often compared to slaves, but other characters are as well. For instance, Rhett Butler displays a number of African American characteristics

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in his coloring and his attitude towards work and sex. Melanie, who is loyal to Scarlett despite her rudeness, is a mirror for the loyal slave who stays with his master even after the abolition of slavery.35 The Tarleton twins’ slave, Jeems, has more understanding and common sense than his restless masters while Uncle Peter has a world knowledge Aunt Pittypat entirely lacks. Other valuable slaves include Old Levi, who conducts the city orchestra and Tara’s Big Sam, who, after Jonas Wilkerson is fired because of his affair with white trash Emily Slattery, makes a very capable overseer until a replacement is found. Despite black inferiority in general, individual portraits show that some slaves have personal worth, such as Pork, Mammy, Dilcey or Uncle Peter. All in all, Mitchell’s male slaves show an intelligence many of her white male characters lack.36 Yet, for all of Uncle Peter’s taking care of the family dutifully for years, he is still an inferior to be protected from the dangerous world, such as Yankee women insulting him cruelly and viciously: [Scarlett] had listened with calm contempt while these women had underrated the Confederate Army, blackguarded Jeff Davis and accused Southerners of murder and torture of their slaves. If it were to her advantage she would have endured insults about her own virtue and honesty. But the knowledge that they had hurt the faithful old darky with their stupid remarks fired her like a match in gunpowder. For a moment she looked at the big horse pistol in Peter’s belt and her hands itched for the feel of it. They deserved killing, these insolent, ignorant, arrogant conquerors…. She glanced at Peter and saw that a tear was trickling down his nose. Instantly a passion of tenderness, of grief for his humiliation swamped her, made her eyes sting. It was as though someone had been senselessly brutal to a child. Those women had hurt Uncle Peter — Peter who had been through the Mexican War with old Colonel Hamilton, Peter who had held his master in his arms when he died, who had raised Melly and Charles and looked after the feckless, foolish Pittypat, “pertecked” her when she refugeed, and “’quired” a horse to bring her back from Macon through a war-torn country after the surrender. And they said they wouldn’t trust niggers!37

What is more, “Uncle Peter keeps order, though he becomes comic in his efforts, for in the novel, there is something ridiculous about black men who become monkeys and small children, their common epithets” and even Mammy mocks and ridicules his attempts at scolding Scarlett and Melanie to get them back to Aunt Pitty.38 Because Scarlett and the narrator both fail to acknowledge that the Southern antebellum lifestyle was only made possible by the existence of slavery, Mitchell has for long been seen as a perpetuator of the image of the “happy darkie,” satisfied with his lot as slave. In Gone with the Wind, slaves are happy enough and if they are oppressed or mistreated it is not because of the plantation system or the owners, but because of the sufferings that cruel Yankee overseers or white trash inflict on them; what is more, the slaves’ positions are not so bad, for poor whites are worse off than the slaves and even envy them.39 Physical abuse of slaves is almost unknown in Tara and, in the very rare instances when it does take place, entirely justified: Gerald once whipped a careless slave who

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forgot to tend to his horse, and Scarlett only hits Prissy out of frustration for Melanie’s day-long labor, stressed out by Prissy’s lies about her knowledge on childbirth and her indolence: “she had never struck a slave in all her life, but now she slapped the black cheek with all the force in her tired arm. Prissy screamed at the top of her voice, more from fright than pain, and began to dance up and down, writhing to break Scarlett’s grip.”40 The only slaves sold in the novel are Dilcey and Prissy and they are sold to Gerald O’Hara so that they can live in Tara with Dilcey’s husband, Pork. The hard work necessary to plant the cotton fields is only acknowledged when it falls on Scarlett’s back (and this is caused by the Yankees) and though the novel indicts the poverty in which Scarlett and her neighbors have fallen because of the war, there is no pity of even recognition for the hardship of the slaves’ antebellum conditions.41 Scarlett, like Mitchell herself, fails to see the dependence of Southern society on slavery for it to exist. Georgia had passed in 1735 a law banning the importation of blacks and their use as slaves, only to have it repealed in 1750, a decision largely owing to the failure to implement in Georgia the indentured servant system and to the fact that slave-grown cotton was the principal export of America, profiting from the high demand of the Industrial Revolution.42 Large plantations in the South were rare, however, with most slave owners having fewer than fifty slaves, nothing to do with Mitchell’s rich slave owners. Mitchell’s fictional Clayton County is populated by slave owners significantly wealthier than the real 1860s county: Poor white trash in Gone with the Wind never own more than four Negroes, but in Clayton County only 36 farmers owned more than 10 Negroes, and only 134 owned from one to ten. To reach even the lowly status of poor white, a man in this country in fiction would have to own as many slaves as a middling slave owner in fact. The Tarletons own 100 Negroes, and apparently several other plantations in the novel are about that same size. But the census of 1860 lists no slave owner with that many slaves in Clayton County, and only one owned between 40 and 50 slaves.43

Building on family stories and oral history (also a source of many modern African American historical novels) Mitchell’s novel intended to correct a negative image of the South that had been prevalent ever since the second half of the nineteenth century, a task a number of Southern writers took upon themselves.44 Mitchell had to justify slavery if she did not want the whole system on which her society was based labeled as evil. How to say that Scarlett and her neighbors are good, honest people if slavery is immoral? If national reconciliation was to be achieved and the South was to be rehabilitated, slavery had to be portrayed under a more benign light, as advocated by Professor William A. Dunning. Some thinkers presented slavery as something perfectly reasonable and, thus, early American historian George Bancroft reminded his readers in his History of the United States, from the Discovery of the American Continent (first published in 1834) that “in every Grecian republic, slavery was an indis-

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pensable element.”45 President Dew of William and Mary College in 1832 declared that slavery had been the condition of all ancient culture, that Christianity approved servitude, and that the law of Moses had both assumed and positively established slavery…. It is the order of nature and of God that the being of superior faculties and knowledge, and therefore of superior power, should control and dispose of those who are inferior. It is as much in the order of nature that men should enslave each other as that other animals should prey upon each other.46

That the slaves deserved their lot was a pervasive belief, dating back to the origins of slavery: in Hebrew, the word for slave, ‘ebed, implied that slavery was a divine punishment. At the same time, the adjective black was just another physical marker but, because of the black skin of those held in bondage and slavery, it acquired a pejorative connotation by the seventeenth century.47 In Gone with the Wind slavery conditions are described almost as a social class-based system, with slaves being industrious and good when supervised by gentle masters, resounding with echoes of social Darwinism ideas. That way, “the taint of slavery was transmogrified into harmonious cohabitation,” a balanced biracial society whose order and harmony was, ironically enough, disrupted by the Yankees48: Scarlett thought: What damnably queer people Yankees are! Those women seemed to think that because Uncle Peter was black, he had no ears to hear with and no feelings, as tender as their own, to be hurt. They did not know that negroes had to be handled gently, as though they were children, directed, praised, petted, scolded. They didn’t understand negroes or the relations between the negroes and their former masters. Yet they had fought a war to free them. And having freed them, they didn’t want to have anything to do with them, except to use them to terrorize Southerners. They didn’t like them, didn’t trust them, didn’t understand them, and yet their constant cry was that Southerners didn’t know how to get along with them.49

Whereas slavery allowed for slaves to work in occupations fitting to their innate capacities, making them useful for society, the end of slavery had debased African Americans, making of them lazy good-for-nothings in the Reconstruction days. These views about slaves’ industriousness were propagated during the antebellum period and perpetuated after the end of the war; for example, the propagandistic Pro-Slavery Argument, published in 1853, contended that “slavery has elevated the Negro from savagery. The black man’s finer traits of fidelity and docility were encouraged in his servile position.”50 Even Ashley, so squeamish in hiring convicts for the mills, has no problem with working slaves, as an exasperated Scarlett exclaims: “But you owned slaves!” Ashley’s reply is typical of the paternalistic vision of slavery: “They weren’t miserable. And besides, I’d have freed them all when Father died if the war hadn’t already freed them. But this is different, Scarlett.”51 Once slavery had been abolished, Southerners felt the need to continue defending the worth of the domestic institution and vindicating the good treatment of African Americans under it as apology

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for their old lifestyle, presenting African Americans as better off when subjected to the rule of paternal masters than in the dangerous postbellum period.52 Thus, Scarlett thinks that free darkies are certainly worthless…. You just can’t depend on the darkies any more. They work a day or two and then lay off till they’ve spent their wages, and the whole crew is like as not to quit overnight. The more I see of emancipation the more criminal I think it is. It’s just ruined the darkies. Thousands of them aren’t working at all and the ones we can get to work at the mill are so lazy and shiftless they aren’t worth having. And if you so much as swear at them, much less hit them a few licks for the good of their souls, the Freedmen’s Bureau is down on you like a duck on a June bug.53

However, the former slaves are not to blame if, without proper guidance after the end of the war, they have gone wild: To the credit of the negroes, including the least intelligent of them, few were actuated by malice and those few had usually been “mean niggers” even in slave days. But they were, as a class, childlike in mentality, easily led and from long habit accustomed to taking orders. Formerly their white masters had given the orders. Now they had a new set of masters, the Bureau and the Carpetbaggers, and their orders were: “You’re just as good as any white man, so act that way. Just as soon as you can vote the Republican ticket, you are going to have the white man’s property. It’s as good as yours now. Take it, if you can get it!”54

Popular literature does not challenge society’s views, which is the case of Gone with the Wind. The Wind Done Gone, on the other hand, challenges society’s view of the antebellum South and of America’s treatment of slaves. The Wind Done Gone participates of the same premise that sustained Gone with the Wind: to revise history to portray it as it really was. Yet, Randall’s attempt to present a corrected version of Gone with the Wind was perceived as flawed, failing to deliver an alternative version to Mitchell’s work55: The Wind Done Gone presents a contradictory fantasy. By seeking to combine an individual, therapeutic politics with a narrative of communal but indefinable blackness, the novel accurately reflects the confusion that persists in the wake of much postmodernist thought — the attempt to conflate an individualist, ludic postmodernism with a utopian politics of solidarity and social transformation. Like ludic postmodernism in general, it allows subjects to claim both the moral authority of victims and the privileges of victors, to be autonomous masters in control of their desires and impersonal vehicles of larger historical (and specifically racial) forces. In short, it suggests that if only one claims one’s authentic blackness, freedom and necessity will become one and the same. And in doing so, it also ensures that its contribution toward historical understanding and social transformation will remain limited.56

Rather than seeing The Wind Done Gone as a recovery of African Americans’ voices missing in the original text, the general impression was that it was a racial vendetta and “a dose of race-relations comeuppance.”57 Although the Civil War is over by the time Cynara begins her diary, its aftereffects are still noticeable and have a lasting influence on her. Where

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Mitchell could obliterate Rhett’s Confederate past, Cynara cannot. For Scarlett, the only consequence of Rhett’s enlisting is that he abandons her with Wade, Melanie, baby Beau and Prissy on the road to Tara. She does not even care that he was imprisoned for killing a former slave: “No, now that I am free of the toils, I’ll frankly admit that I’m as guilty as Cain. I did kill the nigger. He was uppity to a lady, and what else could a Southern gentleman do? And while I’m confessing, I must admit that I shot a Yankee cavalryman after some words in a barroom. I was not charged with that peccadillo, so perhaps some other poor devil has been hanged for it, long since.”58 That Frank Kennedy belongs to the Ku Klux Klan only scares Scarlett because Ashley, also a member, could get killed, but their very participation fills her with pride: “All of them, all the men she knew, even the drowsy-eyed Ashley and fidgety old Frank, were like that underneath — murderous, violent if the need arose. Even Rhett, conscienceless scamp that he was, had killed a negro for being ‘uppity to a lady.’”59 But for Cynara, that R. was a Confederate has changed her perception of him; moreover, she herself is tainted by his reputation as a former Confederate soldier and she will not be received by good African American families because of her situation as “the Confederate’s concubine.”60 The Wind Done Gone has been defined as a new take on the neo-slave narrative, for, although slavery has been already abolished by the beginning of the novel, Cynara still suffers from the psychological hurt slavery inflicted upon African Americans: “It is not in the pigment of my skin that my Negressness lies. It is not the color of my skin. It is the color of my mind.” This is emphasized when she discovers that Other also was partially black herself, but, ignorant of this situation, she behaved and was treated as a Southern lady.61 According to Winthrop D. Jordan, it was the captivity experience that characterized slavery most decisively and profoundly, not the servitude or the hard work.62 Ralph Ellison wrote that “being a Negro American has to do with the memory of slavery and the hope of emancipation and the betrayal by allies and the revenge and contempt inflicted by our former masters after the Reconstruction, and the myths, both Northern and Southern, which are propagated in justification of that betrayal.”63 Cynara is no longer a slave, but she is still captive by social conventions about the proper place of an African American woman, as her reluctance to abandon her black neighborhood and pass as white as R. suggests to her, testify to. Thus, The Wind Done Gone follows after slave narratives and African American autobiographies that called forth the subject’s seeking refuge in their ethnic community if they were to come to terms with their twofold identity as Americans and black. At the same time, not turning one’s back on the race by passing as white was a task frequently asked from mulattoes, as in Iola Leroy, because many former slaves aspired to be white. Cynara, in contrast, always stays within her community, refusing to pass off as white.64 If Scarlett is in a position of inferiority as a woman, Cynara is doubly so because she is African American and a woman, but she does not try to subvert

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patriarchy, being far more concerned with racial and class issues than with gender matters. Cynara aspires to belong to the African American elite and does not really care about women’s role or their plight, similar to Scarlett’s own obliviousness to the possibility of women’s suffrage. Because of her concern with race issues instead of gender matters, Cynara does not conform to the feminist or black feminist model, but to Africana womanism, “a race-based, family-centered paradigm.”65 For all of Randall’s interest in creating a Gone with the Wind version for African Americans as a whole, Cynara regards herself as a member of the African American elite, ignoring the situation of over four million freed slaves who barely subsisted in the hard Reconstruction days, up to the point that her final hope for the race gets obscured — is she referring to the race as a whole or just to the urban, growing African American middle and upper classes? In this aspect, Cynara comes really close to Mammy in Gone with the Wind, who snubs field hands because she is a domestic servant and, therefore, in a better position in the plantation social hierarchy. Just as Gone with the Wind concentrated on the Southern elite, so did The Wind Done Gone with the African American elite.66 “The contradiction between the individualism of Cynara’s quest and the novel’s attempt to make that quest meaningful for African American history as a whole,” in dire contrast to Scarlett’s individualistic drive, is not successfully answered and how to make of Cynara’s particular life experiences an example for all African Americans is not fully resolved.67 For all her hopes for the future of the race, Cynara succeeds only on an individual level (in contrast to the pessimistic overall situation for the race, for her African American Congressman lover and other African American politicians are losing their seats): “regardless of how others view her — often as no more than a mistress— she creates her own space as a worthy individual. She interacts with multiple groups of people, yet she finds her greatest peace at the end of the story when she succeeds as an individual, creating a unique new role for herself.”68 Cynara fully endorses the idea that the African American elite should direct the rest, thus being a proto-forerunner of W. E. B. Du Bois’ concept of the talented tenth: “the exceptionally qualified men and women of the race, the cultural elite, to lead the masses in the struggle for full American citizenship.”69 This task, though, is an arduous one, given that, as African American writer Charles W. Chesnutt noted, once having achieved middle-class status, African American professionals tended to get commodified and forget their less fortunate fellow men, afraid of endangering their hardly earned new social position.70 In nineteenth-century novels, mulattoes and those African Americans in a better social position were morally urged to help the rest and fight racist views.71 This is unattainable for Cynara, for her relationship with R. makes of her a social pariah among the African American upper-class society in Washington, D.C., where they move trying to get rid of the racial boundaries of Atlanta — unsuccessfully, as it soon turns out. Other than the references to Du Bois’ tal-

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ented tenth, there are other anachronisms to be found in The Wind Done Gone. These include allusions to Toni Morrison’s ideas on memory, Patricia Williams’ theories on ownership, William Faulkner’s Light in August, “The Yellow Wallpaper” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, and “Strange Fruit” by Billie Holiday, acknowledging that The Wind Done Gone not only attempts to portray the evils of the Reconstruction days but also engages in a dialogue with present-day issues. Two of the main themes explored by the first African American novels were “a messianic delivery from oppression and an eschatological overthrow of white supremacy” and it is possible to see these themes underlying The Wind Done Gone.72 Cynara herself exemplifies the difficulties of finding a good job for African American women in the postbellum South: she is first a slave in Tara, then in Charleston, later on she is sold to a different kind of “slavery as a maid in Beauty’s Atlanta brothel” and eventually she becomes R.’s concubine, so that “loving him is the only work I’m trained to do.”73 In this view, R. can be interpreted as Cynara’s Messiah in that he saves her from Beauty’s brothel but she eventually abandons him, therefore overthrowing white supremacy, although just at an individual level. We could say that if the quest for “freedom, literacy, and wholeness” is the main theme in African American writings, Cynara’s individual quest personifies it but without being really significant for the race as a whole. Whereas nineteenth-century novelists focused on the domestic institution at large while sacrificing the individual character in the process, Randall reverses this by concentrating on the experiences of Cynara as representative of the African American; ultimately her success is an individual one, of Cynara as a worthy person, even if that means embracing a solitude that she formerly rejected.74 Parody by definition is polemical but few parodies have been as controversial as The Wind Done Gone in recent American publishing history, with even its very status as parody being questioned. The Wind Done Gone exploited the device of repeating differently, a characteristic feature of African American artistic representations.75 The first African American writers were accused of being but poor imitators, lacking any originality. Nevertheless, reinterpretation (“the interpretation of white cultural patterns according to African principles”) is central to African Americans and allowed African American writers to make use of white texts to convey their own meaning, offering a fresh look on those texts or traditions they employ so as to create an original, authentic black voice.76 Some saw Randall’s rewriting of Gone with the Wind as evidence of her lack of literary skills and imagination and concluded that her exposé of homosexuality and her inclusion of some new material absent in the original novel did not make The Wind Done Gone worth the effort.77 These criticisms were thus putting the finger on a charge African American literature has encountered ever since its beginnings. African Americans have long depleted current signifiers (whose meaning came from whites’ conventions) of their meaning to

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have them created anew with their own meanings. Randall tries to do this with the signifier “Gone with the Wind,” as Pat Conroy acknowledged when he praised Randall’s “clever inversions and insiders jokes on the themes of GWTW.”78 Because “parody in its broadest sense and application may be described as first imitating and then changing either, and sometimes both, the ‘form’ and ‘content,’ or style and subject-matter, or syntax and meaning of another work, or, most simply, its vocabulary,” The Wind Done Gone changes the form (from third-person narrative to diary), content (the other side of Tara) and even syntax, using Negro dialect. In some types of parody, the effect is achieved by means of “the suppression of one term of the simile implied in comparison itself: x is like y. The reader must supply the model, of which the author’s text is a distorted image, mirrored in some way”; in The Wind Done Gone, this model is Gone with the Wind, to which Randall’s work remains fairly anchored, as seen below.79 In a way, Randall is one of the “black fabulators [who] combine elements of fable, legend, and slave narrative to protest racism and justify the deeds, struggles, migrations, and spirit of black people” in that she takes her fable and legend from Gone with the Wind. Her work is also reminiscent of African American satirists’ task of pointing out the absurdity of society.80 The literary representation of Southern motherhood has produced two equally pervasive and powerful stereotypes— the Southern belle/lady and the Mammy.81 As important and enduring as the image of the Southern lady is its counterpart, the Mammy, a composite, largely fictional figure that came into existence mostly after the war at the hands of Civil War veterans’ children. This was part of a larger propaganda effort to vindicate racial harmony in the antebellum South, contrary to abolitionists’ attacks on the brutality of the domestic institution.82 At odds with the equally pervasive image of the sensual, highly sexualized slave woman, the Mammy constituted the “sole emblem of ‘good’ black womanhood.” What is more, the stereotype of the Mammy produces no fear of racial confusion, for in the popular imagination Mammies are too darkskinned to provoke arousal (also a comforting sign of their not being mulattos themselves) and too obese and maternal. This popular image of Mammies is largely made up, though: Like the field hands, those black bondswomen who worked indoors were unlikely to be overweight because their food stuffs were severely rationed. They were more likely to be light as dark because household jobs were frequently assigned to mixed-race women. They were unlikely to be old because nineteenth-century black women just did not live very long; fewer than 10 percent of black women lived beyond their fiftieth birthday.83

Because Mammies did not write diaries or leave any other sort of writings, their thoughts and inner feelings are an unknown. Whereas the Mammy’s role in regards to the white children has been glorified and cherished, little has been said about the role of Mammy as a biological mother. The exaltation of the Mammy in postbellum literature made her existence seem to be a wide-

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spread phenomenon in the antebellum South but there appear to have been significantly fewer Mammies than we have been led to believe. Slave narratives, for instance, instead of speaking about Mammies, quite frequently referred to white women taking care of slave children.84 Frederick Douglass’s slave narrative, in which he made reference to his grandmother, a Mammy, is an exceptional document in that it constitutes one of the very few pieces of writing by a former slave speaking of the Mammy: She had served my old master faithfully from youth to old age. She had been the source of all his wealth; she had peopled his plantation with slaves; she had become a great-grandmother in his service. She had rocked him in infancy, attended him in childhood, served him through life, and at his death wiped from his icy brow the cold death-sweat, and closed his eyes forever. She was nevertheless left a slave — a slave for life — a slave in the hands of strangers; and in their hands she saw her children, her grandchildren, and her greatgrandchildren, divided, like so many sheep, without being gratified with the small privilege of a single word, as to their or her own destiny.85

Beloved, Dessa Rose, or Jubilee as well as other historical African American novels dwelled with motherhood as the site for the creation of identity for slave women and their daughters.86 In the words of Marianne Hirsch, “although mothers are present, even dominant, in the texts of black women writers, maternal identity suffers from important and symptomatic limitations and constraints. In Randall’s vision, slavery did not allow much room for the existence of slave families. The daughter-writer often has to define herself in opposition to and not in imitation of the maternal figure.”87 The Wind Done Gone presents a rather negative picture of motherhood. Cynara admits that “they always say we don’t have family feelings. I hate proving them right.”88 Traditionally, the Mammy assumed the role of primary caregiver of the white children, while neglecting her own. This situation was often presented as excruciating for the white women: “of all the painful and humiliating experiences which southern white women endured, the least easy to accept … was that of a mother who had no choice but to take the husk of a love which her son in his earliest years had given to another woman. She valiantly made jokes about it, telling her friends that her child preferred Mammy to her and that was fine, wasn’t it, for it gave her so much more time to attend to all she had to do!” Nevertheless, this situation was presented as happy enough for the Mammy, insensitive to her children’s needs.89 In The Wind Done Gone, Mammy turns all her attention to Other, depriving her biological daughter of her love. Cynara, in turn, receives the care of Lady, embittered because both her husband and her firstborn child prefer Mammy, so that Cynara can say, “I am Lady’s child and she is Mammy’s.”90 Randall’s Mammy is far from being the outraged mother often found in African American narrative, for she is too much a loving mother to Other.91 What is more, slavery blurs the family relations within African American families; for R., Mammy is just Other’s Mammy, not Cynara’s mother. Mammy’s rejection

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constitutes a constant source of pain and frustration for Cynara: “It don’t hurt near as much that Mammy didn’t love me as it hurts that I didn’t love Mammy.… It hurts not to love her. And it hurt more when I didn’t — I still don’t — believe she ever loved me.”92 Deprived of any sound, maternal role, Cynara’s own motherhood is also problematical and, aware of her declining health, she gives up her son to his African American Congressman father. This episode can be interpreted in opposite ways; on the one hand, Cynara replicates her mother’s failings as a mother by getting rid of her child. On the other, it has been reinterpreted and recast in a far more positive light: “by giving away her son, she does not necessarily fail as a mother. In fact, she succeeds in putting his needs ahead of hers: a completely selfless act.”93 The African American presence in American literature has long been conveniently edited out. Far from being accidental, this absence is due to a careful attempt to have it removed from nineteenth-century American literature. In her landmark essay, “Unspeakable Things Unspoken,” Toni Morrison suggested re-examining both nineteenth-century founding American literary works as well as contemporary popular fiction texts so as to “unearth” the African American experience in these texts in which it is largely absent, at least at first glance. Her point was that “invisible things are not necessarily ‘not-there’; that a void may be empty but not be a vacuum. In addition, certain absences are so stressed, so ornate, so planned, they call attention to themselves; arrest us with intentionality and purpose, like neighborhoods that are defined by the population held away from them.” The Wind Done Gone participates in this perceived need to examine “contemporary literature (both the sacred and profane) for the impact Afro-American presence has had on the structure of the work, the linguistic practice, and fictional enterprise in which it is engaged.”94 Randall combines this with the practice, specially favored by sequel writers, of giving voice to females whose voices were absent in the original novels. In Randall’s case, this was the voice of African American slaves and mulatto children as illustrated by Cynara. Nevertheless, although reviewers praised Randall’s attempt to rewrite the “history” of Gone with the Wind, they compared it poorly in comparison to other revisionist works rewriting classical American literary texts from an African American perspective such as My Jim, told from the point of view of the wife of Huckleberry’s Finn’s loyal companion, by Nancy Rawles.95 The ignorance about African American women is not solely caused by white observers’ disinterest in finding out the true feelings of these women they reduced to the role of nurturing caregivers with no lives of their own; it also obeys the fact that because of the interplay of racial animosity, class tensions, gender role differentiation, and regional economic variations, black women, as a rule, developed and adhered to a cult of secrecy, a culture of dissemblance, to protect the sanctity of inner aspects of their lives. The dynamics of dissemblance involved creating the appearance of disclosure, or openness about themselves and their feelings, while

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actually remaining an enigma. Only with secrecy, thus achieving a self-imposed invisibility, could ordinary black women accrue the psychic space and harness the resources needed to hold their own in the often one-sided and mismatched resistance struggle.

This lack of information about African American women led, in turn, to the creation of simplistic stereotypes to make up for this disinformation.96 Exslaves themselves were the first ones in omitting many references about the slavery days, mostly not to disengage their white readers. African American female writers such as Toni Morrison, Alice Walker or Margaret Walker have publicly denounced that in their own families, stories about the slavery days were silenced or suppressed.97 African American women used this secrecy and stereotyping to protect themselves from potential sexual harassment. This is what Mitchell’s Mammy does up to certain extent while Randall’s challenges this. Mammy becomes such an enigma for everyone that not even her own, biological daughter knows who she really is. Other, who is much closer to Mammy than Cynara, similarly frets over Mammy’s love, wondering if she is loved for herself or just because Mammy is forced to love her.98 The Wind Done Gone was not the first or only African American response to Gone with the Wind, though it has certainly been the most controversial (and well-publicized) by far. All African American novels dealing with the antebellum days can be said to be, up to a certain extent, a reaction to the portrayal of race relations in Gone with the Wind because Gone with the Wind is now the standard for Southern novels and films in as much as Uncle Tom’s Cabin or The Birth of a Nation (or Dixon’s novels, which were the basis for the film) once were. Even Steven Spielberg’s adaptation of Alice Walker’s novel The Color Purple pays homage to Gone with the Wind.99 Condé analyzes the idea that African American servants were happy to live through their white employees, whose pervasiveness she credits to Gone with the Wind, and how it is conveyed in the short story volume Like One of the Family (1956) by Alice Childress. As one of Childress’ protagonists reminds us, we should not believe stories “’bout ‘good ole days’ ’cause wasn’t no such thing, wasn’t nothin’ but a long tired yesterday!’”100 Jubilee by Margaret Walker shares a number of similarities with Gone with the Wind, only that Jubilee, like The Wind Done Gone, presents the other side of the story, the lives of the slaves. If Mitchell reflected the twenties’ and thirties’ sensibility, other novels dealing with the antebellum South are also heavily indebted to the historical moment and the current contemporary concerns at the time when they were written. Thus, Jubilee owes its scope largely to the momentum of the sixties.101 Just as African American historiography was originally largely written with the goal of correcting the omissions or flagrant mistakes in “white” historiography, so is African American literature. It is telling that many African American writers dealing with the conditions under slavery and after abolition have found inspiration in historical documents and, like Margaret Walker, have regarded

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themselves as social historians.102 The Wind Done Gone belongs to this genre of African American historical novels set in the antebellum South to which Roots, Beloved or Dessa Rose, to name a few examples, also belong. Roots tried to dispel myths about African Americans as a people without a past or a distinctive culture they could claim as theirs. At the same time, it received its own share of criticisms for presenting Kunta Kinte’s close-knit family as an exception to the rule when recent findings show that by the close of the antebellum days freed or slave African American families were fairly common.103 A tradition in African American women’s writing tries to prove how “events in the private lives of fictional characters are narratively linked to particular episodes in the struggle for racial justice.” The African American historical novels written by Morrison, Walker and Williams testify to “these writers’ desire to re-vision African American history from their imaginative and informed point of view.” African American female writers’ need to write historical novels comes from the omissions of the side of African Americans’ perspective in the American past. History and fiction are often blended in these novels: in Dessa Rose, Sherley Anne Williams twists history to accommodate her fictional story, and Morrison found inspiration for Beloved in a real event she altered for her own purposes.104 The Wind Done Gone, like Beloved, explores how the historical and political context decisively shapes individuals’ lives. Critics were especially harsh with Randall’s portrayal of R., very far from Rhett Butler’s image in Gone with the Wind: “even R. (Rhett), the dashing blockade-runner, is old, wrinkly, and unappealing” or “most of the white people in The Wind Done Gone are portrayed as cowardly, ineffectual or deluded. The Rhett figure (known as “R”) emerges not as the dashing figure played by Clark Gable but as a lovelorn, befuddled fellow who is summarily dumped by Cynara for a dashing black politician.” In having such an unflattering portrayal of her male protagonist, The Wind Done Gone participates of a larger trend in African American literature of having negative portrayals of white characters.105 If Randall’s white characters have any worth or redeeming positive qualities it is because they are partly black: cousins Lady and Feeleepe’s common ancestor was the black mistress of their great-grandfather, therefore making them and their descendants partially black. Although not black himself, “there was always something African about Planter, and Garlic was it. Even Planter’s love of the land had something African in it.” Where Du Bois in The Souls of Black Folk demanded from the African American that “he would not Africanize America…. He would not bleach his Negro soul in a flood of white Americanism, for he knows that Negro blood has a message for the world,” Randall, in contrast, has the whites’ blood blackened.106 To elevate their African American characters’ social and personal standing, nineteenth-century African American novelists had their African American characters speaking Standard English, not African American English — except for comic relief in secondary characters, but never the protagonists.107 The lan-

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guage used in African American writings has been an issue of contention and controversy ever since the beginning of African American letters. Theodore Parker, for all his fierce defense of African American literature and his vindication of its value and relevance to American literature, “was put off by the language of the slaves’ narratives.” Alexander Crummell, an advocate of African Americans’ rights, was appalled by what he perceived as the inferiority signs of African languages and called forth the use of Standard English for the elevation of African Americans’ status. Because language is not a transparent tool but is charged with meanings, connotations, and nuances, American writers (African American or not) cannot escape the racial connotations of language. For instance, Mitchell and her husband were most concerned about Macmillan not altering the dialect in Gone with the Wind and Mitchell claimed that she had strove for the Negro dialect in Gone with the Wind “to be not only phonetically accurate but easy to read.” Ironically, Randall was attacked for her poor language; while acknowledging her satiric aim at Mitchell’s style and language, critics commented that “Ms. Randall’s hothouse language … ends up making The Wind Done Gone read like a cheap romance novel.”108 The Wind Done Gone was found to lack a sound historical background, too concerned instead with presenting African Americans in a far more favorable light than Mitchell’s perspective.109 But is this portrayal so positive? Certainly, her African American characters are active agents but, at the same time, Mammy is the killer of white babies, a bitter woman manipulating whites through Other, an innocent girl deprived of her rather emotionally unavailable mother’s love. Randall complained, “I was operating against a total void in Gone with the Wind of rounded, black portrayals. All the black characters of Gone with the Wind are stereotypes,” but her Cynara is not too well defined either. Randall’s characters, Cynara in particular, are flat and unsympathetic, not well-rounded characters. Cynara is too dependent on her relationship with her half-sister, which prevents her from becoming much of a realistic character herself, ending up as an unsympathetic character, especially if compared to the original Scarlett.110 One of the main points of contention about The Wind Done Gone was that Scarlett and Rhett, among others, are as central to The Wind Done Gone as they are to the plotline of Gone with the Wind. If slaves were in the background of Gone with the Wind, the protagonist of Mitchell’s novel remains at the core and very much present in The Wind Done Gone, too.111 Even those defending Randall’s work brought attention to her heavy reliance on Gone with the Wind “even to the point of indulging in the same kind of nostalgia for the Old South that readers of Gone with the Wind often cherish. Garlic, for instance, genuinely loves Cotton Farm…. He and Pallas [Mammy] are just as devoted to the power, prestige, and sacredness of Cotton Farm as Planter and Other ever were.” Yet, for all the preeminence of Other in the narrative, Randall never has Cynara meet Other, explaining that Scarlett was all the time present in Gone with the Wind and, accordingly, in order to make a point, she wanted

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her to be deliberately absent from her novel so that Scarlett did not lessen Cynara’s protagonism. Because parody is firmly anchored into another work from which it derives its meaning, The Wind Done Gone remains very much bound to Gone with the Wind and even her language sometimes echoes the same nostalgic nuances of Gone with the Wind she sought to counterattack.112 The critical consideration of The Wind Done Gone has been mostly negative, far from Morrison’s enthusiastic view of the novel: “Miss Randall’s prose is by turns evocative, wry, plangent. Her wit is sharp but free of malice.”113 The publicity that The Wind Done Gone received on the grounds of the lawsuit was perceived as unmerited and raising the potential sales of a book that would have most likely gone unnoticed otherwise. The Wind Done Gone was hailed as an example of entitlement publishing — having a work published not on account of its literary merits or its artistic value but on the grounds of political motivations.114 Despite their different treatment of the Gone with the Wind plot, Scarlett and The Wind Done Gone had in common their high sales figures but negative reviews.115 All in all, the story was well regarded, but Randall’s development was considered faulty and her characters flat and lifeless. Randall has argued, however, that this was entirely intentional and if there are no wellrounded black characters in Gone with the Wind, she wanted to fight back in The Wind Done Gone by portraying flat white characters. Critics argued that “where Mitchell’s novel was epic, vibrant and accessible, Randall’s narrative is spare, flat and oblique.”116 Randall’s hope that, reading The Wind Done Gone, “whites and blacks could have a deep, hearty belly laugh together” is far from being realized, given the opposite and strong passions that arose from her book.117

“Frankly, Scarlett, I Do Give a Damn!” “Frankly, Scarlett, I Do Give a Damn,” Beverly West and Nancy Peske’s very brief parody of Gone with the Wind, is a rewriting of the original text from a politically correct, twentieth-century perspective. This parody, however, follows the film version rather than the novel, a preference clearly given out in their claim that Bonnie was Scarlett’s only child.118 From the very first line of the story, “Scarlett O’Hara was not beautiful but men seldom realized it when caught by her charms, her keen intellect, her independent spirit, and her considerable depth of character, all of which men valued far more than a pretty face or a seventeen-inch waist,” we see the demystifying of Gone with the Wind that West and Peske attempt. Scarlett’s decade-long infatuation with Ashley is characterized “as a result of self-esteem issues” on the part of Scarlett, who, despite her having “her pick of the young bucks,” chooses Ashley, a man described as having a “masculist dysfunction” and “a deep-seated fear of intimacy.”119

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Mitchell’s Rhett, modeled after the dark hero of nineteenth-century American fiction, in West and Peske’s rendering becomes a metrosexual man, very much attuned with women’s needs and concerned about providing Scarlett with as much sexual pleasure as he gets. He is also a dutiful homemaker, willing to cook her dinner and take care of other housekeeping chores as well. Rhett, rather than leaving Scarlett, tired of her having mooned after Ashley for years, now decides to stay so that they can healthily work out their problems by making use of their emotional intelligence and can have “a loving, symbiotic, monogamous relationship.”120 One of the issues Rhett and Scarlett are going to work on is their communication skills, given the misunderstandings that plagued their relationship in Gone with the Wind. Rhett, more than Scarlett’s romantic pursuit, is now her “soulmate” and “her life partner of choice,” thus reflecting that she is a strong, independent woman who decides to live her life with a partner, rather than submitting to a man. Actually, by now Scarlett “had learned to surrender her illusion of control in the interest of establishing trust and intimacy with her life partner of choice.” Moreover, Rhett is understanding and caring and realizes the impositions that social conventions of Southern womanhood imposed on Scarlett. Thus, “Frankly, Scarlett, I Do Give a Damn” points out the inadequacies and problems of what we could well call Rhett and Scarlett’s unhealthy relationship and applies twentieth-century psychological concepts related to marriage counseling.

Conclusions In the two texts analyzed in this chapter, Gone with the Wind is parodied from a racial perspective and a politically correct approach although there are differences when it comes to how each text addresses the original novel: The Wind Done Gone does not offer the humorous denunciation that parodies are conventionally expected to provide. Instead, it deals with complex issues so as to denounce the situation of African American women and advocates for a new social order very much owing to Du Bois’ theories of the talented tenth of African Americans to rule the rest of the African American population. Mitchell lived in a historical moment marked by racial unrest in Georgia and witnessed the racial riots in Atlanta when she was just six years old, a period of time when segregation was applied throughout the whole country and black-on-white rape was perceived as a very real possibility.121 Gone with the Wind reflected general American attitudes towards African Americans at the time it was written and published, not only in the South but also in the North.122 However, while The Birth of a Nation, because of its overtly racist message and pro–Ku Klux Klan ideology, has not been re-released or often broadcasted, Gone with the Wind, racist or not, politically correct or not, remains being widely popular, and television re-runs still move big audiences.123

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Notes 1. Alice Randall, The Wind Done Gone (Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2001), 1. 2. Beverly West and Nancy Peske, “Frankly, Scarlett, I Do Give a Damn!” in Frankly, Scarlett, I Do Give a Damn! Classic Romances Retold (New York: HarperCollins, 1996), geocities.com/cactus_st/ article/article19.html?200819 (accessed February 19, 2008). 3. Nancy M. Tischler, “The Negro in Modern Southern Fiction: Stereotype to Archetype,” Negro American Literature Forum 2, no. 1 (1968): 3 –4; Sterling A. Brown, “Negro Characters as Seen by White Authors,” The Journal of Negro Education 2, no. 2 (1933): 180, 193. 4. Joanne Dobson, “Portraits of the Lady: Imagining Women in Nineteenth-Century America,” American Literary History 3, no. 2 (1991): 398; John D. Stevens, “The Black Reaction to Gone with the Wind,” Journal of Popular Film 2, no. 4 (1973): 370. 5. Confederate general Jeb Stuart went against laws punishing teaching the slaves to write and read and had his own slaves learn how to read and write in preparation for the day in which they might need these skills. 6. Quoted in Valerie Babb, “The Color Purple: Writing to Undo What Writing Has Done,” Phylon 47, no. 2 (1987): 108. 7. Henry Louis Gates, Jr., The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of Afro-American Literary Criticism (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), 129; quoted in Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Loose Canons: Notes on the Culture Wars (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), 26. 8. Randall, The Wind Done Gone, 35, 146. 9. Barbara Christian, “‘Somebody Forgot to Tell Somebody Something’: African-American Women’s Historical Novels,” in Wild Women in the Whirlwind: Afra-American Culture and the Contemporary Literary Renaissance, ed. Joanne M. Braxton and Andrée Nicola McLaughlin (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1990), 336. 10. Randall quoted in Nicole Argall, “A Rib from My Chest: Cynara’s Journey as an Africana Womanista,” CLA Journal 47, no. 2 (2003): 239 –240; Bernard W. Bell, The Afro-American Novel and Its Tradition (Amherst: The University of Massachusetts Press, 1987), 45. 11. Randall, The Wind Done Gone, 45 –46; quoted in Fred Goss, “Gay with the Wind: The Wind Done Gone— Review,” The Advocate, September 11, 2001, findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1589/ is_2001_Sept_11/ai_78265990 (accessed January 25, 2008). 12. Vicki Eaklor, “Striking Chords and Touching Nerves: Myth and Gender in Gone with the Wind,” Images: A Journal of Film and Popular Culture (2002), imagesjournal.com/2002/features/gwtw/ (accessed June 26, 2008). 13. Anya Jabour, Scarlett’s Sisters: Young Women in the Old South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007), 10; Diane Miller Sommerville, Rape and Race in the Nineteenth-Century South (Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, 2004), 142; Stephanie M. H. Camp, “The Pleasures of Resistance: Enslaved Women and Body Politics in the Plantation South, 1830 – 1861,” The Journal of Southern History LXVIII, no. 3 (2002): 538. 14. Randall, The Wind Done Gone, 53 –54, 63. 15. Ronald G. Walters, “The Erotic South: Civilization and Sexuality in American Abolitionism,” American Quarterly 25, no. 2 (1973): 181. 16. See Julian B. Carter, The Heart of Whiteness: Normal Sexuality and Race in America, 1880–1940 (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2007), 83; Carole Meritt, “Looking at Afro-American Roots,” Phylon 38, no. 2 (1977): 212; Willie Lee Rose, Slavery and Freedom (expanded ed.) (Oxford, New York, Toronto, Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1982), 24, 20–21; Camp, “Pleasures of Resistance,” 535. 17. Margaret Mitchell, Gone with the Wind, special commemorative 60th-anniversary edition (New York: Warner Books, 1999), chapter II; Rose, Slavery and Freedom, 131; Molly Haskell, Frankly, My Dear: Gone with the Wind Revisited (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2009), 211. 18. Bell, The Afro-American Novel and Its Tradition, 7. 19. Nancy Bentley, “White Slaves: The Mulatto Hero in Antebellum Fiction,” American Literature 65, no. 3 (1993): 503 –504; Betsy Klimasmith, “Slave, Master, Mistress, Slave: Genre and Interracial Desire in Louisa May Alcott’s Fiction,” American Transcendentalist Quarterly 11, no. 2 (1997), EBSCOhost (accessed September 24, 2009); Camp, “Pleasures of Resistance,” 541; Betty TaylorThompson and Gladys Washington, “Mothers, Grandmothers, and Great-Grandmothers: The Maternal Tradition in Margaret Walker’s Jubilee,” in Southern Mothers: Fact and Fictions in Southern Women’s Writing, ed. Nagueyalti Warren and Sally Wolff (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1999), 42–43. 20. Klimasmith, “Slave, Master, Mistress, Slave”; Brown, “Negro Characters as Seen by White Authors,” 193.

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21. Taylor-Thompson and Washington, “Mothers, Grandmothers, and Great-Grandmothers,” 42–43. 22. Quoted in Goss, “Gay with the Wind”; Brown, “Negro Characters as Seen by White Authors,” 194, 196; Thomas F. Haddox, “Alice Randall’s The Wind Done Gone and the Ludic in African American Historical Fiction,” MFS: Modern Fiction Studies 53, no. 1 (2007): 124. 23. Anne Edwards, Road to Tara: The Life of Margaret Mitchell, Author of Gone with the Wind (1983; London: Orion, 1996), 327–328, 336, 339; Marianne Walker, Margaret Mitchell and John Marsh: The Love Story behind Gone with the Wind (Atlanta: Peachtree Publishers, 1993), 3, 512; John Wiley, Jr., “Everything Scarlett,” BIBLIO Magazine, 1997, gwtwbooks.com/EverythingScarlett/scarlett.htm (accessed December 15, 2009); Richard Harwell, “Preface,” Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind Letters, 1936 –1949, ed. Richard Harwell (New York: Macmillan; London: Collier Macmillan, 1976), xxiii; Margaret Mitchell, Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind Letters, 1936 –1949, ed. Richard Harwell (New York: Macmillan; London: Collier Macmillan, 1976), 181–182. 24. Edwards, Road to Tara, 130; M. Carmen Gomez-Galisteo, “Margaret Mitchell,” The Literary Encyclopedia, May 5, 2008, litencyc.com/php/speople.php?rec=true&UID=4925 (accessed May 6, 2008). 25. M. Carmen Gomez-Galisteo, “‘Certain Things Have Become Unpleasant’: Pleasantville, Far from Heaven and American Society in the Fifties,” The Grove Working Papers on English Studies X (2009): 63–84; Tru Leverette, “Guess Who’s Welcome to Dinner: Contemporary Interracial Romance and the New Racism,” Reconstruction 8, no. 4 (2008), reconstruction.eserver.org/084/leverette.shtml (accessed May 6, 2009). 26. Quoted in Motoko Rich, “Rhett, Scarlett and Friends Prepare for Yet Another Encore,” The New York Times, May 16, 2007, ny times.com/2007/05/16/books/16book.html?_r=3&oref=slogin& pagewanted=print (accessed January 24, 2008). 27. Quoted in Walters, “The Erotic South,” 183. 28. Walters, “The Erotic South,” 182–183, 185; Bentley, “White Slaves,” 504; Estelle B. Freedman, “Sexuality in Nineteenth-Century America: Behavior, Ideology, and Politics,” Reviews in American History 10, no. 4 (1982): 199. 29. Gates Jr., Loose Canons, 27–28. 30. Toni Morrison, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (Cambridge, MA, and London: Harvard University Press, 1992), 37–38, 47–48; Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, “Scarlett O’Hara: The Southern Lady as New Woman,” American Quarterly 33, no. 4 (1981): 410; Mitchell, GWTW, chapter IV; Charles Rowan Beye, “Gone with the Wind, and Good Riddance,” Southwest Review 78, no. 3 (1993), EBSCOhost, search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=aph&AN=9402084185&site=ehostlive (accessed March 5, 2010); Haskell, Frankly, My Dear, 210; Drew Gilpin Faust, “Clutching the Chains That Bind: Margaret Mitchell and Gone with the Wind,” Southern Cultures 5, no. 1 (1999): 13–14; Blanche H. Gelfant, “Gone with the Wind and the Impossibilities of Fiction,” Southern Literary Journal 13, no. 1 (1980): 25. 31. Meindl, “A Reappraisal of Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind,” Mississippi Quarterly 34, no. 4 (1981): 428 –430; “Women in the Antebellum South. Review of Tara Revisited: Women, War, and the Plantation Legend by Catherine Clinton,” The Journal of Blacks in Higher Education 8 (1995): 101; Beye, “GWTW, and Good Riddance”; Jabour, Scarlett’s Sisters, 136, 140; Rose, Slavery and Freedom, 32; Anne Goodwyn Jones, Tomorrow Is Another Day: The Woman Writer in the South, 1859 –1936 (1981; Baton Rouge and London: Louisiana State University Press, 1982), 5. 32. Quoted in Jones, Tomorrow Is Another Day, 27. 33. Amanda Adams, “‘Painfully Southern’: Gone with the Wind, the Agrarians, and the Battle for the New South,” Southern Literary Journal 40, no. 1 (2007): 72. 34. Beye, “GWTW, and Good Riddance”; Adams, “Painfully Southern,” 72; Randall, The Wind Done Gone, 177, 47. 35. Beye, “GWTW, and Good Riddance”; Joel Williamson, “How Black Was Rhett Butler?” in The Evolution of Southern Culture, ed. Numan V. Bartley (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1988), 97. 36. Fox-Genovese, “The Southern Lady as New Woman,” 408–410; Beye, “GWTW, and Good Riddance.” 37. Mitchell, GWTW, chapter XXXVIII. 38. Gelfant, “Fiction Impossibilities,” 28; Mitchell, GWTW, chapter XXX. 39. “Margaret Mitchell’s Renewed Role as Benefactor of Morehouse College,” The Journal of Blacks in Higher Education 36 (2002): 58; Faust, “Clutching the Chains that Bind,” 13; Louis D. Rubin, Jr., “Scarlett O’Hara and the Two Quentin Compsons” in The South and Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha: The Factual and the Apocryphal, ed. Evans Harrington and Ann J. Abadie (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1977), 183; Mitchell, GWTW, chapter III. 40. Mitchell, GWTW, chapter XXI.

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41. Floyd C. Watkins, “Gone with the Wind as Vulgar Literature,” Southern Literary Journal 2, no. 2 (1970): 97; Roger Ebert, “Gone with the Wind,” Chicago Sun Times, June 21, 1998, rogerebert.sun times.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/19980621/REVIEWS08/401010323/1023&template=printart (accessed March 25, 2010). 42. Faust, “Clutching the Chains That Bind,” 13; A. Leon Higginbotham, Jr., In the Matter of Color: Race and the American Legal Process: The Colonial Period (1978; Oxford, New York, Toronto, Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1980), 216 –217, 237; David Brion Davis, The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1966), 9. 43. “Women in the Antebellum South: Review of Tara Revisited: Women, War & The Plantation Legend by Catherine Clinton,” The Journal of Blacks in Higher Education no. 8 (1995): 101; Watkins, “GWTW as Vulgar Literature,” 94 –95. 44. Hazel Carby quoted in Haddox, “Alice Randall’s TWDG and the Ludic in African American Historical Fiction,” 132. 45. Jack Temple Kirby, Media-Made Dixie: The South in the American Imagination (Baton Rouge and London: Louisiana State University Press, 1978), 1; Davis, The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture, 21. 46. Quoted in Brown, “Negro Characters as Seen by White Authors,” 181. 47. Andrée Nicola McLaughlin, “Black Women, Identity, and the Quest for Humanhood and Wholeness: Wild Women in the Whirlwind,” in Braxton and McLaughlin, Wild Women in the Whirlwind, 153; Davis, The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture, 63. 48. Haskell, Frankly, My Dear, 209. 49. Mitchell, GWTW, chapter XXXVIII. 50. Simms quoted in Brown, “Negro Characters as Seen by White Authors,” 182. 51. Mitchell, GWTW, chapter LVI. 52. Brown, “Negro Characters as Seen by White Authors,” 183. 53. Mitchell, GWTW, chapter XXXVI. 54. Ibid., chapter XXXVII. 55. Dawson Gaillard, “Gone with the Wind as Bildungsroman. Or Why Did Rhett Butler Really Leave Scarlett O’Hara?” The Georgia Review 28, no. 1 (1974): 11; Haddox, “Alice Randall’s TWDG and the Ludic in African American Historical Fiction,” 134; Helen Schulman, “Never the Twain,” The New York Times, January 30, 2005, query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9906E0DA1038F933 A05752C0A9639C8B63 (accessed January 19, 2010). 56. Haddox, “Alice Randall’s TWDG and the Ludic in African American Historical Fiction,” 124. 57. Amy Alexander, “Parody Prevails in Wind Done Gone Case,” Africana.com, May 21, 2001, Internet Archive Wayback Machine, web.archive.org/web/20021227074039/ africana.com/Column /bl_lines_21.htm (accessed January 27, 2010); Barbara Lloyd McMichael, “Freeing the Man Inside Twain’s Jim,” The Seattle Times, February 13, 2005, community.seattletimes.nwsource.com/archive/?da te=20050213&slug=myjim13 (accessed January 19, 2010). 58. Mitchell, GWTW, chapter XXXVI. 59. Ibid., chapter XXXVII. 60. Randall, The Wind Done Gone, 89, 116, 191. 61. Haddox, “Alice Randall’s TWDG and the Ludic in African American Historical Fiction,” 124, 126; Randall, The Wind Done Gone, 162. 62. Camp, “Pleasures of Resistance,” 534. 63. Bell, The Afro-American Novel and Its Tradition, 5. 64. Ibid., 9, 18. 65. Argall, “A Rib from My Chest,” 231–234. 66. Bell, The Afro-American Novel and Its Tradition, 8 –9; Haddox, “Alice Randall’s TWDG and the Ludic in African American Historical Fiction,” 127–128; Richard Butsch, “Legitimations of Class Structure in Gone with the Wind,” Qualitative Sociology 2, no. 2 (1979): 68. 67. Haddox, “Alice Randall’s TWDG and the Ludic in African American Historical Fiction,” 130 – 131. 68. Argall, “A Rib from My Chest,” 239. 69. Bell, The Afro-American Novel and Its Tradition, 13. 70. Haddox, “Alice Randall’s TWDG and the Ludic in African American Historical Fiction,” 129; Richard Schur, “The Wind Done Gone Controversy: American Studies, Copyright Law, and the Imaginary Domain,” American Studies 44, no. 1–2 (2003): 6; Bell, The Afro-American Novel and Its Tradition, 69. 71. Bell, The Afro-American Novel and Its Tradition, 57–58. 72. Ibid., 23. 73. Darlene Clark Hine, “Rape and the Inner Lives of Black Women in the Middle West:

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Preliminary Thoughts on the Culture of Dissemblance,” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 14, no. 4 (1989): 913; Randall, The Wind Done Gone, 2, 96. 74. Bell, The Afro-American Novel and Its Tradition, 341–342; Christian, “Somebody Forgot to Tell Somebody Something,” 333; Argall, “A Rib from My Chest,” 237. 75. Simon Dentith, Parody (London and New York: Routledge, 2000), 9. Haddox, “Alice Randall’s TWDG and the Ludic in African American Historical Fiction,” 129; Gates Jr., The Signifying Monkey, xxiv. 76. Bell, The Afro-American Novel and Its Tradition, 11; Gates Jr., The Signifying Monkey, 113, 171, 239. 77. Ron Mackovich, “An Ill Wind?” The Advocate: The National Gay & Lesbian Newsmagazine, October 9, 2001, thefreelibrary.com/_/print/PrintArticle.aspx?id=127059457 (accessed January 27, 2010); Terry Teachout, “Entitlement Publishing,” National Review, August 20, 2001, thefreelibrary. com/_/print/PrintArticle.aspx?id=76915721 (accessed January 26, 2010). 78. Gates Jr., The Signifying Monkey, 46; “Declaration of Pat Conroy,” SunTrust Bank v. Houghton Mifflin, houghtonmifflinbooks.com/features/randall_url/pdf/Declaration_Pat_Conroy.pdf (accessed December 15, 2009). 79. Gates Jr., The Signifying Monkey, 110; Margaret A. Rose, Parody: Ancient, Modern, and PostModern (1993; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 45. 80. Bell, The Afro-American Novel and Its Tradition, 285, 137. 81. Nagueyalti Warren and Sally Wolff, “Introduction” in Warren and Wolff, Southern Mothers, 3; Taylor-Thompson and Washington, “Mothers, Grandmothers, and Great-Grandmothers,” 42. 82. Joan Wylie Hall, “‘White mama … black mammy’: Replacing the Absent Mother in the Works of Ruth McEnery Stuart,” in Warren and Wolff, Southern Mothers, 71; Frank Diller, “Mammy Dearest: The Depiction of African American House Servants in The Birth of a Nation, Gone with the Wind, and Song of the South,” MA thesis, August 1999, xroads.virginia.edu/~ma99/diller/mammy/ (accessed February 22, 2010). 83. Turner quoted in Diller, “Mammy Dearest”; Warren and Wolff, “Introduction,” 6; Naylor quoted in Mary Condé, “Some African-American Fictional Responses to Gone with the Wind,” The Yearbook of English Studies 26 (1996): 216. 84. “Women in the Antebellum South,” 101; Hall, “White mama … black mammy,” 71; Warren and Wolff, “Introduction,” 5; Christian, “Somebody Forgot to Tell Somebody Something,” 330; Diller, “Mammy Dearest”; Helen Taylor, Scarlett’s Women: Gone with the Wind and Its Female Fans (London: Virago Press, 1989), 170. 85. Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave. The Library of America, 68 (New York: Literary Classics of the United States, 1994). 86. Christian, “Somebody Forgot to Tell Somebody Something,” 338–339; Taylor-Thompson and Washington, “Mothers, Grandmothers, and Great-Grandmothers,” 50. 87. Quoted in Charles E. Wilson, Jr., “‘Everyday Use’ and Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl: Escaping Antebellum Confinement,” in Warren and Wolff, Southern Mothers, 169. 88. Randall, The Wind Done Gone, 146. 89. Lillian Smith quoted in Diller, “Mammy Dearest”; Patricia Morton quoted in Diller, “Mammy Dearest”; Warren and Wolff, “Introduction,” 5; Nagueyalti Warren, “Resistant Mothers in Alice Walker’s Meridian and Tina McElroy Ansa’s Ugly Ways,” in Warren and Wolff, Southern Mothers, 182; Cheryl Thurber quoted in Diller, “Mammy Dearest”; Caroline Levander, “‘Following the Condition of the Mother’: Subversions of Domesticity in Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl,” in Warren and Wolff, Southern Mothers, 31. 90. Randall, The Wind Done Gone, 47. 91. Joanne M. Braxton, “Ancestral Presence: The Outraged Mother Figure in Contemporary AfraAmerican Writing,” in Braxton and McLaughlin, Wild Women in the Whirlwind, 300. 92. Randall, The Wind Done Gone, 27, 42–43. 93. Argall, “A Rib from My Chest,” 241. 94. Toni Morrison, “Unspeakable Things Unspoken: The Afro-American Presence in American Literature,” The Tanner Lectures on Human Values, University of Michigan (October 7, 1988), 135– 136, 139, 145, tannerlectures.utah.edu/lectures/documents/morrison90.pdf (accessed February 11, 2010). 95. Schulman, “Never the Twain.” 96. Darlene Clark Hine quoted in Victoria Sturtevant, “‘But things is changin’ nowaday an’ Mammy’s getting’ bored’: Hattie McDaniel and the Culture of Dissemblance,” Velvet Light Trap 44 (1999): 68 –69. 97. Christian, “Somebody Forgot to Tell Somebody Something,” 329, 326. 98. Sturtevant, “Hattie McDaniel and the Culture of Dissemblance,” 69; Randall, The Wind Done Gone, 103.

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99. Condé, “Some African-American Fictional Responses to GTWT,” 208, 210; Taylor, Scarlett’s Women, 166, 161–162. 100. Condé, “Some African-American Fictional Responses to GTWT,” 210, 211. 101. Ibid., 213; Melissa Walker, Down from the Mountaintop: Black Women’s Novels in the Wake of the Civil Rights Movement, 1966 –1989 (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1991), 24. 102. Robert L. Harris, Jr., “Coming of Age: The Transformation of Afro-American Historiography,” The Journal of Negro History 67, no. 2 (1982): 107; Walker, Down from the Mountaintop, 14. 103. Meritt, “Looking at Afro-American Roots,” 211–212; David Levin, “American Fiction as Historical Evidence: Reflections on Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” Negro American Literature Forum 5, no. 4 (1971): 132–133. 104. Walker, Down from the Mountaintop, 33, 3; Christian, “Somebody Forgot to Tell Somebody Something,” 327, 329; Condé, “Some African-American Fictional Responses to GTWT,” 215 –216. 105. Claire Davis, “Review: The Wind Done Gone: A Mild Breeze,” CNN, edition.cnn.com/2001/ SHOWBIZ/books/06/29/review.wind.done.gone/index.html (accessed December 18, 2009); Michiko Kakutani, “Within Its Genre, a Takeoff on Tara Gropes for a Place,” Race Matters, May 5, 2001, race matters.org/thewinddonegone.htm (accessed January 25, 2008). 106. Tilman C. Cothran, “White Stereotypes in Fiction by Negroes,” Phylon (1940 –1956) 11, no. 3 (1950): 256; Randall, The Wind Done Gone, 63; quoted in Bell, The Afro-American Novel and Its Tradition, 3. 107. Christian, “Somebody Forgot to Tell Somebody Something,” 332. 108. Gates Jr., Loose Canons, 23, 74, 72; Morrison, Playing in the Dark, 12–13; Edwards, Road to Tara, 186; Mitchell, Letters, 282; Kakutani, “Takeoff on Tara.” 109. Haddox, “Alice Randall’s TWDG and the Ludic in African American Historical Fiction,” 132. 110. “Declaration of Alice Randall,” SunTrust Bank v. Houghton Mifflin, houghtonmifflinbooks .com/features/randall_url/pdf/Declaration_Alice_Randall.pdf (accessed December 15, 2009); Kim Lightfoot, “The Wind Done Gone: A Novel— Book Review,” Curled Up With a Good Book, curled up.com/winddone.htm (accessed 25 January 25, 2008); Megan Harlan, “Review of The Wind Done Gone,” The New York Times, July 1, 2001, nytimes.com/books/01/07/01/bib/010701.rv105803.html (accessed January 25, 2008); Teachout, “Entitlement Publishing”; Kakutani, “Takeoff on Tara.” 111. Jeffrey D. Grossett, “The Wind Done Gone: Transforming Tara into a Plantation Parody,” Case Western Reserve Law Review 52, no. 4 (2002): 1121; Jana Siciliano, “Review of The Wind Done Gone,” Bookreporter.com, bookreporter.com/reviews/0618219064.asp (accessed January 25, 2008); Davis, “A Mild Breeze”; Motola quoted in Schur, “TWDG Controversy,” 19 –20. 112. Haddox, “Alice Randall’s TWDG and the Ludic in African American Historical Fiction,” 130; Davis, “A Mild Breeze”; Paul Gray, “The Birth of a Novel,” Time, May 7, 2001, time.com/time/printout /0,8816,999825,00.html# (accessed February 9, 2010). 113. “Declaration of Toni Morrison,” SunTrust Bank v. Houghton Mifflin, houghtonmifflinbooks. com/features/randall_url/pdf/Declaration_Toni_Morrison.pdf (accessed December 15, 2009). 114. Alexander, “Parody Prevails in TWDG Case”; Teachout, “Entitlement Publishing.” 115. Linton Weeks, “Donald McCaig: The Rhett Stuff: Virginia Writer Took on Tara,” The Washington Post, November 7, 2007, george.loper.org/~george/trends/2007/Nov/988.html (accessed January 22, 2008). 116. Harlan, “Review of The Wind Done Gone.” 117. Quoted in Al Neuharth, “Is Wind Done Gone A Parody or a Steal?” USA Today, June 22, 2001, usatoday.com/news/opinion/columnists/neuharth/2001–06–22-neuharth.htm (accessed January 27, 2010). 118. West and Peske, “Frankly, Scarlett, I Do Give a Damn.” 119. Ibid. 120. Ibid. 121. Ebert, “Gone with the Wind”; Williamson, “How Black Was Rhett Butler?” 89 –90, 97. 122. Jerome Stern, “Gone with the Wind: The South as America,” Southern Humanities Review 6 (1976): 11–12; Patricia Storace, “Look Away, Dixie Land,” The New York Review of Books 38, no. 21 (1991): 34. 123. L. D. Reddick, “Educational Programs for the Improvement of Race Relations: Motion Pictures, Radio, the Press, and Libraries,” The Journal of Negro Education 13, no. 3 (1944): 371–372.

5 Rhett Butler’s Side of the Story: Rhett Butler’s People by Donald McCaig Rhett’s eyes fell on a very young woman in a green dancing frock and his heart surged. “Dear God,” he whispered. She wasn’t a great beauty: her chin was pointed and her jaw had too much strength…. “She’s just like me!” His heart slowed. He looked away, smiling at himself. It had been a long time since he’d made a fool of himself over a woman.1

Although the depiction of African Americans in Gone with the Wind has for long been a matter of bitter controversy, as chapters three and four illustrate, less studied is the rather sketchy and fairly stereotypical portrayal of men in the novel. Gerald O’Hara, as much as Scarlett loves him, “is described as the stereotypical charming Irish drunk. And infantilized.”2 Ashley Wilkes’s role is limited to playing the passive object of Scarlett’s affections; his complexity or his real personality are clouded by Scarlett’s obsessive pursuit of him, which blinds her from seeing his real self. It is only because of the centrality that he has in Scarlett’s mind that readers are misled to believe that he is more important to the narrative than he actually is, for he is absent for most of the novel and, when present, he does not actually play any important or decisive part in Scarlett’s life.3 The same shallow treatment applies to Rhett Butler; many readers of Gone with the Wind, most of whom now come to the novel only after having watched the movie, are so swept away by Clark Gable’s charismatic performance that they fail to see the flaws and deficiencies in the character of Rhett Butler as depicted by Margaret Mitchell.4 Contemporary reviewers of the novel readily did point out that the description of Rhett Butler owed a lot to the figure of the renegade or the dark hero, a stock character to be found in numerous nineteenth-century American novels. The first critics of Gone with the Wind saw Rhett as a rather weak character in contrast to Scarlett’s strength, complaining that he was almost a replica of previous literary types, if not even a parody of them.5 107

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Mitchell vigorously denied this literary indebtedness and argued that real men like her male protagonist had certainly existed during the Civil War period: I never thought, when I wrote him that there’d be so much argument about whether he was true to life or not. His type was such an ordinary one in those days that I picked him because he was typical of his times. Even his looks…. In the matter of Captain Butler I am caught between crossfires. Down here, folks find him so true to life that I may yet have a lawsuit on my hands despite my protests that I didn’t model him after any human being I’d ever heard of.6

But critics remained largely unconvinced and eventually Mitchell conceded that Rhett was a “stock figure of melodrama.”7 Samuel Tupper, Jr., in his review for the Atlanta Journal in 1936, pinpointed what makes Rhett such a dashing character, flaws and all: “Rhett Butler, adventurer and blockade runner, the most subtle and audacious characterization, is perhaps not always accounted for convincingly. But he is so bold and brilliant a figure that most readers will take the author’s word for his actions.”8 Even though Mitchell used nineteenthcentury literary types to draw Rhett, his endurance in later popular literature has been such that he has become the example to follow in a number of texts, especially romantic novels like the Harlequin romances.9 For all the centrality of Scarlett in Gone with the Wind, she does not change at all from beginning to end and by the close of the novel she is still the same girl convinced she will get the man of her dreams— be it her neighbor or her husband. The only character that does change in Gone with the Wind is Rhett, who undergoes a dramatic transformation both in behavior and in opinions from his days as daring blockade runner to dutiful head of the family.10 For Mitchell, “the turning point of the book, or at least of Rhett’s character” was when he decides to become a good role model for Wade and secure a place for Bonnie in Atlanta society, for “no man who has taken a wife and child can ever live utterly as he pleases.”11 After the movie premiere, she commented that “he seemed to grow as the story progressed. At the end he was a mature character, not too cynical, no longer impetuous.”12 Rhett’s change first grants him the favor of Atlanta’s Old Guard, allegedly merely for Bonnie’s sake, but by the end of the novel, he has been completely won back by Southern gentility and its values, which he used to reject and scorn, up to the point that he longs to go back home to Charleston: I’ve reached the end of roaming, Scarlett. I’m forty-five — the age when a man begins to value some of the things he’s thrown away so lightly in youth, the clannishness of families, honor and security, roots that go deep — Oh, no! I’m not recanting, I’m not regretting anything I’ve ever done. I’ve had a hell of a good time — such a hell of a good time that it’s begun to pall and now I want something different. No, I never intend to change more than my spots. But I want the outer semblance of the things I used to know, the utter boredom of respectability — other people’s respectability, my pet, not my own — the calm dignity life can have when it’s lived by gentle folks, the genial grace of days that are gone. When I lived those days I didn’t realize the slow charm of them.13

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The publication of The Wind Done Gone forced Mitchell’s heirs to launch yet another authorized novel in response to Randall’s novel, which culminated with the publication of Rhett Butler’s People by Donald McCaig in 2007. Rhett Butler’s People, for which St. Martin’s Press paid $4,500,000, was different from Scarlett in that its author was not a romance writer but a reputed Civil War novelist. After the number of “blood-soaked casualties,” in the words of Emma Tennant, to find the right author to pen the new sequel, McCaig was chosen on the grounds of the critical success and popularity he had earned with his novel Jacob’s Ladder, regarded by The Virginia Quarterly Review as the best Civil War novel ever written.14 The lawyers for the Trust explained that their decision to commission another sequel was not solely motivated by financial concerns on the tails of the economical success of Scarlett but by their interest in producing a sequel with outstanding literary value.15 Publicized as “the authorized novel based on Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind,” the main attraction of Rhett Butler’s People was that it covered a span of time much longer than the original novel or Scarlett. Running from 1843 to 1874, that is, almost twenty years before the beginning of Gone with the Wind and including a few months after the end of the original novel, Rhett Butler’s People was the story of Gone with the Wind as seen by Rhett Butler. Thanks to this second authorized sequel we would be able to learn whether he really gave a damn or not, as they advertised it in the flap cover.16 This new approach to the Gone with the Wind plot was not entirely original, though, for Conroy had tentatively titled the novel he had in mind The Rules of Pride: The Autobiography of Capt. Rhett Butler, C.S.A., in which he planned to deal with the Civil War and its effects on Rhett, making him the man he later became.17 It has been problematical to define Rhett Butler’s People. Though it has usually been called a sequel, it cannot be said to be a real sequel, for the action begins earlier than Gone with the Wind’s and ends a little later. Also, it rejects Ripley’s sequel. Is it a prequel or “the new sort-of-a-sequel to Gone with the Wind,” as one reviewer put it? It could be called a parallel novel, like Wide Sargasso Sea for Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre or Geraldine Brooks’ March in regards to Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women.18 Because Rhett Butler’s People overlaps with and then continues Gone with the Wind, it is simultaneously a prequel, a parallel novel and eventually a sequel. In McCaig’s words, his work is an overlay or a parallel novel, whose action is for the most part simultaneous to that of Gone with the Wind. A point of contention when it comes to men and Gone with the Wind is that the point of view being that of Scarlett’s (not too discerning or analytical a character), “male” matters such as the war itself pass almost unnoticed. Because we only know as much as Scarlett knows, especially when it comes to her obliviousness to Rhett’s real feelings, Mitchell was accused of not understanding men’s motivations at all.19 Also, during long sections in the narrative, Rhett is not in Atlanta and Scarlett is ignorant of his whereabouts or his activ-

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ities. McCaig noted that Rhett is a mysterious figure, all the time appearing and disappearing in Gone with the Wind and that little is known about him, so he tried to account for Rhett’s missing actions.20 Since Rhett was largely a stereotype and his past almost a complete mystery other than a few snippets of information that he provides Scarlett with, as well as not too credible rumors, McCaig had to give him a distinctive past of his own. He also provides background information pertaining to Rhett’s previous life, which is a mystery to readers of Gone with the Wind as much as it is to Scarlett. McCaig made up certain episodes which are “missing” in Gone with the Wind, exploring what Rhett was doing during the war, including a conversation with Ashley after the Christmas furlough. This is especially interesting because although Mitchell has Rhett and Scarlett once visiting the Wilkes and reports that Rhett and Ashley were discussing the mills, in Gone with the Wind there is no conversation between the two men. Rhett Butler’s People provides the background story to Gone with the Wind as well. For instance, in Gone with the Wind we learn that Scarlett sacrifices one of the last beautiful things she still owns, a yellow shawl, in order to make a sash for Ashley as a Christmas present during his furlough; in Rhett Butler’s People we learn the story behind that shawl — it was a shawl Rhett bought in Cuba for his sister, who treasured it, especially after the death of her four-year-old daughter Meg, who used to play with it. After his sister gives the shawl back to Rhett, urging him to go give it to Scarlett as well as his love, Rhett rushes to Atlanta in a hazardous trip through the battle lines to give it to Scarlett. But Scarlett fails to pay much attention to his gift and engages in frivolous talk with him, and, as a result, he cannot bring himself to declare his love for her, only to later see Ashley’s sash.21 One of the main limitations imposed on McCaig was that he had to limit his scope to Rhett’s perspective and the events in which he took part. If Gone with the Wind is all about Scarlett’s point of view and vision of affairs, however reduced and limited it sometimes is (especially concerning Rhett or the war), Rhett Butler’s People, choosing to take Rhett’s side, could not cover central events to Gone with the Wind unknown or unseen by Rhett. Famous scenes from the original work are, therefore, necessarily absent in Rhett Butler’s People. Additionally, Rhett Butler’s People sometimes presents alternative versions of events that in Gone with the Wind read differently. Thus, Ashley and Scarlett’s embrace before his birthday party is a passionate one, while in Gone with the Wind it was nothing but two friends comforting each other after an afternoon of remembering the happy days before the war and the beloved friends who have died since then.22 Because it is a very rare occurrence to have an insight into the male protagonist’s thoughts, McCaig tried not only to provide this insight into Rhett’s mind but also to explain how Rhett Butler became the man we admire in Gone with the Wind. In Rhett Butler’s People we see Rhett’s thoughts and mental workings of which Mitchell deprived us. Yet, in some instances, by letting other narrators report the action, McCaig loses Rhett’s perspective. For

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instance, Bonnie’s death is conveyed in a letter to Rosemary by Melanie, obliterating Rhett’s thoughts on such a crucial point in his life.23 McCaig was committed to presenting a far from idealized vision of slavery, thus acknowledging that public attitudes towards race have changed since 1936.24 Just like Mitchell could not convey the overtly racist message of Thomas Dixon’s The Klansman in Gone with the Wind, matters have also changed since the novel was first published and McCaig had to do some changes in regards to the portrayal of race issues.25 Rhett Butler’s People gives another turn to racial relations but any hint of miscegenation is suppressed except for one single reference — Charleston ladies, we are told, bear with grace the existence of mulatto children closely resembling their husbands, thereby complying with the Trust’s abhorrence of such a topic and their prohibition that it appears in any authorized Gone with the Wind sequel.26 The portrayal of slavery in Rhett Butler’s People, in contrast to the idyllic picture of Gone with the Wind, where slaves are only bought and sold so that families can be reunited and they are never physically hurt, stands in marked contrast with the situation at the Butler plantation, where Rhett’s father, Langston Butler, is by far much more concerned with keeping order and quashing any potential rebellion than in the fair treatment of slaves. Rhett’s sympathy toward the plight of the slaves, refusing to learn how to drive them, despite his father’s wishes, makes him an unusual master. Punished by his father to toil in the family rice fields for having defied his overseer’s orders to defend a slave, “for a white boy, you was a pretty fair nigger.” Whereas Ashley has a sugar-coated vision of slavery, in which slaves “were like happy children,” “forgetting” that wives were sold, separated from their husbands and children, Rhett sees the ugly (true) side of slavery and is ready to remind Ashley of it later on in the novel, which indicts the situation of African Americans after the end of the war and the paternalistic vision of Southerners as well. This Rhett is proto–Civil Rights–minded and has no problem in hiring his African American friend Tunis Bonneau as pilot of his ship, a job coveted by many a white man in Charleston, earning the respect and admiration of the African American community in the process. Furthermore, in the novel women’s helplessness is compared to the slaves’ situation: Rhett’s sister, Rosemary, thinks she is a slave, subject to her father’s (and later her husband’s) wishes.27 A most disturbing element in Gone with the Wind is that Rhett was imprisoned for killing an African American who was uppity to a lady. In the original novel, Rhett shows no remorse for this— just the opposite, for he even confesses his guilt to Scarlett boastfully: “No, now that I am free of the toils, I’ll frankly admit that I’m as guilty as Cain. I did kill the nigger. He was uppity to a lady, and what else could a Southern gentleman do?”28 In Rhett Butler’s People, Rhett certainly kills the African American man, Tunis Bonneau, but only to prevent him being cruelly lynched by the mob and hanged. It is further revealed that Bonneau is a life-long friend of Rhett’s, which explains why Rhett felt compelled

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to shoot him so as to spare him the suffering at the hands of the brutal mob whereas the woman was a common prostitute who lied to involve Bonneau when he rejected her advances. While Mitchell tried to present the Ku Klux Klan as an honorable mechanism for Southern gentlemen to protect their womenfolk from former slaves whom the Yankees urged to help themselves to white women, McCaig offers another version to this “uppity.” With his explanation of Bonneau’s innocence and the reasons why Rhett killed him, McCaig was not only offering a more politically correct portrayal of Rhett Butler where it seemed impossible, in the light of his pride in admitting to Scarlett his crime, but also dismantling the pervasive Reconstruction myth of former slaves gone wild and attempting any chance to rape white women. However, if black men raping white women was largely a Reconstruction falsity, so it is to a very large extent the idea of white mobs lynching African Americans cruelly, for “throughout the war white southerners did continue to respect the custom and law of providing accused slave rapists with a trial. Only one case of a lynching of a suspected slave rapist in all of wartime Virginia can be documented.” During the Reconstruction, “death also came to some alleged black rapists of white women at the hands of white mobs, certainly more frequently than before the Civil War. Of course, extralegal violence in general increased dramatically during Reconstruction.”29 In Gone with the Wind it is unclear to Scarlett if Rhett has joined the Klan or not — he was reluctant to do so but would do if it were absolutely necessary in order to have Bonnie received by the Old Guard: “Do? I’m going to cultivate every female dragon of the Old Guard in this town…. If I have to crawl on my belly to every fat old cat who hates me, I’ll do it…. And, if worst comes to worst, I’ll join their damned Klan — though a merciful God could hardly lay so heavy a penance on my shoulders as that.”30 Rhett eventually, questioned by Scarlett, admits as much as having, along with Ashley, helped to dismantle the Klan but without ever committing himself to assert or deny his own membership: “Rhett,” she asked suddenly, “did you have anything to do with the breaking up of the Klan?”… “My love, I did. Ashley Wilkes and I are mainly responsible…. Ashley never believed in the Klan because he’s against violence of any sort. And I never believed in it because it’s damned foolishness and not the way to get what we want. It’s the one way to keep the Yankees on our necks till Kingdom Come. And between Ashley and me, we convinced the hot heads that watching, waiting and working would get us further than nightshirts and fiery crosses.”31

Conveniently, in McCaig’s novel, Rhett never joins the Klan and, what is more, he never gets involved with its activities in any way. If the war itself is not glorified in Rhett Butler’s People (Melanie herself shows her fears of a future deification of the South and the war horrors), neither is the Klan. This Klan is not a heroic, romantic organization founded to defend Southern women’s honor

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or chastity from violent African American rapists, but the only way of racist, embittered Civil War veterans to vent their racism in the face of a new social order where they have no prestige and no role whatsoever.32 Reviewers agreed in that McCaig’s sequel was significantly better than Scarlett, but still, they complained about his depiction of female characters, which lacked depth and complexity.33 Obviously, the portrayal of Scarlett was the one that attracted the most attention. In McCaig’s hands, Scarlett is docile, a simpleton, and mostly the passive subject of adverse circumstances, when not an altogether disagreeable character: “a charmless gold digger, a blunt spud on the make just like her Irish immigrant father…. You can see Clark Gable playing McCaig’s Rhett but McCaig’s Scarlett is more Joan Crawford than Vivien Leigh.”34 There is even a certain element of mockery the first time Scarlett’s name is mentioned, when, while waiting for news of Rhett’s duel to arrive, Mrs. Butler and her friends comment on the recent scandal caused by Ellen Robillard’s marriage below herself to an upstart Irishman and the birth of their first child: “Scarlett? What a curious name. Scarlett O’Hara — those Irish, dear me.”35 In Gone with the Wind we are always privy to Scarlett’s feelings for Ashley and her confusion about why Rhett married her and spoiled her afterwards, his true thoughts and feelings only being revealed at the end of the novel: Contemplating the suave indifference with which he generally treated her, Scarlett frequently wondered, but with no real curiosity, why he had married her. Men married for love or a home and children or money but she knew he had married her for none of these things. He certainly did not love her. He referred to her lovely house as an architectural horror and said he would rather live in a well-regulated hotel than a home. And he never once hinted about children as Charles and Frank had done. Once when trying to coquet with him she asked why he married her and was infuriated when he replied with an amused gleam in his eyes: “I married you to keep you for a pet, my dear.” No, he hadn’t married her for any of the usual reasons men marry women. He had married her solely because he wanted her and couldn’t get her any other way. He had admitted as much the night he proposed to her. He had wanted her, just as he had wanted Belle Watling. This was not a pleasant thought. In fact, it was a barefaced insult. But she shrugged it off as she had learned to shrug off all unpleasant facts. They had made a bargain and she was quite pleased with her side of the bargain. She hoped he was equally pleased but she did not care very much whether he was or not.36

In Rhett Butler’s People this situation is reversed and whereas it is crystal clear that Rhett loves Scarlett and confides as much to his sister, we have to figure out what is going on in Scarlett’s mind, with Scarlett being the mysterious one instead. As a critic pointed out, had Scarlett read Rhett Butler’s People, she would have spared herself and the readers years of uncertainty and later pain.37 The portrayal of Scarlett was deemed unbelievable and, as it had happened with Ripley’s Scarlett, McCaig’s Scarlett proved disappointing, nothing to do with Mitchell’s original one.38 Mitchell’s treatment of Scarlett was revolutionary at

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the time because “markedly unlike most female characters in novels written by men, and for that matter in most romantic novels by women, Scarlett is by no means defined solely in terms of her sexual and romantic relationships.”39 She is in Rhett Butler’s People, resulting in that she is unappealing and dull. Where Scarlett took matters into her own hands in order to survive, McCaig has a much more passive Scarlett wishing for life to be good to her.40 Rhett Butler’s People might be better appreciated when it is considered on its own, regardless of Gone with the Wind; however, readers of Rhett Butler’s People without any knowledge of Gone with the Wind (should that be possible) might find it hard enough, if not altogether impossible, to believe that Rhett falls in love with such a stupid, spineless creature as his Scarlett is. McCaig’s Scarlett is at best a perennial child to Rhett, whom she does not understand at all. At worst, Scarlett is a heartless woman always ready to remind her husband that she does not love him.41 McCaig alleged, “Scarlett O’Hara is, in my opinion, the greatest female character in American literature…. Was my Scarlett purely Margaret Mitchell’s Scarlett? No. Is she a believable take on Scarlett? I hope so.”42 This Scarlett, more often than not, is somebody about whom others write, think, or gossip but is not an actor for most of the novel. McCaig certainly lacked a sympathetic understanding for the female characters, as he has made clear in interviews. He was especially callous about the love triangle that sustains Gone with the Wind, failing to understand Scarlett’s fascination with Ashley: “All this dithering about Ashley was nonsense…. By the time Scarlett finally decides she might not want him, she’s already been married three times for Chrissake! Have you ever met any woman, outside of an institution, who’d still be pining for him?” He was not any warmer towards Melanie: “I don’t believe that Melanie didn’t know what was going on there. I’ve never met a woman that stupid —‘Oh, my best friend is lusting after my husband for years. Gee, I didn’t see that.’”43 For McCaig, Melanie was far from being unaware of the feelings between her husband and her best friend. If one of the principal tenets of Scarlett and Melanie’s relationship is that Melanie is blind to Scarlett’s flaws, in Rhett Butler’s People Melanie is not, for she overhears Scarlett and Rhett and learns that Scarlett never really loved Charles. Additionally, she does know what happened at the mills although she pretends otherwise because she won’t allow two marriages to be destroyed by it.44 Given that most of Rhett’s past life is unknown except for rumors, gossip and the rare piece of information he somewhat reluctantly feeds Scarlett from time to time, Rhett’s portrayal owes much to the figure of the female protagonist’s confidante who offers her sound advice or helps her analyze clearly a situation in contrast to the idealized vision of the protagonist.45 Because of his supporting Scarlett, Rhett could be seen as a surrogate mother for the orphan Scarlett.46 At the same time, he is also a paternal figure for Scarlett, who identifies in him the smells that remind her of her father. Rhett tries (unsuccessfully) to fulfill a number of roles for Scarlett — lover, husband, confidant, best friend,

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soul mate, father, and guide. This multiplicity of roles is similar to Mr. Knightley in Jane Austen’s Emma, who also plays a number of roles for the eponymous protagonist: Mr. Knightley embodies in a quite marvelous and incredible way all of the virtues of an ideal father and an ideal lover. Infinitely caring and attentive to Emma’s every move, wise in her ways and the ways of the world, able to protect her (to some degree) from the consequences of her egotism, willing to instruct her patiently and to wait for her to profit, in her proud way, from his instruction, he is like the best of parents, or rather like our fantasies about that ideal parent, never found in real life — a godlike creature. Yet he also possesses, quite implausibly when you come to think about it, all or most of the virtues of the ideal lover. Still young, he is not only handsome, well turned out, and possessed of the impeccable manners of the perfect gentleman, but he is also witty and wise.47

Nevertheless, in contrast to Austen’s happy ending of the wedding between Mr. Knightley and stubborn Emma, because Rhett sees Scarlett alternatively as the woman he has loved the most in his life and a child to spoil, his ends up being “an impossible identity as Scarlett’s father and lover” that culminates with his departure.48 The interrelationship between the American Civil War and literature has been very present ever since President Abraham Lincoln reportedly referred to Harriet Beecher Stowe, author of the pro-abolitionist novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852), as the “little woman who wrote the book that made this great war.” Stowe’s depiction of the cruelties of slavery, “the most damning lie America has ever told itself ” according to writer James Carroll, gave rise to public opinion’s sympathy towards abolitionism in the days preceding the Civil War. Stowe’s work, in which she portrayed how a noble slave, Uncle Tom, considered almost a family member by his kind master, is sold South to a terrible life of hardships and corporal punishments, moved many, who up to then had remained remiss to adopt a point of view about slavery, to denounce it. The Civil War having occupied a prominent position in the fiction of women writers, it is not surprising that the two most famous literary depictions of this war Stowe contributed to provoke are also written by women: Louisa May Alcott in Little Women when it comes to the Northern side of the war and in Gone with the Wind in regards to the Southern defeat.49 Moments of social and political upheaval offer numberless opportunities for women to re-define their roles and free them from the chains of traditional behavior. Thus, the Civil War constituted a major turning point in white women’s lives, training them as nurses or even as field hands, and teaching them to depend solely on themselves. It also severely affected their marriage prospects and their gender roles.50 For Scarlett, the Civil War becomes a golden opportunity to get rid of restrictive female roles about Southern womanhood.51 The Civil War in Gone with the Wind is the women’s Civil War and Mitchell was particularly praised for her treatment of the Civil War in regards to women.

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Stephen Vincent Benét wrote in his review for the Saturday Review of Literature that “we have had other novels about the Civil War by women, but I don’t know of any other in which the interest is so consistently centered, not upon the armies and the battles, the flags and the famous names, but upon the other world of women who heard the storm, waited it out, succumbed to it or rebuilt after it, according to their natures.”52 Where Gone with the Wind was “the woman’s war novel, the home-front war novel,” Rhett Butler’s People is the man’s novel, with some elements of nineteenth-century boys’ books.53 McCaig presented the Civil War, with women cast aside in the margins, as a male business, explaining that “the Civil War has a tremendous moral and emotional force. You take the Civil War out of [Gone with the Wind] and have the epic love story and everything else is kind of ‘oh dear.’”54 Rhett is not only an enduring stereotype but a hero for a lot of women. For filmmaker Amy Jones, Rhett represents women’s unrealistic views of romantic love and their misconceptions about how men should be, these being beliefs that mislead women to aspire to fictional men in real life rather than real men.55 Well aware of this, McCaig sought to distance himself from these romantic notions surrounding the figure of Rhett Butler. If the war put women into situations they had not been raised for, for Rhett, on the other hand, the war means a period during which to prove his bravery and get rich. The war is the reference point in much of Rhett Butler’s People, the event chosen to mark in a chronological sequence all the other events in the novel and thus, page three explains that the following events took place twelve years before the war. If Scarlett read like a historical romance, Rhett Butler’s People is more of a Civil War novel, reflecting their respective writers’ careers and literary pursuits. In Gone with the Wind Rhett’s blockading activities in the early days of the war are regarded by the Old Guard of Atlanta as an unequivocal sign of his fervent patriotism. That he has not joined the Confederate army as a regular soldier is conveniently overlooked by these respectable matrons as long as he is providing them with luxuries they would be deprived of otherwise. However, Rhett’s true (and only) motivation is actually making as much money as fast as possible, as he has no qualms in admitting to Scarlett: “the great blockader! That’s a joke. Pray give me only one moment more of your precious time before you cast me into darkness. I wouldn’t want so charming a little patriot to be left under a misapprehension about my contribution to the Confederate Cause…. Blockading is a business with me and I’m making money out of it. When I stop making money out of it, I’ll quit.”56 Actually, as blockade running gets gradually more dangerous and the risks dramatically increase, Rhett has no problems in selling off his ship to engage in food speculation schemes, much more profitable and less dangerous, to the censure of Atlanta’s society. There is no glamour and no threat to his life in food speculation and all the patriotism of blockade running vanishes with these unsavory activities, making Rhett lose his good name in town — to Scarlett’s distress, for the nefarious consequences

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this public disapproval of Rhett’s character has on her own reputation. Rhett’s speculating with food once the blockade becomes too tight and which earns him the enmity of the Old Guard was removed from the movie and Rhett Butler’s People continues with this embellishment of Rhett Butler’s figure.57 It is one thing to earn a buck by cheating the Yankees and helping Confederates to buy what they need, almost as if this was a crime without victims, but accumulating food to make prices artificially rise while people are starving is a far cry from the image of a dashing hero. What is more, where Rhett used to boast of the money earned with his blockade, McCaig’s Rhett has scruples about becoming richer at a time when others are about to lose their fortunes: “Rhett had bought Kennedy’s stored crop and stood to make a fortune. He should have felt good about that. He felt like hell.” This Rhett is definitely not the ruthless man willing to profit from others’ disgraces and be proud of it.58 McCaig, in a way, has to “apologize” and make amends for Rhett’s “cowardice” during the Civil War in not joining the war effort till the very end. Though Scarlett does not mind this at all (she even approves of his decision, for he is the only man sensible enough not to go enlist and die), she is not typical of the period. During the Civil War, young women urged their beaux and prospective suitors to join the war effort and “prescriptive enlistment fables, poems, songs, and cartoons portrayed young women renouncing and chastising men who refused to enlist, often demonstrating their own earnestness and heroism as they revealed men’s cowardice.”59 In order to rehabilitate Rhett’s figure in the context of a Civil War novel, McCaig dwells more on Rhett’s service, presenting his time in the Pennsylvania campaign. Where Gone with the Wind “is hardly the field of honor of a Civil War romance,” Rhett Butler’s People provides it.60 The Civil War is far from being romanticized but its hardships in the battlefield are more fully displayed than in Gone with the Wind. For all of McCaig’s deliberate effort not to make Rhett Butler’s People into a romance, the centrality of the love story (after all, if Rhett’s past is of any interest to Gone with the Wind readers and prospective sequel buyers, it is because he is Scarlett O’Hara’s crossed lover) is inescapable. Despite the novel’s emphasis on Rhett’s adventures and early youth before he meets Scarlett, McCaig implicitly brings attention to the romantic aspect of Gone with the Wind with the quotation that opens the novel: “Above all, love each other deeply, because love covers over a multitude of sins” (1 Peter 4:8). This sets the tone, attributing to love a certain redeeming quality that atones for Rhett’s sins. Rhett’s redemption comes not only for his interest in securing Bonnie’s standing in proper society (“I’m at fault too. I’ve gone through life like a bat out of hell, never caring what I did, because nothing ever mattered to me. But Bonnie matters. God, what a fool I’ve been! Bonnie wouldn’t be received in Charleston, no matter what my mother or your Aunt Eulalie or Aunt Pauline did — and it’s obvious that she won’t be received here unless we do something quickly”61) but also from his love for Scarlett and his own sister. Early in the novel, Rhett

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decides to reform for Rosemary’s sake —“perhaps her child’s love could save him” and at the end of Rhett Butler’s People, it is only after Rhett receives Scarlett’s telegraph asking him for help that he puts an end to the self-destruction process that began right after Bonnie’s death.62 Rhett, the renegade, the blockade runner, the food speculator, the successful entrepreneur, the Confederate soldier, becomes, above all other considerations, Scarlett’s husband. Even Rhett admits that he can hardly remember his life before Scarlett and his many previous adventures do not seem to him as real as their marriage, despite its flaws.63 As a reviewer put it, “by the end, the book dissolves into such a soap opera, you want to yell at Rhett to skip the Twelve Oaks barbecue. Ride on, Mr. Butler. Let McCaig write his own books, and spare us more authorized sequels.”64 Rhett Butler’s People uses a frequent device to be found in literary sequels— having new characters that closely resemble those in the original novel. The main female character in Rhett Butler’s People is Rosemary (née Butler) Haines Ravanel, Rhett’s sister, a true lady who reminds the reader of Melanie (with whom she corresponds) but also of Scarlett in that both of them undergo a number of similar circumstances: losing a daughter, a loveless marriage hastily entered into after the wedding of her beloved to another woman, an unrequited love that sustains her through an unhappy marriage and the war, and several marriages. Rosemary’s story, up to a large extent, is what Scarlett’s story could have been had she married Ashley. Rosemary, widowed, eventually marries Andrew Ravanel, the man she was in love with since she was a young woman, but it ends up being a failure once she realizes that Andrew, the Confederate hero, does not match up her juvenile fantasies. Though Mitchell forcefully quashed the slightest hint that she had based any Gone with the Wind character on real people (including herself as the most obvious source of inspiration for Scarlett’s rebelliousness), Rhett has some similarities with Mitchell’s first husband. His initials, R.K.B., are a rearrangement of Red Berrien K. Upshaw, who was involved in a number of illegal activities, including bootlegging.65 Mitchell also had a pirate grandfather who had been involved in blockade running, making a quick fortune.66 There are perceived resemblances between Rhett Butler and Confederate president Jefferson Davis, St. Elmo (the protagonist of Augusta Jane Evans’ St. Elmo), Lord Rochester (in Jane Eyre —this being a comparison favored by Mitchell herself, along with St. Elmo), Lord Steyne or Rawdon Crawley (both characters from Thackeray’s Vanity Fair), Jack Dalton, British Romantic poet Lord Byron, Quentin Compson (the protagonist of William Faulkner’s Absalom! Absalom!), or even Stackolee, the mythic black man who went to hell and returned because the devil would not have him there (similarly, Rhett is imprisoned by the Yankees only to be released when he becomes too uncomfortable a presence).67 Rhett has also been compared to the protagonists of gangster films popular in the twenties who are redeemed or die at the end, characters in which, incidentally, Clark Gable specialized in the first years of his cinematographic career.68

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Hints in Gone with the Wind lead us to believe that Rhett very possibly might have fathered Belle Watling’s son. She has a son nobody knows about (except for Melanie, whom she confides in), who has never been in town and is away at school. Rhett, Belle’s silent partner in her brothel and with his own key to the house, frequently visits New Orleans to go see his legal ward, whom he showers with gifts and begs Scarlett to keep the boy’s existence a secret — so much for a man who enjoys scandalizing polite society and being the talk of town: “He is my legal ward and I am responsible for him. He’s in school in New Orleans. I go there frequently to see him…. He’s a perfect hellion. I wish he had never been born. Boys are troublesome creatures. Is there anything else you’d like to know?” He looked suddenly angry and his brow was dark, as though he already regretted speaking of the matter at all…. “I would appreciate it if you’d say nothing of this to anyone,” he said finally. “Though I suppose that asking a woman to keep her mouth shut is asking the impossible.”69

In McCaig’s account, Belle Watling’s boy is definitely not Rhett’s at all and only his kind heart moves him to take care of the child. The relationship between Rhett and Belle Watling is characterized simply as a commercial venture, further removing any idea of a possible romantic or sexual relationship between the two. Significant changes in contemporary sensibilities in the last seventy years have provoked that McCaig removes deeds of Rhett that Mitchell considered positive (e.g., his murdering an African American man, that he might me a member of the Klan or not, and that he helped the Klan out) but which now are no longer acceptable in a hero.70 For all of McCaig’s good efforts and hard work put into making a credible past for Rhett, most of his charisma is also gone in the process. Rhett’s mysteriousness is part of what makes him such an attractive character, much of his appeal being lost if he is to be thoroughly morally and psychologically explored.71 This Rhett is more human and not larger than life: He surprises and impresses us because we never can guess what he is going to do next. McCaig’s Rhett worries. He aches for Scarlett, is wounded by her tantrums and her indifference, and confides his fears to his sister. By stripping away the veneer, McCaig transforms Rhett into a version of the angst-ridden, on-themake, love-struck antihero of modern fiction: Rhett Butler as channeled by Rabbit Angstrom or T. S. Garp. Is this really the Rhett we want? … In reducing Rhett to a perplexed and worrying Everyman, McCaig reduces the power of Mitchell’s original.72

In Gone with the Wind, from the collection of weak men Scarlett can understand and easily control, Rhett stands out: All the other men she had known she could dismiss with a half-contemptuous “What a child!” Her father, the Tarleton twins with their love of teasing and their elaborate practical jokes, the hairy little Fontaines with their childish rages, Charles, Frank, all the men who had paid court to her during the war — every-

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McCaig’s Rhett is not afraid of crying at the sight of the battlefield horrors or upon discovering the corpse of his brother-in-law, presenting a picture of a sensitive man in consonance to twenty-first-century values.74 In some instances, McCaig’s portrayal of Rhett’s past is less glorious than Mitchell’s and these revelations about his otherwise mysterious past ultimately render Rhett as less formidable and more down-to-earth. For instance, his time in California dur-ing the Gold Rush is not as rough or dangerous as we thought — instead of directly taking part in the search for gold and engaging himself in hazardous adventures such as life-or-death knife fights (as the long scar in his abdomen testifies to), Rhett was just a successful trader, supplying goods to the miners’ camps. One would expect riskier adventures from Rhett than being a mere merchant. Rhett’s unpredictability is gone, his hidden agenda in trying to win Scarlett O’Hara is no longer hidden and we are privy to his innermost thoughts and his inner pain. Rhett is brought down to earth; he is no longer the dashing, larger-than-life mystery man who puzzled Scarlett (and us).75 The enigma of who Rhett Butler really is (is he a patriotic blockade hero or a remorseless rascal? “Reformed rake or misunderstood idealist”?76 A social pariah or a doting father? A renegade or a diehard Democrat supporter? A scallawag or a Southern gentleman?) accounts for much of the fascination his figure generates in Gone with the Wind: Rhett’s attraction lies in his mystery, self-assurance, humour, canniness and association with evil, crime, piracy and all that is thrilling (in fantasy, anyway)…. Rhett is associated with the forces of evil, mystery and male sexuality.… His darkness allies him also with other legendary and fictional figures, from the pirate and villain of melodrama to the swarthy Victorian hero and the gangster. Attractive but sinister, sexually irresistible but possibly morally repulsive.77

All this is lost with McCaig’s “whiter,” much more politically correct version of Rhett. McCaig’s version, though published seventy years after the original novel, is much more conservative, denying occurrences such as Rhett’s having a love child or his engagement in distasteful (when not outright criminal, by twenty-first-century standards) activities such as food speculation, his possible membership of the Klan (or, at the very least, his assistance to the Klan members after they are ambushed by Yankee troops) or the murder of at least two men. Rhett Butler has thus joined Mr. Darcy from Pride and Prejudice and

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Heathcliff from Wuthering Heights in becoming one of those mysterious fictional figures who have been subsequently unmasked, their secrets exposed, the rumors about them dispelled or confirmed, and, in a way, made more human while losing part of their appeal, the appeal of the unknown and maybe even danger. Where Margaret Mitchell, Jane Austen and Emily Brontë chose to keep their leading male characters’ secrets, Donald McCaig, Emma Tennant in Pemberley and Lin Haire-Sargeant in H: The Return to Wuthering Heights have decided to explore these characters more fully. At the time Rhett Butler’s People was published, the Trust announced through one of their members, lawyer Paul Anderson, Jr., that it would be the last Gone with the Wind authorized sequel: “The public itself wanted another sequel [after Scarlett]…. But this is not like Rocky. We’re not coming back every time we think we can make another book.” 78 Because the ending to Rhett Butler’s People, “WHICH WASN’T NEARLY: THE END,” seems to hint at the contrary, opening the door for a new sequel, it remains to be seen if any other authorized sequel will in the future be added to the Gone with the Wind canon.79

Notes 1. Donald McCaig, Rhett Butler’s People (London: Macmillan, 2007), 89 –90. 2. Charles Rowan Beye, “Gone with the Wind, and Good Riddance,” Southwest Review 78, no. 3 (1993) EBSCO (accessed March 5, 2010). 3. Helen Taylor, Scarlett’s Women: Gone with the Wind and Its Female Fans (London: Virago Press, 1989), 111. 4. Stephen L. Carter, “Almost a Gentleman,” The New York Times, November 4, 2007 (accessed January 24, 2008). Beye, “Good Riddance.” 5. Taylor, Scarlett’s Women, 113. 6. Quoted in Anne Edwards, Road to Tara: The Life of Margaret Mitchell, Author of Gone with the Wind (1983; London: Orion, 1996), 218 –219. 7. Molly Haskell, Frankly, My Dear: Gone with the Wind Revisited (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2009), 171–172. Quoted in Blanche H. Gelfant, “Gone with the Wind and the Impossibilities of Fiction,” Southern Literary Journal 13, no. 1 (1980): 10. 8. Quoted in “The Book of the Month: Reviews,” in Gone with the Wind as Book and Film, ed. Richard Harwell (1983; New York: Paragon House, 1987). 9. Greg Brian, “Rhett Butler’s People and the Continuing Greatness of the Gone with the Wind Saga,” November 9, 2007 (accessed April 30, 2010), 17. 10. Ben Railton, “‘What Else Could a Southern Gentleman Do?’: Quentin Compson, Rhett Butler, and Miscegenation,” Southern Literary Journal 35, no. 2 (2003): 42. 11. Quoted in Sakuralux, “If Thy Right Eye Offend Thee,” March 2, 2010 (accessed March 8, 2010). 12. Mitchell quoted in Bill Pope, “Gable Took Atlantans by Storm,” Atlanta Constitution, November 18, 1960 (accessed May 18, 2010). 13. Margaret Mitchell, Gone with the Wind, special commemorative 60th-anniversary edition (New York: Warner Books, [1999]), chapter LXIII. 14. Quoted in Anthony Gardner, “Gone with the Wind, the Never Ending Story,” The Sunday Times October 28, 2007 (accessed March 2, 2010); Linton Weeks, “Donald McCaig: The Rhett Stuff: Virginia Writer Took on Tara,” The Washington Post, November 7, 2007 (accessed January 22, 2008). 15. Motoko Rich, “Rhett, Scarlett and Friends Prepare for Yet Another Encore,” The New York Times, May 16, 2007 (accessed January 24, 2008). 16. McCaig, Rhett Butler’s People.

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17. Jonathan D. Austin, “Pat Conroy: ‘I was raised by Scarlett O’Hara,’” CNN, February 4, 2000 (accessed February 18, 2008). 18. Weeks, “The Rhett Stuff ”; Bethanne Patrick, “‘Gone’ but Not Forgotten,” The Washington Post, November 7, 2007 (accessed January 22, 2008). 19. John Crowe Ransom in Amanda Adams, “‘Painfully Southern’: Gone with the Wind, the Agrarians, and the Battle for the New South,” Southern Literary Journal 40, no. 1 (2007): 59, 66. 20. Jill Vejnoska, “Rhett Is Kind of a Mysterious Character,” The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, November 3, 2007 (accessed January 13, 2010); Melissa Whitworth, “This Rhett Butler Does Give a Damn,” Telegraph, November 20, 2007 (accessed January 27, 2010). 21. McCaig, Rhett Butler’s People, 172–173, 177–178, 195. 22. Ibid., 386. 23. Ibid., 406. 24. Rich, “Rhett, Scarlett and Friends.” 25. L. D. Reddick, “Educational Programs for the Improvement of Race Relations: Motion Pictures, Radio, the Press, and Libraries,” The Journal of Negro Education 13, no. 3 (1944): 376; Rich, “Rhett, Scarlett and Friends.” 26. McCaig, Rhett Butler’s People, 83. 27. Ibid., 15 –16, 29, 18, 97, 99, 196 –197, 262. 28. Mitchell, GWTW, chapter XXXVI. 29. Diane Miller Sommerville, Rape and Race in the Nineteenth-Century South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004), 144, 193. 30. Mitchell, GWTW, chapter LII. 31. Ibid., chapter LVIII. 32. McCaig, Rhett Butler’s People, 405, 366, 274 –275. 33. Deirdre Donahue, “Rhett Butler’s People: ‘Gone’ Around the Bend,” USA Today, October 31, 2007 (accessed January 24, 2008); Celia Brayfield, “Review of Rhett Butler’s People by Donald McCaig,” The Times, November 2, 2007 (accessed January 24, 2008). 34. Donahue, “Rhett Butler’s People: ‘Gone’ Around the Bend.” 35. McCaig, Rhett Butler’s People, 39. 36. Mitchell, GWTW, chapter LXIII. 37. Brian, “Rhett Butler’s People and the Continuing Greatness of the Gone with the Wind Saga.” 38. Tina Jordan, “Review of Rhett Butler’s People by Donald McCaig,” Entertainment Weekly, November 2, 2007 (accessed January 24, 2008). 39. Harriett Hawkins, Classics and Trash: Traditions and Taboos in High Literature and Popular Modern Genres (Toronto and Buffalo: University of Toronto Press, 1990), 154. 40. Toni Johnson-Woods in Elizabeth Meryment, “Yes, we do give a damn,” The Australian, November 28, 2009 (accessed February 23, 2010). 41. McCaig, Rhett Butler’s People, 292, 362. 42. Quoted in Vejnoska, “Rhett Is Mysterious.” 43. Ibid. 44. McCaig, Rhett Butler’s People, 158, 404. 45. Charles Rowan Beye, “Gone with the Wind, and Good Riddance,” Southwest Review, 78, no. 3 (1993) EBSCO (accessed March 5, 2010). 46. Haskell, Frankly, My Dear, 174. 47. Wayne C. Booth, “Emma, Emma and the Question of Feminism,” Persuasions 5 (1983): 29 – 40 (accessed June 16, 2009). 48. Gelfant, “Fiction Impossibilities,” 10. 49. Elizabeth Young, “A Wound of One’s Own: Louisa May Alcott’s Civil War Fiction,” American Quarterly 48, no. 3 (1996): 439. 50. Ellen Willis, “‘War!’ said Scarlett. ‘Don’t you men think about anything important?’” in Favorite Movies: Critics’ Choice (New York: Macmillan, 1973), 191; Anya Jabour, Scarlett’s Sisters: Young Women in the Old South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007), 277; Hope Norman Coulter, “Introduction” in Civil War Women: American Women Shaped by Conflict in Stories by Alcott, Chopin, Welty and Others, ed. Frank D. McSherry, Jr., Charles G. Waugh, and Martin Greenberg (Little Rock: August House, 1988), 7–8; Judith E. Harper, “Alcott, Louisa May (1832–1888),” in Women During the Civil War: An Encyclopedia (New York: Routledge, 2003), 14 –17 (accessed October 30, 2009). 51. Hawkins, “Shared Dreams,” 127; Louis D. Rubin, Jr., “Scarlett O’Hara and the Two Quentin

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Compsons,” in The South and Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha: The Factual and the Apocryphal, ed. Evans Harrington and Ann J. Abadie (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1977), 186. 52. Quoted in “Margaret Mitchell and Her Novel Gone with the Wind,” promotional material issued by Macmillan (accessed January 22, 2010). 53. Rhett and Tunis drifting through the fog in a raft is reminiscent of Twain’s Huckleberry Finn. Harriett Hawkins, “The Sins of Scarlett,” Textual Practice 6, no. 3 (1992): 491. 54. Quoted in Rich, “Rhett, Scarlett and Friends.” 55. Quoted in “Looking for Rhett Butler; or The Art of Exploitation II,” Monthly Film Bulletin 53, no. 624 –635 (1986): 136. 56. Mitchell, GWTW, chapter IX. 57. Richard Butsch, “Legitimations of Class Structure in Gone with the Wind,” Qualitative Sociology 2, no. 2 (1979): 72; Carter, “Almost a Gentleman.” 58. McCaig, Rhett Butler’s People, 86. 59. Alice Fahs, “The Feminized Civil War: Gender, Northern Popular Literature, and the Memory of the War, 1861–1900,” The Journal of American History 85, no. 4 (1999): 1468. 60. Dieter Meindl, “A Reappraisal of Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind,” Mississippi Quarterly 34, no. 4 (1981): 426. 61. Mitchell, GWTW, chapter LII. 62. McCaig, Rhett Butler’s People, 109. 63. Ibid., 342. 64. Donahue, “Rhett Butler’s People: ‘Gone’ Around the Bend.” 65. Paul Pickrel, “Vanity Fair in America: The House of Mirth and Gone with the Wind,” American Literature 59, no. 1 (1987): 51. 66. Joan Arehart-Treichel, “Novel That Brought Fame, Riches Had a Surprising Birth,” Psychiatric News 40, no. 4 (2005): 20 (accessed April 9, 2010); Marianne Walker, Margaret Mitchell and John Marsh: The Love Story Behind Gone with the Wind (Atlanta: Peachtree Publishers, 1993), 25. 67. Mitchell, Letters, 36; Jordan, “Review of Rhett Butler’s People by Donald McCaig”; Stephen Vincent Benét quoted in “The Book of the Month: Reviews,” in Gone with the Wind as Book and Film, ed. Richard Harwell (New York: Paragon House, 1987), 20; Herschell Brickell, “The Best Friend GWTW Ever Had,” in Gone with the Wind as Book and Film, ed. Richard Harwell (New York: Paragon House, 1987), 25; Railton, “What Could a Gentleman Do?” 45; Pickrel, “Vanity Fair in America,” 49; Henry Steele Commager, “The Last of Its Genre,” in Gone with the Wind as Book and Film, ed. Richard Harwell (New York: Paragon House, 1987), 195; Williamson, “Black Rhett?” 99. 68. Marian J. Morton, “‘My Dear, I Don’t Give a Damn’: Scarlett O’Hara and the Great Depression,” Frontiers 5, no. 3 (1981): 54. 69. Mitchell, GWTW, chapter XLIII. 70. Carter, “Almost a Gentleman.” 71. Rubin, “Scarlett and Quentins,” 192–193. 72. Carter, “Almost a Gentleman.” 73. Mitchell, GWTW, chapter XLVIII. 74. McCaig, Rhett Butler’s People, 224, 228. 75. Carter, “Almost a Gentleman”; Taylor, Scarlett’s Women, 118. 76. Taylor, Scarlett’s Women, 113. 77. Ibid., 115. 78. Jill Vejnoska, “Rhett’s back, hoping that we still care,” The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, October 28, 2007 (accessed February 19, 2008). 79. McCaig, Rhett Butler’s People, 498.

6 Gone with the Wind Fan Fiction I just was not satisfied with the original ending of Gone with the Wind but at the same time do not think it should ever be changed because it is legend. You can’t change something so remembered and amazing and heart wrenching as that. The real ending was a good one, and we all know that Scarlett would have gotten him back.1 “I won’t disappoint you this time, Rhett. I promise you I won’t. I know I have before many times, but this time will be different.” He kissed her cheek again, gathering her closer against him. “I believe you, Scarlett.”2

Forcing a writer to write a story in which one’s beloved characters behave as one wishes was the dream of Annie Wilkes in Stephen King’s novel Misery, a dream come true when she rescued her favorite author from a car crash and made him write a new novel bringing his recently killed off protagonist back to life. Fan-fiction writers certainly do not abduct anybody; instead, they become the author themselves to write the storylines they wanted to read in their much-loved books but which the original authors failed to deliver. Nowadays readers can only very rarely influence authors to change their writings so as to accommodate their wishes and expectations but it has not always been so: nineteenth-century British novelists whose novels appeared in newspapers in serialized form, writing installments as the novel was already being published, took their readers’ opinions into account. Their audience’s approval was so important for newspapers’ sales that readers’ animadversion could persuade a novelist to kill a character off or, at the very least, to punish it.3 Sir Arthur Conan Doyle killed Sherlock Holmes off at the height of his popularity, tired of not being able to write other kind of stories “because his character admits of no light or shade.” Public pressure soon mounted; not only did fans write their own fan fiction but the intense demands (including from his own mother) forced him to bring the character back to life.4 Because of the diminished influence of readers on the writing process, fan fiction is born from readers’ frustration with a favorite piece of popular culture, a frustration so intense that 124

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they undertake writing on their own, blurring the boundaries between writers and readers in the process.5 Fan fiction is a reader-oriented genre; not only do fan-fiction authors make use of their preferred works’ characters, but they also take into account other readers’ likes and dislikes. Fan-fiction authors encourage feedback and by posting their works in progress they allow readers to play an important role in the creative process, commenting and influencing the final product. Fan-fiction readers who are especially active or thorough in commenting on fan fiction are called “beta readers” and work closely with an author or a reduced number of them. Fan fiction is not so much an individual authorial product but the work of the reading community as a whole, a circumstance that readers appreciate. Even when a fan-fiction story is considered complete by its author, it remains a work in progress, for readers are still free to make comments and the story can be later revised. Therefore, fan-fiction authors are closer to their audience than a conventional author.6 Fan fiction is basically a type of writing building upon a previous work written by a fan and could be regarded as a branch of derivative or appropriative literature. Although now it seems almost impossible to think of fan fiction without the Internet, fan fiction existed even before the advent of the World Wide Web. It became extremely popular in the sixties, distributed in photocopies or through fanzines, and during fan conventions, or it simply remained locked up in a drawer.7 During the nineties fan fiction moved to the Internet, generating an endless number of sub-genres: there is fan fiction for literature, anime, TV shows, movies, comic books, and even real-life people, such as Antonio Banderas, Princess Diana, the Beatles or Bill Clinton.8 Most fan fiction thrives on novels or TV shows currently protected by copyright and, which, consequently, cannot have sequels or versions written by people other than the copyright holders. While copyright holders can license authors to use their copyrighted material, usually involving the payment of a fee, they are unlikely to license new developments where their characters are cast in an unfavorable light, as it was the case with The Wind Done Gone. The majority of fan fiction consists of short stories, but there are also novel-length creations, screenplays, songs and even poems.9 If “new media since the printing press have in every case served to ultimately further the democratization it engendered, with the result that critics of the new media have usually been defenders of the elite, attempting to bar the new onslaught of the masses,” this is especially true in the case of fan fiction, which allows anyone with a computer and Internet access to publish his or her writings. Programming skills are not even an issue, for sites such as www.fanfiction.net allow writers to upload their .doc documents, all the formatting and editing being done by the site’s software.10 Printing costs and risks are eliminated from the equation of publishing, making fan fiction a very peculiar case of sequel writing — open to anyone and, what is more, with fewer constrictions.

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The democratization of the Internet, where anybody can publish anything they wish, for better or worse, regardless of literary or artistic quality and without the need of a publisher and with no financial costs marring the process, has opened up the way for online fan fiction. The Internet offers a protection and a freedom usually unaffordable to writers by other means. Most importantly, because there are no barriers and almost no laws applying on the Internet, fan fiction is unpredictable. Fan-fiction writing and publishing reflects a different aspect of cultural production — limited means now need not stop writers from getting published, albeit on an online environment, thus seemingly putting to rest the fears of those who claimed that the Internet was killing literature and creative composition. “The act of copying can be simultaneously homage and subversion” and, for some, the way to make their fantasies come true, at least on the computer screen.11 It is not only that fan fiction is available to anyone; it is available to anyone for free. Fan-fiction authors do not receive royalties and, a crucial point in determining the legality (i.e., fair use) of fan fiction, neither do the writers from whose works fan-fiction authors borrowed their characters. Fan-fiction writers stress in the disclaimers to their works that they do not earn a cent from their writings; even fanzines’ earnings, to make sure that no profit is made, are donated to charity. Consequently, most legal scholars understand that fan fiction falls within the first criterion for fair use — that no profit is made from other’s copyright.12 Copyright infringement lawsuits that forbid authors to publish their derivative works are almost non-existent on the Internet. Yet, writers such as Nora Roberts, Anne McCaffrey or Anne Rice make it a point to have those who write fan fiction based on their works be sent cease-and-desist letters. Rice has publicly declared that having fan-fiction writers making illegitimate use of her characters upsets her. Nevertheless, none of these cease-and-desist letters has been the prelude for a full-fledged lawsuit against a fan-fiction writer. For the most part, publishers look the other way and give fan fiction a “benign neglect,” aware that a possible lawsuit against fan fiction writers might result in negative publicity: Warner Bros. stopped sending cease-and-desist letters to the owners of Harry Potter fan sites (most of them teenagers) when angry fans called for a boycott of the upcoming movie. What is more, professional writers are warned by their lawyers not to read fan fiction based on their own works or it might result in a plagiarism suit against the original author.13 A probable reason for this lack of lawsuits against works that, were they to appear in print, would be immediately quashed by the original authors is that fan fiction, being free, is unlikely to harm the financial profit of the original work. Profit made from one’s characters seems to be a central concern. Not only is this economic factor the number-one criterion to judge whether a derivative work falls within fair use or not, but writers are also adamant in their negative to have others profit from works they worked so hard to pen. For instance, J. K. Rowling tolerated the existence of an online Harry Potter lexicon

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and even endorsed it but when news came that the author of the site planned to turn it into a book, she went to court to quash its publication. Restrictions and limitations enforced by the copyright holders and subsequently aided by court decisions do not apply on the Internet because of its open character and its not being bound by any particular country’s rules and jurisdiction. It seems that writers who manage to make their characters resemble real people to their readers so much that they worry for them after the end must face the downside that their characters no longer belong solely to them.14 It is controversial what effect fan fiction (or unauthorized sequels, for that matter) has on copyrighted works and if that effect is pernicious or beneficial, not only in terms of damaging the original work’s market but also in destabilizing the social and cultural meaning of the original work. Fan fiction has been critically snubbed because it often reads as romance literature, or, worse, as pornography. The high sexual content of some fan fiction, in contrast to the chaste or even prudish original works, has made it so some consider fan fiction immoral or indecent. Writers such as J. K. Rowling have distressedly seen how their sex-free novels are sexualized in the Internet, about which her lawyers have complained. Additionally, fan fiction, because of its close relationship to popular culture and its heavy dependence on the original text, has been considered immature and semi-literate, reduced to “in-jokes for geeks.”15 Whereas medieval and Renaissance authors tried to convince their readers that they were merely transcribing (or translating, if it came in a foreign language) a manuscript they had found perchance, fan-fiction writers have indeed found another author’s text and modify it for their own purposes. “In the days of widespread literacy, internet access and participatory culture,” readers no longer want to play a passive role, restricted to reading the works of others. Fan-fiction authors’ labor is important because “by the time many copyrighted literary works fall into the public domain they will have either become unassailable classics, or have fallen out of the public consciousness.”16 Fan fiction circumvents these restrictions to comment on currently relevant or popular literary works. Not so happily-ever-after endings have more chances of being the starting point for a sequel than other, more satisfying ends providing closure. Nonetheless, this is not a sine qua non condition: even though Jane Austen has been accused by critics of creating happy endings even to the expense of bending plotlines, her novels constitute a gold mine for sequel writers.17 Therefore, it is not surprising that dissatisfied readers found in fan fiction the perfect place for imagining the future of Rhett Butler and Scarlett O’Hara, a future in which they more often than not see them together. We also should bear in mind the tight control that Mitchell’s heirs have and the destiny that non-authorized sequels have fared, problems which fan fiction has so far avoided. The Gone with the Wind fan-fiction corpus analyzed in this chapter covers from a 190,000word novella to shorter pieces of a few thousand words or even less; “Colors

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of the Wind,” for example, is a collection of vignettes.18 These include stories posted at individual sites such as phantomroses.com or swfics.50megs.com or at fan-fiction sites such as fanfiction.net. Frequently fan-fiction writers also write their own, original stories, which occasionally makes their fan fiction suffer in terms of dedication because they eventually give up fan fiction in order to turn to their original manuscripts. Fan fiction thus proves to be a useful medium for professional writers-to-be to test their writing abilities and hone their skills; some writers have gotten book deals from reputed publishers after having published their fan fiction, including Meg Cabot and several science fiction writers. However, it seems that this no longer is a realistic possibility: “Since copyright laws prohibit the commercial distribution of media fan materials and only a small but growing number of fans have gone on to become professional writers of media texts, these fan artists have a more limited chance of gaining entry into the professional media art and thus have come to regard fandom less as a training ground than as a permanent outlet for their creative expression.”19 Other fan-fiction writers, however, humbly declare that they write just for fun or to play, for class and even to enter them in competitions (ficathons), admitting the influence of other fanfiction writers upon their own stories, up to the point that in some instances their stories are the result of a bet among fan-fiction writers. For example, as homage to some fan-fiction authors, in a story, Rhett is presented having nightmares whose plots are taken from other fan-fiction stories.20 The boldest of fan-fiction writers, though they take Gone with the Wind as their starting point, soon depart from Mitchell’s work. They basically borrow the main characters while leaving out most of the Gone with the Wind plot, replacing it instead with their own creative developments. This is the case of “Gone with the Wind Retold,” which, despite its eloquent title, does much more than retelling, actually rewriting the whole story. Many fan-fiction stories build on “what if?” at a given point in the original Gone with the Wind. “Nothing but a Whisper” recounts what would have happened if, when Scarlett called for Rhett following her miscarriage, Rhett came to her side.21 Another alternative scenarios feature how Scarlett decided at the barbecue not to continue loving Ashley and turned her attention to Rhett instead; a ten-year-old Rhett and an eight-year-old Scarlett are best childhood friends; a childless widow, Scarlett goes to New York City in April 1868 to identify the remains of her Uncle Andrew and meets Rhett; after the end of Gone with the Wind, Scarlett is taken to the Twelve Oaks barbeque, where everything changes: Ashley asks Scarlett to marry him but she refuses him and uses her second chance to seduce Rhett, etc.22 In creating an alternative universe, fan-fiction writers get rid of most of the elements of Gone with the Wind and they just take the basics— the Civil War/ Reconstruction historical background, that Rhett and Scarlett love each other despite themselves, and that circumstances, problems, and difficulties (most notably, Ashley) arise to make them express their true feelings. Often, fan-

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fiction characters openly speak out their feelings, which readers know or might guess but which characters in Gone with the Wind keep for themselves for the most part. Fan-fiction authors thus serve as literary ventriloquists in giving voice to characters whose thoughts were previously hidden.23 In contrast to more radical rewritings of the original novel, some fan fiction explores plotlines that never occurred in Gone with the Wind but which could more or less smoothly be added into the novel. These stories, for the most part, do not challenge the status quo or Mitchell’s chronology — they just mean to add “missing scenes” in the original.24 For example, in “First Encounters,” Rhett is introduced to baby Ella; “Keeping the Moon” recounts what happened when Rhett went to Belle’s after having been kicked out from Scarlett’s bedroom; or Rhett and Scarlett have a snowball fight when Scarlett is pregnant during which she realizes that Rhett loves her and decides to forget Ashley.25 Most of them dwell on Rhett and Scarlett’s marital bliss, which is, for those Gone with the Wind readers who particularly enjoy the romance between the protagonist couple, too brief in the midst of their relationship, constantly fraught by problems and tensions. Rhett and Scarlett’s wedding, which Mitchell completely omits, is another favorite of fan fiction. Other events missing in Gone with the Wind for which fan fiction has a soft spot include Rhett and Scarlett’s first morning at their new home or their first Christmas as a married couple. The visit to the mill when Ashley puts into Scarlett’s mind the idea of not sleeping with her husband again is also retold in many stories.26 In other cases, a fan-fiction story rewrites a given moment of Gone with the Wind, thus rejecting the rest of the original novel and offering an alternative course. A multitude of stories have Rhett and Scarlett reconciled at a given point in the novel, as, for instance, after Scarlett’s miscarriage, during Ashley’s Christmas furlough, after the birth of their second baby, when he returns home with Bonnie, shortly after Scarlett expelled him out of their bedroom and realized her mistake, after Bonnie’s death, or after their passionate night. This is called an episode fix, “a rewriting of an event provided in canon to a deliberately noncanonical, preferred conclusion.” There are also stories narrating events that could be incorporated into Scarlett, such as “Rhett and Anne,” recounting their wedding night.27 Rhett and Scarlett’s racy sex life is brought up in many stories, especially in those that recreate Rhett and Scarlett’s “night of passion.” By far, the most popular starting point in fan fiction is what happened when Rhett took Scarlett upstairs after Ashley’s birthday party, be it as a turning point for Rhett and Scarlett’s marriage (generally) or just to have an M-rated story.28 In fan fiction, often the sex scene is the main element in the story, what Driscoll calls the plot sex, but this is not usually the case with Gone with the Wind fan fiction. Though in Gone with the Wind fan fiction, sex is certainly used “to resolve plot and character,” generally it is only after Rhett and Scarlett have worked out their differences, cleared the misunderstandings between them, forgiven the past, and, more importantly, declared their true love for each other, that their rela-

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tionship can be sexually consummated. An exception is “Midnight Whisperer,” which has the typical romance/erotica plot of having sex with a stranger slipping into the protagonist’s bed — in this case, Rhett entering a sleeping Scarlett’s bedroom in Tara at the end of the war.29 In contrast to Scarlett’s prudishness in Gone with the Wind, fan fiction makes Scarlett respond passionately to Rhett’s advances, presenting her as ardent as him: “That fiery temper of hers had proven to make for rather fiery lovemaking as well.”30 Scarlett’s approach to sex, at least in fan fiction, changes when she marries Rhett and her wedding night with Rhett is presented as totally opposite to her two previous ones.31 The boldest of fan fiction has Scarlett initiating sex, resolved to please him as he pleases her while Rhett encourages her to be daring in bed. Scarlett no longer cares about what is proper or not for a lady to do in bed with her husband and is “a compliant and insatiable lover,” making Rhett’s dreams come true. Other times, Scarlett is still prudish and shy about nudity, especially because she still remembers Ellen’s voice berating her sexual conduct.32 In fan fiction we see Rhett hurting and even crying; he is not the man confident in himself that Mitchell, Ripley or McCaig portray — sometimes he does not even know why he is doing things, such as his sudden decision of marrying Scarlett after making her his mistress.33 He is demystified and is not master of his own emotions or feelings. “Rhett Butler’s Plea” is an interesting case because far from romanticized views of Rhett Butler, it presents him in a much more demystifying light: he is no longer a figure of mystery or romance but an alcoholic.34 Rhett’s past is explored in a number of fan-fiction stories, such as his first sexual experience with a mulatto prostitute, how he decided not to marry the girl he compromised, or how a seventeen-year-old Rhett meets Philippe and Ellen Robillard.35 In that Rhett is more of a human being (not even one with heroic qualities, as Rhett Butler’s People contends) and less of a hero, fan fiction comes closer to Randall’s portrayal than to that of any other continuations of Gone with the Wind. In contrast to Gone with the Wind’s treatment of Rhett as a larger-than-life figure, in fan fiction he is more human: if Scarlett believed that he could not be possibly hurt in their way out of Atlanta, in fan fiction he is actually hurt. He is a man very much in love, sometimes even eager to express to Scarlett his love or tortured by his inability to do so— because of his fears about Scarlett rejecting or ridiculing him. Rhett is regretful of having hidden his love from Scarlett and comes to regard it as one of the causes why she never learned to love him.36 Some fan-fiction writers, for all their dispelling of other mysteries, still want to keep Rhett a figure of mystery, to some extent. Thus, Rhett’s hands are described as “hands rough from use and wear. Years of sailing, manual labor, and handling of weapons [Scarlett] didn’t want to know about had caused that.”37 Rhett’s faithfulness is a topic much discussed in fan fiction, which strives to present Rhett as faithful to Scarlett ever since they got engaged or married.

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Rarely is Rhett presented as unfaithful to Scarlett and when he is, authors try to justify him, for “infidelity was harder than he had expected.”38 Gone with the Wind to the contrary, fan fiction often has it that Rhett and Belle have not been lovers since before he married Scarlett, even though she kicked him out of her bedroom. In some stories, Belle Watling and Rhett are simple business partners; in others, Rhett gives up his sexual relations with Belle after meeting Scarlett.39 Sexual mores now are not what they were in the nineteenth century and whereas in the nineteenth century it was socially “acceptable” for men to keep mistresses, faithfulness is now more appreciated than it was back then. In fan fiction when Rhett visits Belle, it does not mean that he is unfaithful to Scarlett, for he only goes there to play cards. Other times, he decides not to go at all because Scarlett is mad at Rhett’s going to Belle Watling’s. In a bold move, fan fiction has Scarlett confronting Belle Watling, or, at least, going to her place.40 The consequences of Rhett’s unfaithfulness are dealt with in a story told from the companion of many women, including Scarlett’s for the last twenty-five years— syphilis, which Rhett passed on to Scarlett.41 If fan-fiction writers are most concerned about whether Rhett is faithful to Scarlett or not, Scarlett’s previous sexual history is not a matter of less concern. Some fan-fiction writers even have Rhett being Scarlett’s first and only husband, and, accordingly, Scarlett is a virgin until their wedding night. In other stories her previous marriage (or marriages, depending on the story) went unconsummated. Thus, Scarlett embodies one pervasive stereotype of romance novels, the widowed virgin.42 In Gone with the Wind we know that Rhett and Belle Watling had a longterm relationship, that he is her silent partner, that she is proud of him (“‘I thought Captain Butler done mighty fine too,’ said Belle, shy pride in her voice”43), that he has been living with her since Scarlett kicked him out of her bedroom, and there is the insinuation that Rhett has a legal ward in New Orleans whereas Belle has a son who does not live in town, but we do not know much about Rhett and Belle’s feelings for each other. Did Rhett father Belle Watling’s son? Fan-fiction writers are of different minds about the paternity of her son. If Mitchell hinted forcefully at it while McCaig denied it vehemently (Ripley did not deal with the matter at all), in fan fiction he might be or not. Some fanfiction stories have Rhett being the father of Belle’s child, others deny it and a few have Belle certain of Rhett’s paternity while he is very reluctant to acknowledge himself as more than a guardian for the boy.44 Most Gone with the Wind fan-fiction stories are “het texts,” stories which “revolve around a heterosexual relationship, either one invited by the author or one presented in the primary source text.”45 They intend to show, as one fan-fiction writer put it, what “Margaret Mitchell wouldn’t show us.”46 Gone with the Wind “slash” fan fiction is kept at a minimum: in the corpus of fan fiction analyzed, there are two slash fan-fiction stories involving Melanie and Scarlett and three involving Rhett and Ashley. One of the stories about Rhett and Ashley soon almost retracts from the implication with the author clarifying that Rhett

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and Ashley’s encounter in the Old World (and subsequent homosexual relationship) might have been just a dream of Rhett’s.47 The boldest Ashley-Rhett slash fan fiction story is “The Ubiquitous Mr. Wilkes,” which has Rhett and Ashley engaging in oral sex, and, moreover, having this but as the beginning of a new relationship between the two, to be continued.48 Another slash story explains that after Ashley is wounded and Frank killed in the raid in Shantytown following Scarlett’s attack, Rhett kisses Ashley and wonders what might happen if things were different.49 About Melanie and Scarlett, in “Somebody’s Darling,” the night after Scarlett kills the Yankee soldier and conceals the murder with Melanie’s help, she kisses Melanie passionately, much to her own surprise.50 In “A Drink and a Secret,” Melanie and Scarlett get drunk and Melanie seduces Scarlett to go into her bedroom with her.51 An important aspect is that the appeal of fan fiction does not come from the outstanding literary quality of these stories or how well characters are developed and how masterfully situations are handled. Actually, some fan-fiction stories scarcely sketch the main characters, the plot is reduced to outlining the basic elements necessary to bring Rhett and Scarlett back together, descriptions are vague, and dialogue is confined to the characters’ spelling out their true feelings and professions of love. Minor characters are almost non-existent: Mammy is a stereotypical figure that provides comfort and advice and Will Benteen is just somebody to marry Suellen off to, an attentive ear to listen to Scarlett’s problems at most, despite the importance he has for her in Gone with the Wind. Still, we have to take into account that in the movie he was also deleted. About Melanie and Ashley, we for the most part have scarce glimpses of them, although the stories penned by SW are an exception to this. Aunt Pittypat, Mrs. Meade, and Mrs. Merriweather appear even less, except for judging Rhett and Scarlett harshly or gossiping about them. An exception to the vagueness of descriptions is apckrfan’s minute descriptions of clothing in her stories.52 What is more, fan fiction gets rid of Mitchell’s rich historical background for the most part. The war is almost non-existent, for fan fiction generally prefers not to deal with the war going on. All this is no obstacle for readers finding solace in fan fiction, for as rough as descriptions might be, readers supplement them with the vast amount of information they already got while reading Gone with the Wind. The dependence of fan fiction on Gone with the Wind does not come only from readers already being familiar with who Rhett and Scarlett are and why they are now estranged (the starting point of most fan fiction); it also means that readers might overlook scanty background information. This, however, is not solely a characteristic of fan fiction for McCaig’s scarce treatment of Scarlett relied much on readers’ bearing in mind Mitchell’s much more appealing portrait of Scarlett O’Hara or they would have had trouble accepting that such a fascinating man as Rhett Butler fell for the likes of such a simpering wraith. Some fan-fiction writers are aware of the Gone with the Wind authorized

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sequels and even offer their own personal opinion about them; they for the most part discard Scarlett and do not take it as part of the chronology, with some even explicitly acknowledging their rejection of Scarlett. Others do acknowledge the existence of Scarlett and substantially or partially make use of it.53 Scarlett fared badly with critics and, judging from fan fiction, also with readers, who were eager enough to learn how the story continued to buy the sequel but were for the most part disappointed about how it wrapped things up. The ending of Scarlett¸ deemed too inconclusive, is continued in many a fan-fiction story and Scarlett itself is subject to rewritings. “Astray,” which begins with Scarlett in labor with Cat, sees Scarlett as its starting point but getting rid of the most hard-to-believe elements, such as Rhett’s willingness to marry a woman he had compromised, something he had refused to do in the past, and that coming from a man whose reluctance to marry is well known.54 Fan-fiction authors often mention their dissatisfaction with Scarlett, explaining that they did not know fan fiction existed when they read Scarlett for the first time.55 Scarlett is usually the starting point, but then the stories progress on their own, changing so much that, in the words of a fan-fiction writer, “but mercifully, has little to do with that novel.”56 Fan-fiction authors have trouble with many of Ripley’s developments. One of them is that, at the opening of Scarlett, Rhett apparently has moved on and forgotten Bonnie, whereas in fan fiction Rhett is still grieving Bonnie’s death.57 Another is the idea that Rhett divorces Scarlett, as conveyed in Scarlett. To begin with, divorced people bore a social stigma impossible to remove in nineteenth-century Southern society, especially women. Because contemporary audiences might be unaware of the importance of a divorce in the nineteenth-century South, fan-fiction authors often remind their readers that it was worse than death at the time. By divorcing Scarlett, Rhett would have made her a social pariah shunned by proper society and ruined Wade and Ella’s social standing in the process. As Gone with the Wind explains, “divorced people were under the ban not only of the Church but of society. No divorced person was received.”58 The divorce is not an option for many fan-fiction authors because it was almost impossible legally, would ruin Rhett socially forever, and would make Scarlett an outcast in the South. It would be unthinkable for Scarlett to live outside the South, in Yankee territory, abroad or in Ireland!59 All in all, fan-fiction authors are especially critical with Ripley’s moving Scarlett to Ireland, which they deem unbelievable.60 Many also have trouble with Scarlett going to Charleston for she would not have dared to make a fool of herself by following Rhett there (though in some fan-fiction stories she does go to Charleston). In a story, Mammy won’t let Scarlett chase after a man again; Rhett will have to come on his own, thus indicting Ripley’s storyline.61 The hysterectomy in Scarlett is disregarded, too, because it would have been impossible to survive it without anesthesia or antibiotics. Possibilities playing upon Scarlett are almost endless— after the ending,

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Rhett and Scarlett are together with Cat in Charleston; Scarlett showed up in Charleston with Wade and Ella; Scarlett while in labor in Ireland writes Rhett a letter and upon reading it, he presumes Scarlett died and goes to Ireland to find out; Scarlett heads back home as soon as she hears about the divorce and crashes Rhett and Anne’s wedding; Rhett is badly hurt in a fire in a brothel and his mother summons Scarlett; Bonnie was the one who told Cat to hide when the Ballyhara riots started; Rhett, torn after the shipwreck, returns to Charleston to find Scarlett gone and launches a private investigation to find her; Scarlett considers going to Ireland but that would not do— it is too far away from Tara; the divorce is overturned, so he cannot marry Anne and meets Scarlett again in Ireland at a party; Scarlett accepts the divorce and conceals her pregnancy from Rhett in retaliation.62 Rhett Butler’s People, because it is a more recent novel, has yet to make an impact on fan fiction. Some fan-fiction writers state that they are not rewriting Scarlett from Rhett’s point of view or that they do not have anything to do with Rhett Butler’s People, despite their stories being primarily seen through Rhett’s eyes. We have novels telling Pride and Prejudice from Mr. Darcy’s point of view (Mr. Darcy’s Diary by Amanda Grange), Jane Eyre according to Bertha Mason’s (Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys), or Rebecca from Rebecca’s own (Rebecca’s Tale by Sally Beauman). If Rhett Butler’s People is an attempt to rewrite Gone with the Wind from Rhett’s perspective, fan fiction has also attempted to incorporate Rhett’s point of view to the story. At certain points in Gone with the Wind, the point of view is not Scarlett’s but “Ashley’s (Ch. XXXII, 540 –41), Frank’s (Ch. XXXVI, 627–34), Wade’s (Ch. L, pg. 875 –79), Aunt Pitty’s (Ch. LV, pg. 942–43), and Melanie’s (Ch. LVI, pg. 952–55; Ch. LVII, pg. 956 –60).”63 But, interestingly enough, not Rhett’s. In fan fiction we have Rhett’s feelings, too, especially in that penned by apckrfan, which moves from Scarlett’s to Rhett’s thoughts, providing the perspective and opinion of the two of them upon one single instance. In any case, even if they do not follow Rhett Butler’s People chronology or developments, it is clear that McCaig’s retelling of Gone with the Wind from Rhett’s eyes has inspired many to follow his example.64 In the corpus of fan fiction analyzed, there is only one story that reportedly is inspired by The Wind Done Gone although it does not follow the changes introduced by it; rather, the author was moved to write after reading The Wind Done Gone.65 If Seth Grahame-Smith had Elizabeth Bennet and Mr. Darcy meet the zombies in his Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, Gone with the Wind fan fiction has also taken the chance of having the characters of their favorite novel meet the protagonists of contemporary TV shows such as FBI Special Agents Mulder and Scully from The X-Files (a source of multiple adaptations on its own) and FBI Agent Seeley Booth and forensic anthropologic Temperance Brennan of Bones.66 Crossover practices testify more to the fan-fiction writers’ personal likes and philias than to any other consideration. What can twentieth- and

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twenty-first-century shows about FBI agents solving paranormal cases or crime investigations have to do with a Civil War Southern novel? The current popularity of a given show or novel makes it not only likely to generate a number of fan-fiction stories on its own, but also give rise to crossovers. This is the case of the “Twilight Saga” by Stephenie Meyer and thus we have seen how fan fiction has introduced the Cullens to Rhett and Scarlett.67 Other crossovers include how Rhett in a ball in England meets Sara Crewe, the protagonist of Frances Hodgson Burnett’s The Little Princess, to whom he feels attracted because she resembles Scarlett; a thirteen-year-old Scarlett being a classmate of Eva St. Clare’s mother of Uncle Tom’s Cabin; a fourteen-year-old Scarlett fails to seduce a fifteen-year-old Laurie Lawrence off Little Women and Rhett has a dream in which he gets into Alice in Wonderland, in which Scarlett is the Queen of Hearts.68 Rhett and Scarlett’s arguments are an important part of Gone with the Wind as well as of fan fiction, where they embody the characters’ inner conflicts. Because “individuals who experience relational satisfaction report significantly different conflict tactics than individuals who experience relational dissatisfaction,” Rhett and Scarlett’s quarrels are particularly bitter, with each hurting the other as much as possible. In general, women tend to either avoid confrontation altogether or throw tantrums whereas men make use of their expertise, formal legitimacy, and direct information instead of women’s strategies of helplessness and indirect information. In Gone with the Wind it is almost always Rhett initiating the fight, with Scarlett unable not to reply to his barbs. In fan fiction Rhett and Scarlett use strategies of emotional appeal (appeal to other’s love and affection, promise to be more loving in the future, get angry and demand that the other give in) but especially strategies of emphatic understanding (discuss what would happen if we each accepted the other’s point of view, talk about why we do not agree, hold mutual talks without argument). Scarlett accuses Rhett of running away from personal conflicts, such as the morning after, and expresses her frustration because Rhett is always walking out on her, constantly coming and going.69 Fan fiction stresses how Rhett runs away when things get too personal or problems are too difficult to be his usual flippant self about them. As Angela Carter characterizes him, “he is the sort of macho weakling who is off like a long dog at the whiff of a genuine emotional demand.”70 In fan fiction, Rhett and Scarlett are in dangerous waters, unsure about their relationship or if it is possible to work things out, which shows in their conversations: A number of conflict theorists maintain that we choose our strategies based upon the risk involved in implementing them. Individuals in a more committed relationship generally have less concern about the strength of the relational bonds. Consequently, they employ more spontaneous and emotionally toned strategies in their relational conflicts. As commitment increases, these strategies are probably perceived as less risky since the cohesiveness of the relationship

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The Wind Is Never Gone precludes easy termination. In the less committed relationships, the cohesiveness of the partners is still being negotiated. As a result, they are more inclined to utilize conflict avoidance strategies. Undoubtedly, it would be too risky for them to employ the more open conflict strategies of the firmly committed.71

Fan fiction presents a more traditional and conservative view of womanhood and family than that of Gone with the Wind, espousing a less revolutionary and more traditional view. In fan fiction, Scarlett often sells her businesses or does not take care of them anymore, being perfectly happy with housework.72 Scarlett’s rebelliousness is often very limited, such as no longer wearing corsets, an anachronism in itself.73 Also, because dresses were designed and made taking into account wearing a corset, it would be impossible that Scarlett could continue wearing her dresses without a corset. Sometimes fan fiction writers are well aware that they are pushing the limits almost to unbelievable extremes, and have the characters accordingly admit that they are behaving in a manner out of character for them. In fan fiction Scarlett grows more introspective and reflects more on her feelings and thoughts; she is not so stubborn and is often willing to compromise about the size of their wedding reception or their house in Atlanta.74 “A Glimmer of Hope” has a harsh portrayal of Scarlett as selfish, unladylike, childish and self-centered, much more in consonance with Mitchell’s portrayal than to later, more flattering idealizations of Scarlett’s character.75 Part of the revolutionary character of Scarlett comes from her lack of maternal instincts, for which she does not apologize or feel guilty. If Ripley has Scarlett finding life’s meaning in Cat, fan fiction has Scarlett often turning to Wade and Ella to prove to herself, to Rhett, and to Atlanta that she is an able mother. Fan fiction shares with Scarlett that they atone for Scarlett’s previous abhorrence for childbearing and motherhood in having her discover the joys of motherhood, although Ripley has Scarlett realizing this with her fourth child and fan fiction offers a number of possibilities: Scarlett gets closer to Wade and Ella after Bonnie’s death, to Bonnie (sometimes with Wade and Ella never having been born), to a fourth child (in fan fiction Scarlett sometimes does not miscarry the baby conceived during their passionate night and it is born either after Bonnie’s death or when Bonnie is still alive) or even to a completely different child born in an alternative version of Gone with the Wind. Scarlett’s relationship with alcohol is further explored in fan fiction, offering a number of possibilities. Sometimes, she is an alcoholic whose decisions are influenced by alcohol; in this case, that Rhett drove Scarlett to alcoholism by encouraging her to drink openly is often stressed. More often than not, Scarlett gives up alcohol, as she did in Scarlett and so does Rhett sometimes.76 Favorite expressions of Scarlett’s such as “fiddle-dee-dee,” “great balls of fire” or “God’s nightgown” are conveyed in many fan-fiction stories to capture Scarlett’s language.77 Similarly, references to Scarlett’s habit of putting off thinking till tomorrow or her nightmares are numerous.78 If in Gone with the Wind age

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is rarely discussed (Rhett ignores Scarlett’s age till the very end and neither does she know that Rhett is a year older than her own mother), in fan fiction, jokes about Rhett’s age or his discussing his old age often occur.79 Ellen and Gerald O’Hara in some stories do not die but live to see Scarlett marry Rhett. In Gone with the Wind Ellen’s death marks the turning point in Scarlett’s subsequent behavior but in fan fiction Ellen lives and Scarlett still behaves more or less as she did in Gone with the Wind because Ellen and Gerald are alive but ineffectual, for it is Scarlett taking care of the taxes, the plantation and so forth.80 This shows that, even though fan fiction wants Scarlett to go through fewer tragedies, it perceives her as basically the same person, undergoing the same decisive experiences that shape her character when she becomes the head of the family. Scarlett, more analytical and reflexive in fan fiction, often looks back on her parents’ marriage and notices her mother’s emotional shortcomings. This new understanding of Ellen’s personality sometimes is useful to Scarlett for she realizes that she does not want, like her mother, to be married to one man while loving another one.81 Gone with the Wind wondered “if Ellen had ever regretted her sudden decision to marry him, no one ever knew it, certainly not Gerald, who almost burst with pride whenever he looked at her. She had put Savannah and its memories behind her when she left that gently mannered city by the sea, and, from the moment of her arrival in the County, north Georgia was her home”; in fan fiction, Ellen is still unsure about the wisdom of marrying Gerald when not definitely regretful of not having waited for a more passionate, suitable husband.82 Where to have Rhett and Scarlett meet again offers a vast number of possibilities. It could be at Scarlett’s aunt Eulalie’s funeral; when Scarlett follows Rhett to the inn where he is staying once he abandons her and they make up; when a friend of Rhett’s gets him into the New Orleans building business and eventually maneuvers a reconciliation between Rhett and Scarlett; after Rhett spends two or three years traveling until he realizes he is no longer mad at Scarlett but in love with her; in a horse fair in Ireland or at Christmastime, a particularly favorite time for fan-fiction writers to have Rhett and Scarlett reunited.83 In Scarlett, as well as in most fan fiction, it is Scarlett plotting and making plans to get Rhett back, when not actually going to him herself. Sometimes in fan fiction it is Rhett initiating things: he orchestrates it that her aunts invite Scarlett to his New Year’s Eve ball at Dunmore Landing to celebrate its restoration.84 In other instances, Rhett decides to come home by himself: he finds that Charleston is not his cup of tea; he is happy with his mother and sister but they sometimes get on his nerves; Rhett realizes he was worn out physically, not emotionally; Rhett goes to Europe and realizes he still loves Scarlett a little; he understands better that Scarlett clung to Ashley’s love because it was the only thing left of the old days; Mrs. Butler and Rhett’s sister encourage him to go back to Scarlett; Rhett returns home to help an emaciated Scarlett at the end of Gone with the Wind, and more.85 Some stories present Rhett and

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Scarlett’s reconciliation as a fait accompli to move on to other matters. For instance, Rhett and Scarlett are in Italy celebrating the tenth anniversary of their reconciliation, they go to Tara in Rhett’s brand-new car in 1896, or Scarlett still mourns Rhett’s death in the Titanic shipwreck five years ago.86 Mitchell made it clear that Ashley was a good-for-nothing from the very beginning and thus, in the second chapter, she has Ashley declare, “Oh, Scarlett, what a coward I am!”87 Hardly the love proposal Scarlett was expecting (since he refers to his reluctance to tell Scarlett about his engagement with Melanie). Yet, for Scarlett, blind to his flaws till the very end of Gone with the Wind, Ashley is the paragon of virtue and honor. Fan fiction often presents Scarlett’s coming to terms with Ashley’s true colors and her realization of his worthlessness. He is nobody to rely on and she cannot count on him to help her out. Because Ashley is presented more often than not as a coward and a weakling, a good-for-nothing who never helped her, Scarlett comes to realize that he is not so appealing, generally in conjunction with her suddenly seeing Rhett’s handsomeness.88 At times Scarlett’s giving up on Ashley and moving on is not too traumatic: in “The Scarlett Letter,” Scarlett happily accepts Ashley’s explanation that he only loves her as a brother and happily goes to meet Rhett. To understand Ashley’s real personality, Scarlett may need some “help,” too, and, thus, Rhett forces Ashley to write a letter to Scarlett telling her he never loved her before killing him.89 Ashley is patently jealous of Rhett in fan fiction and is blamed for leading Scarlett on, ruining her chances of happiness to inflate his male ego.90 At the same time that Ashley is presented as jealous that Scarlett is now happy with Rhett, fan fiction expresses more of Rhett’s feelings towards Ashley, having a jealous Rhett where he was cool and even detached in Gone with the Wind.91 If Scarlett is the leading character in Gone with the Wind, she is even more so in fan fiction. It is striking that there are very few fan-fiction stories about Melanie, reportedly Mitchell’s true heroine. Melanie more often than not is just a foil for Scarlett, with some exceptions. For instance, in a fan-fiction story Melanie overhears Ashley and Scarlett in the Twelve Oaks library, seeing the coward Ashley is: loving Scarlett but not daring to break off their engagement (curiously enough, in another story, Scarlett thinks Melanie always knew what was going on between her and Ashley but pretended otherwise).92 Melanie is not the only naïve character; so is Anne, her counterpart in Scarlett. Although Ripley insists that Anne was never aware of Rhett’s love for Scarlett, fan fiction does not believe her to be so naïve and, in contrast, has her suffering because she knows Rhett does not love her as much as he once loved Scarlett, even regretting having married him. Rhett’s wedding night with Anne is also a topic of fan fiction: “Rhett and Anne” presents Rhett’s side of it, as written by Princess Alica, whereas the second part in the story, contributed by Cornorama, approaches Anne’s side.93 In “Nothing but a Whisper,” not only is Melanie favorable to female suf-

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frage, she also finds it unfair that women nurse their husbands night and day whereas their husbands not only do not nurse them, but are shunned from the room when their wives are ill on the grounds of modesty.94 It is surprising that such a conventional and tradition-bound character as Melanie entertains such a revolutionary thought. There are also stories about how Melanie and Ashley fell in love, covering Melanie’s point of view or a story featuring Melanie’s sexual longings.95 Melanie and Scarlett frequently get closer or Melanie does not die and takes part in events after the end of Gone with the Wind.96 Fan-fiction writers put the finger on “incomprehensible” points in Gone with the Wind —how could Rhett leave Scarlett now that she has declared his love for him, as he always wanted? Why a man who took pride in having no reputation of his own accepted returning to Atlanta to keep gossip down, especially after he had ruined his wife’s reputation for years? Fan fiction has a fondness for reversing situations, and, thus, if Rhett waits for Scarlett’s love, we often have Scarlett longing that he loves her as much as she loves him or Scarlett jealous of Belle Watling. Scarlett is not the only one flaring in rage and spoiling the moment; Rhett often cannot control his temper and ruins the moment himself.97 Scarlett gets a more intellectual dimension too and appears reading, totally entranced by a book (sometimes Shakespeare), enjoying Rhett reading her poetry, etc.98 Rhett’s fondness for reading poetry is mentioned, too. 99 Because Rhett has a culture Scarlett lacks, knows Shakespeare, quotes from The Tempest and is well versed on a number of disciplines such as history or art, fan fiction brings up Scarlett’s ignorance vs. Rhett’s broader culture and academic formation; for instance, during their made-up European honeymoon, Rhett is annoyed by Scarlett’s ignorance about art and architecture.100 This is a contrast found in Gone with the Wind, too, for “Mitchell has introduced an anti-intellectualism that will run throughout the novel, not for its own sake, but for what it means in terms of people’s ability to survive in the ‘real’ world. Rhett Butler, after all, somehow seems to know everything Ashley does, but his theoretical knowledge is balanced by a propensity for action and hard-headedness.”101 So little do fan-fiction writers feel bound to social and historical conventions, or even by a certain period in time, that sometimes they choose to entirely get rid of concerns such as setting or chronology. Some fan fiction is based on the movie rather than on the book or we can find Gone with the Wind fan fiction set in a time period other than that described by Mitchell102; in “What Is This Feeling Taking Over?” Rhett and Scarlett are twenty-first-century teenage high school students and in “A Ring of Fire” Scarlett is a country singer in 1963 Nashville forming a duo with Ashley whereas Rhett is an admirer of them and long-time friend. 103 Halloween stories also feature Rhett and Scarlett : in “Something’s About to Happen,” Scarlett realizes she loves Rhett, not Ashley, after Bonnie’s death, just as Rhett is missing and mysterious murders are taking place; Scarlett at Tara on Halloween has some strange dreams; or Rhett

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tells Scarlett on Pitty’s porch a ghost story that ends up scaring the two of them.104 Mitchell could have taken the easy way out in having Rhett to go with Scarlett all the way to Tara so as to share her burden with her. But Gone with the Wind is about Scarlett fighting alone, with no man to help her out, and this is what makes her the person she later becomes, even if she becomes greedy and ruthless in order to become rich. No longer having her parents to rely on or to provide for her, Scarlett is forced to become the head of the family: “She was seeing things with new eyes for, somewhere along the long road to Tara, she had left her girlhood behind her. She was no longer plastic clay, yielding imprint to each new experience. The clay had hardened, some time in this indeterminate day which had lasted a thousand years. Tonight was the last time she would ever be ministered to as a child. She was a woman now and youth was gone.”105 Often in fan fiction, Rhett takes Scarlett to Tara and stays to help Scarlett pick up the cotton, sparing her a lot of trouble and hard work.106 Other times, once the war is over, after Gerald’s death, Rhett returns to help the people at Tara or he buys Tara at the auction, beating Wilkerson, and moves in with Scarlett, to everyone’s scandal.107 In fan fiction Scarlett is not always the resourceful, manipulative woman ready to face the world on her own. Rather, she is a damsel in distress in need of a knight to come to her rescue. For instance, as Scarlett waits for Rhett’s train a man tries to rape her and Rhett rescues her.108 Rhett also saves her from being robbed and probably raped by a river rat when she took the children out for dinner.109 Moreover, Scarlett is afraid of this new, Reconstruction world, and she wants Rhett to guide her through it.110 Fan fiction is marred by a number of anachronisms, most of them having to do with social and moral proprieties and public displays of affection. Unrestrained by copyright restrictions, marketability of their works, sometimes even literary quality, the imagination is the limit and anachronisms exist freely and unchecked, if not for readers pointing them out. Where Mitchell took great pains in order to ensure the historical veracity and the verisimilitude of her novel, fan-fiction writers take poetic license to the extreme in that Rhett goes out on a “no-date” with Belle Watling or invites Scarlett out for dinner and a dance without a chaperone, or without having been first introduced to her parents.111 The most obvious anachronisms in fan fiction consist of public displays of affection, such as Scarlett hugging Rhett in the middle of the street or kissing Rhett in public to scandalize Anne Hampton.112 Some daring scenes that would have been totally improper in the nineteenth century but which occur in fan fiction are the following: Rhett gets Scarlett drunk in Pittypat’s house’s bedroom, which they sneaked into in the middle of the night; Rhett and Scarlett are “behaving like a couple of teenagers on the sofa”; Rhett declares in politically correct, twenty-first-century language that “I would never marry someone just because they were pregnant” (italics mine); Bonnie has a playdate; Scarlett is

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breastfeeding, even in front of Rhett; Ellen speaks openly of Scarlett’s pregnancy in front of the whole family; Rhett used to sneak into Scarlett’s bedroom in Tara in the mornings to wake her up when he is living there; Rhett goes with Scarlett into a hotel room; Scarlett wants to have sex with Rhett even before marriage; Rhett and Belle Watling are openly having lunch in a restaurant together in Atlanta for everyone (including Scarlett) to see; Rhett and Scarlett have dinner out without chaperones; Rhett and Scarlett have not been properly introduced but she goes out on walks with him without a chaperone; a single Scarlett eats heartily in front of Rhett; Scarlett travels alone to Atlanta, without Mammy; Rhett takes Scarlett to his house in Atlanta and cooks her dinner; Ashley mentions the baby to Scarlett; Rhett makes sexual remarks to Scarlett at the Meades’ Christmas party; Rhett smokes a cigarette, not a cigar; Rhett uses the word “date”; Rhett removes Scarlett’s shoes and stockings, seeing her bare legs; single Rhett and Scarlett openly discuss maternity; a fourteen-yearold Scarlett is allowed by her mother to wear rouge; Scarlett travels to Charleston on her own; Rhett tells Ashley that Scarlett and he plan to have more children; Scarlett is given jewels by beaux, which is highly improper: “‘candy and flowers, dear,’ Ellen had said time and again, ‘and perhaps a book of poetry or an album or a small bottle of Florida water are the only things a lady may accept from a gentleman. Never, never any expensive gift, even from your fiancé. And never any gift of jewelry or wearing apparel, not even gloves or handkerchiefs. Should you accept such gifts, men would know you were no lady and would try to take liberties.’”113 Especially modern is fan fiction’s approach to pregnancy-related issues, which their characters have no problem directly speaking of. Such a thing would have horrified Scarlett. In Gone with the Wind we are told that “in no way had either of them [Rhett and Scarlett] ever hinted at her condition and she had always kept the lap robe high under her armpits when with him, even on warm days, comforting herself in the usual feminine manner with the belief that she did not show at all when thus covered, and she was suddenly sick with quick rage at her own condition and shame that he should know.”114 Because social mores and social standards of propriety have greatly changed since the nineteenth century, some fan-fiction writers have no problem in having Rhett and Scarlett openly displaying their relationship, such as having “dates” or going out dancing and for dinners without any chaperone, when this would have been completely forbidden by the much stricter nineteenth-century conventions. Fan fiction often presents a picture of male/female relationships closer to twenty-first-century standards than the rigid nineteenth-century moral proprieties and conventions that ruled social interaction. This stands in marked contrast to the reality of courtship in the South, a very formal matter, with future spouses hardly ever seeing each other before their marriage, and very rarely if at all without a companion present (this made marriage between cousins, who had known each other for all their lives and without the interference of chaperones, the most desirable for future spouses).115 Other mistakes in

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fan fiction include Rhett’s travels back and forth from Atlanta to Tara without any of the difficulties that traveling had in the nineteenth-century South.116 Rhett’s blame over Bonnie’s death plays heavily in fan fiction, with Scarlett having to try to convince him that she did not mean her accusations and he is not to blame.117 Rhett’s guilt also looms large over his quarrel with Scarlett at the top at the stairs and her subsequent fall and miscarriage, with sometimes Wade blaming him for all this.118 Sometimes, Rhett and Scarlett comfort each other about Bonnie’s death and are able to work out differences and help each other out in their sorrow after Bonnie’s death.119 Bonnie is also presented seeing her parents from Heaven and orchestrates it so that they are together again, talking to each of them.120 Not all fan fiction shares the same genre with Gone with the Wind; some stories are playful —“Uncle” has Rhett going to Charleston with Wade and Ella in their first year of marriage while Scarlett stays in Atlanta, desperately waiting for him and besieged by a secret admirer who stalks her … and who turns out to be Rhett; in “Kiss Me” Rhett and Scarlett sing twentieth-century songs and dance, and “Colors of the Wind” is a collection of vignettes presenting a number of glimpses into Rhett and Scarlett’s life together, using Gone with the Wind, Scarlett and what might have happened next.121 Thus, we see Rhett’s life in Charleston with Rosemary, his mother and a pregnant Anne; a young Ashley tells Scarlett about a concert; Melanie drinks brandy out of concern for Ashley; Scarlett gets three marriage proposals; Suellen sweats because of the hard work at Tara; Brent Tarleton and Carreen O’Hara are engaged; Rhett compares Cat and Bonnie; Ella shows her hatred for her mother; Rhett spends time in Charleston with Bonnie; Cat’s many names are discussed; Wade fears the fire in the sky in Atlanta; a five-year-old Ellen Robillard is comforted by her cousin Philippe; Cathleen Calvert comes up, as does Scarlett’s first corset and the green bonnet Rhett presented Scarlett with; India’s relief that Scarlett stole Stuart Tarleton from her; Ellen’s visits to her three dead sons’ graves; the love letters Charles writes to Scarlett while she pretends to be writing to Ashley; Rhett’s laugh at Scarlett’s mispronunciation; Scarlett’s indignation now that young men look at Cat and not at her; and little Solange Prudhomme’s travel to Ireland, where Katie Scarlett O’Hara and her son Gerald see her ship sailing. Slavery is mentioned a few times in fan fiction. For instance, the slave quarters at Dunmore Landing are hidden from the view “as a dirty secret known to all, but still not put on display.”122 There is a negative stereotyping of African Americans in some stories; they are presented as slow, and shouting at them is useless.123 There is a paternalistic view of slavery at the same time that the situation during the Reconstruction is criticized: African Americans cannot ride in trains with white people any more while the Yankees are stirring racial hatred and they are to blame for the Klan.124 Scarlett remembers the kind treatment of slaves at Tara and states that it is “good that I am so much kinder to the darkies than white people.”125

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In fan fiction the character of Rhett’s mother is further developed. She can be a beaten wife, or closely resemble Ellen O’Hara.126 Sometimes she dislikes Scarlett, at other times she is genuinely fond of her, or she is not too sure about what her opinion of Scarlett is— with her being the niece of her close friends Eulalie and Pauline — but she is determined to help Rhett and Scarlett get back together because she realizes how much Rhett loves Scarlett.127 Rhett’s mother is presented as against their separation when not outright in favor of Scarlett, whom she prefers to Anne, and she encourages him to go back to Scarlett, for she knows that he has ruined his chances at happiness by divorcing her.128 Scarlett is genuinely fond of Mrs. Butler; her love is not just a ruse to endorse her mother-in-law’s support in her fight for Rhett.129 Other times, Mrs. Butler is not so fond of her daughter-in-law but is rather appalled by Scarlett’s unladylike and childish manners.130 There are many topics recurrent in the Gone with the Wind fan fiction, but probably the two most dealt with are Rhett and Scarlett’s Atlanta home and Scarlett’s two first children, Wade and Ella. In Gone with the Wind, one of the main symbols of Rhett and Scarlett’s relationship and of their different backgrounds and personal opinions is the house that Rhett builds in Atlanta for Scarlett. This house is built entirely according to Scarlett’s gaudy wishes, much to Rhett’s distress. Rhett enjoys teasing Scarlett about the ugliness of the house to make her mad, though he accepts her architectural preferences with grace: “She thought it the most beautiful and most elegantly furnished house she had ever seen, but Rhett said it was a nightmare. However, if it made her happy, she was welcome to it.” In Gone with the Wind, the Atlanta house is just a house, never a home for Rhett and Scarlett. Rhett longs for Charleston, as it is revealed in the end, and for Scarlett, home, the place where restoring her health after physical illnesses or misfortunes, is always Tara.131 In fan fiction, Rhett and Scarlett’s feelings toward the house are often mentioned. Because of the dismal state of Rhett and Scarlett’s relationship at the beginning of most fan-fiction stories, the house only has negative connotations for Rhett: “the house that in his mind bore a striking resemblance to what he thought Hell would look and feel like,” “House of Horrors,” “that gloomy house,” “the looming presence of his home,” “the eyesore he called a home,” “monstrosity of a home,” “their Peachtree Monstrosity,” “the monstrosity that his love had built,” “the monstrosity that he detested.”132 Rhett’s feelings are projected onto the house (“the dismal gloom that surrounded the house, and his heart”), which continues to symbolize Rhett’s love for Scarlett: “it was a grotesque monument to the feelings that he had long displayed, and yet never verbalized, and as dense as Scarlett was at times, she had not seen this atrocity of architecture for what it was— a large scale manifestation for his love for her” or the chains that bind him to her: “seeing the house as what he had always seen it, as a prison.” All in all, the house only contains bad memories for Rhett.133 In fan fiction Scarlett is hurt that Rhett regards their Atlanta house a mon-

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strosity because she is still proud of it.134 However, she also realizes that their house was never a home for Rhett and comes to abhor it too, redecorating it or altogether moving out to a smaller place.135 In Scarlett, Ripley has Scarlett sell the house, severing all her ties to America: “It was funny about the Peachtree Street house, Scarlett thought. You’d think it would hurt to part with it. After all, it was where I lived with Rhett, the place where Bonnie was born and spent her terribly brief life. But the only thing I felt was relief. When that girls’ school made an offer I could have kissed the old prune-faced headmistress. It felt like lifting chains off me. I’m free now. No more obligations in Atlanta.” Similarly, in fan fiction, Scarlett comes to detest her house, which becomes “that great monstrosity of a house that she had so far called her home” or “the monstrosity she had once called a house” and she finds it oppressive.136 Symbolizing new beginnings, sometimes Rhett and Scarlett have a new house built in Atlanta after their reconciliation.137 Other times, the Atlanta house is never built: in “The Next Morning,” Rhett and Scarlett own a plantation called Emerald Heights in Clayton County, not too far away from Tara, or Tara becomes Rhett’s home.138 When Rhett and Scarlett decide to keep their Peachtree Street house, it is no longer the house of horrors for Rhett, for there are good memories contained on it, too, such as Bonnie, Scarlett declaring her love for him, or their reconciliation.139 Some Gone with the Wind storylines are not so well known because they were left out in the cinematographic version. Many fans have watched the movie endless times but never read the book because of its bulkiness. Wade and Ella, who hardly appear in the novel, pose a challenge to fan-fiction writers— given that they were omitted in the movie, fan-fiction writers are forced to clarify that Wade and Ella are not made-up characters but have been taken from the book. Because fan fiction often relies on the movie more than in the book, many stories have Bonnie as Scarlett’s first child, omitting Scarlett’s children by Charles Hamilton and Frank Kennedy, just as the movie did.140 Other stories, however, give more narrative space to Wade and Ella.141 A few attempt a compromise and thus in “These Things I’ll Never Say,” Wade and Ella do exist but they are not extensively dealt with: the first reference to them comes in the eighth chapter (out of seventeen) and the first time they appear is in chapter twelve, which is consistent with the neglect in Gone with the Wind.142 When they appear in fan fiction, Scarlett not only becomes a good mother to them, sometimes they are the excuse invoked either by Rhett or by Scarlett to meet again. What is more, sometimes they are more dynamic and Wade is an active participant in the Rhett and Scarlett love story: in “Seven Years Later,” a grownup Wade begins working for Rhett months before running into Scarlett in Ireland and in “A Letter from Wade,” he writes to Rhett in May 1874, begging him to return home.143 Rhett is often presented as regretful for having abandoned Wade and Ella.144 Mitchell’s children are not quite credible characters. If Mitchell was not happy about the way she had handled Wade and Ella, fan fiction tries to make

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amends for this and presents Scarlett as a better mother or, at least, as more willing to be a better mother.145 In Gone with the Wind Scarlett may be careless when it comes to the emotional aspect of motherhood, but she is concerned about her children’s well-being constantly: “and Wade could have nourishing food to fill out his thin cheeks and warm clothes and a governess and afterward go to the university … and not grow up barefooted and ignorant like a Cracker.”146 In fan fiction Scarlett realizes she is as detached from her children as her mother was and fears that they will be afraid of her now.147 In general, Scarlett comes to appreciate Wade and Ella more than ever, but the degree of her newly found motherly feelings for them changes from story to story; at times, she becomes a loving and devoted mother, sometimes with Rhett’s help. Other times, she finds it hard to connect with them, despite her best efforts, for a number of reasons— they are not Rhett’s, they remind her too much of their fathers (though Scarlett in fan fiction often finds traits of herself in her children), their estrangement has gone for too long, etc.148 A few times Scarlett’s estrangement from her children, especially Ella, is presented as permanent.149 Wade and Ella even resent the attention Bonnie gets, railing that after her death Rhett left.150 “Shattered Remnants” is more realistic than other fan fiction in depicting Scarlett’s relationship with her two eldest children.151 Whereas most fan fiction develops that Scarlett, after Bonnie’s death (with more or less difficulties), is finally able to appreciate Wade and Ella and bond with them, “Shattered Remnants” shows, like Scarlett, that this is no longer attainable for Scarlett. The recognition of her love for Rhett might have changed Scarlett in profound ways, but not enough to make her feel maternal instincts overnight, even though she is presented as trying to win her children’s love and, at least, attaining some sort of acceptance and tolerance of their presence that she had never displayed before. If in Gone with the Wind Rhett did not have anything nice to say about Scarlett’s maternal abilities, in fan fiction this is often brought up. Rhett has to apologize for his former accusations against Scarlett, more often than not in the light of the change in Scarlett. Rhett attributes Scarlett’s lack of warmth as a mother to her following her mother’s example, even though he sees the good in her, too: she starved herself during the war so that Wade was fed.152 Whereas in Gone with the Wind Scarlett’s poor mothering skills are attacked, fan fiction shares some of the blame with Rhett. For instance, a fan-fiction story recounts a Thanksgiving dinner during which Melanie lectures Rhett and Scarlett on parenting when they pay too much attention to Bonnie, completely ignoring Wade and Ella.153 After so many changes in setting, genre, time period, and more, the question remains of what stays at the very core of Gone with the Wind fan fiction. How can Rhett and Scarlett still be easily recognizable by readers (other than by their names) when they might be characters living in Nashville in 1963 or teenagers in 2009? Some things obviously remain — their deep (and unacknowl-

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edged, for the most part) love and misunderstandings. Rhett and Scarlett become vehicles for fan-fiction writers to put forward their own storylines, ideas about evolution (“The Dissent of Man”) or female suffrage.154 Rhett and Scarlett may be put to any use the writer fancies, regardless of place- and timebound considerations. In any case, Gone with the Wind readers are not “forced” to read the rewritings. Fan-fiction readers are aware of what they are about to read and understand the characteristics of the genre, such as racy sex — a circumstance of which they are usually informed of in the headers before the story itself. As fan-fiction writer Euripides says, “Don’t like, don’t read.”155 Fan fiction, for the most part, turns the tragic story of Gone with the Wind into a more conventional romance with a happy ending. Fan fiction is comfortable because, more often than not, readers will get a happy ending, with some exceptions.156 While most fan-fiction writers maneuver to have Rhett and Scarlett together, others continue Gone with the Wind to offer Rhett’s departure, with no reconciliation with Scarlett.157 In “On Leaving Atlanta,” though Rhett leaves Scarlett for good, longing for Europe, he doubts if Charleston will help him, if he gives a damn or not or even if he can heal without Scarlett’s help; in another story, Rhett, caught by a stray bullet upon leaving Scarlett, has Scarlett’s nightmare and dies peacefully in Scarlett’s arms.158 Rarely does Scarlett die; for instance, Rhett tells his mother, crying in her skirts, about Scarlett’s fall and death, only to discover that it was a nightmare while Scarlett still is out in the woods.159 There are only two stories in which Scarlett dies; in one, Scarlett kills herself after Rhett’s desertion and he arrives too late; thus, the author compares Rhett and Scarlett to Romeo and Juliet and Anna Karenina and Vronsky.160 In “This Year’s Love,” after Rhett finds Scarlett in New Orleans after the shipwreck, Scarlett dies while sleeping because of pregnancy-related complications.161 In the fan-fiction story “Rhett Butler’s Plea” Rhett asks fan-fiction writers to leave him in peace and stop writing because “while I admire your effort,” now “I need my rest.” Rhett’s love for Scarlett is dead and he is worn out but fan-fiction writers are as stubborn as Scarlett and the South. After all he went through, it is impossible to give his marriage a second try.162 But with fan fiction, the end is never the end, but rather “The End…,” as a fan-fiction writer very eloquently puts it.163 Rhett’s petition is far from being attended to. Currently, only at fanfiction.net, there are over six hundred Gone with the Wind fan-fiction stories and the figure increases every day. Free of any legal restriction, whether there will be more authorized or unauthorized sequels, Rhett and Scarlett will live on in fan fiction.

Notes 1. TeamButlerx3, “Hate That I Love You,” September 6, 2009, fanfiction.net/s/5051089/1/Hate_ That_I_Love_You (accessed February 1, 2010).

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2. apckrfan, “Desolation,” May 2002, phantomroses.com/apckrfan/fanfic/GWTWfic/desolation. html (accessed December 31, 2009). 3. David Lodge, “Ambiguously Ever After: Problematical Endings in English Fiction,” Working with Structuralism: Essays and Reviews on Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century Literature (Boston, London and Henley: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1981), 146. 4. David Plotz, “Luke Skywalker Is Gay?” Slate, April 14, 2000, slate.com/id/80225/pagenum/all/ (accessed January 11, 2010); quoted in Jasmina Zecevic, “Distinctively Delineated Fictional Characters That Constitute the Story Being Told: Who Are They and Do They Deserve Independent Copyright Protection?” Vanderbilt Journal of Entertainment and Tech. Law 8, no. 2 (2006): 376. 5. Henry Jenkins, Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture (New York and London: Routledge, 1992), 45. 6. Karen Hellekson and Kristina Busse, “Introduction,” in Fan Fiction and Fan Communities in the Age of the Internet, ed. Karen Hellekson and Kristina Busse, 6 –7 (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2006); Francesca Coppa, “Writing Bodies in Space: Media Fan Fiction as Theatrical Performance,” in Hellekson and Busse, Fan Fiction and Fan Communities in the Age of the Internet, 242. 7. Abigail Derecho, “Archontic Literature: A Definition, a History, and Several Theories of Fan Fiction,” in Hellekson and Busse, Fan Fiction and Fan Communities in the Age of the Internet, 63; Plotz, “Luke Skywalker Is Gay?”; Anupam Chander and Madhavi Sunder, “Everyone’s a Superhero: A Cultural Theory of ‘Mary Sue’ Fan Fiction as Fair Use,” California Law Review 95 (2007): 600; Helen Taylor, Scarlett’s Women: Gone with the Wind and Its Female Fans (London: Virago Press, 1989), 154. 8. Hellekson and Busse, “Introduction,” 13; Sharon Cumberland, “Private Uses of Cyberspace: Women, Desire, and Fan Culture,” MIT Communications Forum, January 25, 2000, web.mit.edu/comm-forum/papers/cumberland.html (accessed January 19, 2010); Sheenagh Pugh, “The Democratic Genre: Fan Fiction in a Literary Context,” Refractory 5 (2004), blogs.arts.unimelb.edu.au/refractory/2004/02/03/the-democratic-genre-fan-fiction-in-a-literary-context-sheenagh-pugh (accessed January 19, 2010). 9. Plotz, “Luke Skywalker Is Gay?” 10. Paul Levinson quoted in Kathleen Fitzpatrick, The Anxiety of Obsolescence: The American Novel in the Age of Television (Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 2006), 36. 11. Cumberland, “Private Uses of Cyberspace”; Natasha Walter, “Works in Progress,” The Guardian, October 27, 2004, guardian.co.uk/books/2004/oct/27/technology.news (accessed July 7, 2009); Chander and Sunder, “Everyone’s a Superhero,” 626. 12. Chander and Sunder, “Everyone’s a Superhero,” 600; Pugh, “The Democratic Genre.” 13. Walter, “Works in Progress”; Chander and Sunder, “Everyone’s a Superhero,” 600; John Jurgensen, “Rewriting the Rules of Fiction,” Wall Street Journal, September 16, 2006, online.wsj.com/ public/article/SB115836001321164886-GZsZGW_ngbeAjqwMADJDX2w0frg_20070916.html# (accessed January 12, 2010); Pugh, “The Democratic Genre”; Eleanor Robinson, “Once Upon a Time … A Happy Ending for the Unauthorised Sequel?” The New Zealand Law e-Journal 4 (2006); 12–13. 14. Pugh, “The Democratic Genre.” 15. Cecilia Ogbu, “I Put Up a Website about My Favorite Show and All I Got Was This Lousy Cease-and-Desist Letter: The Intersection of Fan Sites, Internet Culture, and Copyright Owners,” Southern California Interdisciplinary Law Journal 12 (2003): 308; Catherine Driscoll, “One True Pairing: The Romance of Pornography and the Pornography of Romance” in Hellekson and Busse, Fan Fiction and Fan Communities in the Age of the Internet, 85; Walter, “Works in Progress.” 16. Pugh, “The Democratic Genre”; Jeffrey D. Grossett, “The Wind Done Gone: Transforming Tara into a Plantation Parody,” Case Western Reserve Law Review 52, no. 4 (2002): 1127. 17. Kathleen Glancy, “What Happened Next? Or the Many Husbands of Georgiana Darcy,” Persuasions 11 (1989), jasna.org/persuasions/printed/number11/glancy.htm (accessed December 4, 2009); M. Carmen Gomez-Galisteo, “A Damsel in Distress: Jane Austen’s Emma and Clueless,” unpublished paper delivered at the 1st ASYRAS Conference, Salamanca (Spain), October 1–3, 2009. 18. apckrfan, “Gone with the Wind Retold,” February 2000, phantomroses.com/apckrfan/fanfic/ GWTWfic/fullstory.html (accessed December 29, 2009); Sera dy Relandrant, “Colors of the Wind,” October 9, 2009, fanfiction.net/s/5126782/1/Colors_of_the_Wind (accessed January 25, 2010). 19. Jenkins, Textual Poachers, 48; Jurgensen, “Rewriting the Rules of Fiction”; Plotz, “Luke Skywalker Is Gay?”; TeamButlerx3, “Something’s About to Happen,” November 10, 2009, fanfiction. net/s/5464948/1/Somethings_About_To_Happen (accessed February 1, 2010); TeamButlerx3, “Hate

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That I Love You”; apckrfan, “Midnight Whisperer,” June 2005, phantomroses.com/apckrfan/fanfic/ GWTWfic/midnightwhisperer.html (accessed December 31, 2009). 20. TeamButlerx3, “Don’t You Dare Drive Me Crazy,” November 26, 2009, fanfiction.net/s/ 5538256/1/Dont_You_Dare_Drive_Me_Crazy (accessed February 1, 2010); TeamButlerx3, “Right by Your Side,” October 15, 2009, fanfiction.net/s/5445261/1/Right_By_Your_Side (accessed February 1, 2010); TeamButlerx3, “Cullens Gone Southern,” October 17, 2009, fanfiction.net/s/5386182/1/Cullens _Gone_Southern (accessed December 18, 2009); rubeanddodo, “Uncle,” January 28, 2010, fanfiction. net/s/5701948/1/Uncle (accessed March 1, 2010); Mrs.ScarlettButler, “Kiss Me, Rhett,” July 27, 2009, fanfiction.net/s/5253301/1/Kiss_me_Rhett (accessed January 21, 2010); apckrfan, “A Letter to Scarlett,” May 2002, phantomroses.com/apckrfan/fanfic/GWTWfic/KillingAshley.html (accessed December 31, 2009); Merovia, “On Returning to Atlanta,” January 21, 2009, fanfiction.net/s/4809554/1/Ficathon_On_Returning_to_Atlanta (accessed March 5, 2010); MuchTooHighACost, “Later On, We’ll Conspire,” September 7, 2009, fanfiction.net/s/5361853/1/Later_On_Well_Conspire (accessed February 4, 2010); Scarlett Jaimie, “A Ring of Fire,” December 24, 2009, fanfiction.net/s/5607469/1/A_Ring_ of_Fire (accessed March 8, 2010); Scarlett Jaimie, “Clay,” December 12, 2009, fanfiction.net/s/ 5575341/1/Clay (accessed February 18, 2010); PrincessAlica, “Gura slan an scealai,” January 8, 2010, fanfiction.net/s/4713683/1/Gura_slan_an_scealai (accessed February 15, 2010). 21. CCgwtw, “Nothing but a Whisper,” July 9, 2009, fanfiction.net/s/4945281/1/Nothing_But_ a_Whisper (accessed February 17, 2010). 22. TeamButlerx3, “No Disgrace,” September 27, 2009, fanfiction.net/s/5428007/1/Cold_As_You (accessed February 1, 2010); SassyAni, “The Bright Shining World,” November 21, 2008, fanfiction. net/s/4668354/1/The_Bright_Shining_World (accessed February 19, 2010); apckrfan, “A Chance Encounter,” January 2002, phantomroses.com/apckrfan/fanfic/GWTWfic/gwtwnyfull.html (accessed January 25, 2010); SW, “GWTW: The Second Wind,” swfics.50megs.com/tsw.html (accessed January 12, 2010). 23. SW, “GWTW: The Second Wind”; apckrfan, “A Chance Encounter”; SassyAni, “The Bright Shining World”; Mrs.ScarlettButler, “Against All Odds,” May 4, 2006, fanfiction.net/s/2899084/1/ Against_All_Odds (accessed February 15, 2010); apckrfan, “Gone with the Wind Retold”; apckrfan, “The Next Morning,” February 2000, phantomroses.com/apckrfan/fanfic/GWTWfic/nextmorning .html (accessed December 18, 2009); Grossett, “TWDG: Transforming Tara,” 1113. 24. Hellekson and Busse, “Introduction,” 11. 25. the-reverie, “First Encounters,” January 31, 2010, fanfiction.net/s/5708910/1/First_Encounters (accessed March 1, 2010); The Pixess, “Keeping the Moon,” June 9, 2007, fanfiction.net/s/3584553/1/ Keeping_the_Moon (accessed February 19, 2010); MuchTooHighACost, “Later On, We’ll Conspire.” 26. gypsymuse, “A Brazen Combination,” September 13, 2006, fanfiction.net/s/3152364/1/A_ Brazen_Combination (accessed February 18, 2010); apckrfan, “All of Atlanta Turns Out,” March 2000, phantomroses.com/apckrfan/fanfic/GWTWfic/allofatlanta.html (accessed December 18, 2009); DreamGWTW, “These Things I’ll Never Say,” November 16, 2009, fanfiction.net/s/5288613 /1/These_Things_Ill_Never_Say (accessed February 4, 2010); apckrfan, “The Next Morning”; isolabella, “Christmas in Atlanta,” January 10, 2010, fanfiction.net/s/5569908/1/Christmas_in_Atlanta (accessed February 4, 2010); Mrs.ScarlettButler, “Amends,” June 8, 2009, fanfiction.net/s/4022875/1/Amends (accessed January 21, 2010). 27. samiam004, “Every End Has a Beginning,” February 13, 2010, fanfiction.net/s/5743783/1/ Every_End_Has_A_Beginning (accessed February 19, 2010); Streetxspirit, “Twilight,” June 11, 2006, fanfiction.net/s/2985110/1/Twilight (accessed June 25, 2010); Mrs.ScarlettButler, “Kiss Me,” July 11, 2009, fanfiction.net/s/5208923/1/Kiss_Me (accessed January 21, 2010); Mrs.ScarlettButler, “Never Gonna Give You Up Never Gonna Let You Go,” January 26, 2008, fanfiction.net/s/2843866/1/ Never_Gonna_Give_You_Up_Never_Gonna_Let_You_Go (accessed January 21, 2010); Mrs.ScarlettButler, “A Glimmer of Hope,” January 11, 2008, fanfiction.net/s/2581225/1/A_Glimmer_of_Hope (accessed January 21, 2010); TeamButlerx3, “Mr. Winter,” October 7, 2009, fanfiction.net/s/5428 304/1/Mr_Winter (accessed February 1, 2010); Mrs.ScarlettButler, “Honesty for Once,” August 24, 2005, fanfiction.net/s/2549342/1/Honesty_For_Once (accessed January 21, 2010); Sohhkb, “Gravity,” August 27, 2010, fanfiction.net/s/5335539/1/Gravity (accessed March 8, 2010); TeamButlerx3, “Me Plus You,” October 11, 2009, fanfiction.net/s/5436388/1/Me_Plus_You (accessed February 15, 2010); Hellekson and Busse, “Introduction,” 11; PrincessAlica, “Rhett and Anne,” May 11, 2009, fanfiction. net/s/4882671/1/RHett_and_Anne (accessed February 15, 2010). 28. apckrfan, “Gone with the Wind Retold”; PrincessAlica, “Gura slan an scealai”; spottedhorse, “Proud Flesh,” fanfiction.net/s/4885177/2/Proud_Flesh (accessed February 18, 2010); Mrs.Scarlet

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Butler, “Honesty for Once”; Merovia, “Shattered Remnants,” July 14, 2009, fanfiction.net/s/4556573/ 1/Shattered_Remnants (accessed February 17, 2010); spottedhorse, “Heaven and Hell,” August 21, 2009, fanfiction.net/s/5319710/1/Heaven_and_Hell (accessed February 4, 2010); Kelly Melly, “Requiem: Pour La Petit Mort,” June 3, 2010, fanfiction.net/s/6020431/1/Requiem_Pour_La_Petit_Mort (accessed June 17, 2010); SassyAni, “The Bright Shining World”; callafallon, “The Course of True Love,” August 22, 2009, fanfiction.net/s/5319786/1/The_Course_of_True_Love (accessed March 8, 2010); Capt Scarlett, “Astray,” December 30, 2008, fanfiction.net/s/4416794/1/Astray (accessed January 12, 2010); PrincessAlica, “The Night Before Tomorrow,” December 8, 2008, fanfiction.net/s/4543547/1/The_ Night_Before_Tomorrow (accessed April 7, 2010); MuchTooHighACost, “Surrender,” September 19, 2009, fanfiction.net/s/5388284/1/Surrender (accessed February 18, 2010); LadyPanther, “Love or Lust?” June 9, 2007, fanfiction.net/s/3584117/1/Love_or_Lust (accessed February 18, 2010); SassyAni, “Possession,” February 8, 2009, fanfiction.net/s/4849767/1/Possession (accessed February 19, 2010); marthasville, “The Edge of Victory,” July 13, 2009, fanfiction.net/s/5100775/1/THE_EDGE_OF_VICTORY (accessed February 3, 2010). 29. Driscoll, “One True Pairing,” 85 –86; apckrfan, “Midnight Whisperer.” 30. apckrfan, “All of Atlanta Turns Out”; marthasville, “The Edge of Victory”; apckrfan, “The Next Morning.” 31. PrincessAlica, “Rhett and Scarlett,” August 3, 2009, fanfiction.net/s/4710909/1/Rhett_and_ Scarlett (accessed February 15, 2010); PrincessAlica, “The Life of Frank and Scarlett,” January 9, 2009, fanfiction.net/s/4707990/2/The_Life_of_Frank_and_Scarlett (accessed February 15, 2010); PrincessAlica, “Charles And Scarlett’s Life Together,” fanfiction.net/s/4711587/1/Charles_and_Scarletts_Life _Together (accessed February 4, 2010). 32. Ellie, “Another Day,” mademoiselle.50megs.com/anotherday.txt (accessed December 18, 2009); Myra2003, “Love in Tara,” August 6, 2007, fanfiction.net/s/2197437/1/Love_In_Tara (accessed February 17, 2010); apckrfan, “A Letter from Wade,” May 2002, phantomroses.com/apckrfan/ fanfic/GWTWfic/wadesletterfull.html (accessed January 26, 2010); StreetxSpirit, “Reflections,” June 30, 2006, fanfiction.net/s/2941646/1/Reflections (accessed February 18, 2010); Scarlett Jaimie, “Clay.” 33. apckrfan, “Worth $300?” August 2000, phantomroses.com/apckrfan/fanfic/GWTWfic/jailindex.html (accessed December 30, 2009). 34. Merovia, “Rhett Butler’s Plea,” August 27, 2009, fanfiction.net/s/5334967/1/Rhett_Butler_Plea (accessed March 5, 2010). 35. Random-Battlecry, “As Lucifer,” October 4, 2009, fanfiction.net/s/5421647/1/As_Lucifer (accessed February 4, 2010); Merovia, “The Beginning of a Great Adventure,” June 7, 2009, fan fiction.net/s/5119440/1/The_Beginning_of_A_Great_Adventure (accessed March 5, 2010); SassyAni, “Possession.” 36. apckrfan, “Gone with the Wind Retold”; Ellie, “The Ghost of Hope,” mademoiselle.50mgs. com/ghostofhope.txt (accessed December 18, 2009); SW, “GWTW: To Love Again,” swfics.50megs. com/TLA.html (accessed January 12, 2010); PrincessAlica, “Rhett and Anne.” 37. apckrfan, “Reconnecting at a Funeral,” March 2007, phantomroses.com/apckrfan/fanfic/ GWTWfic/reconnectingatafuneral.html (accessed December 18, 2009). 38. apckrfan, “All of Atlanta Turns Out”; submit guess, “Betwixt Her Lips and Mine,” September 28, 2009, fanfiction.net/s/5408565/1/Betwixt_Her_Lips_and_Mine (accessed February 18, 2010); Spottedhorse, “Proud Flesh.” 39. Raicheal Emerald, “Gone with the Kid,” July 25, 2009, fanfiction.net/s/3344266/1/Gone_With_ the_Kid (accessed March 8, 2010); apckrfan, “Gone with the Wind Retold.” 40. TeamButlerx3, “Hate that I Love You”; StreetxSpirit, “Reflections”; djeanne, “Rhett,” February 2, 2009, fanfiction.net/s/3989048/1/Rhett (accessed February 19, 2010); spottedhorse, “Heaven and Hell.” 41. CaptScarlett, “The Great Imitator,” May 5, 2009, fanfiction.net/s/5040829/1/The_Great_Imitator (accessed January 20, 2010). 42. apckrfan, “All of Atlanta Turns Out”; apckrfan, “Worth $300?” 43. Margaret Mitchell, Gone with the Wind, special commemorative 60th-anniversary edition (New York: Warner Books, 1999), chapter XLV. 44. The Pixess, “Keeping the Moon”; apckrfan, “Gone with the Wind Retold”; apckrfan, “A Letter from Wade”; apckrfan, “The Next Generation,” July 2002, phantomroses.com/apckrfan/fanfic/GWTW fic/gwtw2002index.html (accessed December 29, 2009); spottedhorse, “Proud Flesh”; Raicheal Emerald, “Gone With the Kid”; apckrfan, “Worth $300?” Catherine Chen, “Something of the Prostitute in All Gallant Women,” March 1, 2009, fanfiction.net/s/4896070/1/Something_of_the_Prostitute_in_All_Gallant_Women (accessed April 7, 2010).

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45. Hellekson and Busse, “Introduction,” 10. 46. gypsymuse, “A Brazen Combination.” 47. Euripides, “Rome, Paris, London,” November 6, 2006, fanfiction.net/s/3232188/1/Rome_Paris _London (accessed January 21, 2010). 48. pinklotus, “The Ubiquitous Mr. Wilkes,” February 21, 2009, fanfiction.net/s/4879957/1/The_ Ubiquitous_Mr_Wilkes (accessed February 19, 2010). 49. Euripides, “Darkened Eyes,” October 17, 2006, fanfiction.net/s/3202612/1/Darkened_Eyes (accessed January 21, 2010). 50. Halrloprillalar, “Somebody’s Darling,” March 1, 2004, prillalar.com/fic/text/darling.txt (accessed December 18, 2009). 51. ArtemisMisteriosa, “A Drink and a Secret,” June 2, 2010, fanfiction.net/s/6018472/1/A_drink_ and_a_secret (accessed June 17, 2010). 52. apckrfan, “Reconnecting at a Funeral.” 53. CaptScarlett, “Astray”; Merovia, “Shattered Remnants”; Ellie, “Another Day.” 54. CaptScarlett, “Astray.” 55. spottedhorse, “Aftermath,” October 13, 2007, fanfiction.net/s/3827114/1/Aftermath (accessed May 18, 2010); PrincessAlica, “Gura slan an scealai.” 56. PrincessAlica, “Gura slan an scealai”; isolabella, “Threshold,” February 25, 2010, fanfiction. net/s/5774670/1/Threshold (accessed February 26, 2010); JESSEK, “One Last Glance,” August 16, 2009, fanfiction.net/s/5306950/1/One_Last_Glance (accessed February 4, 2010); Cornorama, “This Year’s Love,” March 9, 2009, fanfiction.net/s/3359774/1/This_Years_Love (accessed February 19, 2010); Mrs.ScarlettButler, “Your Heart Will Lead You,” August 31, 2005, fanfiction.net/s/2559929/1/ Your_Heart_Will_Lead_You (accessed January 21, 2010); TeamButlerx3, “Hate that I Love You.” 57. PrincessAlica, “Returning,” May 27, 2010, fanfiction.net/s/6002132/1 (accessed May 28, 2010). 58. marthasville, “The Edge of Victory”; Mitchell, GWTW, chapter XVI. 59. isolabella, “Threshold.” 60. Cornorama, “This Year’s Love”; isolabella, “Threshold.” 61. spottedhorse, “Aftermath”; Raicheal Emerald, “Butterfly Cry,” December 13, 2009, fanfiction. net/s/5353033/1/Butterfly_Cry (accessed March 8, 2010); Sakuralux, “If Thy Right Eye Offend Thee,” March 2, 2010, fanfiction.net/s/5786912/1/If_Thy_Right_Eye_Offend_Thee (accessed March 8, 2010); djeanne, “Rhett.” 62. StarkRavinMMAD, “After Ballyhara,” January 7, 2010, fanfiction.net/s/5048472/1/After_Ballyhara (accessed February 15, 2010); isolabella, “Threshold”; PrincessAlica, “Gura slan an scealai”; spottedhorse, “Proud Flesh”; Writingtiger, “None That Can Touch Her,” July 10, 2006, fanfiction. net/s/3036758/1/None_That_Can_Touch_Her (accessed June 25, 2010); Cornorama, “This Year’s Love”; Mrs.ScarlettButler, “A Unexpected Visit,” August 15, 2005, fanfiction.net/s/2535296/1/A_Unexpected_Visit (accessed January 21, 2010); Mrs.ScarlettButler, “Your Heart Will Lead You.” 63. Margot Morgan, “Scarlett O’Hara Returns from Hollywood: Correcting the Misinterpretations of Mitchell’s Political Novel, Gone with the Wind”; paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Political Science Association, Marriott, Loews, Philadelphia, and the Pennsylvania Convention Center, Philadelphia, PA, August 31, 2006, allacademic.com/meta/p152591_index.html (accessed February 2, 2010). 64. greencyanide, “Seven Years Later,” February 12, 2010, fanfiction.net/s/5691442/1/Seven_Years_ Later (accessed February 3, 2010). 65. Girl-In-Colour, “Chains,” July 19, 2009, fanfiction.net/s/5230228/1/Chains (accessed March 17, 2010). 66. M. Carmen Gomez-Galisteo, “La verdad está dentro de estas páginas: Las novelas de Expediente X y los usos de la literatura de ciencia ficción,” in Ensayos sobre literatura fantástica y ciencia ficción, ed. Teresa López Pellisa and Fernando Ángel Moreno (Madrid: Servicio de Publicaciones Universidad Carlos III, 2009), 531–542; Jane Austen and Seth Grahame-Smith, Pride and Prejudice and Zombies (Philadelphia: Quirk Books, 2009); Joan the English Chick, “Beautiful Dreamer. Part 2: Southern Comfort,” November 24, 1997, englishchick.com/fic/fanfic/gwtw.htm (accessed January 12, 2010); apckrfan, “Family Remains,” March 2007, phantomroses.com/apckrfan/fanfic/GWTWfic/familyremains.html (accessed December 18, 2009). 67. TeamButlerx3, “Cullens Gone Southern.” 68. Sera dy Relandrant, “Camaraderie,” August 30, 2009, fanfiction.net/s/5342458/1/Camaraderie (accessed January 25, 2010); Sera dy Relandrant, “Striptease,” October 11, 2009, fanfiction.net/s/54347 53/1/Striptease (accessed January 25, 2010); Sera dy Relandrant, “Green Eyed Flirt,” June 20, 2009,

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fanfiction.net/s/5152179/1/Green_Eyed_Flirt (accessed December 18, 2009); Pimpernel Princess, “The Queen of Hearts,” August 31, 2009, fanfiction.net/s/5331563/1/The_Queen_of_Hearts (accessed March 17, 2010). 69. CCgwtw, “Nothing but a Whisper”; Cornorama, “This Year’s Love”; Myra2003, “Love in Tara.” 70. Angela Carter, “The Belle as Businessperson,” in Shaking a Leg: Journalism and Writings (London: Chatto & Windus, 1997), 379. 71. Mary Anne Fitzpatrick and Jeff Winke, “You Always Hurt the One You Love: Strategies and Tactics in Interpersonal Conflict,” Communication Quarterly 27, no. 1 (1979): 5, 7, 10. 72. spottedhorse, “Proud Flesh”; spottedhorse, “Heaven and Hell”; CCgwtw, “Nothing but a Whisper”; Mrs.ScarlettButler, “After Gone with the Wind,” August 16, 2005, fanfiction.net/s/2536990/ 1/After_Gone_With_The_Wind (accessed January 21, 2010); SW, “GWTW: Opening Your Eyes,” swfics.50megs.com/OYE.html (accessed January 12, 2010). 73. Ellie, “Another Day”; Myra2003, “Love in Tara”; Mrs.ScarlettButler, “After Gone with the Wind”; apckrfan, “Gone with the Wind Retold”; Mrs.ScarlettButler, “Land of Confusion,” September 19, 2006, fanfiction.net/s/2941645/1/Land_of_Confusion (accessed January 21, 2010); Cornorama, “This Year’s Love.” 74. isolabella, “Christmas in Atlanta”; DreamGWTW, “These Things I’ll Never Say”; Merovia, “Shattered Remnants.” 75. Mrs.ScarlettButler, “A Glimmer of Hope.” 76. MuchTooHighACost, “Independence,” July 8, 2009, fanfiction.net/s/5200621/1/Independence (accessed June 28, 2010); Raicheal Emerald, “Butterfly Cry”; Merovia, “Rhett’s Butler Plea”; apckrfan, “A Letter from Wade”; aspengold, “Always Scarlett.” 77. apckrfan, “All of Atlanta Turns Out”; Ellie, “The Ghost of Hope”; CCgwtw, “Nothing but a Whisper.” 78. Ellie, “Another Day”; apckrfan, “Reconnecting at a Funeral.” 79. Scarlett Jaimie, “Shiver My Timbers,” August 30, 2009, fanfiction.net/s/5296056/1/Shiver _my_Timbers (accessed May 18, 2010); apckrfan, “All of Atlanta Turns Out”; Ellie, “Another Day”; Ellie, “The Ghost of Hope.” 80. apckrfan, “All of Atlanta Turns Out”; apckrfan, “The Next Morning”; Myra2003, “Love in Tara.” 81. Merovia, “Shattered Remnants”; Mrs.ScarlettButler, “A Glimmer of Hope”; Molly Haskell, Frankly, My Dear: Gone with the Wind Revisited (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2009), 62; Mrs. ScarlettButler, “A Gentle Wind,” January 23, 2006, fanfiction.net/s/2713185/1/A_Gentle_Wind (accessed January 21, 2010). 82. Mitchell, GWTW, chapter III; greencyanide, “Of Wedding Days and Tears,” February 10, 2010, fanfiction.net/s/5735568/1/Of_Wedding_Days_and_Tears (accessed February 15, 2010); jalf1018, “Quand J’etais Jeune,” December 25, 2009, fanfiction.net/s/5611599/1/Quand_Jetais_Jeune (accessed February 4, 2010). 83. greencyanide, “The Night He Left,” February 14, 2010, fanfiction.net/s/5745220/1/The_ Night_He_Left (accessed February 15, 2010); djeanne, “Rhett”; Merovia, “On Returning to Atlanta”; Mrs.ScarlettButler, “After Gone with the Wind”; apckrfan, “Reconnecting at a Funeral”; TeamButlerx3, “Lovedrunk,” December 22, 2009, fanfiction.net/s/5601946/1/Lovedrunk (accessed February 4, 2010); CaptScarlett, “White Flag,” June 18, 2009, fanfiction.net/s/5147282/1/White_Flag (accessed January 20, 2010); apckrfan, “The More Things Change,” February 2008, phantomroses .com/apckr fan/fanfic/GWTWfic/morethingschange.html (accessed December 31, 2009); isolabella, “Christmas in Atlanta.” 84. Merovia, “Shattered Remnants.” 85. PrincessAlica, “The Night Before Tomorrow”; xhearyoume, “Closure,” October 18, 2009, fanfiction.net/s/5452012/1/Closure (accessed March 3, 2010); djeanne, “Rhett.” 86. CaptScarlett, “Unsinkable,” October 28, 2008, fanfiction.net/s/4622486/1/Unsinkable (accessed January 20, 2010); Scarlett Jaimie, “Clay”; CaptScarlett, “Road Trippin,’” February 25, 2009, fan fiction.net/s/4884424/1/Road_Trippin (accessed January 20, 2010). 87. Mitchell, GWTW, chapter II. 88. AnnaSmiles95, “Rhett’s Return” October 18, 2009, fanfiction.net/s/5348894/1/Rhetts_Return (accessed February 4, 2010); Streetxspirit, “Twilight”; Mrs.ScarlettButler, “Against All Odds”; Scarlett Jaimie, “Shiver My Timbers”; djeanne, “Rhett”; DreamGWTW, “These Things I’ll Never Say”; TeamButlerx3, “Me Plus You”; Mrs.ScarlettButler, “After Gone with the Wind”; Ellie, “The Right Decision”; apckrfan, “Gone with the Wind Retold”; CCgwtw, “Nothing but a Whisper”; Kitty Cat O’Hara, “The

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Scarlett Letter,” June 13, 2007, fanfiction.net/s/3592101/1/The_Scarlett_Letter (accessed February 19, 2010). 89. apckrfan, “A Letter to Scarlett.” 90. apckrfan, “Gone with the Wind Retold”; DreamGWTW, “These Things I’ll Never Say”; apckrfan, “The Next Generation.” 91. CaptScarlett, “Woolgathering,” August 16, 2009, fanfiction.net/s/5306798/1/Woolgathering (accessed January 20, 2010); gypsymuse, “A Brazen Combination”; SW, “GWTW: Opening Your Eyes”; apckrfan, “Worth $300?” 92. Mrs.ScarlettButler, “Never Gonna Give You Up Never Gonna Let You Go”; Girl-In-Colour, “Chains.” 93. PrincessAlica, “Rhett and Anne.” 94. CCgwtw, “Nothing but a Whisper.” 95. PrincessAlica, “Falling in Love,” August 12, 2009, fanfiction.net/s/5296308/1/Falling_in_Love (accessed February 15, 2010); Girl-In-Colour, “Chains.” 96. DreamGWTW, “These Things I’ll Never Say”; Mrs.ScarlettButler, “A Glimmer of Hope”; apckrfan, “The Next Generation”; Milesquizine, “Scarlett’s Secret,” October 13, 2009, fanfiction.net/ s/5440944/1/Scarletts_Secret (accessed February 4, 2010); Myra2003, “Love in Tara.” 97. DreamGWTW, “These Things I’ll Never Say”; samiam004, “Every End Has a Beginning.” 98. spottedhorse, “Heaven and Hell”; apckrfan, “Gone with the Wind Retold”; Mrs.ScarlettButler, “After Gone with the Wind”; apckrfan, “And the Bride Wore White,” October 2004, phantomroses. com/apckrfan/fanfic/GWTWfic/brideworewhite.html (accessed December 31, 2009); apckrfan, “A Chance Encounter”; SW, “GWTW: To Love Again”; LadyShiva17, “Good Night, My Dear,” May 6, 2010, fanfiction.net/s/5949970/1/Good_Night_My_Dear (accessed May 20, 2010). 99. rubeanddodo, “Uncle.” 100. Ieyre, “The Ironic Byronic Book Club,” May 2, 2009, fanfiction.net/s/5034353/1/The_Ironic_ Byronic_Book_Club (accessed June 29, 2010); Darlene Ciraulo, “The Old and New South: Shakespeare in Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind,” Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 1, no. 1 (2005), borrowers.uga.edu/cocoon/borrowers/pdf?id=78141º8 (accessed April 12, 2010); PrincessAlica, “European Honeymoon,” June 10, 2010, fanfiction.net/s/6040026/1/ (accessed June 11, 2010). 101. Amanda Adams, “‘Painfully Southern’: Gone with the Wind, the Agrarians, and the Battle for the New South,” Southern Literary Journal 40, no. 1 (2007): 67. 102. DreamGWTW, “These Things I’ll Never Say”; milesquizine, “Scarlett’s Secret”; Raicheal Emerald, “Gone With the Kid.” 103. TeamButlerx3, “What Is This Feeling Taking Over?” November 23, 2009, fanfiction.net /s/5136535/1/What_Is_This_Feeling_Taking_Over (accessed February 1, 2010); Scarlett Jaimie, “A Ring of Fire.” 104. TeamButlerx3, “Something’s About to Happen”; MuchTooHighACost, “Ghost Stories,” August 22, 2009, fanfiction.net/s/5323513/1/Ghost_Stories (accessed February 4, 2010). 105. Mitchell, GWTW, chapter XXIV. 106. apckrfan, “Gone with the Wind Retold”; Myra2003, “Love in Tara.” 107. Streetxspirit, “Reflections”; Raicheal Emerald, “Gone with the Kid.” 108. AnnaSmiles95, “Safety,” August 31, 2009, fanfiction.net/s/5296941/1/Safety (accessed February 4, 2010). 109. spottedhorse, “Aftermath.” 110. StreetxSpirit, “Reflections.” 111. apckrfan, “Gone with the Wind Retold.” 112. Mrs.ScarlettButler, “A Glimmer of Hope”; DreamGWTW, “These Things I’ll Never Say”; Myra2003, “Love in Tara.” 113. Sera dy Relandrant, “Green Eyed Flirt”; SW, “GWTW: Opening Your Eyes”; CaptScarlett, “Astray”; djeanne, “Rhett”; Mrs.ScarlettButler, “Never Gonna Give You Up Never Gonna Let You Go”; apckrfan, “Gone with the Wind Retold”; Mrs.ScarlettButler, “A Gentle Wind”; Mrs.ScarlettButler, “A Glimmer of Hope”; SW, “GWTW: To Love Again”; CaptScarlett, “Astray”; Mrs.ScarlettButler, “After Gone with the Wind”; Myra2003, “Love in Tara”; apckrfan, “Worth $300?” apckrfan, “A Letter to Scarlett”; apckrfan, “A Chance Encounter”; Mitchell, GWTW, chapter XIII. 114. Mitchell, GWTW, chapter XXXVIII; apckrfan, “Worth $300?” 115. Anya Jabour, Scarlett’s Sisters: Young Women in the Old South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007), 142–145.

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116. Jabour, Scarlett’s Sisters, 87. 117. isolabella, “Christmas in Atlanta”; djeanne, “Rhett.” 118. isolabella, “Christmas in Atlanta”; PrincessAlica, “Gura slan an scealai.” 119. SW, “GWTW: To Love Again”; Mrs.ScarlettButler, “Reaching the Unreachable,” December 15, 2007, fanfiction.net/s/3947268/1/Reaching_the_Unreachable (accessed January 21, 2010). 120. Kitty Cat O’Hara, “Someone’s Watching Over Us,” June 27, 2007, fanfiction.net/s/3205739 /5/Someones_Watching_Over_Us (accessed February 19, 2010). 121. rubeanddodo, “Uncle”; Mrs.ScarlettButler, “Kiss Me”; Sera dy Relandrant, “Colors of the Wind.” 122. Merovia, “Shattered Remnants.” 123. Iva1201, “Overheard,” January 15, 2010, fanfiction.net/s/5668201/1/Overheard (accessed January 21, 2010). 124. spottedhorse, “Proud Flesh.” 125. Iva1201, “Overheard”; spottedhorse, “Proud Flesh.” 126. SassyAni, “Possession”; Merovia, “Shattered Remnants”; Mrs.ScarlettButler, “A Glimmer of Hope”; Streetxspirit, “Twilight.” 127. Merovia, “Shattered Remnants.” 128. apckrfan, “A Letter from Wade”; TeamButlerx3, “Hate that I Love You”; greencyanide, “Seven Years Later.” 129. Merovia, “Shattered Remnants.” 130. Mrs.ScarlettButler, “A Glimmer of Hope.” 131. Mitchell, GWTW, chapter XLIX ; Richard F. Selcer, “Home Sweet Movies: From Tara to Oz and Home Again,” Journal of Popular Film and Television 18, no. 2 (1990): 61. 132. djeanne, “Rhett”; Raicheal Emerald, “Gone With the Kid”; LadyShiva17, “Good Night, My Dear”; Merovia, “Shattered Remnants”; Streetxspirit, “Twilight”; PrincessAlica, “The Night Before Tomorrow.” 133. Streetxspirit, “Twilight”; PrincessAlica, “Returning.” 134. djeanne, “Rhett.” 135. Merovia, “On Returning to Atlanta”; Mrs.ScarlettButler, “Your Heart Will Lead You”; Mrs.ScarlettButler, “After Gone with the Wind.” 136. Alexandra Ripley, Scarlett: The Sequel to Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind (London, New York, Sydney, Toronto: BCA, 1991), 576; Mrs.ScarlettButler, “Land of Confusion”; Merovia, “Shattered Remnants”; eternal rose 45, “Vulnerable,” April 25, 2008, fanfiction.net/s/3569982/2/Vulnerable (accessed February 19, 2010). 137. djeanne, “Rhett”; TeamButlerx3, “Hate That I Love You.” 138. apckrfan, “The Next Morning”; djeanne, “Rhett.” 139. callafallon, “The Course of True Love.” 140. samiam004, “Every End Has A Beginning”; Mrs.ScarlettButler, “A Glimmer of Hope”; Roland Flamini, Scarlett, Rhett, and a Cast of Thousands: The Filming of Gone with the Wind (New York: Macmillan; London: Collier Macmillan, 1975), 200. 141. Ellie, “The Ghost of Hope.” 142. DreamGWTW, “These Things I’ll Never Say.” 143. greencyanide, “Seven Years Later”; apckrfan, “A Letter from Wade.” 144. PrincessAlica, “Gura slan an scealai.” 145. Leslie A. Fiedler, “The Anti-Tom Novel and the Great Depression: Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind,” in Gone with the Wind as Book and Film, ed. Richard Harwell (1983; New York: Paragon House, 1987), 245; Anne Edwards, Road to Tara: The Life of Margaret Mitchell, Author of Gone with the Wind (1983; London: Orion, 1996), 150. 146. Mitchell, GWTW, chapter XXXIII. 147. PrincessAlica, “Gura slan an scealai.” 148. TeamButlerx3, “Hate That I Love You”; Myra2003, “Love in Tara”; Mrs.ScarlettButler, “Never Gonna Give You Up Never Gonna Let You Go”; Ellie, “The Right Decision,” mademoiselle. 50megs.com/rightdecision.txt (accessed January 12, 2010); apckrfan, “The More Things Change”; Mrs.ScarlettButler, “Land of Confusion”; Cornorama, “This Year’s Love”; Aspengold, “Always Scarlett,” May 22, 2010, fanfiction.net/s/5990528/1/Always_Scarlett (accessed May 27, 2010); djeanne, “Rhett”; Iva1201, “Overheard”; Ellie, “The Ghost of Hope”; SW, “GWTW: To Love Again”; Mrs.ScarlettButler, “Your Heart Will Lead You”; CaptScarlett, “Astray”; apckrfan, “A Letter from Wade”; Mrs.ScarlettButler, “A Gentle Wind”; apckrfan, “Desolation”; Mrs.ScarlettButler, “After Gone with

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the Wind”; Sakuralux, “A Faint Gleam of Admiration,” November 23, 2009, fanfiction.net/s/5530257/ 1/A_Faint_Gleam_of_Admiration (accessed February 15, 2010). 149. iris fibonacci, “Requiem December 8, 1941,” July 12, 2008, fanfiction.net/s/4389858/1/Requiem_December_8_1941 (accessed May 6, 2010). 150. Iva1201, “Overheard”; iris Fibonacci, “The Box,” December 20, 2009, fanfiction.net/s/5594893 /1/The_Box (accessed February 15, 2010); Raicheal Emerald, “Butterfly Cry.” 151. Merovia, “Shattered Remnants.” 152. CCgwtw, “Nothing but a Whisper.” 153. TeamButlerx3, “Don’t You Dare Drive Me Crazy.” 154. CaptScarlett, “The Dissent of Man,” October 21, 2009, fanfiction.net/s/5457580/1/The_Dissent_of_Man (accessed January 20, 2010); CCgwtw, “Nothing but a Whisper.” 155. Euripides, “Rome, Paris, London.” 156. TeamButlerx3, “Right by Your Side”; CaptScarlett, “The Great Imitator”; CaptScarlett, “Unsinkable.” 157. BlaqueCat13, “The Truth About Cats & Dogs,” March 31, 2010, fanfiction.net/s/5857915/ 1/The_Truth_About_Cats_Dogs (accessed May 27, 2010); the-reverie, “The Train,” January 31, 2010, fanfiction.net/s/5708922/1/The_Train (accessed February 15, 2010); TeamButlerx3, “Cold as You,” October 7, 2009, fanfiction.net/s/5428007/1/Cold_As_You (accessed February 1, 2010). 158. Merovia, “On Leaving Atlanta,” May 14, 2009, fanfiction.net/s/5061697/1/On_leaving_Atlanta (accessed March 5, 2010. TeamButlerx3, “Right by Your Side.” 159. CCgwtw, “Nothing but a Whisper.” 160. XxzenmasterxX, “Final Stand,” March 21, 2010, fanfiction.net/s/5807022/1/Final_Stand (accessed May 27, 2010). 161. Cornorama, “This Year’s Love.” 162. Merovia, “Rhett Butler’s Plea.” 163. SW, “GWTW: Opening Your Eyes.”

7 The Gone with the Wind Canon My book belongs to anyone who has the price, but nothing of me belongs to the public.1

Although Gone with the Wind has frequently been accused of being far too long, its fans do not seem to mind its length at all; actually, they still want more and more of Gone with the Wind, even after its “first” thousand pages.2 Margaret Mitchell soon realized that Gone with the Wind is my own creation but it has long since gotten out of my hands. It belongs apparently, not to me, but to its readers, and the number of them is greater than I have been able to comprehend.… Personal experience has shown me that the public interest centered around Gone with the Wind is a force of such magnitude that it is not to be trifled with. I do not trifle with it myself and I would not advise anyone else to trifle with it.3

While she abhorred the public interest in her private life so much that it reportedly made her regret ever having her only novel published, she also complained about how people felt entitled to use her characters illegitimately, as if they rightfully belonged to them as much as to herself. She fought hard and long during her lifetime to have her rights properly asserted and to be paid the appropriate royalties due every time her novel was put to a profit, spending a great deal of her time fighting impostors and those who were unlawfully profiting from Gone with the Wind.4 Mitchell would certainly not have welcomed the development of unauthorized works and fan fiction featuring her characters, given the fierce determination with which she went after pirate editions and adaptations. Fan-fiction writers enthusiastically declare their admiration for Mitchell, but, ironically enough, she would not have enjoyed the form that this veneration adopts at all, more probably than not joining the ranks of authors such as Anne Rice or Nora Roberts, who have publicly stated their distaste for fan fiction and whose cease-and-desist letters against fan-fiction writers have provoked some fan fiction sites, such as www.fanfiction.net, to refuse as a rule to allow the posting online of stories featuring characters from these writers’ works.5 155

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Mitchell intended Scarlett O’Hara to stand for no cause, to be a representative of no set of values, and was extremely surprised that such a ruthless character became a heroine and a role model for so many people worldwide. Scarlett has been interpreted as a proto-feminist ahead of her time, a catalyst of changes to come, with purely selfish accomplishments of hers (such as her refusal to go in mourning for three long years for a husband she did not love and to whom she was but briefly married) being interpreted as stepping stones for women’s liberation.6 Margaret Martin, who adapted Gone with the Wind as a musical that ran briefly in 2008 in London, saw Scarlett as a symbol of present-day teenage single moms who have to take care of their children on their own, very much like Martin herself did.7 Different visions and characterizations of Scarlett owe a great deal to the specific historical moment in which they were written. Scarlett continues being reinterpreted according to changing contemporary morals and values in order to make her a fitting cultural image for times (and readers) to come. Thus, twenty-first-century fan-fiction stories do not mind having a Scarlett who eagerly declares her sexual desire for her husband. Poetic license and creative freedom are two important points to take into account when dealing with the Gone with the Wind continuations, which sometimes contradict certain aspects and events in Gone with the Wind, bending or expanding them, to give their authors more room to maneuver. Fan-fiction writers are well aware that sometimes their characters behave in ways surprising or inconsistent with their original personalities (OOC — out of character). Some new events are created while others (especially Scarlett’s first two children) are altogether deleted. Do writers of continuations sometimes go too far in characterizing anew well-known characters? Some think they do, especially when it comes to slash fan fiction, which for Hunter constitutes “character rape.” Continuations create new developments which are far-fetched from the original text: Randall kills Scarlett off; she is a shadow of herself in Ripley’s novel and a simpleton in McCaig’s rendering; she dies in fan fiction, when she is not whining for Rhett’s love or turning all her attention to her husband and children, forgetting her days as a hard-hearted and greedy entrepreneur.8 The label “Civil War novel” (and determining to which novels it has been applied) is problematic. Even though Little Women is set in 1861 and the four March sisters endure the shortcomings and difficulties of the war, the novel has rarely been described as such, Young constituting an exceptional case. 9 Gone with the Wind is heralded as the Southern view of the Civil War although Mitchell claimed that hers was not a Civil War novel: “It’s about the people in the South during those times who had gumption and the people who didn’t.”10 Maybe because Gone with the Wind is antiwar, the Civil War does not loom large in the continuations of Gone with the Wind except for Rhett Butler’s People, not surprising taking into account McCaig’s reputation as a Civil War novelist. When it deals with the war, fan fiction rewrites it not in political terms but in

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more personal ones, adding romantic undertones to the military conflict : “Meeting someone is the beginning. Falling in love is the war. Trusting each other is the reconstruction. Creating an outcast is the aftermath.”11 In fan fiction, the war is largely an individual affair, only touched inasmuch as it affects private lives, especially Scarlett’s. Scarlett’s ruthlessness is mainly the result of the hardships she experiences at the end of the war in Tara, which force her, at twenty, to leave her youth behind and become the head of the family. Nineteenth-century Southern ladies similarly noticed the hardening of their hearts due to their war experiences. For instance, Sarah Morgan, author of A Confederate Girl’s Diary (which remained unpublished until 1913), wrote: This is a dreadful war, to make even the hearts of women so bitter! I hardly know myself these last few weeks. I, who have such a horror of bloodshed, consider even killing in self-defense murder, who cannot wish them [the Union soldiers] the slightest evil, whose only prayer is to have them sent back in peace to their own country — talk of killing them! For what else do I wear a pistol and carving-knife? I am afraid I will try them on the first one who says an insolent word to me. Yes, and repent for it ever after in sackcloth and ashes. Oh! if I was only a man! Then I could don the breeches, and slay them with a will! If some few Southern women were in the ranks, they could set the men an example they would not blush to follow. Pshaw! there are no women here! We are all men!12

Anne-Marie Slaughter has noted that “in her choosing between ruthlessness and defeat, Scarlett O’Hara’s brutalization is far more subtle than what happens to soldiers, but no less enduring.”13 In contrast, Scarlett in fan fiction is very much softened and the war hardships are somewhat alleviated, mainly by Rhett’s help. Because Mitchell herself was an excellent representative of the virtues and personal characteristics of the flapper, her initial characterization of Scarlett (until she goes back to Tara with Melanie, Prissy and the children in tow) “sounds very much like the flapper of the 1920s: a self-centered, hedonistic, amoral woman who uses her sexual charms to collect men. Her contemporaries regard her as ‘fast,’ and Scarlett’s low-cut gown at an afternoon barbecue was the mid-nineteenth-century equivalent of the scandalous rolled-down hose of the roaring twenties.” 14 Scarlett was a revolutionary character in American letters— a woman who does not long to be married, who does not have any maternal instinct, who puts business before her family life: “she felt little affection for the child, hide the fact though she might. She had not wanted him and she resented his coming and, now that he was here, it did not seem possible that he was hers, a part of her.”15 With statements such as “Why had God invented children, she thought savagely … useless, crying nuisances they were, always demanding care, always in the way,” Gone with the Wind was revolutionary because it did not portray motherhood as a woman’s central task in life. What is more, it challenged conventional ideals that motherhood sweetened women, much to Frank Kennedy’s distress16:

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The Wind Is Never Gone Frank, Pitty and the servants bore her outbursts with maddening kindness, attributing her bad disposition to her pregnancy, never realizing the true cause. Frank knew that pregnant women must be humored, so he put his pride in his pocket and said nothing more about her running the mills and her going about town at such a time, as no lady should do.… After the baby came, he knew she would be the same sweet, feminine girl he had courted. But in spite of everything he did to appease her, she continued to have her tantrums and often he thought she acted like one possessed.17

Whereas she was so unconventional, especially for the thirties, new versions of Scarlett are “tamer,” more home-oriented and less career-driven so that she can devote her full attention to Rhett and her children. Revolutionary traits in the original novel such as Scarlett’s abhorrence of marriage and motherhood are deleted in the continuations (except for The Wind Done Gone, where she is such a sketchily drawn character that she pretty much stays the same) and she becomes a devoted wife and mother. The radical Scarlett, who is repulsed by motherhood and would have gotten an abortion were it not for Rhett’s fierce opposition, becomes a joyful mother in Scarlett and most fan-fiction stories, her only ambition being, apparently, her child. If in Gone with the Wind she all too happily defies social conventions about the proper role of women by keeping her mills, in fan fiction she is often all too willing and happy to give up her mills or, at the very least, give Rhett control over them.18 While some fan-fiction writers are aware that Scarlett was not as conventional as we would like her to be (“the journal Katie had found was more a telling of Ella’s mother’s life and the effects it had on Ella and her brother Wade. Katie wondered if Ella had not written it as an attempt to justify some of Scarlett’s behaviors, some were questionable even by today’s progressive standards”), most of them present a milder, more domestic version of the formerly indomitable Scarlett O’Hara.19 At a time when women could not have careers, Mitchell depicted a strong woman whereas twenty-first-century fan fiction tends to portray Scarlett as embracing the pleasures of motherhood and housewifery and happily enough rejecting her business career. In Gone with the Wind, for all of Scarlett’s independence and role as deputy head of the family, eventually she is punished for this and ends up abandoned by her husband, by her best friend, by the man she has thought herself in love with for her entire adult life, and rejected by the conservative Atlanta society. One cannot be a lady without money, Rhett warned Scarlett, but businesswomen’s lot is to be socially ostracized and condemned. Those who adjust to the new, changing social order make a fortune in the process through methods proper society condemns: Rhett with his food speculation, Belle Watling with her brothel, Scarlett with her store and the mills and then marrying Rhett for his money. Rhett, though, tries to atone for his previous (mostly illegal) moneymaking schemes by pretending to have a respectable job at the bank in Gone with the Wind and later wasting his money on restoring his family’s plantation home to its old splendor in Scarlett.20 Scarlett unsexes herself in the opinion of

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Atlanta’s Old Guard with her stubbornness for working when Frank could well provide for her, a process that has been compared to Lady Macbeth’s masculinization.21 It is not only that her personal circumstances force Scarlett to work hard because she has to assume the role of household head at Tara; her business instinct leads her to work even when she does not need to and is actually expected to stay at home as Frank’s wife. The traditional female roles available to her (the Southern belle, the lady, the wife, the mother, the war widow) are too limiting for Scarlett, who eagerly embraces the masculine roles of head of the family and entrepreneur. Scarlett belongs to a literary tradition of resourceful, manipulative Southern belles, but she soon becomes dissatisfied with the downside of being a Southern belle: ensnaring a husband and becoming a dull matron. Once she realizes this, from then on, for her the Southern belle façade will become just the most effective way to achieve her goals, be it conquering more beaux than any other girl in the county in the happy antebellum days or, later on, to make business deals.22 Where literary works by male authors present women as the Other in regards to their male heroes, women’s literature emphasizes the similarities between the male hero and the female heroine. Scarlett is a masculine woman, which brings her closer to Rhett (or to her father) than to other female characters, with Rhett often mentioning that the two of them are the same. At a time when a woman’s power came in a surrogate manner via her husband’s and her only ambition should rest on religious fervor, Scarlett defies expectations. First, she becomes a masculinized woman and emasculates her second husband in the process, eventually causing his death after being attacked on her way to the mills, that is, to work. Later, although Rhett allows her to go on pursuing her business deals, she loses him because of her failure to give up her business in time to become a submissive wife.23 Far from making her novel a moralizing, cautionary tale and extracting a moral teaching out of her protagonist’s experiences, Mitchell refused to have Scarlett go through a change of heart or, at least, vow to amend her ways. Scarlett wants to win Rhett back but she does not repent. The end is “not transformation through suffering” because Scarlett does not change and remains a teenager at the core. Scarlett, “being the least analytic of people,” is basically the same person at the end of the novel: “and to the end of her days she would never be able to understand a complexity.” It is because of this that “she loved him and she wanted him and she did not understand him.”24 Rhett is not oblivious to Scarlett’s incapacity to change (and thence his departure): You’re such a child, Scarlett. A child crying for the moon. What would a child do with the moon if it got it? And what would you do with Ashley? Yes, I’m sorry for you — sorry to see you throwing away happiness with both hands and reaching out for something that would never make you happy. I’m sorry because you are such a fool you don’t know there can’t ever be happiness except when like mates like. If I were dead, if Miss Melly were dead and you had your pre-

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The Wind Is Never Gone cious honorable lover, do you think you’d be happy with him? Hell, no! You would never know him, never know what he was thinking about, never understand him any more than you understand music and poetry and books or anything that isn’t dollars and cents. Whereas, we, dear wife of my bosom, could have been perfectly happy if you had ever given us half a chance, for we are so much alike. We are both scoundrels, Scarlett, and nothing is beyond us when we want something. We could have been happy, for I loved you and I know you, Scarlett, down to your bones, in a way that Ashley could never know you. And he would despise you if he did know.… But no, you must go mooning all your life after a man you cannot understand.25

Even though it is set in the nineteenth century and largely dependent on the model posed by the Victorian novel, Gone with the Wind is not one, and it ultimately fails to provide any moral lesson. Because Scarlett does not undergo any significant change in Gone with the Wind when it comes to her inner self, Mitchell “joked about a sequel called Back with the Breeze, ‘a highly moral tract in which everyone, including Belle Watling, underwent a change of heart and character and reeked with sanctimonious dullness.’”26 Scarlett’s circumstances certainly change —from wealth to poverty and to wealth again, but she basically remains the same at her core even though Rhett hoped for her to change.27 If anything, the traits of her character that she tried to conceal from her mother, invested as she was in being a Southern lady, become more marked during the years, when, far from Ellen’s control in Atlanta, and after her death especially, she can become more herself. Scarlett’s postponing reflection and thinking of a tomorrow that never comes allow her not to suffer and, ultimately, to survive, but it is a sign of her inability to reflect on the consequences of her actions in the long run, too. Ironically enough, Scarlett, who does not care about consequences and does not think, survives, while those who think (too much) like Ashley or Rhett do not thrive or are eventually destroyed.28 Scarlett’s selfishness, her capacity to put her own needs first, is what will allow her to survive: “Dear Scarlett! You aren’t helpless. Anyone as selfish and determined as you are is never helpless. God help the Yankees if they should get you.”29 Because women in the novel are ignorant of the historical forces at work, it is men who enlighten them: if Rhett tells Scarlett about the outcome of the war, Ashley pours very similar feelings into his letters to Melanie since none of the women can really understand historical processes.30 Because those who are able to survive are the very ones who do not pay much attention to historical changes or the teachings to be extracted from all this, Scarlett, the ultimate survivor, is not to gain an awareness or capacity of analysis, as Rhett longs for. Her return to Tara, to the beginning of her life, marks her changelessness.31 If Gaillard interpreted Rhett’s leaving Scarlett as a necessary condition for Scarlett to complete her maturing process, so do the writers of the Gone with the Wind continuations, be they the authorized sequels or fan fiction. The continuations stress the growing process Scarlett undergoes once Rhett has left her.

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All these texts seem to accept Scarlett’s maturity as a fait accompli at the end of Gone with the Wind; the only thing is that it is only in the continuations that Rhett finally realizes that Scarlett has indeed changed, a change he denied at the end of Gone with the Wind. Scarlett and fan fiction share the similarity that they present a much more reflexive Scarlett, much more analytical and aware of her feelings and careful about other people’s. Meanwhile, in The Wind Done Gone Scarlett does not really change; instead, the only growing process in the novel takes place within Cynara, not Scarlett.32 Scarlett, more in the book than in the movie, is a selfish and ruthless woman, “a heroine (if you could call her that) like no other,” in the words of Molly Haskell. This has been softened in subsequent retellings. If in Wuthering Heights Catherine’s feminization runs parallel to her becoming virtually somebody else, losing all her characteristic traits, the same occurs when Scarlett becomes a devoted wife and mother.33 Womanhood is a complex notion for Mitchell, unsure as to which female model to follow.34 Scarlett, who adapts to the new social order, is punished eventually and the death of Melanie, the true Southern lady, marks the end of the novel. If ladies need money and Scarlett succeeds while the Old Guard starves (Melanie’s money comes out from Scarlett’s pocket through Ashley’s job at the mills), how can Southern womanhood possibly survive?35 Melanie is the perfect female role model but it was Scarlett who attracted the reading public’s attention, to Mitchell’s puzzlement. Isabel Paterson, who reviewed Gone with the Wind in 1936 for the New York Herald-Tribune, warned that “it’s an evil omen for society that she should be the triumphant type” and RKO turned down the cinematographic rights of Gone with the Wind because they deemed Scarlett too unsympathetic a character.36 Scarlett is a much more interesting character than Melanie because, even though Scarlett fails to reflect on her life and rather acts impulsively, Melanie is a flat character whose “code of behaviour and her outlook are inherited rather than examined, and in consequence she can neither see Scarlett’s faults nor be a moral force in her life.”37 Because Scarlett is punished and Melanie dies, Mitchell fails to provide us with a female role model appropriate for the new economic order and times. Gone with the Wind offers a very particular case of authorized sequel writing. There are several options when having more than one authorized sequel: Does the second sequel follow the changes introduced by the first one? Or does the second author discard all those changes in order to write his own story, competing with the first sequel? Or is it better to accept the changes in the first sequel and live with them? Daphne Du Maurier’s Rebecca, like Gone with the Wind, has two authorized sequels, Mrs. De Winter (1993) by Susan Hill and Rebecca’s Tale (2001) by Sally Beauman, but they form a coherent whole with the original novel, with the authorized sequels being consistent one with the other. In the case of Gone with the Wind, that McCaig rejected the changes done by Ripley has provoked the most awkward situation that the only two authorized novels present differing visions, making it highly problematical trying to estab-

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lish a Gone with the Wind canon. The problem is delimiting the canon — is it Gone with the Wind and Scarlett? Or Gone with the Wind and Rhett Butler’s People? How to reconcile the two of them? Should we accept the first sequel or does the last one, in turn, displace the first? Both are authorized but they are contradictory —can there be a bigger paradox? Even worse, why should McCaig’s and Ripley’s versions be more legitimate than those by fan-fiction writers— or, come to that, even Randall’s? Adding The Wind Done Gone to the equation makes it all even more problematical when it comes to determine what the true story is. In contrast to the limited number of authorized sequels, with fan fiction, there is not one single revision of the original text, but numberless, for fan fiction offers an ever-growing, ever-expanding version of the characters. These multitudes of interpretations of characters and canon scenes are often contradictory yet complementary to one another and the source text. Nevertheless, working with and against one another, this multitude of stories creates a larger whole of understanding a given universe. This canvas of variations is a work in progress in so far as it remains open and is constantly increasing; every new addition changes the entirety of interpretations.38

Fan fiction, also called archontic literature, is constantly expanding. With fan fiction, no text has a fixed or stable meaning, for any meaning is always subject to change, new interpretations are readily available or will be in the future.39 Fan-fiction writers, in writing multiple, alternative stories with different endings for Gone with the Wind, prove that the Gone with the Wind canon is neither one nor fixed, but that it allows for multiple rewritings and alternatives, with different options at different points along the way. Even one single fan-fiction author can write several alternative stories; for example, apckrfan has Rhett and Scarlett reunited after the end of Gone with the Wind, after Bonnie’s death, when Scarlett needs tax money for Tara, with the help of a twenty-first-century descendant, after the burning of Atlanta, after Ashley’s furlough, and even a crossover with the TV show Bones.40 “Gone with the Wind … just can’t be left with The Catcher in the Rye and To Kill a Mockingbird in the noble brotherhood of literary one-hit wonders,” complained journalist Celia Brayfield when Rhett Butler’s People was published in 2007. With the exception of works already conceived by their author as the first part of a series, novels, to be satisfying, have to come to a conclusion in which readers feel that characters have already been fully explored to the limit of their artistic possibilities.41 Endings are supposed to bring closure and put an end to themes, issues, questions and topics that have been developed throughout the extension of the narrative; as Alexander Welsh comments, “Endings are critical points for analysis in all examinations of plot; quite literally, any action is defined by its ending.”42 Every novel needs an ending but continuations deny that endings are meaningful or even that they provide closure,

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for they are open to revision, rewriting and continuation, thus denying the very idea at the core of the concept of ending: that this is the end. Instead, because of their refusal to acknowledge the validity of the original end, sequels provide, as Henry James called it, the “love of a comfortable ending.”43 Is the ending of Gone with the Wind a happy one or not? Is it a desolate or a hopeful one? It depends on whether one chooses to take Rhett’s “Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn” or Scarlett’s more optimistic “Tomorrow is another day.”44 Seemingly, given the many continuations of Gone with the Wind, it is clear that the original ending is largely unsatisfactory and far from being the only possible outcome to Rhett and Scarlett’s relationship. Historical revisionism that figured prominently in Gone with the Wind and The Wind Done Gone is absent from Scarlett, Rhett Butler’s People, and fan fiction, though some fan-fiction writers do consult historical textbooks and works so as to document their stories more accurately. The historical revisionism, the assertion of strong female roles, and the topic of survival in the face of adversity are all important themes in the original novel that have been diluted and have even gotten lost with each continuation of Gone with the Wind. McCaig’s continuation is exceptional in its focusing primarily on issues other than the love relationship between Rhett and Scarlett but, as analyzed in chapter 5, it also ends up reading as a love story. Even The Wind Done Gone, which addresses historical issues such as African American politicians, Reconstruction, miscegenation or slave families, because of Cynara and Rhett’s longterm affair, owes a great deal to the romance topic in Gone with the Wind; moreover, Randall’s work also explains what happened to Rhett and Scarlett after Bonnie died. Many possible interpretations as to what the “true” meaning of Gone with the Wind have been put forward. Mitchell probably offered the most widely reprinted one, characterizing the novel as a story of survival. The continuations of Gone with the Wind provide a good example of how a love story might overshadow the central theme (in this case, survival and gumption) in a novel. What most readers or viewers remember of Gone with the Wind is not the historical backdrop or the fight for survival, but, rather, that, in the end, Rhett abandoned Scarlett, apparently for good, with the continuations, except for McCaig’s male-centered novel, reflecting this prevalence of the romantic plot. For all of Mitchell’s insistence on the novel’s emphasis on who survives and who cannot cope with change in a moment of historical upheaval, most of its admirers have concentrated on the romance story, as evidenced by the prominent place that it occupies in Scarlett as well as in most fan-fiction stories. There is no fan fiction built on Rhett Butler’s People: this omission, rather than intentional, is due to the fact that the novel has been recently published; Scarlett, in contrast, although fan-fiction writers expand the ending or use the novel as their starting point to continue it in a different manner, has been around longer. More interesting is the case of Randall’s parody, for fan-fiction

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writers reject The Wind Done Gone altogether as part of the Gone with the Wind canon. Although one fan-fiction writer encourages readers to read it, no fanfiction story makes even a slight reference to Cynara. Subversive or revisionist as Randall’s story might be, morally and legally entitled to rewrite Gone with the Wind as she might, fans and fan-fiction writers still want the “classical” Gone with the Wind. If we are to judge by the number of fan-fiction stories, The Wind Done Gone has failed to make any impact on the Gone with the Wind readership. It is probable that Rhett Butler’s People will have an impact in the future, while it is largely unlikely that The Wind Done Gone will because of its challenging several elements in Gone with the Wind (most notably, Rhett’s love for Scarlett) that constitute the pillars of fan fiction. Racist as Gone with the Wind may be, people still prefer it to more politically correct versions. Part of the everlasting endurance of Gone with the Wind comes from the fact that each reader can find an interpretation and reading of the text fitting to his or her own tastes. Mitchell complained that people found meanings in her novel that she never intended and declared, “I wish some of them [reviewers] would actually read the book and review the book I wrote — not the book they imagine I’ve written or the book they think I should have written.”45 Often, we see in Gone with the Wind whatever we want to see. Thus, Angela Carter has problems with the glorification of the Civil War in the movie, very much in the line with Apocalypse Now, thus forgetting that Mitchell never sought to do that. For all of the remembering of the Civil War days that Mitchell liked and the fact that her novel is a testament and monument of the South during the war, her heroine did not care much for the war itself or even for remembering it: “Oh, why can’t they forget? Why can’t they look forward and not back? We were fools to fight that war. And the sooner we forget it, the better we’ll be.”46 Readers might regard a certain aspect of the book generally overlooked or considered secondary as its main topic, as Stephens Mitchell’s interpretation of Gone with the Wind reveals; for him, Gone with the Wind is not about change and survival or war and its aftermath. That’s the background. It is the story of the inheritance of a certain characteristic, that characteristic being juvenile love for some man. [Scarlett O’Hara’s] mother falls in love with her worthless cousin, who finally gets killed in a barroom. But she marries and is a faithful wife, builds up a big plantation for her husband, and dies with her worthless cousin’s name on her lips. Her daughter inherits that characteristic. She loves her village beau, too, but she can’t have him. And then, after all these things have occurred — war, pestilence, and so on — she has her hands on him and all of a sudden finds out that it is just a juvenile fantasy. And that’s the crux.47

Whereas most analyses of Gone with the Wind, including those that specifically address Scarlett’s fixation with Ashley and her inability to acknowledge her true feelings for Rhett, ignore the similarities between this and Ellen O’Hara’s failed romance; for Stephens Mitchell it is the most important element in the

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book, in his own reading. In a way, fan-fiction writers, in providing their own interpretations, are also making use of their “own” Gone with the Wind, not necessarily the same as Mitchell’s. If communism proposed a view of novels without authors, nowadays, due to capitalist editorial practices, we have sequels whose main (if not sole) value seems to lie on their being continuations, being publicized and bought for their content, not for their literary or artistic merit.48 Yet, despite the bad reputation that sequels and prequels have in critical circles, they should not be regarded as solely a way to make a quick buck, for they constitute “fundamental elements in the literary canon — as they were, indeed, in classical times,” parodies also being another step in the life of a literary text.49 The sequel reader wants to relive and re-experience the pleasure upon first reading the original work, looking for “the pleasure of repetition and nostalgia: something familiar, and something lost,” the need to hear well-known stories again.50 That is why even though the authorized sequels have (at least for the time being) put an end to Gone with the Wind, or some fans have created happy-ending continuations, there will always be more continuations to come (the majority of fan-fiction authors have written more than one story), more “new” episodes added to the Gone with the Wind chronology, and more alternative universes. The vast number of fan-fiction stories dealing with Rhett and Scarlett’s adventures make us think that, once the copyright has expired, new novels will appear revaluing, rewriting or continuing Mitchell’s work. As already mentioned, in the continuations to Gone with the Wind except for Rhett Butler’s People, the centrality of the love story between Rhett and Scarlett has taken over other aspects of the novel. Some believe that the romance plot of Gone with the Wind has sugarcoated what they regard as its true theme — the exploitation of a number of groups, including women, African Americans, and Southerners.51 Gone with the Wind has very often been critically snubbed as a romance — but is Rhett and Scarlett’s relationship really a love story? For long sections in Gone with the Wind, Rhett and Scarlett (and even Ashley and Scarlett) are separated: Rhett comes and goes during the war and Ashley is away fighting. Scarlett toils on her own in Tara, with both gone, and even when she moves back to Atlanta, married to Frank, Rhett continues appearing and disappearing whereas Ashley remains in Tara. Moreover, in contrast to Scarlett’s sheer pragmatism, “romance … emanates from the male figures rather than the female.”52 Why then do we see Gone with the Wind primarily (if not exclusively) as a love story? One of the reasons is the centrality of the love story between Rhett and Scarlett in the movie, where we hardly see Scarlett without Rhett except for the Tara segment.53 This is very different from the novel, where we are first introduced to Scarlett, who only meets Rhett very briefly during the barbecue and then Rhett disappears until he shows up in Atlanta at the bazaar, but only after a long section narrating Scarlett’s brief marriage, widowhood, mother-

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hood, her errand to Savannah and Charleston, and her subsequent return to Tara, submerged in a depression until she is sent to Aunt Pittypat Hamilton’s in Atlanta. Even after meeting Rhett for the second time (and having all of Atlanta gossip about them for their dancing at the bazaar), Rhett is constantly leaving and coming, going off to blockade escapades. While Scarlett is married to Frank, Rhett is not the constant presence that the film has, for he continues to come and go. Even once they are married, in the last section in the book, it is problematic to define Rhett and Scarlett’s relationship romantically. For once, Scarlett believes herself to be very much in love with Ashley. On the surface the Butler marriage reads like a story of unrequited love, but “it is almost entirely expressed through the imagery of slave and master.”54 Rhett and Scarlett’s relationship is from the very beginning based on power; for a number of reasons, Rhett plays the superior to Scarlett’s inferiority — he is older and wiser, he is privy to Scarlett’s biggest secret (her love for Ashley), he can read her mind (whereas she ignores his true feelings and thoughts), and he is physically stronger than she, of which we are often reminded.55 Some think that because of the profound differences between Rhett and Scarlett that Mitchell herself brought attention to, it is impossible to believe that they will eventually get together without straining one’s credulity: “the inveterate hopefuls among Mitchell fans and the best-selling sequel to the contrary, can anyone over the mental age of fifteen believe that the star-crossed lovers will ‘get together’ one day? Or that they should?” Despite Scarlett’s love declaration to Rhett at the end, it is obvious that their expectations in marriage stand at odds; Rhett’s control over Scarlett cannot but clash with her desire for her independence (while enjoying the security and protection Rhett can give her). Seen from a nineteenth-century perspective, what Rhett seeks in their marriage (a loving and submissive wife) is more realistic than Scarlett’s desire of being a strong, independent woman while enjoying the emotional and financial security net provided by a tolerant husband.56 Moreover, because in the novel we see a long section of the Butler marriage deteriorating after Bonnie’s death (while the film has Melanie’s death the very same night Rhett agrees to put an end to Bonnie’s “wake”), this makes it harder for the novel readers to believe in a happy ending than for the film viewers. Authorized sequels give readers solace and comfort in that they can be sure that nothing bad (or, at least, nothing irreparable) is going to happen to Rhett and Scarlett. In contrast to the cruelty of the Gone with the Wind ending (though most readers make it happier somewhat by believing firmly that Rhett and Scarlett will get back together sooner rather than later), because of the Trust’s tight control, we know that in Scarlett and Rhett Butler’s People, Rhett and Scarlett will be reunited and they will not die. This sharply contrasts with The Wind Done Gone, where Rhett is old and sexually unappealing and Scarlett dies disfigured by smallpox. It is the same with fan fiction, where “bad” things

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might happen to Rhett and Scarlett. Rhett and Scarlett get together in the vast majority of fan-fiction stories, with few exceptions, for most fan-fiction writers minimize the harm to Rhett and Scarlett, and have alternative versions in which everything runs much more smoothly than in Gone with the Wind.57 Anna Karenina continues with Anna already dead for nineteen chapters, but Gone with the Wind is not perceived as Scarlett-less, except for The Wind Done Gone, whose subversive character has already been mentioned. It is very telling that Scarlett does very rarely die in fan fiction; for all the misery that fan fiction often puts Scarlett through, the authors stop short of having her killed. Fan fiction does not dare to go beyond Scarlett’s death and explore the possible implications of a world without her. In the corpus of fan fiction analyzed in this book, only two fan-fiction stories, “This Year’s Love” and “Final Stand,” have Scarlett dying.58 Apart from the works analyzed in this book, there are other Gone with the Wind continuations that have had a limited circulation (and, therefore, a scarce impact on the Gone with the Wind canon). In the USSR Gone with the Wind remained banned until the end of communism because of the righteous statecontrolled list of approved readings, but that did not prevent it, once it was legally published, from becoming a best seller, as well as the starting point for many sequels. Pirate Russian sequels abound, with titles so provocative (and repetitive) as We Call Her Scarlett, The Secret of Scarlett O’Hara, The Secret of Rhett Butler, or The Last Love of Scarlett. The majority of these sequels are penned by a group of ghost writers working under the collective name of Yuliya Hilpatrik. Under current Russian copyright legislation it is unlikely that “Yuliya Hilpatrik” may be prosecuted for copyright infringement or piracy because these novels could be deemed original works on the grounds of their divergence from Gone with the Wind.59 Because in Australia Gone with the Wind no longer enjoys copyright protection, Kate Pinotti has published her own sequel to Gone with the Wind, Winds of Tara. This is really a collaborative effort, up to some extent, for it was corrected by some Windies, as Gone with the Wind fans are also called. Copyright restrictions prevent the book from being sold abroad and its publisher cannot ship orders abroad so as not to infringe Mitchell’s heirs’ still applicable copyright everywhere else.60 As already mentioned, if twentieth- and twenty-first-century continuations of Gone with the Wind owe much to the current political, historical, sociological, racial circumstances, so did Gone with the Wind, which was fraught with the anxieties of the twenties and thirties. For Seydell, “I don’t know whether Gone with the Wind is a true picture of the South of these days. But I do know that it is a true picture of the picture of those days” in the thirties.61 In a similar manner, now we have new rewritings of Gone with the Wind that largely reflect contemporary values. If Mitchell invested her Rhett with characteristics of the dark hero, in fan fiction he comes quite close to a metrosexual man, willing to express his feelings and more concerned for his partner’s sexual gratification

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than his own pleasure. McCaig, though trying to stay close to nineteenth-century American masculinity ideals, has portrayed Rhett as a man befriending an African American rather than a murderer of one so as to make him more palatable and morally acceptable to twenty-first-century post-racial America. Even more surprising, McCaig has made Rhett a man openly crying. Public attitudes towards slavery, race relations and even towards Gone with the Wind itself have greatly changed since the city happily hosted the world’s premiere of Gone with the Wind in 1939. Evidence of this is that the residents of the Tara Boulevard, in Jonesboro, Atlanta, petitioned to have the name changed to Rosa Parks Boulevard.62 Accusations of Gone with the Wind not dealing with African Americans or white lower classes have often been dismissed because Gone with the Wind does not attempt to portray the situation in the South as a whole, but only as seen and lived by a Southern belle.63 All in all, despite its intention to correct Gone with the Wind, The Wind Done Gone has not replaced it. A probable reason for this could be that “Randall’s book may be righteous, and it may have the truth on its side, but when it comes to the South, it’s always the best story that wins.”64 All together, while not making a coherent narrative, all the Gone with the Wind continuations make an increasingly expanding text, constantly growing, uncontrollable and moving simultaneously in multiple directions. It remains to be seen if Scarlett O’Hara will also go on to live in yet another authorized sequel. McCaig left Rhett and Scarlett trying to work out their new relationship only a few months after the end of Gone with the Wind. Their adventures into Scarlett’s middle age (she is only twenty-nine by the close of Rhett Butler’s People) could still be “authoritatively” covered, as McCaig himself hinted — with the Trust’s approval, we assume. That new sequels continue to be written, that old stories keep being told, but with a new outlook, does not testify to the obsoleteness of the original stories. Paradoxically, unsatisfied with the very texts they love, fan-fiction writers challenge them, reworking them for their own purposes and exploring venues left unexplored by their original creators. Fan-fiction writers defy conventional reading patterns but this does not mean that fan-fiction writers can get rid of the original text; on the contrary, that the original texts are revisited (and sometimes modernized in the process) means that they continue to have validity in the twenty-first century.65 As Mitchell realized, her novel no longer seems to belong solely to its author.66 She lost her authority over the novel because of people’s admiration and now the novel does not seem to be owned by anybody in particular, and especially not the Trust, which had to allow for the publication of The Wind Done Gone and seems to consent to fan fiction, for no cease-and-desist letters have been sent to any Gone with the Wind fan-fiction writer yet. In a way, because the Trust authorized sequels, fan-fiction writers are, if not legally, at least morally, entitled to write their own works. Fan fiction is as valuable as the print novels in helping create a Gone with the Wind canon. Whereas the Trust’s lawyers tried to downplay readers’ participation when it comes to the meaning

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of Gone with the Wind, the court decision and fan fiction have proved that the novel does not exclusively belong to them. Because “when a character is born he immediately assumes … an independence even of his own author,” Scarlett entered the public imagination long ago and, for better or worse, it is here to stay, regardless of the Trust’s interests.67

Notes 1. Margaret Mitchell quoted in Richard Harwell, “Preface,” in Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind Letters, 1936 –1949 (New York: Macmillan; London: Collier Macmillan, 1976), xxiii. 2. G. Glenwood Clark, “Review of Gone with the Wind,” William and Mary College Quarterly Historical Magazine 17, no. 1 (1937): 131. 3. Quoted in Andrew Sinclair, ed., GWTW: The Screenplay (London: Lorrimer Publishing, n.d.), 10 –12. 4. Finis Farr, Margaret Mitchell of Atlanta: The Author of Gone with the Wind (New York: William Morrow, 1965), 190 –191. 5. See the terms of service posted at www.fanfiction.net. 6. Karen Lewis, “Scarlett O’Hara: Feminist Before Her Time?” April 18, 2007, associatedcontent. com/article/207398/scarlett_o_hara_feminist_before_her.html?cat=9 (accessed April 30, 2010). 7. Shelley Emling, “Musical Gone with the Wind Explores More Than Love and War,” Cox News Service, March 26, 2008, accessatlanta.com/arts/content/arts/stories/2008/03/25/gwtw_0326.html (accessed March 27, 2008). 8. Henry Jenkins, Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture (New York and London: Routledge, 1992), 187. 9. Elizabeth Young, “A Wound of One’s Own: Louisa May Alcott’s Civil War Fiction,” American Quarterly 48, no. 3 (1996): 439 –474. 10. Quoted in Anne Edwards, Road to Tara: The Life of Margaret Mitchell, Author of Gone with the Wind (1983; London: Orion, 1996), 11. 11. TeamButlerx3, “Before Bliss,” November 8, 2009, fanfiction.net/s/5435778/1/Before_Bliss (accessed February 1, 2010). 12. Quoted in Edmund Wilson, Patriotic Gore: Studies in the Literature of the American Civil War (1962; New York and London: W.W. Norton, 1994), 264 –265. 13. Quoted in Rachel Donadio, “War: A Reader’s Guide,” New York Times, December 17, 2006, nytimes.com/2006/12/17/books/review/Donadio.t.html (accessed January 25, 2010). 14. Marian J. Morton, “‘My Dear, I Don’t Give a Damn’: Scarlett O’Hara and the Great Depression,” Frontiers 5, no. 3 (1981): 53. 15. Margaret Mitchell, Gone with the Wind, special commemorative 60th-anniversary edition (New York: Warner Books, 1999), chapter VII. 16. Mitchell, GWTW, chapter XXIV. 17. Ibid., chapter XXXVIII. 18. Harriett Hawkins, “Shared Dreams: Reproducing Gone with the Wind,” in Novel Images: Literature in Performance, ed. Peter Reynold (London and New York: Routledge, 1993), 128; Thomas H. Pauly, “Gone with the Wind and The Grapes of Wrath as Hollywood Histories of the Depression,” Journal of Popular Film 3, no. 3 (1974): 214. 19. apckrfan, “The Next Generation,” July 2002, phantomroses.com/apckrfan/fanfic/GWTW fic/gwtw2002index.html (accessed December 29, 2009). 20. Morton, “Scarlett and the Depression,” 52, 55. 21. Darlene Ciraulo, “The Old and New South: Shakespeare in Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind,” Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 1, no. 1 (2005), borrowers.uga.edu/cocoon/borrowers/pdf?id=78141º8 (accessed April 12, 2010). 22. Morton, “Scarlett and the Depression,” 54; Anne Goodwyn Jones, Tomorrow Is Another Day: The Woman Writer in the South, 1859 –1936 (1981; Baton Rouge and London: Louisiana State University Press, 1982), 341; Catherine Clinton, “Gone with the Wind,” in Past Imperfect: History According to the Movies, ed. Ted Mico, John Miller-Monzon and David Rubel (New York: Henry Holt, 1995), 135;

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Ellen Willis, “‘War!’ said Scarlett. ‘Don’t you men think about anything important?’” in Favorite Movies: Critics’ Choice (New York: Macmillan, 1973), 192. 23. Harriett Hawkins, Classics and Trash: Traditions and Taboos in High Literature and Popular Modern Genres (Toronto and Buffalo: University of Toronto Press, 1990), 162–163; Daniell in Anna T. Hicks, “Scarlett Leads the Schoolhouse: Does Being Southern Matter?” 2000, Advancing Women, advancingwomen.com/awl/summer2000/m1_hicks.html (accessed January 27, 2010); Morton, “Scarlett and the Depression,” 54; Willis, “‘War!’ said Scarlett,” 194. 24. Mitchell, GWTW, chapter II; James Boat-wright, “Reconsideration: Totin’ de Weery Load,” in Gone with the Wind as Book and Film, ed. Richard Harwell (1983; New York: Paragon House, 1987), 217; Molly Haskell, Frankly, My Dear: Gone with the Wind Revisited (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2009), 140, xiii, 227. 25. Mitchell, GWTW, chapter LIV. 26. Taylor, Scarlett’s Women, 141. 27. Margot Morgan, “Scarlett O’Hara Returns from Hollywood: Correcting the Misinterpretations of Mitchell’s Political Novel, Gone with the Wind,” paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Political Science Association, Marriott, Loews, Philadelphia, and the Pennsylvania Convention Center, Philadelphia, PA. August 31, 2006, allacademic.com/meta/p152591_index.html (accessed February 2, 2010). 28. Morgan, “Scarlett Returns.” 29. Mitchell, GWTW, chapter XXIII. 30. Jones, Tomorrow Is Another Day, 348. 31. Morgan, “Scarlett Returns.” 32. Nicole Argall, “A Rib from My Chest: Cynara’s Journey as an Africana Womanista,” CLA Journal 47, no. 2 (2003): 231. 33. Justine Larbalestier, “The Problem with Gone with the Wind,” December 1, 2009, justinelarbalestier.com/blog/2009/12/01/the-problem-with-gone-with-the-wind/ (accessed February 23, 2010); Molly Haskell, “The Lady and the Vamp,” Town and Country, February 1, 2009, Academic Research Library, ProQuest (accessed February 22, 2010); Taylor, Scarlett’s Women, 104; Hawkins, Classics and Trash, 161–162. 34. Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, “Scarlett O’Hara: The Southern Lady as New Woman,” American Quarterly 33, no. 4 (1981): 400 –401. 35. Mary Condé, “Some African-American Fictional Responses to Gone with the Wind,” The Yearbook of English Studies 26 (1996): 209; Fox-Genovese, “Scarlett,” 403. 36. Floyd C. Watkins, “Gone with the Wind as Vulgar Literature,” Southern Literary Journal 2, no. 2 (1970): 101; Jones, Tomorrow Is Another Day, 333; “The Book of the Month: Reviews,” in Harwell, Gone with the Wind as Book and Film, 18. 37. Hayden B. J. Maginnis, “The Trouble with Scarlett,” Queen’s Quarterly 102, no. 3 (1995): 645. 38. Karen Hellekson and Kristina Busse, “Introduction,” in Fan Fiction and Fan Communities in the Age of the Internet, ed. Karen Hellekson and Kristina Busse (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2006), 7. 39. Abigail Derecho, “Archontic Literature: A Definition, a History, and Several Theories of Fan Fiction,” in Hellekson and Busse, Fan Fiction and Fan Communities in the Age of the Internet, 75. 40. apckrfan, “Worth $300?” August 2000, phantomroses.com/apckrfan/fanfic/GWTWfic/jailindex.html (accessed December 30, 2009); apckrfan, “Family Remains,” March 2007, phantomroses. com/apckrfan/fanfic/GWTWfic/familyremains.html (accessed December 18, 2009); apckrfan, “A Chance Encounter,” January 2002, phantomroses.com/apckrfan/fanfic/GWTWfic/gwtwnyfull.html (accessed January 25, 2010); apckr fan, “A Letter from Wade,” May 2002, phantomroses.com/ apckrfan/fanfic/GWTWfic/wadesletterfull.html (accessed January 26, 2010); apckrfan, “A Letter to Scarlett,” May 2002, phantomroses.com/apckrfan/fanfic/GWTWfic/KillingAshley.html (accessed December 31, 2009); apckrfan, “All of Atlanta Turns Out,” March 2000, phantomroses.com/ apckrfan/fanfic/GWTWfic/allofatlanta.html (accessed December 18, 2009); apckrfan, “And the Bride Wore White,” October 2004, phantomroses .com/apckrfan/fanfic/GWTWfic/brideworewhite.html (accessed December 31, 2009); apckrfan, “Desolation,” May 2002, phantomroses.com/apckrfan/ fanfic/GWTWfic/desolation.html (accessed December 31, 2009); apckrfan, “Fire In the Sky,” August 2004, phantomroses.com/apckrfan/fanfic/GWTWfic/fireinthesky.html (accessed January 25, 2010); apckrfan, “Gone with the Wind Retold,” February 2000, phantomroses.com/apckrfan/fanfic/GWTW fic/fullstory.html (accessed December 29, 2009); apckrfan, “In Exchange for What?” April 6, 2001, fanfiction.net/s/246873/1/In_Exchange_For_What (accessed February 18, 2010); apckrfan, “Looking

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Skyward,” January 2004, phantomroses.com/apckrfan/fanfic/GWTWfic/lookingskyward.html (accessed January 25, 2010); apckrfan, “Midnight Whisperer,” June 2005, phantomroses.com/apckrfan/ fanfic/GWTWfic/midnightwhisperer.html (accessed December 31, 2009); apckrfan, “Reconnecting at a Funeral,” March 2007, phantomroses.com/apckrfan/fanfic/GWTWfic/reconnectingatafuneral. html (accessed December 18, 2009); apckrfan, “Solitude and Mourning Don’t Make for Good Bedfellows,” April 2006, phantomroses.com/apckrfan/fanfic/GWTWfic/solitude.html (accessed December 31, 2009); apckrfan, “The More Things Change,” February 2008, phantomroses.com/apckrfan/fanfic/ GWTWfic/morethingschange.html (accessed December 31, 2009); apckrfan, “The Next Generation,” July 2002, phantomroses.com/apckrfan/fanfic/GWTWfic/gwtw2002index.html (accessed December 29, 2009); apckrfan, “The Next Morning,” February 2000, phantomroses.com/apckrfan/fanfic/GWTW fic/nextmorning.html (accessed December 18, 2009). 41. Celia Brayfield, “Now Discontent Is Our de Winter: Mrs. De Winter — Susan Hill,” The Independent, October 10, 1993, independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/book-review — now-discontentis-our-de-winter-mrs-de-winter—susan-hill-sinclairstevenson-1299-pounds-1509933.html (accessed May 25, 2009). 42. Quoted in Karen Newman, “Can This Marriage Be Saved: Jane Austen Makes Sense of an Ending,” ELH 50, no. 4 (1983): 693. 43. Quoted in David Lodge, “Ambiguously Ever After: Problematical Endings in English Fiction,” Working with Structuralism: Essays and Reviews on Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century Literature (Boston, London and Henley: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1981), 147. 44. Paul Pickrel, “Vanity Fair in America: The House of Mirth and Gone with the Wind,” American Literature 59, no. 1 (1987): 57; Trisha Curran, “Gone with the Wind: An American Tragedy,” in The South and Film, ed. Warren French (Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 1987), 55. 45. Quoted in “Book of the Month,” 15. 46. Angela Carter, “The Belle as Businessperson,” in Shaking a Leg: Journalism and Writings (London: Chatto & Windus, 1997), 380; Mitchell, GWTW, chapter XLI. 47. Quoted in Pickrel, “Vanity Fair in America,” 52. 48. Patricia Storace, “Look Away, Dixie Land,” The New York Review of Books 38, no. 21 (1991): 37. 49. Marjorie Garber, “‘I’ll Be Back’: Review of Part Two: Reflections on the Sequel,” London Review of Books 21, no. 16 (1999), lrb.co.uk/v21/n16/marjorie-garber/ill-be-back/print (accessed January 19, 2010). 50. Garber, “‘I’ll Be Back.’” 51. Bonnie Kae Grover, “Gone with the Wind ‘Rape,’” August 14, 1996, Listserv. H-Net, H-Minerva Archives, h-net.org/~minerva/archives/threads/gone.html (accessed February 11, 2010). 52. Haskell, Frankly, My Dear, xii. 53. Dieter Meindl, “A Reappraisal of Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind,” Mississippi Quarterly 34, no. 4 (1981): 416; Morgan, “Scarlett Returns”; Robert E. May, “Gone with the Wind as Southern History: A Reappraisal,” The Southern Quarterly 17 (1978): 63. 54. Storace, “Look Away,” 36. 55. María Rosa Cabellos Castilla, Estudio de las formas de tratamiento y de la cortesía en la novela Gone with the Wind, de Margaret Mitchell (Alcalá de Henares: Servicio de Publicaciones de la Universidad de Alcalá, 2005), 122, 188. 56. Haskell, Frankly, My Dear, 4; Vicki Eaklor, “Striking Chords and Touching Nerves: Myth and Gender in Gone with the Wind,” Images: A Journal of Film and Popular Culture (2002), imagesjournal. com/2002/features/gwtw/ (accessed June 26, 2008). 57. CaptScarlett, “Unsinkable,” October 28, 2008, fanfiction.net/s/4622486/1/Unsinkable (accessed January 20, 2010); Myra2003, “Love in Tara,” August 6, 2007, fanfiction.net/s/2197437/1/Love_In_Tara (accessed February 17, 2010); apckrfan, “Gone with the Wind Retold,” February 2000, phantomroses. com/apckrfan/fanfic/GWTWfic/fullstory.html (accessed December 29, 2009). 58. Cornorama, “This Year’s Love,” March 9, 2009, fanfiction.net/s/3359774/1/This_Years_Love (accessed February 19, 2010); XxzenmasterxX, “Final Stand,” March 21, 2010, fanfiction.net/s/ 5807022/1/Final_Stand (accessed May 27, 2010). 59. Alessandra Stanley, “Frankly My Dear, Russians Do Give a Damn,” The New York Times, August 9, 1994, query.nytimes .com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9801EEDE1F39F93AA1575BC0A962958260& sec=&spon=&pagewanted=print (accessed February 21, 2008). 60. “Segundas partes … (III)” February 10, 2008, Viento Escarlata, vientoescarlata.blogspot.com/ 2008_02_01_archive.html (accessed January 15, 2010).

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61. Quoted in Richard Harwell, “Introduction,” in Harwell, Gone with the Wind as Book and Film, xvii. 62. “The Wind Done Gone,” The Political Game, November 26, 2005, politicalgame.blog spot.com/2005/11/wind-done-gone.html (accessed January 25, 2008). 63. Meindl, “Reappraisal of GWTW,” 429; Robert Drake, “The Book, the Movie, the Dream,” Mississippi Quarterly 44, no. 2 (1991): 188; Roger Ebert, “Gone with the Wind,” Chicago Sun Times, June 21, 1998, rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/19980621/REVIEWS08/401010323/ 1023&template=printart (accessed March 25, 2010). 64. Laura Miller, “Mammy’s Revenge,” Salon, May 2, 2001, salon.com/books/feature/2001/05/ 02/wind (accessed January 25, 2008). 65. Jenkins, Textual Poachers, 18, 23. 66. Quoted in Sinclair, ed., GWTW: The Screenplay, 10 –12. 67. Schur, “TWDG Controversy,” 19; Luigi Pirandello quoted in Craig J. Dickson, “‘A Life of His Own’: The Copyright Protection of Fictional Characters,” www.nzipa.org.nz/SITE_Default/x-files/ 96311.doc (accessed February 9, 2010).

Conclusion: Is It Gone with the Wind? I’ll think of it all tomorrow, at Tara. I can stand it then. Tomorrow, I’ll think of some way to get him back. After all, tomorrow is another day.1 Oh, Springfield Elementary! I will have you back again. After all, tomorrow is another school day!2

If at the end of Gone with the Wind Scarlett O’Hara trusts that she will be able to get Rhett back, despite his professions of not giving a damn for what will happen to her to the contrary, Principal Seymour Skinner in The Simpsons, having just been dumped by Patty Bouvier, one of his nemesis Bart Simpson’s spinster aunts, declares that he will get the control of his school back, temporarily in the hands of his “prospective nephew.” Scarlett O’Hara is at the same time a cultural icon, the embodiment of Southern ideals of chivalry and belles, and, above all, the hen with the golden eggs. Gone with the Wind memorabilia still constitutes a huge business; the online seller Gone with the Wind Memories reported that during the Christmas shopping season of 2009, Georgia ranked third in buying products after Tennessee and Alabama, with Canada, Russia, Italy and Australia being the top four foreign buyers.3 Given this prominence, it is not surprising that allusions to Scarlett O’Hara or to Gone with the Wind are almost endless in popular culture. The Simpsons, which, with its critique of mainstream American society, builds on popular culture, has referred to Gone with the Wind several times: in “Brush with Greatness,” Homer marks his intention of dieting with the following statement: “as God is my witness, I’ll always be hungry again!”; the injured children in “Bart’s Inner Child” are positioned like the soldiers in the Atlanta depot during the siege of the city; in “Three Men and a Comic Book,” the tending to Bart’s wound is reminiscent of the amputation Scarlett witnesses in the hospital; in “Black Widower,” Sideshow Bob merrily claims, “Fiddle-dee-dee. Tomorrow’s another day”; in “The Old Man and the C Student,” the Springfield Retirement Castle shows a senior-friendly version of Gone with the Wind, in which Rhett does not leave 173

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Scarlett but instead wants to remarry her; and in “Thursdays with Abie,” Grampa Simpson claims that Clark Gable borrowed (and never returned) his Gone with the Wind copy, which gave him the idea to play Rhett Butler, although Gable forced Grampa to keep the secret for sixty years.4 In Southerner Flannery O’Connor’s short story “The Enduring Chill,” the protagonist is encouraged by his mother to write —“‘When you get well,’ she said, ‘I think it would be nice if you wrote a book about down here. We need another good book like Gone with the Wind.… Put the war in it,’ she advised. ‘That always makes a long book.’”5 Another short story by O’Connor, “A Late Encounter with the Enemy,” has a Civil War veteran remembering not the war, of which he has not even a vague reminiscence by now, but his attendance at the Gone with the Wind premiere in Atlanta in 1939.6 In Song of Solomon, Toni Morrison refers to “some Scarlett O’Hara cunt.” In You Can’t Keep a Good Woman Down, the narrator explains that “my trouble with Scarlett was always the forced buffoonery of Prissy whose strained, slavish voice, as Miz Scarlett pushed her so masterfully up the stairs, I could never get out of my head.”7 El viento se llevó lo que is a 1998 Argentinean-French-Dutch film whose title is an ungrammatical rearrangement of the title of Gone with the Wind in Spanish, Lo que el viento se llevó, which explores the life of a small Argentinean village where the movies are played in the local theater censored to the point of being almost unrecognizable. Southern-born-and-raised Blanche in the eighties TV show The Golden Girls is often referred to as “Scarlett,” thus conflating the two most pervasive literary archetypes of Southern women, Scarlett O’Hara and Blanche Dubois, the protagonist of Tennessee Williams’ play A Streetcar Named Desire (which, incidentally, was also played by Vivien Leigh). 8 Jacqueline Susann’s novel Valley of the Dolls mentions Gone with the Wind a number of times, having one of her characters adopt O’Hara as her stage name. Clare Boothe’s play Kiss the Boys Good-Bye centered on a Southern girl’s arrival in the North to be auditioned for the role of Scarlett. Its message, however, was lost on most people, much to Boothe’s distress, who claimed that “this play was meant to be a political allegory about fascism in America. But everywhere it has been taken for a parody of Hollywood’s search for Scarlett O’Hara.”9 For oppressed French people under the Nazi government, Scarlett was a symbol of political resistance in the face of a superior and ruthless enemy. The English under German bombings escaped from their harsh daily existence by finding solace and comfort in the sufferings of the war-torn South. Communists condemned Scarlett’s greedy attachment to her property and the novel’s overall capitalist approach, which led to the novel being banned for decades in the USSR while pirate copies were cherished and widely circulated. A political prisoner in an Ethiopian prison in the seventies found strength, hope and courage to go on by translating Gone with the Wind from English into their national language, Amharic, using 3,000 scraps of paper from cigarette packs. He commented, “If you were in prison and read that book and saw the end of it, where

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out of destruction reconstruction comes, where out of war comes peace — that is the utmost you can dream of.”10 Margaret Mitchell would not have been happy to see that a novel for which she saw no other ending has been used so many times as the starting point for others’ works, given her fierce defense of her copyright. Frustrating as the open ending of Gone with the Wind is, it has opened the path for multiple continuations. Had Rhett and Scarlett been happily reunited at the end, it may have been impossible to change, alter or challenge that “sacrosanct” ending. Instead, Rhett and Scarlett’s “romantic misalliance has remained a subject of speculation and debate — a pop-culture obsession serving as a template for a nation’s romantic dreams and regrets.”11 Some cultural theorists and sociologists warn that allowing for multiple interpretations or versions of a single text (be this text a movie, a song, a TV show or a novel) will leave people adrift in a world where icons are no longer recognizable, thus destabilizing culture, while others disagree — Jane Austen has not suffered or lost sales to other writings inspired by her novels.12 Although it is already past its seventieth anniversary, Gone with the Wind remains widely popular, despite its parodies, sequels, fan fiction and the like. It seems that there is still room enough for all these creations as well as the original novel. The Gone with the Wind fan fiction shows that, regardless of court decisions or out-of-court settlements between copyright holders and the authors of new continuations, Gone with the Wind belongs to anyone and that continuations, though they may not be published, can still be written by anyone — and enjoyed by thousands of readers thanks to the cyberspace. Not only that, but readers can also commission new Gone with the Wind stories according to their personal (dis)likes, as some fan-fiction stories are written according to the instructions of a contest or a particular reader. Gone with the Wind is, following Leo Marx’s definition, a cultural symbol —“an image that conveys a special meaning (thought and feeling) to a large number of those who share the culture.”13 Scarlett has become a heroine for people of all generations, including African American high school students.14 She has been compared to Anna Karenina, Don Quixote, Quentin Compson, Becky Sharp off Vanity Fair, and Lady Macbeth.15 For Molly Haskell, twentyfirst-century Scarlett emulators can be seen in the female protagonists of the teen TV show Gossip Girl, Sarah Palin, Hillary Clinton during the 2008 primary campaign, or even Madonna.16 Her appeal to readers has been compared to that of Rebecca De Winter (whose darker side is hidden to all she knew by her charm) or James Bond.17 Feminist interpretations of Scarlett have been numerous, and, thus, successively, “Scarlett O’Hara becomes the very symbol of the New Woman, recognised as such by 1940s wartime women workers and mothers, 1960s liberationists and careerists, and 1980s ‘Me’-generation post-feminists.”18 Scarlett is an attraction for selling almost any kind of object, even though

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after the publication of the novel Mitchell fought very hard for the rest of her life to have her rights asserted against countless pirate editions and unlicensed products of all sorts. SunTrust v. Houghton Mifflin already proved that it was not going to be possible for the Trust to always have the last word when it comes to the use of the Gone with the Wind characters. When such strong economic interests are at play and the work in question has cast such a powerful influence on society for generations, it is obvious that any discussion about Gone with the Wind and its current and potential continuations is not merely a literary matter, or, even, it no longer is a literary matter at all. Liking Gone with the Wind, because of the critical neglect or the idea that it is too corny, is a guilty pleasure, even against our better judgment: “What kind of image is that [presented in Gone with the Wind]? But, goodness me, how enjoyable it is!”20 Gone with the Wind is part of people’s lives and reading it is almost a rite of passage.21 Academia has traditionally always frowned upon anything well liked by a significant number of people, especially by those it considered inferior in intellectual terms, ranging from women to middle and low classes, including minorities. If it is popular, it is immediately suspected. Even worse, if it is well liked by a predominantly female audience, chances are that it will be doubly frowned upon, critically ignored and disregarded. This accounts for the critical neglect of Gone with the Wind. Hard as you may try, you will not find Mitchell’s name or any reference to her novel in any literary anthology, though it is mentioned in books about slavery.22 In spite of the praising reviews, the first scholarly article on Gone with the Wind only came in 1958, twenty-two years after the novel was first published: “Tara Twenty Years After,” by Robert Drake, who vehemently argued that “it’s not junk, it’s not trash which a few years ago was still selling 100,000 hardcover copies a year worldwide and 250,000 paperbacks in the United States alone. And the book has had something to say particularly to other cultures which have been faced with the ultimatum of surrender.”23 Critical disregard or not, even its detractors have to concede that Gone with the Wind is a cultural icon and a “cultural occurrence.”24 Conventional reasons put forward for the novel’s enduring popularity — such as the appeal of the magnolia myth or the general public’s atrocious taste — do not hold because of their very simplicity.25 Gone with the Wind meets Umberto Eco’s list of conditions for a book or movie to become a cult object: The work must be loved, obviously, but this is not enough. It must provide a completely furnished world so that its fans can quote characters and episodes as if they were aspects of the fan’s private sectarian world.… I think that in order to transform a work into a cult object one must be able to break, dislocate, unhinge it so that one can remember only parts of it, irrespective of their original relationship with the whole.26

The novel’s critical neglect stands in marked contrast with the movie’s critical appraisal, a gap so broad that some call for appreciating the movie as

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something distinctive from the book. However, both are so ingrained in the popular imagination that it is hard to separate one from the other. In any case, despite Gone with the Wind’s neglect in literary anthologies, the movie has appeared prominently for decades in rankings of the best films such as the polls conducted by the American Film Institute (AFI). Gone with the Wind appeared second only to Casablanca in the 2002 poll of the one hundred best loved films.27 Rhett’s line “Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn” was voted as the best movie quote by the AFI even though those wanting Rhett and Scarlett back might not like it so well, or, at the very least, might want to have it erased when Scarlett gets Rhett back. It is probably as well known as Austen’s famous opening of Pride and Prejudice, “It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife,” and equally mocked and parodied. Gone with the Wind has so far generated a movie, two authorized sequels, a miniseries based on the first authorized sequel, two musicals, a Japanese theatrical adaptation running in Japan and London in 1972, another one in 1976, an endless and ever-growing number of fan-fiction stories, multiple unauthorized sequels, and a parody told from the point of view of Gerald O’Hara and Mammy’s illegitimate daughter.28 More recently, there was another musical version in London, expected to run till January 2009, but which closed down after a seventy-nine-performance run on June 14, 2008, less than two months after its April 2008 release.29 Critics used Gone with the Wind’s last line to make fun of its failure: “Frankly, I fear, you won’t give a damn,” “Frankly, this show is damned,” or “Frankly, my dear, it’s a damn long night.”30 Seeing the failure in London, plans for a move of the production to New York never materialized. Gone with the Wind has also generated an endless number of parodies, not merely literary parodies, as the ones analyzed in chapter 4, but also TV sketches, stand-in comedians’ monologues, jokes, and more.31 Hemingway declared that “the greater the work of literature, the easier the parody.” In the case of Gone with the Wind, its popularity has made it an easy target of parody. Because everybody knows who Scarlett O’Hara or Rhett Butler are, it is easy to paraphrase for one’s own mocking purposes some memorable lines of the book or the movie.32 For decades, America has had a complex love-hate relationship with Gone with the Wind.33 Many people are still very passionate about it, for better or worse. Gone with the Wind is said to have heavily influenced the writing of Civil War sagas, popular historical romance, the family saga, and the “Superwoman” novel.34 Because Gone with the Wind has largely shaped the vision millions of people in America and worldwide have of the Civil War, its legacy continues and any new take on the Civil War inevitably is compared to Gone with the Wind.35 For its blatant racism, Gone with the Wind displays American prejudices and deeply ingrained attitudes; at the same time, it has been invoked as a teaching tool for raising students’ awareness about historical change.36 The

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controversy and fervor Gone with the Wind generated upon being first published remain; for many, Mitchell’s work still embodies the glorification of slavery and the perpetuation of a number of racist myths. Mitchell’s house has been the object of arsonists several times to the applause of some local Atlantans critical with Mitchell’s portrayal of slavery, such as African American author Pearl Cleage: “I was not sorry to see the Margaret Mitchell House burn to the ground. I was, in fact, delighted that someone had taken direct action against what I consider to be an insult of monumental proportions to African American people.”37 In the South, Gone with the Wind is not just a movie or a film, it is “a legacy and an industry” that is kept very much alive and the movie is theatrically re-released often. As an example, for the seventieth anniversary of the film release in 2009, a three-day gala re-creating the original Atlanta premiere was held in Marietta, Georgia.38 Gone with the Wind has acquired through the years mythic stature and “Rhett Butler and Scarlett O’Hara have become the lineal descendants of all the great fictional lovers of the past, and the fall of Atlanta in our Civil War has become one with the Siege of Troy.”39 Gone with the Wind has been called a compendium of human passions and emotions, the American Bible, a cultural Bible or even “a literary Act of God.”40 Samuel Tupper, Jr.’s prediction in his 1936 review for the Atlanta Journal that “it may well become a book for all time” still holds true and “Scarlett is going to survive the high-brow critics.”41 In the words of Richard Nalley, “Gone with the Wind proved bigger than hula hoops, bigger than saddle shoes, bigger than Davy Crockett. It is a fad we never get over.”42 In the future there will probably be more interpretations of Gone with the Wind to come and more academic books on it, as well as more continuations. As the German publisher of Rhett Butler’s People put it, Gone with the Wind is a myth and myths don’t die — they are re-told.43 Readers continue reading Gone with the Wind, not only once, but many times, always half expecting that, in the end, Rhett changes his mind and does not leave Scarlett. The end never changes; however, readers can now choose from a variety of continuations to Gone with the Wind to decide the ending that satisfies their needs better, and — why not?— write new ones as well. If “the truest test of a good story lies in whether readers can suspend their knowledge of the outcome and reread it as if for the first time,” Gone with the Wind passes it with honors. It speaks worlds about the Windies’ devotion and the story’s enduring fascination that we are willing to read the same story over and over again from a different point of view.44 It is hard to try and guess what new developments await when it comes to Gone with the Wind. Jane Austen provides us with a probable case scenario of what might happen in one hundred or two hundred years’ time to a novel that continues being immensely popular and beloved and which has long fallen out of copyright. Austenites have recently seen the characters of their beloved readings getting involved with zombies and sea monsters. Who is to say that the

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same is not going to happen to Gone with the Wind? Already a Pride and Prejudice spin-off hints at the possibility that the process undergone by Austen’s novels might occur to Gone with the Wind. In Seducing Mr. Darcy, the protagonist, a twenty-first-century divorced researcher, imagines herself in the midst of Pride and Prejudice and, thanks to a magical massage, gets into the book, making far-fetched changes that alter the meaning and even the ending of the original novel. The next couple willing to take part in this massage are about to be sent to the world of Gone with the Wind, with consequences that remain to be seen.45 The copyright of Gone with the Wind expires in 2019, provided that no new copyright extension is granted again. This is not totally unheard of ; although the law gives copyright for seventy-five years after the author’s death, in some cases authors’ relatives have sought and obtained an extension of their copyright. This is the case of James Joyce’s only grandson, who thus stopped the publication of his famous grandfather’s letters to his wife. Peter Pan has also been granted a copyright extension; although some deplored the decision, others applauded it because Peter Pan’s royalties belong to the Great Ormond Street Hospital in London. Copyright extensions have also made possible that Gone with the Wind, supposed to go into public domain decades ago, is still under the tight control of Mitchell’s nephews. Maybe once Gone with the Wind falls into public domain, more liberal renderings of it will be possible. Many have been unfaithful to Scarlett in having Gone with the Wind continued after the end, to paraphrase Dowson’s poem: the Trust, Ripley, Randall, McCaig, and fan-fiction writers as well. Tomorrow will certainly be another day in which Scarlett may get Rhett back or not, but what is for sure is that tomorrow there will be another Gone with the Wind continuation.

Notes 1. Margaret Mitchell, Gone with the Wind, special commemorative 60th-anniversary edition (New York: Warner Books, 1999), chapter LXIII. 2. “Principal Charming,” The Simpsons, 2X14, 1991. 3. “Christmas Season Results” [email], [email protected], January 11, 2010. 4. “Brush with Greatness,” The Simpsons, 02X18, 1991; “Bart’s Inner Child,” The Simpsons, 05X7, 1993; “Three Men and a Comic Book,” The Simpsons, 02X21, 1991; “Black Widower,” The Simpsons, 03X21, 1992; “The Old Man and the C Student,” The Simpsons, 10X20, 1999; “Thursdays with Abie,” The Simpsons, 21X09, 2009. 5. Flannery O’Connor, “The Enduring Chill,” The Complete Stories (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1972), 370. 6. Flannery O’Connor, “A Late Encounter with the Enemy,” A Good Man Is Hard to Find and Other Stories (San Diego, New York, London: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1983), 155 –168. 7. Quoted in Helen Taylor, “Gone with the Wind: The Mammy of Them All,” in The Progress of Romance: The Politics of Popular Fiction, ed. Jean Radford (London and New York: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1986), 114 –115. 8. Helen Taylor, Scarlett’s Women: Gone with the Wind and Its Female Fans (London: Virago Press, 1989), 162.

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9. Clare Boothe, “Introduction to Kiss the Boys Good-bye,” in Gone with the Wind as Book and Film, ed. Richard Harwell (1983; New York: Paragon House, 1987), 91. 10. Quoted in Carol Huang, “Tomorrow Is Another Day,” The American Scholar 75, no. 4 (2006), ProQuest (accessed March 26, 2010). 11. David Denby, “The Real Rhett Butler,” The New Yorker 85, no. 15 (2009), Academic Research Library, ProQuest (accessed February 22, 2010). 12. Anupam Chander and Madhavi Sunder, “Everyone’s a Superhero: A Cultural Theory of ‘Mary Sue’ Fan Fiction as Fair Use,” California Law Review 95 (2007): 597–598. 13. Leo Marx, The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America (1964; Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 4. 14. Jerome Stern, “Gone with the Wind: The South as America,” Southern Humanities Review 6 (1976): 11. 15. Frank Goodwyn, “The Ingenious Gentleman and the Exasperating Lady: Don Quixote de la Mancha and Scarlett O’Hara,” Journal of Popular Culture 16, no. 1 (1982): 55 –71; Louis D. Rubin, Jr., “Scarlett O’Hara and the Two Quentin Compsons,” in The South and Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha: The Factual and the Apocryphal, ed. Evans Harrington and Ann J. Abadie (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1977), 168 –194; Darlene Ciraulo, “The Old and New South: Shakespeare in Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind,” Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation 1, no. 1 (2005), borrowers.uga.edu/cocoon/borrowers/pdf?id=781418 (accessed April 12, 2010). 16. Molly Haskell, “The Lady and the Vamp,” Town and Country (February 1, 2009), Academic Research Library, ProQuest; Molly Haskell, Frankly, My Dear: Gone with the Wind Revisited (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2009), 10. 17. Harriett Hawkins, Classics and Trash: Traditions and Taboos in High Literature and Popular Modern Genres (Toronto and Buffalo: University of Toronto Press, 1990), 148. 18. Taylor, Scarlett’s Women, 105. 19. Carl Spadoni, “The Dutch Piracy of Gone with the Wind,” Bibliographical Society of America 84, no. 2 (1990): 131–150. 20. Angela Carter, “The Belle as Businessperson,” Shaking a Leg: Journalism and Writings (London: Chatto & Windus, 1997), 378. 21. Haskell, Frankly, My Dear, 8, 14 –15. 22. Willie Lee Rose, Slavery and Freedom, expanded edition (Oxford, New York, Toronto, Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1982); Susana Lozano Moreno, “Romance & Melodrama: Feminine Genres Reputed as Trash: Gone with the Wind: The Study of a Case,” The Grove: Working Papers on English Studies 5 (1998): 68; Dieter Meindl, “A Reappraisal of Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind,” Mississippi Quarterly 34, no. 4 (1981): 414. 23. Robert Drake, “The Book, the Movie, the Dream,” Mississippi Quarterly 44, no. 2 (1991): 187–189. 24. “Declaration of Alice Randall,” SunTrust Bank v. Houghton Mifflin, houghtonmifflinbooks. com/features/randall_url/pdf/Declaration_Alice_Randall.pdf (accessed December 15, 2009); Blair Rouse, “Gone with the Wind— But Not Forgotten,” Southern Literary Journal 10, no. 2 (1978): 178. 25. Blanche H. Gelfant, “Gone with the Wind and the Impossibilities of Fiction,” Southern Literary Journal 13, no. 1 (1980): 3 –4. 26. Quoted in Henry Jenkins, Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture (New York and London: Routledge, 1992), 50. 27. Hayden B. J. Maginnis, “The Trouble with Scarlett,” Queen’s Quarterly 102, no. 3 (1995): 642; Ronald Haver quoted in Richard F. Selcer, “Home Sweet Movies: From Tara to Oz and Home Again,” Journal of Popular Film and Television 18, no. 2 (1990): 57; American Film Institute, “AFI’s 100 Years … 100 Passions,” 2002, connect.afi.com/site/DocServer/passions100.pdf?docID=248) (accessed February 9, 2010). 28. Casey Kayser, “Writing about the South ‘In Her Own Way’: Gender and Region in the Work of Southern Women Playwrights,” PhD dissertation, Louisiana State University, 2010, p. 216, etd.lsu. edu/docs/available/etd-04212010 –135523/unrestricted/kayserdiss.pdf (accessed May 5, 2010). 29. Ray Shell, “Goodbye, Cruel Wind,” The Guardian, June 12, 2008, guardian.co.uk/stage/2008/ jun/12/culture.theatre (accessed April 13, 2010). 30. Quoted in Kayser, “Writing About the South ‘In Her Own Way,’” 213. 31. Haskell, Frankly, My Dear, ix, 10. 32. Quoted in Bruce P. Keller and Rebecca Tushnet, “Even More Parodic than the Real Thing: Parody Lawsuits Revisited,” TMR 94 (n.d.): 979 –1016, tushnet.com/EvenMoreParodicarticle.PDF (accessed January 11, 2010).

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33. Vicki Eaklor, “Striking Chords and Touching Nerves: Myth and Gender in Gone with the Wind,” Images: A Journal of Film and Popular Culture (2002), imagesjournal.com/2002/features/gwtw (accessed June 26, 2008). 34. Taylor, Scarlett’s Women, 162. 35. Catherine Clinton, “Gone with the Wind,” in Past Imperfect: History According to the Movies, ed. Ted Mico, John Miller-Monzon and David Rubel (New York: Henry Holt, 1995), 132. 36. Robert E. May, “Gone with the Wind as Southern History: A Reappraisal,” The Southern Quarterly 17 (1978): 64; Jerome Stern, “Gone with the Wind: The South as America,” Southern Humanities Review 6 (1976): 12; Denby, “The Real Rhett Butler”; Marian J. Morton, “‘My Dear, I Don’t Give a Damn’: Scarlett O’Hara and the Great Depression,” Frontiers 5, no. 3 (1981): 52. 37. Quoted in Tray Butler, “The House Is on Fire: The Margaret Mitchell House Wants to Be the Heart of the South’s Literary Community, But Does Its Racial Stigma Stand in the Way?” Creative Loafing Atlanta, February 27, 2002, atlanta.creativeloafing.com/gyrobase/Content?oid=oid%3A8132 (accessed February 9, 2010); May, “GWTW as Southern History,” 63. 38. Bethsa Marsh, “In Search of Rhett and Scarlett,” The Saturday Evening Post, September 1, 2009: 54; Esther B. Fein, “Another Day, Lots of Dollars as Scarlett Returns to Tara,” The New York Times, October 3, 1991, query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9D0CE6D61538F930A35753C1A 967958260 (accessed January 25, 2008). 39. Helen Deiss Irvin, “Gea in Georgia: A Mythic Dimension in Gone with the Wind,” in Recasting: Gone with the Wind in American Culture, ed. Darden Asbury Pyron (1983; Miami: University Press of Florida, 1984), 68; The Saturday Review of Literature quoted in Finis Farr, The Author of Gone with the Wind (New York: William Morrow, 1965), 231. 40. Michener quoted in Richard Harwell, “Introduction,” in Harwell, Gone with the Wind as Book and Film, xv; Edwin Granberry, “The Private Life of Margaret Mitchell,” in Harwell, Gone with the Wind as Book and Film, 47, 54; Selznick in Haskell, Frankly, My Dear, 2; “A Few Notes on Adopting Orientalistic Fiction,” November 30, 2009, Cry Havoc & Unleash the Kaigou of War, kaigou.dream width.org/332403.html?#cutid1 (accessed March 8, 2010); James Boatwright, “Reconsideration: Totin’ de Weery Load,” in Harwell, Gone with the Wind as Book and Film, 211. 41. Quoted in “The Book of the Month: Reviews,” in Harwell, Gone with the Wind as Book and Film, 16; Nell Battle Lewis, “Scarlett Materializes,” in Harwell, Gone with the Wind as Book and Film, 174. 42. Quoted in Taylor, Scarlett’s Women, 3. 43. Quoted in “Vom Winde verweht. Happy End für Scarlett und Rhett?” Focus, focus.de/ kultur/buecher/vom-winde-verweht_aid_138087.html (accessed February 6, 2008). 44. John Wiley, Jr., “Everything Scarlett,” BIBLIO Magazine (1997), gwtwbooks.com/EverythingScarlett/scarlett.htm (accessed December 15, 2009). 45. Gwyn Cready, Seducing Mr. Darcy (New York: Pocket Books, 2008), 329.

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Index Brickell, Herschel 17, 25 Brontë, Charlotte 8, 19, 109 Brontë, Emily 121 Brooks, Geraldine 109 Brown, William Wells 61, 83 Burnett, Frances Hodgson 135 Butler, Bonnie 45, 62, 101, 108, 112, 117–118, 129, 133 –134, 136, 139 –140, 142, 144 –145, 162–163, 166; Precious (The Wind Done Gone character) 62 Butler, Mr. (Rhett’s father) 108, 111, 120 Butler, Mrs. (Rhett’s mother) 41, 44, 113, 117, 134, 137, 142–143 Butler, Rhett 4, 6, 7, 11–12, 18, 20 –21, 28 –30, 36 –38, 40 –42, 44, 46, 49 –50, 55, 58, 62, 69, 72, 84, 91, 98 –99, 101, 107, 109, 111, 113, 115, 117–120, 127–146, 158 –160, 162, 164 – 166, 168, 173 –175, 177–179; African-American traits 86 –87, 111; and Civil War 11, 23; coming and going 42, 45, 109, 135, 165 – 166; Confederate soldier 23, 91, 116 –118, 120; disreputable character 11, 91, 111–112, 116 –120, 158, 168; evolution 27, 108; as a father 108, 117, 120; feelings for Scarlett 130, 138, 143; as figure of mystery or dark hero 11, 41, 46, 98, 101, 107, 109 –110, 119 –121, 130, 132, 167; and KKK 112, 120; as metrosexual man 101, 167; R. (The Wind Done Gone character) 62, 79 –80, 83 –84, 91–93, 95, 98; relationship with Ashley 110; relationship with Scarlett 1, 11, 101, 113 –115; resemblance to historical and literary figures 118; role towards Scarlett 114 –115, 166; as romantic hero 58, 108, 116; similarities with Ashley 120; as a stereotypical figure 107–108, 110, 114; unfaithfulness 130 –131; see also Rhett Butler’s People Butler, Rosemary 41, 110 –111, 117–118, 137, 142 Byron, Lord 118

Abolitionists 85, 94 Absalom! Absalom! 18, 118 Academy Awards (Oscars) 21 Aeneid 24 African-Americans 7; in American literature 10, 57–58, 61, 63, 79 –80, 83, 85, 96; elite 92–93; intellectual capacity 80; language 98 –99; stereotyping 58, 61–62, 70 –71, 80, 94 –95, 97, 99; see also Gone with the Wind; slavery Alcott, Louisa May 83 –84, 109, 115 Alice in Wonderland 135 Anderson, Kevin J. 67–68 Andrews, V.C. 39 Anna Karenina 18, 167; see also Karenina, Anna Apocalypse Now 164 The Aspern Papers 8 Atlanta 4, 6, 16 –17, 20, 22, 26, 40 –42, 45 –46, 60, 62, 70, 92–93, 108 –110, 116, 130, 136, 139, 141–144, 146, 159 –160, 162, 166, 168, 173, 178 Austen, Jane 8, 28 –29, 115, 121, 127, 175, 177– 179 Baldwin, James 70 Ballyhara 43, 134 Band of Angels 21–22 Banderas, Antonio 125 The Beatles 125 Beauman, Sally 134, 161 Beloved 68, 95, 98 Bénet, Stephen Vincent 15, 18, 116 Bennet, Elizabeth 134 Benteen, Will 132 Big Sam 58 –59, 87 The Birth of a Nation 16, 21, 59, 61, 97, 101 black-on-white rape 101, 111–113 The Blue Bicycle 55 Bond, James 175 Bones 12, 134, 162 Bonneau, Tunis 111–112 Boothe, Clare 174 Bovary, Emma 30

Cabot, Meg 128 Caldwell, Erskine 16 Campbell vs. Acuff-Rose Music, Inc. 56, 63, 65 –67

203

204

Index

Capp, Al 55 Carter, Angela 11, 30, 135, 164 Casablanca 177 The Catcher in the Rye 73 Charleston 41–42, 46 –47, 62, 93, 108, 111, 117, 133 –134, 137, 141–143, 146, 166 Chase-Riboud, Barbara 81 Chesnutt, Charles W. 92 Chestnut, Mary 56 –57, 86 Childress, Alice 97 Civil War (American) 3 –5, 7, 11, 15, 18 –19, 21–24, 27–29, 70 –71, 81, 90, 94, 113, 115 – 116, 132, 156 –157, 164, 174, 178; glorification 164 Civil War (Spanish) 5 Civil War novels 15 –16, 23, 69, 156, 177 Cleage, Pearl 70, 178 Clinton, Bill 125 Clinton, Hillary 175 Clotel 61, 83 Cole, Lois Dwight 16 The Color Purple 97 Compson, Quentin 18, 118, 175 Conan Doyle, Arthur 124 Conarroe, Joel 67 Confederacy 23, 43 A Confederate Girl’s Diary 157 The Confessions of Nat Turner 61 Congressman (The Wind Done Gone character) 92, 96, 98 Conroy, Pat 20, 50 –51, 58, 67, 84, 94, 109 Crawford, Joan 113 Crockett, Davy 178 Cukor, George 5 Cunningham, Michael 8 Cynara 62, 72, 80 –83, 90 –93, 95 –96, 98 – 100, 161, 164 Daniel Deronda 18 Darcy, Fitzwilliam 120, 134 Davis, Bette 21 De Certeau, Michel 9 Deforges, Regine 55 Dessa Rose 68, 95, 98 De Winter, Rebecca 134, 175 Diana, Princess 125 Dickens, Charles 3, 29 Dilcey 87–88 Dixon, Thomas 59, 61, 69, 97, 111 Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde 8 Don Quixote 48, 62, 175 Douglass, Frederick 60, 95 Dowson, Ernest 62 Dubois, Blanche 174 Du Bois, W.E.B. 92, 98, 101 Du Maurier, Daphne 8, 39, 161 Eco, Umberto 176 Edwards, Anne (as author of Gone with the Wind sequel) 37–38, 50 Eliot, George 18

Ellison, Ralph 91 Emma 115 “The Enduring Chill” 174 Evans, Augusta Jane (Wilson) 24 fair use 10 –11, 65 –66, 68, 73, 126 fan fiction 124 –128, 162, 168; anachronisms 140 –142; and Civil War 156 –157; crossovers 134 –135; effect on original work 127; episode fix 129; Gone with the Wind fan fiction 1, 2, 7–12, 29, 127–146, 155 –158, 160 – 163, 165 –167, 175, 177; Internet 125 –127; motherhood 144 –145, 158; as a professional career 128; and Rhett Butler’s People 134, 163; and Scarlett 8, 11, 129, 133 –134, 142, 163; sex in 127, 129 –132, 146, 156; slash 131– 132, 156 –157; slavery in 142; and The Wind Done Gone 134, 163 –164 Faulkner, William 18 –19, 25, 93, 118 female suffrage 19, 92, 139, 146 Fenian Brotherhood 43, 46 Fenton, Luke 46 –47 First Amendment 63, 68 Fitzgerald, Francis Scott 21 Fleming, Victor 20 Forster, E.M. 8 “Frankly, Scarlett, I Do Give a Damn” 10, 11, 79, 100 –101 Fraser, Antonia 50 Gable, Clark 3, 11, 20 –22, 98, 107, 113, 118, 174 Gates, Henry Louis, Jr. 67 Gilman, Charlotte Perkins 93 Glasgow, Ellen 18 The Golden Girls 174 Gone with the Wind (book) 15, 19, 22, 26, 29, 50, 57, 61, 63 –73, 81, 84 –85, 90, 92, 94, 97–99, 101, 109 –110, 114, 117, 119 –120, 129 – 141, 145, 155, 162–163, 167–168, 175, 178 – 179; African-American readers 71, 175; African-Americans in 7, 10, 43, 56 –59, 63 – 64, 67, 70 –71, 73, 80, 85 –87, 99, 107, 165, 168; and American culture 1, 60, 67; appeal in the North 4, 24, 60; autobiographical information in 19, 27, 61, 118, 157; bibliography on 6; as Bildungsroman 30, 160 –161; canon 11, 121, 161–162, 164, 167–168, 177; centrality of love story 28, 65, 99, 117, 163, 165; children in 44, 144; and Civil War 4, 22–24, 27–28, 60, 69, 85, 109, 115 –117, 156, 164, 177; as a Civil War novel 16, 18; and Communism 5, 59, 167; copyright infringement 55 –56, 64, 167; critical consideration 1, 6 –7, 18, 22, 25 –26, 51, 57, 100, 176, 178; cultural influence 10 –12, 60, 63, 67, 177; ending 1–2, 6 –9, 28 –30, 36 –38, 40 –41, 47, 124, 127, 158 –159, 161, 163, 166, 168, 173, 175, 178; everlasting popularity, 1, 3 –5, 7, 10, 15, 22, 55, 60, 70, 79, 101, 164, 175 –178; fans 3, 17, 29, 37–38, 48, 51, 61, 66, 166 –167, 178; future of 165, 168, 178 –

Index 179; gender roles 19, 158 –159; and Great Depression 17–18, 26 –27; historical accuracy 22–24, 26, 28, 57, 60 –61, 68, 82; historical background 132; impact on women 19 –20; interpretations 27–28, 38, 163 –165; and the KKK 56; men in 107–109, 160; merchandising 6, 17, 173; miscegenation 18, 57, 98, 111; as a moral lesson 3, 30, 159 –160; musical versions 156, 177; Nazi ban 4; and plantation legend 26 –27, 176; popularity abroad 1, 3 –5, 22, 167; prizes 18; and propaganda 70; racism 56, 164, 177–178; references in popular culture 173 –174, 177; religion in 3; reviews 18, 27–28, 57, 59, 107–108, 116, 161, 164, 167, 176, 178; as a romance 28 –29, 44, 163, 165; sales figures 3 – 4, 17, 22, 37, 47–48, 100, 167, 176; slavery in 5, 7, 10, 56 –58, 60, 65, 69 –70, 73, 82, 85, 87–90, 178; as a source of strength 174 – 175; in the Soviet Union 5, 167, 174; and Spanish Civil War 5; style and language 25, 28, 40, 48, 99; as a teaching tool 22, 28, 177; theatrical adaptations 177; title 61–62; and the twenties and thirties 19, 97, 167; twenties influence 19, 25, 27, 58, 97, 157; Uncle Tom’s Cabin 69; as a Victorian novel 25, 30, 160; women in 19 –20, 23 –25, 160 – 161, 165; and World War II 4 –5, 27, 37; writing and publishing history 1, 4, 6, 16 – 17, 27, 29, 36; see also Butler, Rhett; Mitchell, Margaret; O’Hara, Scarlett Gone with the Wind (movie) 4 –6, 19 –21, 26, 37, 58 –60, 70 –71, 82, 100, 107, 139, 144, 161, 174, 176 –178; African-American reaction 59; box office 21; changes with book 20 –21, 26, 30, 49, 117, 144, 161, 165 –166; ending 30, 37; premiere 6, 20, 26, 108, 168, 174, 178; screenplay 19 –21; sequel 37–38 Grahame-Smith, Seth 134 Grange, Amanda 134 Great Expectations 29 gumption (survival instinct) 5, 156, 163 Haire-Sargeant, Lin 121 Haley, Alex D. 61 Hamilton, Charles 44, 81, 87, 113 –114, 119, 142, 144 –145 Hamilton, Pittypat 87, 132, 134, 140, 157, 166 Hamilton, Wade Hampton 40, 44 –45, 47, 49, 91, 108, 133 –134, 136, 142–145, 156 –158 Hammett, Dashiell 38 Hampton, Anne 42, 44, 46, 129, 134, 138, 140, 143 Harper, Frances 83 Heathchliff 121 Heathcliff: The Return to Wuthering Heights 121 Hemingway, Ernest 25, 177 Hill, Susan 8, 39, 161 historical revisionism 163; see also The Wind Done Gone Holiday, Billie 93

205

Holmes, Sherlock 22, 124 homosexuality 51, 65 –66, 81, 93, 132; in Gone with the Wind fan fiction 131–132; latent homosexuality in Gone with the Wind 81; see also Wilkes, Ashley The Hours 8 Howard, Sidney 19, 21, 59 Huckleberry Finn 64 Hugo, Victor 39 The Iliad 24, 62 Iola Leroy 83, 91 Ireland 40 –45, 47, 49, 133 –134, 137, 144 James, Henry 8, 163 Jane Eyre 8, 19, 109, 118, 134 Jezebel 21 John Brown’s Body 15 Journal of a Residence on a Georgian Plantation in 1838 –1839 86 Joyce, James 179 Jubilee 67–68, 95, 97 Karenina, Anna 30, 51, 146, 167, 175; see also Anna Karenina Kemble, Fanny 86 Kennedy, Ella Lorena 40, 44 –45, 49, 129, 133 –134, 136, 142–145, 156, 158 Kennedy, Frank 44 –45, 69, 81, 91, 113, 117, 119, 132, 144 –145, 157–159, 165 –166 Kennedy, John Pendleton 26 King, Martin Luther, Jr. 70 King, Stephen 50, 124 Kiss the Boys Good-Bye 174 The Klansman 111 Ku Klux Klan 4, 43, 56, 59, 61, 69, 71, 91, 101, 112–113, 119, 120, 142 Latham, Harold 4, 16 Lee, Robert E. 23 Leigh, Vivien 3, 20 –21, 37, 49, 113, 174 Lelchuck, Alan 67–68 Lewis, Sinclair 16 Light in August 93 Like One of the Family 97 Lincoln, Abraham 115 The Little Princess 135 Little Women 12, 83, 85, 109, 115, 135, 156 Macaria 24 Macbeth, Lady 159 Madonna 175 Malcolm X 70 Mammy (character in Gone with the Wind) 25, 40, 43, 48, 58, 62, 80, 82, 85 –87, 92, 132–133, 141, 177; Pallas (The Wind Done Gone character) 62, 79, 81–82, 95 –97, 99 Mammy (historical figure) 70, 94 –95 Mangan, James Clarence 62 March 109 Marsh, John 5 –6, 15 –16, 19, 38, 60, 64, 84, 99

206

Index

Martin, Margaret 156 Marx, Groucho 20 McCaffrey, Anne 126 McCaig, Donald 1–2, 7, 11, 22, 109 –121, 130, 132, 156, 161–163, 168, 179; opinion on Gone with the Wind 114 Meyer, Stephenie 135 miscegenation 18, 51, 56 –57, 61–63, 65 –66, 81, 84 –86, 98, 111, 163 Les Misérables 39 Misery 124 Mr. Darcy’s Diary 134 Mitchell, Eugene M. 16, 28 Mitchell, Margaret 6, 8, 10 –11, 15, 19 –21, 26, 47–48, 55, 57, 60 –70, 81, 84, 86, 88, 110, 112, 115, 119 –121, 130, 138 –140, 155 –156, 158, 161, 166, 168, 175 –176; and admirers 61, 155; and African-American language 99; attitude towards African-Americans 58 –60, 87; authorship of Gone with the Wind 16, 84; biographical information 4, 7, 16, 18, 23, 27, 101; and copyright infringement and plagiarism 64, 155, 175 –176; on ending 29, 36, 38, 175; and fame 3, 17, 19, 29, 38, 155; on Melanie 19, 25, 138; opinion on Gone with the Wind 3, 5, 16 –17, 25, 70, 155 –156, 161, 163; previous experience 16, 19; and reviewers and critics 164; on Rhett 108; on Scarlett 19, 25, 59 –60; on a sequel 6 –7, 29, 38 –39, 160 Mitchell, Maybelle 28 Mitchell, Stephens 16, 28, 38 –39, 164 –165 Mitchell Trust 7, 9 –10, 37–38, 43, 48 –51, 55, 64 –66, 69, 72, 108, 111, 127, 166 –169 Morgan, Sarah 157 Morrison, Toni 12, 63, 67–68, 93, 96 –97, 100, 174 Motola, Gabriel 67, 73 Mrs. Dalloway 8 Mrs. De Winter 8, 39, 161 mulatto 7, 56 –57, 61, 83 –86, 91–92, 94, 96, 98, 111, 130; tragic mulatto 80, 83 My Beloved Tara 55 –56 My Jim 96 NAACP 59 New Deal 27 O’Connor, Flannery 12, 174 O’Hara, Carreen 62, 142 O’Hara, Cat 42, 45 –47, 133 –134, 136, 142 O’Hara, Colum 44, 46 O’Hara, Ellen (Robillard) 7, 44, 57–58, 62, 113, 130, 137, 141–143, 145, 160; Lady (The Wind Done Gone character) 62, 82, 84, 86, 95, 164 O’Hara, Gerald 40, 43, 45, 62, 82, 87–88, 99, 107, 113, 137, 140, 142, 177; Planter (The Wind Done Gone character) 62, 70, 81, 84, 95, 98 O’Hara, Scarlett 4, 6 –7, 11–12, 15, 17, 19, 21–

22, 28 –30, 37, 40, 42–44, 46, 49 –50, 55, 58 –59, 68 –69, 72, 74, 82–83, 86 –92, 99 – 101, 109 –110, 112–120, 127–146, 157, 159 – 162, 164 –166, 169, 173, 175, 177–179; and alcohol 41, 136; and Civil War 11, 22–23, 115, 164; as cultural icon 6, 56, 66, 156, 173; and death 51, 81, 146, 156, 166 –167; as entrepreneur 30, 40, 45, 136, 156 –158; evolution 30, 36, 49, 108 –109, 136 –137, 145, 157, 159 –161; as family head 140, 157– 159; as feminist symbol 19 –20, 156, 175; and gender roles 19, 20, 25, 30; love for Ashley 100, 113 –114, 164, 166; as a masculine woman 45, 158 –159; and morality 30, 59 –60; and motherhood 30, 44 –45, 136, 145, 156 –158, 161; Other (The Wind Done Gone character) 62, 79, 81–83, 86, 91, 95, 97, 99; in popular culture 173 –174; as a revolutionary character 19, 44 –45, 113 –114, 157–158; as role model 156, 161; and sexuality 129 –130, 156; as symbol 156, 169, 173 – 175 O’Hara, Suellen 6, 40, 42–43, 142 Old Guard 108, 112, 116 –117, 159, 161 Our Nig 81 Palin, Sarah 175 Pannell, Charles A., Jr. 56, 64 parody 10, 56, 62–69, 71–73, 79, 93 –94, 100 – 101, 165, 174, 177 Peske, Nancy 10 –12, 79, 100 –101 Peter Pan 179 Pinotti, Kate 167 Pork 62, 87; Garlic (The Wind Done Gone character) 62, 82, 88, 98 –99 Potter, Harry 126 Pride and Prejudice 8, 120, 134, 177, 179 Pride and Prejudice and Zombies 134 Prissy 47, 80, 85, 88, 91, 157, 174 Randall, Alice 2, 6 –7, 10, 51, 56 –57, 60 –73, 79 –86, 90 –100, 130, 156, 162, 179 Rawles, Nancy 96 Rebecca 8, 39, 134, 161 Rebecca’s Tale 134, 161 The Red Badge of Courage 19 Rhett Butler’s People 1, 3, 7, 9 –11, 40, 48, 51, 55, 109 –114, 116 –118, 121, 130, 156, 162–163, 165 –166; Civil War treatment 116 –117, 156; female characters in 11, 40, 113 –114; portrayal of Scarlett in 40, 113 –114, 156; reviews and critical consideration 113, 118; slavery in 111; whitewashing of Rhett’s image 11, 112, 117, 119 –120, 168 Rhys, Jean 8, 72 Rice, Anne 126, 155 Ripley, Alexandra 7, 10, 39 –50, 109, 130, 133, 136, 138, 156, 161–162, 179 Roberts, Nora 125, 155 Robillard, Eulalie 42, 117, 137, 143 Robillard, Pauline 42, 117, 143

Index Robillard, Philippe 62, 130, 142, 164; Feelepe (The Wind Done Gone character) 62, 98 Robillard, Pierre 42 Romeo and Juliet 146 Roots 61, 70, 98 Ropa Carmargin 84 Rowling, J.K. 126 –127 Rubin, Louis, Jr. 67–68 The Rules of Pride: The Autobiography of Capt. Rhett Butler, C.S.A. 51, 109 St. Elmo 118 Salinger, J.D. 73 Sally Hemings 81 satire 10, 63, 65 –67, 72–73 Savannah 166 Scarlett 1, 7, 9, 17, 29 –30, 39 –51, 72, 109, 113, 133, 136 –138, 142, 144 –145, 158, 162–163, 166; and African-Americans 43; and gender roles 45; and motherhood 30, 148, 158; portrayal of Rhett 41–42; religion in 46; reviews and critical consideration 7, 10, 40, 42–43, 47–50, 100, 133; romance 7, 47, 49, 116; sales figures 47–48, 100; Scarlett’s change 30, 36, 46, 49, 161; style 40 –41; as unintended parody 48 –49 Scarlett (TV miniseries) 7, 49 Seducing Mr. Darcy 179 Selznick, David O. 6, 20 –21, 37, 59 Sense and Sensibility 8 sequel 1–2, 7–11, 37–39, 47–48, 51, 64, 68, 72–74, 127, 133, 161–162, 165, 168; authorized 1–2, 7, 9 –11, 17, 39, 50, 65 –66, 68, 109, 111, 118, 121, 133, 160 –162, 165 –166, 168, 175, 177 Sharp, Becky 30, 175 Shearer, Norma 20 Sheldon, Sydney 39 Simpson, Bart 71, 173 Simpson, Homer 173 The Simpsons 12, 173 Sinclair, Lewis 16 slave narrative 91, 94 –95, 99 slavery 57, 81–82, 85, 88, 91, 115; in American literature 85; apology of 82, 88 –90, 94; conditions in the antebellum South 81–82, 88; families 82, 85, 95, 97–98, 111, 163; similarities between slave women and Southern women 85 –86, 111; see also AfricanAmericans; Gone with the Wind So Red the Rose 15 –16 Social Darwinism 89 Song of Solomon 174 Southern Belle 22, 24, 85, 94, 159, 168, 173 Southern lady 25, 27, 48, 85 –86, 91, 94, 160 – 161 Spielberg, Steven 97 Stackolee 118 Stevenson, Robert Louis 8 Stowe, Harriet Beecher 22, 60, 69, 115 A Streetcar Named Desire 174

207

Styron, William 61 SunTrust Bank vs. Houghton Mifflin 43, 51, 56, 63, 68, 176 Susann, Jacqueline 174 Swallow Barn 26 Tara 1, 7, 26, 29, 40, 42, 44 –45, 48, 50, 56 – 57, 70, 72, 87–88, 91, 93, 130, 134, 138 –139, 141–144, 157, 159, 162, 165 –166, 173; Cotton Farm (The Wind Done Gone setting) 82, 99 Tara (Anne Edwards’ novel) 37–38, 50 Tara (Emma Tennant’s novel) 50 Tarleton, Brent 7, 15, 44, 62, 87, 119, 142 Tarleton, Stuart 7, 15, 44, 62, 87, 119, 142 Tennant, Emma 8, 50, 109, 121 Thackeray, William 18, 30, 118 Titanic (movie) 21 Titanic (ship) 138 To Kill a Mockingbird 162 Tobacco Road 16 Tolstoy, Leo 18 Tom Sawyer 64 Twain, Mark 64 Twilight Saga 135 Uncle Peter 59, 87, 89 Uncle Tom’s Cabin 22, 24, 60 –61, 69, 97, 115, 135; see also Gone with the Wind Valley of the Dolls 174 Vanity Fair 18, 21, 30, 118 El viento se llevó lo que 174 Walker, Alice 97 Walker, Margaret 67, 97–98 War and Peace 18 Washington, Booker T. 60 Watling, Belle 42, 62, 113, 119, 129, 131, 139 – 141, 158, 160; Beauty (The Wind Done Gone character) 62, 93; son 119, 131 Wells, H.G. 25 West, Beverly 10 –12, 79, 100 –101 Whalley-Kilmer, Joanne 49 Wide Sargasso Sea 8, 72, 109, 134 Wilkes, Ashley 40, 44, 50, 62, 81, 84, 89, 91, 100 –101, 110, 120, 128 –129, 131–132, 134, 138 –139, 141–142, 160 –162, 165; and Civil War 23 –24; Dreamy Gentleman (The Wind Done Gone character) 62, 81–82; and the KKK 91, 112; as latent homosexual 81; relationship with Scarlett 40 –41; as Scarlett’s love interest 29 –30, 36, 40 –41, 100, 107, 113, 118, 137, 159; views on slavery 89, 111; see also O’Hara, Scarlett Wilkes, India 40, 62, 110, 142; China (The Wind Done Gone character) 62 Wilkes, Melanie Hamilton 5, 40, 44, 48, 62, 71, 87–88, 91, 111, 114, 118 –119, 131, 132, 134, 138 –139, 142, 145, 159 –160; and Civil War 23, 112; Mealy Mouth (The Wind Done

208 Gone character) 62; as Southern lady 25, 160 –161; views on the Civil War 112 Williams, Sherley Anne 67–68, 98 Williams, Tennessee 174 Wilson, Harriet E. 81 The Wind Done Gone 6 –7, 9 –10, 56 –57, 61– 69, 71–73, 79 –84, 86 –87, 90 –101, 109, 125, 134, 158, 161–163, 166 –168; anachronisms 92–93; dependence on Gone with the Wind 63, 65, 68, 72–73, 93 –94, 99 –100; historical background 99; historical revisionism 61, 90, 96, 98, 163 –164; language 94, 99 – 100; motherhood 95 –96; as parody 10, 67– 69, 72–73, 93; reviews and critical consid-

Index eration 67–68, 90, 93, 96, 98 –100; sales figures 100; stereotypes 98 –100; views of African-Americans 99 Winds of Tara 167 Woolf, Virginia 8 Wuthering Heights 121, 161 X, Malcolm 70 The X Files 12, 134 “The Yellow Wallpaper” 93 You Can’t Keep a Good Woman Down 174 Young, Stark 15, 25