“Gone With The Wond”, both book and movie…

Great novel and great film!

Leave my wond out of this!

Godammit, *Wind.

Welcome to DL, Captain Obvious!

Wond is love.

I stayed up all night reading the book, even though I'd seen the movie many times and knew what was gonna happen

It's that kind of book

Hollywood/Selznick treatment is all I ever cared about.

And Miss Leigh-

I love it, but I understand the problematic nature of it going in.

The humiliation of Birth of a Nation received the balm of the Lost Cause, in GWTW.

It was a sweet Klan love letter to the Heritage Foundation. But people in the 40s, only saw wistful nostalgia. Pure propaganda.

They need a remake with "Wond"a Sykes as Mammy.

I Wond as I Wander.

The movie is not as racist as the book.

I wonda why OP is so mad.

Margaret Mitchell wasn't responsible for creating these myths - after the Civil War, the entire South started to create a mythology. And it was funded and perpetuated by the Daughters of the Confederacy.

They put up all of these statues to Confederacy officers in the early 20th century. They waited a generation or two to start painting everything over. Margaret was far far behind that.

Fellow Georgian Flannery O’Connor hated “Wind”. She writes about the movie premiere, but doesn’t name it, in the short story “A Late Encounter With The Enemy”. She viewed it as sentimental and manipulative and shallow.

R13 yes, in the book all of the major male characters join the KKK (except Rhett but he harbors them.) This happens in the movie too but the KKK goes unnamed and they aren't shown in robes or anything .

As awful as that may be, I'm able to compartmentalize it in context. I ADORE the movie. There are BETTER movies, but I'm hard presses to name one as ENTERTAINING.

R13, that opening title card was pretty gross. A land of “cotton fields and cavaliers “where “gallantry took its last bow.”

It was 1939. We know why the movie is the way it is. We are all intelligent enough to put everything in historical context. And if it's all too much for your delicate sensibilities, don't watch it.

In other words, GET OVER IT.

It’s a work of fiction, dear

OP and r16 have inspired me to watch it AGAIN and to make my Australian boyfriend watch it with me.

Wond is a pleasant smelling fart

1988- GWTW was screening at the Brattle Theatre in Cambridge. I was a Freshman at Emerson, and I convinced my str8 roommate, who I had a crush on, to go with me. He was reluctant since he didn't like old movies.

At the intermission he said to me "this is great."

The movie let out after 1am and the T stopped running. We had to walk back to our dorm together as a light snow blanketed Harvard Square.

Now THAT'S a good memory.

[quote]Margaret Mitchell wasn't responsible for creating these myths - after the Civil War, the entire South started to create a mythology. And it was funded and perpetuated by the Daughters of the Confederacy.

I was 8 years old when I first met Kathy Lee on the playground. We became fast friends, just as thick as Louisiana blackstrap molasses on a stack of johnny cakes as high as an elephant's knee!

Anyway, it was at our Southern seafood fry that I proudly dragged Kathy Lee over to meet my folks. Well, my mother took one look at Kathy Lee and forbade ever to see her again, because her mother was not in the Daughters of the Confederacy.

Oh, how my heart went out to little Kathy Lee, standing there while our servants snickered at her servants. But mama insisted I break off the friendship or I wouldn't get my new riding boots for Christmas. So I did.

Years later to get back at me, Kathy Lee slept with my daddy. That was something I had to accept. Mama accepted it, too, along with a brand-new Cadillac Eldorado for her birthday.

"Gone With My Wind"

You're wrong OP. If she had lived to write more it would hackshit on the level of Robert Ludlum.

It's beautifully crafted but with a message that is horrible and full of lies. A deeply flawed piece of art, but there are merits to studying it and discussing its strengths and shortcomings. It's a piece of history and very much of it's time in 1939, showing how little we changed since the era the story is set in.

I also agree with R25. Mitchell was a shit writer who probably had just one good story in her. The film elevates the source material by prettying it up with jaw dropping costumes and cinematography and truly great performances, but it's still shit at its core.

That movie is 84 years old. In fact, we are further in time from it than it was from the Civil War.

The film was released in 1939, so that's 86 years ago.

In 1939, 86 years ago was 1853.

Of course it is, OP. It's from the 1930s. What are you expecting?

I prefer "Went with the Wind"

I also have two mammy dolls. I like big bosoms and sharp-tongued sisters.

GWTW is one of my favorite movies, I'm eager to see it again.

I've never seen it as anything other than a story about these particular people during this particular time. Hugely cinematic characters caught in a remarkable, historic moment. I'm always glad they show Tara in ruins. I thought that was the message.

I'm from New England and we have our own cultural sensibilities. I don't recall feeling any more favorably toward the South after repeated viewings.

OP is miffed, her mama stole her man & her food stamps!

Agreed. Terribly overrated

I just realized the end of WW2 (1945) was 80 years ago.

For people in 1945, 80 years ago was the end of the Civil War (1865).

Faye Dunaway (b. 1941), Barbra Streisand (b. 1942), and Cher (b. 1946) must seem ancient to young people today.

OP’s plight with GWTW is worse than Iranian women, according to Whoopi Goldberg.

How dare you, little homosexual boy!

As wonderful as Vivian Leigh is, it's Hattie McDaniel's film. She walks away with it.

I prefer "Gonorrhea With the Wind".

[quote] I stayed up all night reading the book, even though I'd seen the movie many times and knew what was gonna happen. It's that kind of book

Great narrative drive. In my reading experience, only The Godfather is similar, but it is by no means its equal in world-building and characterization.

OP - All historical novels whitewash their times. Do novels about Versailles mention the starving peasantry, the rats that swarmed about the Hall of Mirrors, the blood-curdling darkness at night, the horrifying squatters in the lower levels moving like ghosts? How about the trays of food just left around any corner uneaten and spoiled, the ragged peddlers selling trinkets in the stalls, the doors to the chateaux' fence rusted open, the dead bodies behind curtains or in an armoire? All those get left out of the romance of Julien and Amélie. In their magical world, it's all embroidered silk stockings, secret assignations, and gowns in pleasant disarray.

It was not like the painting below, but imagined itself to be --

i read the godfather too. the author slipped in a fantasy about a woman with a too large vagina who falls in love with a dr who fixes her clown car snatch.

this and gone w/ the wind, are examples of why people complain about novels being a waste of time.

I believe the original manuscript taken to McMillan Publishing was partially written in LONGHAND, packed up in a suitcase and a bunch of paper bags. Is that true?

Having worked as an editor and proofreader, the idea literally makes me want to vomit, with burning eyes.

[quote] the idea literally

You were an editor?

I 've always wondered if Mitchell was a bit of a subversive for her time. Mammy and Belle Watling are the moral centers of the book. Scarlett is a human manifestation of the South - captivating but ruthless, willing to destroy others for profit. Ashley and Melanie's characters lampoon the gentility, high minded and idealist but hypocritcal profiteers of slavery all the same. The rest of their class are painted as buffoons eager to rush to war and still unwaveringly proud even after being soundly defeated. Rhett is a more honest observer of them all and himself, but even so, remains unscrupulous and unprincipled.

I really don't see a reverence for the Old South but a mockery of its ideals and its people. With the exception of Mammy and Belle, none of these characters are written with love. Rather, they are written loathing.

I love this movie!! It draws you in in the first 5 minutes and keeps you locked for 4 hours

Who cares if some of it is ridiculous? I know I’m not watching a documentary

Wish I could watch it in a movie theatre

Some phrases become overused because they're good, r43.

[quote]Having worked as an editor and proofreader, the idea literally makes me want to vomit, with burning eyes

The idea worked as an editor? I'll believe it, as you certainly did not.

It’s hardly Juneteenth appropriate, but TCM will probably be showing a progressive lineup of blackcentricity.

r44 Exactly, I saw it as a child and interpreted the characters the same way. And nowadays college educated types scream that it's romanticizing slavery. They're just not paying attention to the film. Reminds me of my conservative father who complains every time Bonnie and Clyde is on tv "That movie romanticizes a life of crime!".

R22 That is one of the sweetest things I've read in a long time. Thanks for sharing that lovely memory with us. Maybe it resonated with me because I was in college during those years too, and harbored secret crushes like that as well.

R22. Did you two fuck?

New wars are usually scheduled for every 80 years-it’s convenient and just better for everyone.

I will give r43 and r48 the benefit of the doubt and imagine they’re actually interested in what I was trying to convey.

When you work as an editor and/or proofreader you have piles of manuscripts and screenplay all around you, waiting to be read, summarized, and commented on. The only thing almost all writers now know how to do well is format, because software exists for that.

So to have that basic clarity ripped away via an ENORMOUS manuscript that’s party typed, partly written out in longhand (and arrives unbound in paper bags and a suitcase) is horrifying.

I don’t even think vomiting and burning eyes are how I’d react. I’d either demand a raise, quit, or jump out the window.

Is “Gone with the Wond” JK Rawlings’ reimagining of the story?

I think the burning eyes image keeps coming to me because I know Mitchell stored the suitcase and paper bags in a closet for years and years, sometimes adding to the pages, sometimes not.

I imagine a lot of cats and mice peeing on them over time. Uggh.

The book is just a big, fat Historical Romance novel.

I think I saw this from Sesame Street before I ever saw the movie. Every single older person I knew let me know it had absolutely nothing to with the film.

When I finally saw it I was disappointed. Where's the fucking hurricane? Tornado?

R54, that didn’t happen. Mitchell typed the whole thing. When Harold Latham of Macmillan received it, it was neatly tied together with strings (the title was Tomorrow is Another Day at that point). The leading character’s name was Pansy O’Hara. After Macmillan agreed to publish it, Mitchell spent six months making corrections and revisions.

“I had every detail clear in my mind before I sat down to the typewriter.”

— Margaret Mitchell

Maggie in the street

Was there an episode of Bewitched named "Gone With the Wand"?

A rare case in which both are masterpieces.

You’re happy she was hit by a car and died, OP? Jesus, live and let live.

Gone with the Whim

[quote] “I had every detail clear in my mind before I sat down to the typewriter.”

[quote]— Margaret Mitchell

Not so much, however, when she was crossing the street.

Okay - correcting my memories:

The rough manuscript given to McMillan editor Harold Latham in Atlanta was not in numerous paper bags and a suitcase; the pages were in about 70 musty manilla envelopes, and he then bought a suitcase to hold them in as he continued his train trip.

“Physically, it was the sloppiest manuscript he had handled in thirty years of editorial work.” (SOUTHERN DAUGHTER: THE LIFE OF MARGARET MITCHELL, Darden Asbury Pyron, 1991)

I'm going to guess that book editors almost a hundred years ago probably had different minimum requirements for manuscripts than some copyqueen ranting on Datalounge in 2025.

Musty manila envelopes! EWWW!

The horror... the horror...

I think the cool thing is that even though it was “the sloppiest manuscript he had handled in thirty years of editorial work,” Latham was immediately gripped by the story.

There were duplicate versions of some chapters and others (including Chapter One) were missing entirely, and there were even envelopes from a completely different project mixed in, but he immediately wanted to schedule another meeting with Mitchell to discuss the book.

[quote]Ashley and Melanie's characters lampoon the gentility, high minded and idealist but hypocritcal profiteers of slavery all the same.

To be fair, Ashley did plan to free his slaves after his father died.

That’s what they all say.

The sequel was worse: Gunt with the Wind.

What a stinker.

The movie was a real accomplishment in film making, given it was only 1939. What a score and some enduring cinematography and costuming.

The book is terrific storytelling. Vividly written, often arch and wry, with well developed characters, especially in secondary characters. There was racism in too much of the prose and the action, without question, but there was also dignity and intelligence in some of the slave characters. It can still be read and enjoyed today, in part because we're smart enough and informed enough not to accept it on its face.

[quote]R67 I'm going to guess that book editors almost a hundred years ago probably had different minimum requirements for manuscripts

Yes. I don’t know what a publishing house or literary agency today would do with a manuscript comprised of “yellowed, moldering pages covered with penciled corrections.” (The Atlantic, 02/01/1973)

Perhaps throw it away.

But Mitchell’s discovery is also an age old case of “It’s Who You Know.” Her old friend Lois Cole had worked in the McMillan offices and told Latham to look up the writer while in Atlanta and try to get a peek at her book. So he was going to read it regardless of whatever state it was in.

It lacked an opening when he got it, as I recall reading, lacked several chapters, had versions of various chapters. She was stubborn about handing it over at all and relented at the last minute, delivering him the mixed up contents in a suitcase. It may all be legend now, but that is what I remember reading. And Scarlett was called Pansy.

Read the thread.

^^ are you referring to something specific?

R77, I think she's mad because somebody - probably her - already pointed out the Pansy thing.

It's a step up from Oh, dear, I'll grant you, but the same small sensibility.

Is it a chapter book?

R69 is 'aight.

What would you say the major themes in the story are?

”The Bluebird of Happiness can be in your own back yard all along”

“Perseverance is rewarded”

R81, “Yankees are bad and the the South was guiltless”.

"Wash the dirt off yams before you eat them on an empty stomach"

"Side saddles can be a pain in the neck"

"Curtains can really be the best costume for the day, you understand."

“Sometimes you have to be a high-riding bitch to survive, Dolores. Sometimes being a bitch is all a woman has to hold onto.”

Tara gossip, a relative's relatives met Margaret Mitchell & her husband, circa 1940's, they were an odd couple, Margaret Mitchell was pleasant & talkative, her husband was barely polite, unattractive & overweight.

Miss Vivien Leigh is WOND!!

It’s a WOND-erful movie!

Mitchell's father was an educated man. I believe he thought it was junk.

I'm watching Glory.

“Practically speaking, a seventeen-inch waist is not sustainable, long term.”

[quote]"Wash the dirt off yams before you eat them on an empty stomach"

It was a radish.

“Some people are just mules.”

It’s a celebration of human suffering. It’s like making a romance movie set in Nazi germany with a concentration camp as the setting

^^^ I would go see that movie^^^

I will say that Melanie’s revelation in her (SPOILER ALERT) death scene is masterful.

I don’t think anyone was prepared to hear, “I’ve always known.”

It sounds like a porn parody

GWTW is no worse a depiction of antebellum plantation life than "Jezebel," the Bette Davis movie of the same vintage.

At least GWTW doesn't have the darkies and their little pygmy babies shucking and jiving and dancing in their bare feet and overalls.

^^^I love dat part-Happy Negros everywhere^^^

There are a million books and movies that glamorize certain periods to provide a pretty backdrop for characters and their plotlines. In reality those privileged individuals who lived in splendor did so at the cost of the terrible suffering of others black and white. When Scarlett decides to exploit prisoners to make money and Ashley objects she throws in his face he was a slave owner. When he says they treated their slaves well her attitude is 'yeah right.'

GWTW is certainly less offensive than, I don't know, Dumbo or Taylor Swift's Wildest Dreams shitty music video.

Blake Lively's plantation wedding. And her years of sudiste blanche cosplay in her shitty failed lifestyle brand.

We need a movie called "Gone with the Wund."

Gunt With The Wound

I think it was established that Margaret Mitchell of Atlanta was a racist, and was writing a romance novel about the last days of the Civil War set in Atlanta. I have no idea her intention but I doubt she was making anything resembling a political statement. She was one of those aspiring romance novelists so plentiful in the South. Whatever her intent, the work itself has a life of its own and its very subversive. Dashing Rhett is entirely critical of the Confederacy. He is an opportunist making money and has "friends on both sides, but mostly Yankees. Ashley tells Scarlett the South will certainly be defeated and their way of life will be destroyed. Now there was white trash, like the O Hara Overseer who knocked up his white trash girlfriend. Belle Watling was white, the trashy but decent old whore. And Prissy. Prissy was the most subversive character. Butterfly McQueen should have got an Oscar for spitting at Scarlett. Mammy was in charge. Period. Everyone deferred to her. The scenes of the wounded in the open at the train station was pretty amazing. It's no 12 years a slave, but considering its time, I thought it was more balanced than anyone could expect in 1939 or whenever. Now as determined as Scarlett was, tossing off convention becoming a businesswoman, etc. Rhett's speech to her sort of neutralized anyone thinking the movie had feminist leanings when he said, I like to think Bonnie was you as a little girl. I could spoil her the way I wanted to spoil you, Scarlett."

I don't think the character of Mammy redeems the sins of the movie, but she is utterly fantastic. It's possible that that role just existing makes GWTW a net positive for African-Americans.

I don't think you can rightly say we lost the war. We was more starved out, you might say. That's why I don't understand all these plays about love-starved Southern women. Love was one thing we were never starved for in the South.

Melanie doesn’t say “I’ve always known” but she does tell Scarlett how much Rhett loved her

I just take it for what it is. A Civil War novel told from the perspective of a Southerner, set in Atlanta. Sherman did march to the sea and he did burn down Atlanta. Slavery was important to the Southern economy. There were plantations. Scarlett doesn't give a fuck about the war. She has a very simple opinion. She hates Yankees and supports her friends and neighbors who went to war, many never to return. But she didn't give a fuck about politics. IMO she would have been no different if she had been in Manhattan with white servants. Spoiled, selfish, vain. And certainly not considerate of anyone. Hell she wanted to leave a pregnant woman, in labor in t he middle of a burning city with the enemy advancing and the army, the only law and order possible, "evacuating." She has never been anywhere outside the South, she is uneducated, although she can read, She was in the center of the action and the dangers of war. In the 30's movies weren't explicit, or gritty or realistic.

Exactly, R108. Scarlett is one of those posh women who doesn't give a second thought to anything outside her own little bubble.

I actually think there are six words that redeem Scarlett, and I tear up just thinking of them.

"I'm going to live through this and when it's all over, I'll never be hungry again. NO NOR ANY OF MY FOLK. If I have to lie, steal, cheat or kill I'll never be hungry again."

"No nor any of my folk..." and this included Mammy, Melanie, Ashley and her sisters.

Incredibly moving, and one of the reasons I love her despite everything.

[quote]Was there an episode of Bewitched named "Gone With the Wand"?

Why would there be? Neither Samantha nor Endora used a wand. There was, however, a GWTW parody. Samantha is transported to New Orleans in the 1870s. She meets the handsome Rance Butler and his housekeeper, Aunt Jenny (Isabel Sanford).

R109 - Mitchell based Scarlett partly on her grandmother, who antagonized everyone in Atlanta with her underhanded real estate dealings after the war. She built a huge house, similar to the one Rhett built for Scarlett, a monstrosity. She lived into her 90s and, after she was widowed, she didn't want to live alone, and no one would take her. She had sisters she tried to trick out of their rural home inheritance. Nasty woman.

GOSSIP: In the early 2000s, I met a very old gentleman in the Boynton Beach, FL Barnes and Noble. We got to talking, he had a heavy, courtly Southern accent. He told me that Mitchell was a complete 24-hour alcoholic by the late 1930s. Back then, he had been a Boy Scout and knocked on her door to collect money for something or other. It was around 2 PM. She answered completely drunk out of her mind. A black servant came running and gave the Scouts money.

Later, they were informed that Miss Peggy drank and that they should request funds by mail. I always thought that was why there was never a second book.

R17 Margaret Mitchell didn't like that, either.

[quote] It's beautifully crafted but with a message that is horrible and full of lies.

What message? I only get that it's the story of a beautiful and ambitious woman who's obsessed with someone who represents a decayed civilization (Ashley) while refusing to move on with the new (Rhett) until the very end when she realizes the new is where she belongs. I don't see that the slavery background, as misrepresented as it is, as part of any intentional message.

R110 I never interpreted that to mean Mammy or Ashley. They weren't her folk, She meant her blood kin, her family.

This message:

R115 I guess there's no way to know for sure, I always took it to mean the people who were then-currently stuck at Tara with her. Plus, really Melanie and Ashley were a part of her family by marriage. And she certainly loved Mammy like a family member.

R117, absolutely. She wouldn't have left Mammy in the lurch -- as though Mammy would have let her!

And she was stuck with Melanie because she'd promised Ashley she'd take care of her.

I read the book in high school and my sister reminded me of how evil it was. And I said fiddle Dee Dee

R116 That's not the message at least in the movie.

r115, r116 - What was Mammy's name? Her name at birth, before she became a nursemaid to the Robillard girls.

Scarlett loathes the Lost Cause and people who waste time (and money) mourning the past. All she cares about is securing the future.

R110, your sweet Scarlett and her family profited mightily from the forced labor of slaves

And when slavery was no longer permitted, she profited personally mightily from the forced labor of convicts who were paid nothing directly.

So your sweet, charming Scarlett is nothing but a miserable cunt who benefitted greatly by inflicting pain and misery on others.

Fuck her, fuck the genteel animals who allowed/permitted such arrangements, and fuck idiots like you who romanticize her barbaric behavior.

Would the movie have been as good with Paulette Goddard as Scarlett?

R123 don't care. It's a story. Too bad so sad!

R124 I think Goddard's screen tests are FANTASTIC. If only she was a few years younger. But she could've pulled it off.

Christ, the revisionism and white-washing some of you cling to. Ot romanticize slavery, as seen in some of these responses.

No, Scarlett did NOT consider Mammy "her people." Jesus Christ. She owned the woman, and she was attached to her like any southerner whose mother outsourced child rearing to a black servant (enslaved or "free"), but it was a purely transactional relationship where Scarlett held all the power and Mammy had none. Stop romanticizing that.

And before you come at me and claim Mammy would never "let" Scarlett abandon or neglect her, these are fictional characters. She was [italic]written[/italic] that way, specifically to mask the reality of slavery. No enslaved woman would address her owner that way.

And all of you just lap it up with rose colored glasses, never once [italic]thinking[/italic], and certainly not caring, what the truth of slavery, the civil war, and the (still) entrenched myth of the Lost Cause, are really about. It's just gowns and quotable lines and old hollywood stars for you shallow queens.

It's a great story and yes, Scarlett is far from exemplary but that's what makes her truly fascinating and seductive.

"If Gone With the Wind has a central theme, I suppose is the theme of survival. What quality is it that makes some people able to survive catastrophes and others, apparently just as brave and able and strong, go under? I have always been interested in this particular quality in people. We’ve all seen the same thing happen in the present depression. It happens in every social upheaval, in wars, in panics, in revolutions. It’s happened all the way down history from the time the barbarians sacked ancient Rome, And before that, I suppose, some people survive disasters. Others do not. What qualities are in those people who fight their way through triumphantly — that are lacking in those who do go under?"

"Yes, wars have a way of changing women, whether the women are dressed in hoopskirts and pantalets or in knee-length skirts and bobbed hair. The sorrow and hardships and poverty of the Civil War changed Scarlett O’Hara from a spoiled and selfish but otherwise normal Southern girl into a hardened adventuress, just as the wild period following the World War made modern girls cut loose from their mothers’ apron strings and do shocking things."

R127 Scarlett was in a situation with Mammy that she did not create. But within that wrong situation, Scarlett and Mammy loved each other like family. It's a complex and upsetting situation, sure. But it is what it is. And it's what makes the story all the more interesting.

Please spare me the white liberal guilt. I'm over it.

[quote]R104 I think it was established that Margaret Mitchell of Atlanta was a racist

Re: discrimination, I kind of choked when I came across this while looking through a Mitchell bio, looking up the r66 info:

When she responds to MacMillan’s contract with a six page letter outlining necessary clarifications, clauses, etc., Lois Cole writes back:

[quote]May I take the liberty of pointing out that you are not dealing with a fifth rate Jewish publisher? If your contract had come from Greenberg or even A. A. Knopf your suspicions, in fact all suspicions, might be easily understood. However, the contract came from us and it was the regular printed form which some twelve thousand MacMillan authors have signed without a qualm - In fact, I signed one myself.

"And Mitchell's legacy gets ever more complex when you consider her connection to historic, black Morehouse College in Atlanta.

Researchers in the 1990's discovered that Mitchell secretly sent money to educate young black men.

"We have in our archives, our collection, the bank books, the checks," says college archivist Herman "Skip" Mason.

She never spoke of her donations and delivered the checks by courier so no one would find out.

"It was the 1940's," Mason says. "It was the time. It just wasn't something that you would publicize and announce."

Dozens of black men went on to medical school and careers as doctors because of the notoriously publicity-shy Mitchell.

Atlanta historian Ira Joe Johnson says, the author took an interest in health care for blacks when hospitals denied her cancer-stricken maid care.

"Dr. Martin Luther King in his 'I have a Dream' speech talked about, 'One day, I'd like to have a nation where the sons of former slaves will be able to sit down at the table of brotherhood with the sons of former slave-owners,'" Johnson says. "And I say, at Morehouse, twenty years before Dr. King gave that speech, Margaret Mitchell not only sat down at the table, she pulled out the check."

Given the lasting images of Mammy and Prissy, some African-Americans might bristle at putting Mitchell in the same sentence with a Civil Rights icon.

But like many, Morehouse's Mason is left with these two sides of the enigmatic author and lots of unanswered questions.

What would he like to ask Mitchell if she were alive today?

"I would really want to know, What do you really think about African-Americans?' Mason says. "I mean, just your honest feelings, you know. Whether this was guilt money or whether she thought that this was a great cause we might not never know."

So when R125 is forced into working for free under threat of physical torture and starvation, we can all just laugh and go on our merry way and say "top bad, so sad."

Tops are never bad. They're scarce, though.

Gone with the Wund

You can like it without believing it.

r80 a'ight

[quote] The book is just a big, fat Historical Romance novel.

It's also an effective, still relevant in 2025 expository on why race relations among Americans still the way are they are in the US. Everything is in the book, including the US North talking out of both sides of its mouth with regard to slavery and Blacks.

r95, Melanie never says that. In fact, it's left ambiguous as the whether Melanie knew about Ashley and Scarlett. Even Rhett tells Scarlett, "She wouldn't believe it even if she saw it."

And it's not like they fucked.

R133 take your strawmaiing and your gaslighting and GET THE FUCK OUT.

As awful as the situation (one not created by Scarlett) may have been, within it Scarlett and Mammy had strong family bonds. In the movie (and the book for all I know) there's a reason Rhett says "Mammy is one of the few people whose respect I'd like to have." And there's a reason Rhett says respect rather than admiration or love.

Within the story at some point Mammy was free to leave and she didn't. She took greay pride in her role in the family.

It's a great story with great characters and I feel zero hesitation or guilty about it. If you do, see a shrink, honey chile.

*...zero hesitation or guilt

Even if you hate the story at least some of the money she made from it directly benefited black people

There is no getting around it that the movie's screenplay betrays the central tragic element of the Scarlett Rhett doomed relationship.

Both, out of pride, fear of vulnerability, and simply not believing the other actually is in love with them, never give in, or at least admit to the other, their true feelings.

Rhett, knowing he is helplessly in love with Scarlett and can never give her the power of knowing that because he knows how cruel she is and would hold his love for her over his head "like a whip".

Scarlett, stupidly besotted with Ashley, just plain old doesn't realize she loves Rhett until it's too late- he has fallen out of love with her, finally.

But the screenplay has Rhett 20 minutes in, discussing love with Scarlett.

This is a thread for Della if ever there was one.

Della Reese?

OP goes over the edge proclaiming her superior moral point (correctly) how loathsome the book and film, but then saying it was good the author was killed.

There's nothing more effective in undermining your superiority like proving your own lack of morality or ethics while pretending to the high ground.

The South lost and the Slaves were freed. IMO, Mammy and Poke and Uncle Peter represented the older generation of "house workers" who had become attached to the family and their ways. Prissy represented the younger generation who was happy to spit at Scarlett, only not to her face. Prissy resisted. She rebelled. She did it with a number of devices and tricks. So that's one way to look at it. Mitchell created characters that were more than one dimensional, and she did not ridicule or disparage them. She presented them and their personalities and their status and their situations in the environment she created in her novel. I thought the movie was consistent with the story.

And I do think that from Mitchell's perspective, her White folks were good and honorable, in contrast to Scarlett. Melanie, Ashley, and especially Scarlett's mother Miss Ellen. They prayed together every night. She tended the sick and as Gerald O Hara said when he was reprimanding Scarlett for talking "disrespectful to the darkies" Ellen treated their slaves kindly . Certainly this was not the norm. The horrors of slavery were never shown in GWTW. that was never the intent or the interest of Mitchell. This was a romance novel set in the South during the Civil War. So she glossed over those horrors. We were never allowed to see the slave quarters. Slattery, the overseer was a trashy cruel man, but we were never allowed witness his treatment of the slaves. Mitchell chose to ignore those aspects.

Her focus was on a society and a way of life that disappeared as a result of war. She wrote her novel, and this movie was made during a time of segregation. Movies with Black actors and actresses or entertainers had to be made in such a way that the Black parts could be cut out and a sanitized version shown at theaters through out the South. If you read about Lena Horne or other people from that time, the only way Bojangles and Hattie Mc Daniel could be featured in a movie was as subservient. While we might demand more authenticity, accuracy, truth from stories in these times, in the 1930's 40's, 50's, 60's it was a different world.

If you want to see a really racist movie, seriously, go watch Birth of a Nation. The original. Woodrow Wilson featured it at a White House Screening. That was back when 30,000 members of the KKK marched down Pennsylvania Avenue. The KKK didn't bother to hide either, not only were they heroes in the movies, t hey actually endorsed candidates in local elections.

[quote]R121 What was Mammy's name? Her name at birth, before she became a nursemaid to the Robillard girls.

Peaches Malone.

Her name was Viola.

It was Ruth. No last name.

One thing that gets lost in all this carrying on is the difference between racism and prejudice. Most of us are prejudiced. I am. I know it. It's mild but it's there. Was Mitchell racist? Possibly, in a genuine, of her time way. Yet she was not a hard hearted racist or she wouldn't have given away that money as she did. People are the sum of many parts. Few are all good or all bad. We forget that these days.

R123 She's a fictional character.

I think she stole R123's beau. And possibly her po'teers.

Ms. Mitchell failed to mention that the household slaves like Mammy and Prissy could ALWAYS be coerced/threatened into submission simply by slave owners suggedting they willl be demoted to back breaking work as field hands (under the brutal supervision of overseers) if they don't "shape up."

In downtown St. Louis, there was a privately owned prison where household slaves in the finest St. Louis households where penned up without food and water while they awaited being "sent down the river" to work as field hands on southern plantations, for various infractions to their masters.

One of Scarlett's major characteristics is her coping mechanism of turning a blind eye to a lot of things in order to survive ("I won't think about it today--I'll think about it tomorrow.") I don't think anyone (including the author) thought Scarlett was a perfectly heroic figure. She was human, with a lot of faults, and actually there are many times when the reader or the audience feels superior to her. She's petty, she makes a fool out of herself many times, etc. But she's a survivor at a time when a lot of her friends are going under. She's brazen and gets what she wants without thinking too much of the consequences.

A pretty fascinating character who could have been written as having existed during many other times of historic upheaval. Yes, there was once slavery in the US. There were horrible injustices of all kinds, in history. Margaret Mitchell was writing in the 1920s and 1930s. She wasn't writing the kind of book some of you seem to think GWTW is, some kind of pro-slavery argument. She was writing about one Southern woman's life from before, during, and after the Civil War. One of the most fascinating periods in American History. As a historical novel it's one of the most absorbing and readable, and well written. Just all the research she mut have done--before the internet--is incredible. And then to also create such compelling characters.

R155 you're talking reality. GWTW was not reality it was fiction set in a time during real historical events.

When GWTW premiered the NAACP rightly condemned it and criticized the way they sanitized and portrayed the characters and the story.

Scarlett threatened Prissy with sale south at least once.

"I loved my mammy growing up."

r151 - Ruth is Mammy's name, but it doesn't appear in GWTW. Nor does it appear in two sequels commissioned by the Mitchell estate. It only appears in the third book authorized by the estate. Essentially, the author Donald McCaig pointed out that Mammy had no name. Surprised, the authorized a book telling her story.

Ruth's Journey: The Authorized Novel of Mammy from Margaret Mitchell's Gone with the Wind