Females' attitude toward love and marriage in Gone with the Wind.doc

Females' attitude toward love and marriage in Gone with the Wind1. IntroductionMargaret Mitchells Gone with the Wind is considered to be one of the most popular novels and movies of all the time. It is the Pulitzer Prize winner of 1936. People continue to watch the adapted film and fantasize about this novel almost seventy years after it was written. Mitchell's work relates the story of a rebellious Southern belle named Scarlett O'Hara and her experiences with friends, family, lovers, and enemies before, during, and after the Civil War. Through describing Scarlett's life, Mitchell examined the effect of the war on the old order of the South, and the aftermath of the war on what was left of the southern planter class. The novel is set in North Georgia at the time of the American Civil War, from 1861 to 1865 and beyond when the Southern plantation owners fought the northern Yankees for the right to own slaves. They lost the war, suffered innumerable losses of life in the process, and the romantic plantation life depicted in the early chapters of the novel was utterly destroyed. During this period the characters in the novel had to undergo the transition from a carefree playful life of picnics and parties (underlain by the hard graft of their slaves) to one of hand-to-mouth living with hard physical labor, and finally, back to prosperity. This paper describes Margaret Mitchells environment of personal growth, life experience, marriage and other aspects of emotional description, and her creative process of this immortal work, as well as inspiration for writing and writing background, and combined with the characteristics of the heroine Scarletts personality as well as her view of love and marriage. It has a further explore the awaking of self-consciousness about marriage and spirit of seeking autonomous right about life. The authors experience in emotion and thought established foundation for this works. 2. Biography of Margaret MitchellMargaret Mitchell was born on Nov. 8, 1900 in Atlanta to a family with ancestry not unlike the OHaras in Gone with the Wind. Her mother, Mary Isabelle “Maybelle” Stephens was of Irish-Catholic ancestry. Her father, Eugene Muse Mitchell, an Atlanta attorney, descended from Scotch-Irish and French Huguenots. The family included many soldiers-members of the family had fought in the American Revolution, Irish uprisings and rebellions and the Civil War. The imaginative child was fascinated with stories of the Civil War that she heard first from her parents and great aunts, who lived at the familys Jonesboro rural home, and later, from grizzled (and sometimes profane) Confederate veterans who regaled the girl with battlefield stories as Margaret, astride her pony, rode through the countryside around Atlanta with the men. The family lived in a series of homes, including a stately home on Peachtree Street beginning in 1912.Margaret Mitchell had always been physically active but fragile. In order to play with her brother, Stephens, and the other boys in the neighborhood, Margaret quickly became a tomboy. She dressed in knickers and called herself "Jimmy." She wrote, produced, and directed plays, casting her friends and inviting the neighborhood over. The front parlor rooms of her home were perfect staging areas. Young Margaret attended private school, but was not an exceptional student. When, on one memorable day, she announced to her mother that she could not understand mathematics and would not return to school, Maybelle dragged her daughter to a rural road where plantation houses had fallen into ruin. Margaret fell in love with Lt. Clifford Henry who was a Harvard man in training at Camp Gordon in Atlanta. They quickly engaged. Margaret started her first year at Smith College in the fall of 1918. While at Smith College, she received word that Clifford was dead. Soon after, her mother became ill, and Margaret rushed home to see her but did not make it in time. Chastened, Margaret Mitchell returned to school, eventually entering Smith College in the fall of 1918, not long after the United States entered World War I. Her fiancé, Clifford Henry, was killed in action in France. In January 1919, Maybelle Mitchell died during a flu epidemic and Margaret Mitchell left college to take charge of the Atlanta household of her father and her older brother, Stephens. Although she made her society debut in 1920, Margaret was far too free-spirited and intellectual to be content with the life of a debutante. She quarreled with her fellow debs over the proper distribution of the money they had raised for charity, and she scandalized Atlanta society with a provocative dance that she performed at the debutante ball with a male student from Georgia Tech.By 1922, Margaret Mitchell was surrounded by suitors, but two men remained the top competitors for her attention, an ex-football player and bootlegger, Berrien Red Upshaw, and a lanky newspaperman, John R. Marsh. She chose Upshaw, and they were married in September and the couple moved in with Margaret's family. Upshaws irregular income led her to seek a job, at a salary of $25 per week, as a writer for The Atlanta Journal Sunday Magazine where Marsh was an editor and her mentor. Shortly thereafter, Upshaw became abusive, and Margaret realized he was both a bootlegger and an alcoholic. The two separated and eventually divorced. Margaret landed a job as a reporter at the Atlanta Journal Magazine. Their marriage was stormy and short. They divorced in October 1924, and less than a year later, she married Marsh. The two held their wedding reception at their new ground-floor apartment at 17 Crescent Avenue a house which Margaret affectionately nicknamed “The Dump.” Only months after their marriage, Margaret left her job at the Journal to convalesce from a series of injuries. It was during this period that she began writing the book that would make her world famous. 3. Writing Gone with the Wind and Its SuccessMargaret was forced to quit her job at the newspaper because of arthritis in her ankles and feet. She spent time at home in bed, reading voraciously. John, tired of lugging books home for Margaret to read, brought her a second-hand portable Remington typewriter with the words, "Madam, I greet you on the beginning of a great new career." John's thought was that because Margaret had read basically every book in the public library, she should write her own book. Margaret began composing what her friends jokingly call, "the great American novel," writing about what she had learned from the stories her elders had told her as she was growing up. The bulk of her work was completed. Only two people, John and her friend Lois Cole, who worked for Macmillan Publishing Company, knew the details of her writing. Margaret and John moved from the Crescent Avenue Apartments to the Russell Apartments at Peachtree on 17th Street. Lois Cole asked Margaret to show Latham around Atlanta. Margaret agreed to meet Latham but repeatedly refused his requests to see her manuscript. After an acquaintance cattily remarked to her that she was "not serious enough" to be a writer, Margaret finally gave in, gathering up her tattered manuscript and driving it over to Latham's hotel. She told him to "take the damn thing" before she changed her mind. Latham was spellbound by the manuscript.After conferring with the head of the English Literature department at Columbia University, he bought it from Margaret. The book was officially released on June 30, 1936, and by Christmas it had sold one million copies. The popularity of the book began to change her life and she was besieged by letters and telephone calls from all over the world. The most popular question was "Does Scarlett get Rhett back?" Hollywood producer David O. Selznick bought the film rights to Margaret's manuscript for $50,000, top dollar at the time. Once again, she was besieged, this time by would-be actresses wanting a part in the film. Margaret won Pulitzer Prize for her best-selling book. Atlanta rolled out the red carpet for Hollywood at the movie's premiere at Lowe's Grand Theatre, located on Peachtree Street in the heart of Atlanta. Clark Gable and Vivien Leigh stayed at the Georgian Terrace. The black community was outraged that the hotel did not allow the movie's black actors or actresses to stay there. On August 11, while crossing Peachtree Street to go to a theater, Margaret was hit by an off-duty cab driver. Suffering from internal injuries, she died several days later at Grady Hospital. Margaret Mitchell House, birthplace of Gone with the Wind, is dedicated to the City of Atlanta in honor of the indomitable spirit of Margaret Mannerly Mitchell. 4. Writing Sparking of the WorksMargaret Mitchells strong family interest in history helped Mitchell create a realistic backdrop for her novel Gone with the Wind. As several elements of Gone with the Wind had parallels with Margaret Mitchell's own life, her experiences might have provided some inspiration for the story in context. Mitchell's understanding of life and hardship during the American Civil War, for example, came from elderly relatives and neighbors passing war stories to her generation. She lived her entire life in Atlanta. Georgia, as had her parents and grandparents. Mitchell grew up immersed in family history, listening to the stories of relatives who had survived the Civil War in northern Georgia. Both of her parents were well-versed in Georgian and southern history, and Mitchell's brother edited the Atlantic Historical Bulletin. While Margaret Mitchell used to say that her Gone with the Wind characters were not based on real people, modern researchers have found similarities to some of the people in Mitchell's own life as well as to individuals she knew or she heard of. Mitchell's maternal grandmother, Annie Fitzgerald Stephens, was born in 1845; she was the daughter of an Irish immigrant, who owned a large plantation on Tara Road in Clayton County, south of Atlanta, and who married an American woman named Ellen, and had several children, all daughters.4.1 Historic and Political Elements in NovelGone with the Wind includes a vivid description of the fall of Atlanta in 1864 and the devastation of war (some of that aspect was missing from the 1939 film). The novel showed considerable historical research. According to her biography, Mitchell herself was ten years old before she learned that the South had lost the war. Mitchell's sweeping narrative of war and loss helped the book win the Pulitzer Prize on May 3, 1937.Upon the publication of Gone with the Wind, reviewers drew comparisons with William Makepeace Thackeray's Vanity Fair and Leo Tolstoy's War and Peace. Margaret Mitchell claimed not to have read Thackeray's novel until after she had completed her Civil War saga and confessed her inability ever to get very far in Tolstoy's monumental work. She did admit her saturation in Charles Dickens and her sense that her work was a "'Victorian type novel." Mitchell chose an epic moment in American history and never flinched in bringing it to life on a grand scale; a creative energy reminiscent of the nineteenth century drove the work. From the memorable first sentence through the Twelve Oaks barbecue on the eve of the war, the fall of Atlanta, Scarlett O'Hara's unforgettable journey back home to Tara, and her beginning struggles during Reconstruction, Mitchell's narrative power (at the very top of its form) propels the reader through the limning of a culture (its grace and color and folly and weakness), a vivid evocation of the cauldron of war, and a bitter picture of the devastation following. An episode in the book dealt with the early Ku Klux Klan. In the immediate aftermath of the War, Scarlett is assaulted by poor southerners living in shanties, whereupon her former black slave Big Sam saves her life. In response, Scarlett's male friends attempt to make a retaliatory nighttime raid on the encampment. Northern soldiers try to stop the attacks, and Rhett helps Ashley, who is shot, to get help through his prostitute friend Belle. Scarlett's husband Frank is killed. This raid is presented sympathetically as being necessary and justified, while the law-enforcement officers trying to catch the perpetrators are depicted as oppressive Northern occupiers. Although the Klan is not mentioned in that scene (though Rhett tells Archie to burn the "robes"), the book notes that Scarlett finds the Klan abominable. She believed the men should all just stay at home (she wanted both to be petted for her ordeal and to give the hated Yankees no more reason to tighten martial law, which is bad for her businesses). Rhett is also mentioned to be no great lover of the Klan. At one point, he said that if it were necessary, he would join in an effort to join "society". The novel never explicitly states whether this drastic step was necessary in his view. The local chapter later breaks up under the pressure from Rhett and Ashley. Scarlett expresses views that were common of the era.4.2 Inspiration for the Characters Margaret Mitchell spoke of her research in accounts and memoirs of the period, but probably more important was her knowing people who had lived through the era. A child naturally indulged in old people and to the great drama of her region, Mitchell had gone horseback riding with Confederate veterans, sat listening in the parlors of faded belles, and taken every literary advantage of her exposure to the past. The result is a Balzacian sense of the texture of the periodScarlett O'Hara's green morocco slippers, the bright rag rugs in her bedroom at Tara, Melanie Hamilton's black lace mittensthat leads to the capturing of color and movement in great scenes like the Twelve Oaks barbecue and the ball in Atlanta. Alternating with such scenes are remarkably evocative descriptions of the languorous beauty of the landscape. These places and stories were mentioned in Gone with the Wind. Many researchers believe that the physical brutality and low regard for women exhibited by Rhett Butler was based on Mitchell's first husband, Red Upshaw. She divorced him after she learned he was a bootlegger amid rumors of abuse and infidelity. After a stay at the plantation called The Woodlands, and later Barnsley Gardens, Mitchell might have gotten the inspiration for the dashing scoundrel from Sir Godfrey Barnsley of Adairsville, Georgia. Martha Bulloch Roosevelt, the mother of US president Theodore Roosevelt might have been an inspiration for Scarlett O'Hara. Roosevelt biographer David McCullough discovered that Mitchell, as a reporter for The Atlanta Journal, conducted an interview with one of Martha's closest friends and bridesmaid, Evelyn King Williams, then 87. In that interview, she described Martha's physical appearance, beauty, grace, and intelligence in detail. The similarities between Martha and the Scarlett character are strikin