To think Gone With the Wind really isn't a romantic film?

[FestiveFruitloop]

Just finished watching it, hadn't ever seen it all the way through before. Toxic/abusive relationships, marital rape depicted positively (WTF??), racism and misogyny, manipulative characters... all I can say is I hope it's no longer considered romantic in this day and age. AIBU?

Who exactly is admiring the "attitudes"?

It's an historical document. It's about the south holding onto old values and not agreeing with losing them and the progress of the north.. It's also about how entwined slaves became with their "masters" and family members scarlets shows genuine affection to some but disdain to others and mammy doesn't holdback from calling scarlet a mule. Also the other house slaves refuses to go into belle Watlington, with interesting views on social class she says her mother would whipp her

Often books or films about the south don't show that actual relationship were made between slaves and white folk.

It shows people preaching to the former slaves that they can now own land etc.

The klan to them was a political meeting just as stalin had "political meetings" about his atrocities and Hitler and so on.

Rhett loves scarlet from the day one but he knows what she is like. He constantly helps her, saves her life and so on... And she certainly happily rejects his advances.
I think the book and the film a re tremendous. My dd will study US black history at a level and I think this is an important document.

Vivien leigh is spectacular in the role.

@ChristmasEvemaddness This is a very good post and if I could write like this I would have written it! Agree with every word!

Are you making reference to Sylvia Plath's Bell Jar or another book with the same title?

Plath's, of course.

I felt so bad for the horse. Scarlet was a menace I would have left her too!

A novel written by a woman deep in the clutches of mental illness. If all you got from that cri de cœur was racism you haven’t even begun to understand it.

The only black character in The Bell Jar was "the Negro," an orderly in a mental hospital who serves dinner. He is described thus:
"The Negro kept grinning and chuckling in a silly way."
"All the time the Negro was banging down the tureens and then the dinted silver and the thick, white china plates, he gawped at us with big, rolling eyes."
"The Negro made me an insolent bow."
"I could see the Negro’s face, a molasses-colored moon, risen at the window grating, but I pretended not to notice."
Finally, he commits the apparently unspeakable outrage of serving her two different types of beans at dinner, so she gives him a "hard, sharp kick," whereupon he yelps and moans "Miz, miz" while rolling his eyes.

Sure, it's not racist if it's a poor little rich white girl with ishoos. It's a cri de coeur.

She makes my fucking skin crawl.

She. Was. Ill.

Many artists are and they still don't spew out that kind of shite.

If she'd been satirising the attitudes of entitled little rich girls, it would have been another matter.

You get that this is her flawed, unpleasant, selfish, suicidal character talking about a disliked orderly in a psychiatric hospital, right? And that this no more makes it Plath’s own take on Black people than Nabokov inventing Humbert Humbert means he thinks raping 12 year old is just fine?

I have no difficulty in separating authors from their narrators and of course Nabokov wasn't advocating paedophilia (Lolita is one of his least interesting works, however). But Plath's racial thinking is pervasive in that work (unless you think belittling someone as looking like a bottle blonde negress is A-OK) and is also evident in her poetry (which is, however, much, MUCH better than her heavily autobiographical novel). There's not just a selfishness but a deep inhumanity in a lot of her work that has always really disturbed me.

Other "ill" writers (but really, I don't think writing is an occupation for the sane, ever, is it?) from her country, if not her milieu, also wrote novels from the point of view of sociopathic narrators, and broke my heart in the process, e.g. Shirley Jackson, drawing on her own crippling agoraphobia to pen We Have Always Lived in the Castle. No, of course I don't think Jackson advocates poisoning your family, but she helps you understand the broken little soul who may have found herself doing just that. Plath's narrator is an unmitigated cunt, though- and it is the one novel where I have no sense that the writer and the narrator are so very different in their attitudes.

You'd probably hate my belovedest writers, too. shrug

I agree - Scarlett HAS to be like that to protect and support the women around her - she is as much as victim in many ways but has to grow hard and mean to survive and ensure her families survival - in doing so she sacrifices a lot including her happiness.

I love that she realises the romantic ideal (Ashley) is as much an illusion as the 'old South' is - she has to face the reality of change.

Yes it's totally awful when it comes to race - but so was the era - it would be worse I think to pretend that didn't happen.

With moder eyes it's a hugely problematic film but I still like it

It's been a very long time since I read The Bell Jar (and I didn't much like it) but I read Plath's journals at the same sort of time and I remember thinking that she seemed to be deliberately putting the very worst of herself into Esther, probably because the novel was a form of catharsis and she was expressing self-loathing. I don't think there was any suggestion that you were supposed to admire or support Esther's racism, or indeed much else. Mental illness can make people unpleasant and unlikeable. She was also sometimes deliberately provocative in her poetry, for example comparing herself to a Jew in the camps. She knew she was being horrible and you weren't supposed to like her for it.

I don't think it's a brilliant book on its own but it's context for the rest of her oeuvre.

But as I said, it's been a very long time... I might be totally off the mark.

She's pretty hard and mean by nature, I think... she marries Charles Kennedy purely to cock a snook at Ashley and ruin Honey's life. But hardness and meanness are pretty good for survival... although not so much for the necessary self awareness, introspection and softness that would make you more in tune with your own emotions and make you realise you love someone before you destroy everything.

I agree but what starts out as childish spite turns into real survival and backbone - that mean streak is what keeps everyone alive - marrying a man she doesn’t love and breaking her sisters heart is awful- but it keeps a roof over their heads and food on the table - she sacrifices herself.

I don’t know why you’re assuming I haven’t read more Nabokov than Lolita, or why you think it’s relevant that Lolita is ‘one of his least interesting works’ — I don’t think that’s true, actually, I’d put it ahead of most of the Russian novels, but behind Pnin and Pale Fire).

You do sound as if you have difficulty distinguishing character from author in works you don’t like, though.

I don’t think SP’s own MH issues have anything to do with Esther’s racism or general unpleasantness, though.

I’m not particularly keen on Charlotte Bronte giving Lucy Snowe an entrenched and virulent anti-Catholicism that authorial comments intervene to approve of in Villette, but it’s not terribly surprising in the daughter of a C of E vicar whose Irishness he’d repudiated at Cambridge, writing at a time when poor Irish immigrants were flooding into Liverpool after the Famine, and in a novel drawing on a time in her own life when she felt beleaguered in a Catholic school in Brussels.

I was always a bit unsure about that bit, actually. It may not be so clear in the film, but in the book, Rhett asks her why she doesn't just go and live with Pittypat, as she owns half that house. And Scarlett is clear that she won't give up Tara and have Jonas Wilkinson and Emmie Slattery living in it. They're not actually facing total homelessness, just the loss of Tara. Of course, to Scarlett that's like losing a parent, but it does still mean the situation isn't quite that desperate. She never even asks Suellen or Frank if they'd offer any provision after marrying.

I like how Melanie was a fool to her.

See, I always think Melanie was quite smart, and smarter in some ways than gobby Scarlett.

She just had a soft spot for Scarlett that blinded her to Scarlett's many, many flaws.

I’m now wondering if you’re my sister - do did my mum :)

I think Melanie feels sorry for her and is, perhaps, the only other character that understands her

I think for Scarlett giving up Tara would be giving up - it’s her one tie with her old life and her family home

Melanie doesn't fully understand Scarlett - she has no idea that Scarlett is obsessed with Ashley and refuses to believe it when they are found in each other's arms (although that time truly was only as friends). But she does get Scarlett's survival instinct and her willingness to do what's necessary for it. She absolutely gets why Scarlett shoots the Yankee and would have done the same herself.

I think Mitchell said once that Melanie was the true heroine of the book.

TBF it was common to see 'the Negro' in that sort of context in fiction from those days. Taken together with the characterisation and the way Plath mocks his mode of speech, it's definitely racism, but if we were talking about a different book I'd be reluctant to draw too much context solely from use of 'the Negro' in something written in the 1960s.

Terrible film - waste of a great cast