Gone With The Wind Sparknotes

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Published in 1936, Gone With The Wind enjoyed immediate success. It also brought its author, Margaret Mitchell, a first time novelist, the 1937 Pulitzer Prize. Set during the drama of the Civil War and Reconstruction year, the novel follows the lives of Scarlett O’Hara, Rhett Butler, Ashley and Melanie Wilkes in Clayton County, Georgia, and Atlanta. The main theme of the book is not the issue of slavery but the destiny of planters and their life and in a more broad term of South itself. More importantly the book provides its reader with a historical perspective of the psyche of a white person born in Georgia towards the idea of slavery during the twentieth century. Mitchell’s depicts the slaves with an unhesitant compliance that is characteristic …show more content…

The black women are servile, the black males do not have the least bit of rebellious blood in them against the whites and they are eager to fortify and protect Atlanta against “them Yankees” with pride in their eyes. It depicts a harmonious plantation life which gives a false image of the South and created a huge controversy. Gone With The Wind concludes with the disintegration of the Southern life as it was known but till the very end it presented the distorted vision of slavery and the American South. The present paper deals with the delusive portrayal of the slaves in the …show more content…

The book is full of racial prejudices but the noteworthy thing is that it is in terms of class and not race. Mitchell judges a specific class of people and not a specific race. It has been criticised as a work in which “the Old South and the Lost Cause were glamorised, sanitised and merchandised.” What the book promulgates is the idea of a dedicated black servant who seeks his happiness through the happiness of his white masters and is bereft of his own family. Slaves are treated as big children by Ellen O’Hara, the epitome of the Southern white aristocratic lady. And it is precisely this treatment of the slaves which is used to justify the institution of slavery. For the white man must take care of his slaves and should be conscious of the responsibilities he holds regarding them. Keeping in mind the stories that were fed to Margaret Mitchell as a child, she constructs an inaccurate picture of the Southern life. The utopian image of the South that Mitchell’s provides is limited to the covers of her book

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