Posts Tagged ‘guest blog’

Thanks for all of your comments and visits over the last few days!  Remember, all comments this week are entered to win a copy of Molly Haskell’s Frankly My Dear: Gone With the Wind Revisited.  Just comment on a blog post this week to win…and watch for a special bonus giveaway later this week!  And now, please welcome Melissa Maday, a self-proclaimed “writer, reader, scholar, Smithie” who teaches college English when she’s not reading, writing, or thinking about literature.

The Wind as Literature – Q&A With Melissa Maday

When did you first read GWTW/what were your initial impressions?

I had seen the movie — or parts of it — over and over on TV, but I hadn’t read the book. At Smith, during the first semester of my sophomore year, I took an American lit class with the then-senior member of the English Department. It was 1998, and he’d been at the college for close to 40 years. The students in my class wanted to know if he had known Sylvia Plath as a student or instructor at Smith  but no one wanted to ask him. Finally, they talked me into asking. I raised my hand and asked simply”Professor Murphy, did you know Sylvia Plath when she was here?”

In response, he sighed heavily, shook his head, and leaned on the podium: he said, “We were here at the same time, and I suppose our paths must have crossed,” then he sighed again and added. “I don’t know what the big deal is about Sylvia Plath. The best writer this college ever produced was Margaret Mitchell.”

I was so surprised by this — both that Mitchell had gone to Smith, and that an editor of the Norton Anthology thought she was a better writer than Plath — that i went to the library after class and checked out Gone With the Wind. I read it over the next few weeks, and I was struck by the careful characterization and sumptuous detail. And, carrying its 1037 pages around campus with me for a few weeks also served as a real conversation piece: I was amazed to find out that many women I met felt connected to the book. I heard lots of stories about people whose moms read it every summer, or who had read it for the first time at the age of 12, then read it again and again … it became clear to me that it was a book that meant something to women of different ages and from different backgrounds. There was an unexpected (for me) universality to Scarlett’s story.

You wrote about GWTW in your senior thesis at Smith College. What was your topic?

I wanted to look at the book as a piece of literature. So much had (and has) been written about the movie, but the book’s popularity tended to remove it from consideration as “serious” literature. My thesis sought to read it as literature and position it in the canon of American literature, and — more specifically — American literature by women.  Fortunately for me, the book about Margaret Mitche”s journalism career came out while i was writing my thesis, and that book really served to put GWTW into perspective for me I saw where MM got her trained eye for detail, her ability to describe and explicate characters, and her clear, precise writing style. 

It was also really rewarding for me to write my thesis about an author who was also an alumna of my college. I’m grateful that i had the chance to spend so much time reading and writing about a book that means so much to so many people. I ended up writing a lot about the differences between the movie and the book to highlight that much of the exaggeration and excess we associate with the film was not in the novel.

What do you find most compelling/upsetting/awesome about Margaret Mitchell as an author?

I love her authorial perspective — GWTW is a novel written by a journalist: someone practiced and expert at observation and description. It is not the weepy, melodramatic, sentimental artifact that the movie has come to be. I think it’s most interesting that Mitchell did not like to be compared to Scarlett (in fact, she was kind of horrified by such comparisons). It’s also important to understand that Mitchell had a keen understanding of historical scope — GWTW wasn’t meant to stand on its own, it was the first of a planned trilogy of novels about the American South. But, of course, her untimely death prevented her from going on.

And, I really enjoyed reading about her utter consternation at the making of the movie — my favorite quotation is when she wrote that they were making the Wilkes’ plantation look like Grand Central Station. She was really worried about what the residents of Jonesboro, Georgia would think when they saw how their town was portrayed.

Can you speak to GWTW as a classic/feminist work/work of “serious” or popular fiction?

Yes! GWTW has been repeatedly misnamed as sentimental fiction, when, in fact, it is an historical novel about the Civil War — but from a woman’s perspective — Mitchell was a 20th-century southern woman giving voice to the women before her. She told their stories beautifully in the novel, and she created an archetypal flawed heroine in Scarlett. It always bothers me when critics or scholars contend that “serious” and “popular’ fiction have to be placed in different categories — I think it takes a truly gifted writer to blur those lines, and Mitchell succeeded at it in this novel. To understand this, it’s important to separate the novel from the film, and I think most who only know the latter are surprised by the intensity and depth of Mitchell’s prose.

I use the novel often in my own classroom — I haven’t taught it in full (yet), but it’s a great example of strong, descriptive narrative, and it holds up well under the scrutiny of close reading.

Um, could any week have been MORE eventful than last week?  Not only did The Heroine’s Bookshelf win a Colorado Book Award, but I was invited to guest host #litchat this Friday and Felicity won a lovely copy of GWTW.

This week’s prize is one you might not have on your bookshelf…a copy of Molly Haskell’s Frankly My Dear: Gone With the Wind Revisited.  Just comment on a blog post this week to win…and watch for a special bonus giveaway later this week!  And now, please welcome Melanie Fishbane with a few realizations about GWTW’s prickly heroine.

Scarlett: The Mean Girl I Learned to Admire

I was really flattered when Erin asked me to guest blog in commemoration of the 75^th anniversary of Margaret Mitchell’s Gone With The Wind. Mostly because it is not a book that I feel that I have any expertise in. I haven’t clocked the same amount of hours as I have with some of the other classic novels I study. My focus has tended to be on Anne Shirley, Laura Ingalls or Jo March. Scarlett O’Hara always seemed outside of my world view.

However, I loved having the chance to revisit this novel, because it gave me an opportunity to clock some of those hours I just mentioned. In the process, I realized how much GWTW has been a part of my reading life.

My copy of GWTW is stolen from my mother’s bookshelf. I get confused as to whether she had it first, or, someone gave it me, but somehow it landed on my bookshelf as a teenager and its remained there ever since.  It’s been there for so long, I guess it doesn’t matter. I left it at my parent’s house when I moved out because until I was settled, I didn’t want it to get damaged.  In fact, when preparing for this blog post, I called my mother and asked her if she knew where it was.

I started describing it to her, but she knew exactly what it looked like: grey, hardcover with the dust jacket long gone. The corner edges frayed, the spine worn and the pages yellowed.  I think at one point, the top of the book had some kind of dark ink, but it is now spotted making it look like I once spilled black coffee on it.  The edition is from 1954 and inside there are two columns of writing on each page.  After I got off the phone with her, I found it behind the glass case hutch in the living room with my other special books.

I’m sure it sounds sacrilegious to admit this, but I didn’t like Scarlett at first. This made my first reading of GWTW challenging.  Being mostly teased and betrayed by catty young girls during my elementary and middle school years didn’t warm me to the idea of reading about one. I couldn’t relate to her scheming ways or why boys found her so attractive.

It probably won’t be surprising, that I identified more with Melanie.  For two reasons:  1) She got the guy that Scarlett wanted to marry her; 2) Well, we shared the same name. It seemed disloyal to not be on her side. Still, like Scarlett, I knew that I would never be as good as that fictional Melanie. (I’m not sure how many people could) and so, my connection to her was short-lived.

Over the years, I dumped a lot of the mean girl baggage and became friends with someone who counts Scarlett as one of her favourite heroines. Listening to her talk about Scarlett, I realized that maybe there was more to her than just a spoiled rich girl. So, I re-read and re-watched the movie with new eyes and I saw it.

Scarlett is a survivor.

She has tenacity and stubbornness and willingness to not take “no” for an answer.   Her perseverance and fortitude against immeasurable odds, demonstrates something that we all strive for…and that is passion.  To know what it is you want and to go after it.  Even if he says that he no longer gives a damn, or your house has burned down, or, the man you thought you loved married another, none of that matters if you know what you want. Scarlett does. Now, I might not agree with her methods or how she goes about getting what she wants, but I admire the fact that she has something to go after.

I guess that makes me a Scarlett convert.

Melanie Fishbane is starting her second semester at the Vermont College of Fine Arts where she is working on her first Young Adult novel. With over fifteen year working in YA/Kids lit at various Canadian book chains, she decided it was time to write one herself.  She writes book reviews for the Canadian Children’s Book News and is active with online communities promoting children’s literature, Laura Ingalls Wilder and L.M. Montgomery.  You can see her blogging about writing, YA and her love of classic children’s lit at http://melaniefishbane.blogspot.com/

Wow. What amazing conversation! Keep it up…all comments this week will be entered to win a fabulous first-edition-style hardcover of the book of the hour, Gone With the Wind.  Speaking of GWTW, have you checked out How We Do Run On: A Gone With the Wind Scrapbook yet?  It’s the blog I can’t live without, chock full of ruminations, doppelganger fashions, and in-depth inquiries into the world of the Wind.  Please welcome Claudia, one of the dynamic duo behind the blog, for a very quotable guest post!

“As God Is My Witness…” – A Quote for Hard Times

I have an annoying habit. I quote things. I am the sort of person that breaks into Singin’ in the Rain when it rains (sad, true, now available on the internet). I love the smell of a lot of things in the morning. I tell people I like from the first glance that this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship. And among these quotations that I use more or less compulsively, I have one that’s reserved for when things are bad. Really, really bad. Or as bad as First World Problems go, anyway. Deadlines, excruciating social situations, deadlines, disgusting but inevitable house chores, deadlines, hangovers, hours stranded in the airport, deadlines (did I mention I am bad with deadlines?).

Any one of these things has, at one point in my life, featured above the blanks in a Scarlett O’Hara-style statement. “As God is my witness,” I said, time and again, “____ isn’t going to lick me. I’m going to live through this, and when it’s over I’m never going to write another paper/attend another class reunion/drink Cuba Libre/fall victim to an Icelandic volcano again.” Of course, not one of these things would actually stay a one-off occurrence (not even the Icelandic volcano part, and what were the chances of that happening again?). But in the end it didn’t matter that much, because parodying this line actually helped me get through things when they happened.

So I started thinking. What was to this line that made it so comforting? I am going to go on a limb here and say that large part of it was simply comedic value. It is just one of those lines that everyone uses and abuses, so parodied that there is almost no substance left to it.

But if besides the indisputable value of humor in bad situations (and, let’s face it, there is some comfort in knowing that no matter how bad things are, you can still crack a worse joke), this line offers a different type of comfort too, I think this can only come from the novel’s “appeal to fundamental emotions,” as one begrudging critic once put it. What this line sells is the promise – or, if you want, the illusion – of self reliance and self sufficiency in the face of adversities of all sorts. It basically sells you the hope that you can eventually have control over things that now seem overwhelming.

Of course, it is a cliché, but all clichés are lessons our culture already learned. And I think that perhaps, at the time Gone with the Wind was published, the world desperately needed exactly this sort of lesson. There had rarely been more disempowering times for the individual faced with the forces of history as the beginning of the 20th century. People had seen their lives torn apart in a war like no other they had encountered or heard of before, a war that seemed to have nothing to do with individual soldiers and their courage and skill, and everything to do with bombs and gas, killing impersonally and from afar. Pitched against something like this, men and women were powerless, as they would later be against another unseen enemy, the economy, when the Great Depression hit.

And whereas most of the time’s literature reflected this landscape of confusion and despair, this world where “things fall apart” and nothing much makes sense, Gone with the Wind, a popular novel in all connotations of the word, brought an escape and the promise of optimism. It brought back the old message that had motivated the Western World (and America in particular) ever since Robinson Crusoe set foot on his famous fictional island: the enterprising individual can make it by force of his own willpower against anything Providence throws at him. Gone with the Wind infused new life into the old story of self-reliance.

To the Ashley Wilkes-like characters of modernism, that admit defeat in front of a world that stopped making sense and seek the lost order and symmetry in books and countless references (because that’s all they have left), Mitchell opposed the strength of Scarlett, who refuses to fall victim to the world, but models and bends it to her will. And I imagine people naturally liked this, because it offered them the illusion that it was possible to stand up to history, to stand up to the economy, to stand up to all the things they couldn’t control in their lives. It was possible to at least live through it all, and once it was over, make sure it never happened again.

And it’s this aspect of the book, besides the romance, that gave it its timeless appeal to audiences worldwide. People, especially people who experienced hardships first-hand, could connect to Scarlett’s story and aspire to her strength. And, to me at least, this is the major element that makes Gone with the Wind an important milestone in our culture even now, at its 75th anniversary. And, coming back to me, I suppose it’s the echoes of this message that comfort me when First World Problems strike and that put things into their proper context again.

Or, well, maybe it is just the comfort of a bad joke.

Wow. Great responses and conversation this week! Remember, all comments this week are entered to win a lovely first-edition-style hardcover of Gone With the Wind…in my opinion the most beautiful and readable of the available editions.  Today I’d like you to welcome Sarah Seltzer, an amazing journalist/feminist voice/Janeite and reader you may know as fellowette on Twitter.  I’ve had the privilege of getting to know her a little better through the world of the Internets, and when I decided to do Margaret Mitchell Month I knew I had to ask her opinion on an oh-so-problematic read. Welcome, Sarah!

My Beef With the Wind

My mother handed me Gone With the Wind just before a family vacation when I was ten years old, almost eleven. She was desperate to satiate my appetite for new, “grown-up” reading material–this was the year of Jane Eyre, and later, of Pride and Prejudice, the year when I began to breeze through YA with such quick impatience that Gone With the Wind’s 1,000 plus pages were a welcome challenge.

I’ll never forget the feeling of immersing myself Mitchell’s epic. It was like being sucked into a vortex of adulthood, a completely new and fascinating universe. I curled up reading it at night when I was supposed to be asleep, with the door to the bathroom open for light. I sat in the back of my classroom buried in its chapters, ignoring my classmates’ preteen antics. Finishing those 1,000 pages became the consummate reading experience: troubling, enticing, absorbing, all-consuming. It cemented my love of the written word and of good storytelling. It became a vital part of my coming-of-age as a reader. I was too young to know what was approaching for any of the characters, and so my obsession with them took on an innocent urgency.

But before continue I with my raptures (and I could), I’ll address my giant beef with the novel, which of course, is everyone’s beef. The above paragraphs, the fact that the book was a rite of passage for me, the fact that I read it with fascination may have made something clear to you already: I’m white. And while it spun me upside-down with its artistic power, Gone With the Wind also troubles me because it’s a racist, revisionist novel in a society that’s still racist and revisionist.  To enjoy this novel, to consider it part of your coming of age, to be able to block out its politics, is to benefit from the privilege white people have in America–even if they’re committed anti-racists who think the book’s embedded propaganda is laughable.

As a rule I advocate encountering and challenging art that espouses outdated or prejudiced beliefs (I’m Jewish and have read nearly every major anti-Semitic work in the canon). But this rule is tested by the simple fact that Mitchell’s novel by its nature, in its legacy, is painful for an entire historically oppressed segment of the American population. Worse, it reinforces the blindness of a nation that is still in denial about its slaveholding past, about the very cause of the war the novel details in such gripping scenes. These are not inconsiderable problems. And so I have to ask the question, will I hand it also to my daughter?

To answer that question, I’ll go back to that first read. I wonder now why this aspect of the novel didn’t bother me more; my radical politics were already nascent and my favorite YA books that same year were all about the civil rights era. It’s likely because all the details in Scarlett’s world were utterly foreign, the hoop-skirts and the attendant rail-thin waists, the vast plantations. The selfishness of the heroine eclipsed the flaws and tomboyishness of her counterparts in tamer literature. Even more foreign to me was the book’s “backwards” view of history from what I’d accepted: the idea that the North was an aggressor and the South a victim in the civil war, and particularly that slaves were happy with the status-quo of being treated as subhuman chattel. I knew this was untrue.

I imagine the propagandist aspect of Mitchell’s masterpiece was part of the perverse interest it held. Just as Scarlett is an anti-heroine, the opposite of a morally upright March sister in Little Women, she is also on the wrong side of the war from those virtuous girls, and on the opposite side of most questions (like husband-stealing, for-instance, or seduction for financial ends). So of course she’s on the wrong side of slavery.

And yet. And  yet. Mitchell, through her words is able to compel the book’s readers to feel and experience life along with this woman, even as she spews bile about Yankees and former slaves, even as she contemplates hurting everyone around her, even as she makes terrible choices, cruel ones, self-destructive ones. We want to understand her motivations, we long for her to change her ways before it’s too late. We become invested in someone who is so different from us. And isn’t that one of the things that makes literature powerful and necessary?

So when my future daughter, or my niece, is ready to read the book, I will likely hand it to her, and I will talk to her before she reads it as my mom did for me. And I will probably hand her Harriet Jacobs’ Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, too. And I hope that by the time she gets to Gone With the Wind, the world of Scarlett O’Hara will be even more foreign and strange and removed from reality not just to my daughter, but to our whole society.

A new week means a new slew of Gone With the Wind and Margaret Mitchell love!  Congratulations to Kim, who won Ellen F. Brown’s Margaret Mitchell’s GWTW…and don’t despair, because this week’s batch of commenters will be entered to win a gorgeous, first-edition style copy of GWTW in what I consider to be its most attractive and easy-to-read binding (lovely hardcover, just like it looked in 1936).

Now sit back and welcome Katie Noah Gibson, a book blogger and all-around Great Person I had the pleasure of meeting in person on The Littlest Book Tour.  She’s going to share her perspective on an oft-overlooked character in GWTW.

Mammy: A Different Kind of Heroine

For my 14^th birthday, my friend James gave me a gorgeous hardback copy of Gone with the Wind – bound in red, encased in its own red-flowered white box. My mother promptly warned me about Scarlett O’Hara: “She’s not the kind of heroine you usually read about.”

I’m sure Mom wanted to save me from massive disappointment. You see, I was a good girl who loved reading about other good girls – Anne Shirley, Nancy Drew, Jo March, Laura Ingalls Wilder and many others. My heroines had a few flaws, but they managed to endear themselves to everyone around them, while solving mysteries, writing great books, staking a homestead claim in the Wild West, or even just finding the beauty in everyday life. Scarlett’s main aims, by contrast, are survival and selfish gain. As predicted, she made me furious (even while I admired her chutzpah and sheer force of will). But I fell in love with Mammy.

I know Mammy’s character is based on a problematic stereotype (even at 14 I could see that GWTW is fraught with racial politics at every turn). I know Scarlett often treats Mammy horribly, and I know she often has no choice but to grit her teeth and go along with Scarlett’s schemes. And Mitchell takes every opportunity to reinforce the image of Mammy as black, overweight and unattractive. But I think Mammy rises above the stereotype of her race and position with her intelligence, grit and compassion.

Mammy not only has a moral compass (which Scarlett lacks) and a powerful mixture of kindness and practicality (which allows her to take care of everyone) – she has backbone to spare. She’s one of only two characters (the other being Rhett) who can stand up to Scarlett, and she does it while taking care of Scarlett – and getting very few thanks for her efforts.  She may be a slave, with few rights and little autonomy, but she always has her own opinion, and she is wiser than any of her masters and mistresses.

Although Scarlett drives me nuts, I admire the way Mammy stands by her – throughout her journey from spoiled Southern belle to strong, independent (if still spoiled) woman.  She also cares for other members of Scarlett’s family – tending to various wounds and injuries, nursing Melanie back to health after childbirth, trying to comfort Rhett after Bonnie’s death. Scarlett’s prejudices and frequent quarrels with those around her never prevent Mammy from showing compassion to them.

Hattie McDaniel, who played Mammy so memorably in the film version of GWTW, was the first African-American actress to win an Oscar. I think she – and Mammy – richly deserved it.

What’s your take on Mammy?  Comment and enter to win a lovely first edition-style hardcover of Gone With the Wind!