Voices from the Past REVISITING GONE WITH THE WIND
In the annals of Hollywood, 1939 was a year of spectacular achievement. A recent article in The Washington Post cites it as one of the seven candidates for ‘the best year in movie history’1 – notable titles include Stagecoach (John Ford), the film that clinched the status of the western; the fantasy The Wizard of Oz (Victor Fleming); William Wyler’s adaptation of Wuthering Heights; and Frank Capra’s comedy Mr. Smith Goes to Washington. None, however, provoked such wild anticipation or ensuing adulation as Fleming’s Gone with the Wind.
Released in 1936, the book of the same name – the only novel by Atlanta-born journalist and author Margaret Mitchell published in her lifetime – had won two coveted awards: the National Book Award for Most Distinguished Novel in 1936, and the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1937.2 Apart from receiving such prestigious attention, it was also wildly popular. Reading it again now, eighty-odd years later, it is easy to understand these two kinds of appreciation: not only is it an irresistible page-turner, but it is also expertly structured in its intertwined dealings with the personal lives at its centre and the broader social, political and military history against which the course of those lives is articulated.
Mitchell took the title from a poem by nineteenth-century British poet Ernest Dowson,3 explaining her choice thus: ‘It has movement, it could either refer to times that are gone like the snows of yesteryear […] or to a person who went with the wind rather than standing against it,’ she wrote to her publisher.4 Or does it evoke the idea that so much of the life of the South, of Georgia in particular, would be lost to war’s depredations?
Mitchell the South, where she lived all her life, and her novel is utterly imbued with a detailed, carefully researched sense of what life in
