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Southern Cultures 11.3 (2005) 9-34


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Teaching Gone with the Wind in the Socialist Republic of Vietnam

Mart Stewart


Click for larger view		 Figure 1
On a Fulbright Scholarship in Ho Chi Minh City, the author used Gone with the Wind, a popular novel in Vietnam, to teach seminars on regionalism, the American South, and collective memory. The course led to some unexpected observations on Vietnam's own "civil war," defeated south, and postwar society.
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On his tour through modern Georgia in search of memories of the Old South, Tony Horwitz marveled at Japanese tourists' fascination with Gone with the Wind and observed the exchanges between them and a busy Vivien Leigh–Scarlett O' Hara impersonator, Melly Meadows. Meadows had taken her act to Tokyo and

boasted that she had once shown her red pantalets to a delighted Japanese Empress. She had learned some Japanese to banter with the tourists who contracted for her appearances in Atlanta, and from these exchanges, she speculated that the Japanese had a "special affinity" for Gone with the Wind (GWTW) because of a kindred attraction to traditional notions of femininity and because they, like southerners, had rebuilt their country after a devastating war. Horwitz mentions other sources of attraction: Scarlett's loyalty to family, her strength, and the "subtle, mannered code" that both Japanese and southern culture seem to share.1

It is no news to GWTW watchers that Margaret Mitchell's 1936 book and subsequent film have been embraced by fans around the world. By the late 1930s Gone with the Wind was enormously popular in the United States; it had won a Pulitzer and almost a million and a half volumes were published in the first edition. Today, GWTW is a global phenomenon that has sold over thirty million copies and has been issued in nearly two hundred editions in forty countries. The film, released in 1939, became one of the most popular escapist events of the hard 1930s in the United States, winning eight Academy Awards before it was also sold to audiences around the world. Both book and movie—the GWTW phenomenon has usually circulated in a hybrid of both versions—continued to be widely appreciated everywhere in the next half century. The book was enjoyed even surreptitiously in Nazi Germany after 1942 and in the Soviet Union after World War II, where it and other American books were banned. Gone with the Wind was praised as an example of "people's literature" by authorities in China during the trial of the Gang of Four. It was so popular in Russia during perestroika that it went through at least ten editions in the 1980s; two million copies were published of an edition issued by the publishing house Pravda in 1991. One of the Russian fans of the novel, Alexandra Alekseevna Krupoder, was so moved by the plight of the characters that she wrote a thousand-page sequel that brought to a happy conclusion the sentimental yet unhappy closing of the original. Elsewhere, the story also landed on fertile cultural soil, and foreign-language editions were published in places that had relatively small markets for the book. One collector of "Windiana" that Tony Horwitz encountered in Georgia possessed copies of the book from Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria, Ethiopia, and even one from Latvia, published in 1938, just before Latvia disappeared as an independent country for a half century.2

And there was also one from Vietnam. The book was available in the south of Vietnam in the 1960s and widely read there in the 1980s; the film version was available in the 1960s and again in the 1990s. Alexandra Ripley's massive Wind–inspired [End Page 10]


Click for larger view		 Figure 2
On his search through the South for the "unfinished Civil War," chronicled in Confederates in the Attic, Tony Horwitz marveled at Japanese tourists' fascination with Gone with the Wind.
Figure 3
With Gone with the Wind, Margaret Mitchell (here) authored a global phenomenon that has sold over thirty million copies and has been...

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