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Afterword
- University of South Carolina Press
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Afterword #43 “People have funny ideas.They think the great romance of the book is between Scarlett and Rhett. Now it’s a love story, no question, and Margaret Mitchell does a masterful job keeping us in suspense the whole one thousand-plus pages, wondering if Scarlett and Rhett will get back together—something some twenty-eight million readers have been wondering since the book came out in 1936.The Scarlett and Rhett story, however, turns pale as powdered milk when compared with the creamier romance at hand: the one between book and reader, between reader and Scarlett, between a young girl and her own fantasies.” Beverly Lowry, “A Book of Our Own” (87) “What matters is that lives do not serve as models; only stories do that. And it is a hard thing to make up stories to live by. We can only retell and live by the stories we have read or heard. We live our lives through texts. They may be read, or changed, or experienced electronically, or come to us, like the murmurings of our mothers, telling us what conventions demand . Whatever their form or medium, these stories have formed us all; they are what we must use to make new fictions, new narratives.” Carolyn G. Heilbrun, Writing a Woman’s Life (37) Afterword 139 During the years that I worked on this book, when I would mention my subject to colleagues, they would recommend a “Scarlett” for my study, but more often than not, the suggested characters were more comparable to the typical misperception of the character type, an unfairly critical view of Scarlett that is probably based largely on her depiction in the movie.It is my hope that this study will bring readers back to the book with a view toward recognizing not only Margaret Mitchell’s character’s heroic resistance of the limitations her society tried to place upon her but also society’s tendency to be discomforted by and judgmental toward that resistance.I am still disappointed in myself for not liking Kat Meads’s character Kitty Duncan from the start, for reaching the end of her novel before realizing that this fictional biography was presenting Kitty entirely from the perspective of others—characters who were discomforted by Kitty’s refusal to conform. Elizabeth Wurtzel’s observation in her book Bitch: In Praise of Difficult Women, “how nice it must be to just decide I will not be nice, I am never sorry, I have no regrets: what is before me belongs to me,” reminds me of Kitty Duncan. Wurtzel believes that “for men this attitude is second nature”(30),but the perception of such an attitude in a woman results in her being labeled a bitch. Wurtzel complains on behalf of women who would be so labeled,“All my life, one person or another has been telling me to behave. . . . I have a tough time feeling that feminism has done a damn bit of good if I can’t be the way I am and have the world accommodate it on some level” (28, 33). Kat Meads sets her novel in the middle of the twentieth century, but she wrote it in the twenty-first century,knowing that attitudes toward women who resist or even rebel against status quo (still considered “bad girls”) are not changing fast enough—just as Margaret Mitchell knew that opportunities for women of her day, in the first half of the twentieth century, had not changed very much since the Civil War that gave her heroine the chance to live a different life than she had been raised to expect. There are still, in real life, in the twenty-first century, Scarletts all over the world—women who cannot—either because of their circumstances or their own ambitions—accept the limitations set for their gender. I chose for my examination of this character type in literature to focus on southern Scarletts (including Sula, whose community is as influenced by southern history as the others) because the South is an example of a culture particularly oppressive to women, including both women who have been idealized historically, the white southern lady, and women who suffer the double oppression of also being African Americans. The (false) ideals of equality within the American dream and, for all but Sula, the privileged social position of the white [3.80.211.101] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 02:22 GMT) 140 Afterword southerner place protagonists of the novels covered in this...