The book belongs to all of us: "Gone with the wind" as postcultural product

Abstract

There is a sense in which Mitchell recognizes the fallacy by which the past is transformed into a lost Eden, as it is during the siege of Atlanta when Scarlett O'Hara finds the memory of the rambling 'Tara metamorphosing into that of the sprawling white house with fluttering white curtains at the windows, the thick clover on the lawn with the bees busy in it, the little black boy on the front steps shooing the ducks and turkeys from the flowerbeds, the serene red fields and the miles and miles of cotton turning white in the sun! (339). Attention to the processes surrounding the translation of Gone With the Wind from book to film shows the extent to which "the eyes of the Southerner" were fixed not on a disjunction between historical realism and the Hollywood version, as Mitchell contended, but on a hollow and ultimately amorphous cultural narrative.