There was a fairly recent thread on this topic but I’m too lazy to look for it right now. In any case, the last movie I saw that had an intermission was Gandhi. I think Gettysburg may have been the last film released in the US that had an intermission and that was 1993. If it wasn’t, it had to be some other long movie released released around that year because by the time Titanic came out in 1997, theaters in the US were running it and other 3+ hour films without intermissions.
The 1996 version of Hamlet had an intermission.
Didn’t Pirates of the Caribbean 3 have one?
I’m about 100 pages shy of the end now, and Mitchell’s fables of Reconstruction continue to annoy the hell out of me. And it’s not even the specifics, so much as the whole “Reconstruction was even worse than the war” bit, that she repeatedly says in so many words.
And I’m talking about her narrative voice here. I’m good with her putting thoughts in the minds of Scarlett and other characters that would view the evils of Reconstruction as former Southern aristocrats would have seen it. But when she’s speaking in the omniscient voice, that’s a whole 'nother thing.
And excuse me, but:
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The war killed hundreds of thousands of people. I’m sure some people died due to Reconstruction, but we’re talking orders of magnitude here.
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Before the war, Mitchell says it took >100 Negro slaves working the fields to support Scarlett, her parents, and her two sisters in the style to which they were accustomed. I don’t expect Scarlett to think on this, let alone care, but it’s something Mitchell, writing in the 1930s, should at least include to some modest extent in her moral calculus.
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Instead, it’s just awful that now the Republicans and the Negroes are running everything, while the former slaveowners are struggling to get by. It’s an abuse of democracy, too, because the whites are being outvoted. And the former slaves are ‘insolent’ and ‘impudent.’ Lord help us! It would be nice if there were the least speck of ‘maybe turnabout is fair play’ in her worldview.
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Another omission is any recognition on her part that the South lost the war, and when you lose a war, the winner gets to call your tune for awhile. Her apparent attitude is that [del]elections[/del] war outcomes shouldn’t have consequences outside the battlefield.
‘We lost, now the Yankees should leave us alone’ is a fair summary of her attitude. No, you fought a war to try to make the Yankees leave you alone. You lost, and you don’t get to claim the benefits of winning when you lost.
I’m sure a lot of her ‘facts’ about Reconstruction aren’t factual as well (for instance, Reconstruction being in full swing already in 1865-66), but I’ll let that go because I don’t have time to make a study of it.
Scarlett is an extremely spoiled narcissistic 20 year old with PTSD at the end of the war. I don’t think critical evaluation, moral or social or historic, is in her wheelhouse.
I think Mitchell would respond that field work is all that the darkies are good for, and besides they were much happier as slaves.
Read the groveling account of what he needs that Mitchell puts into the mouth of Big Sam, the former overseer who Scarlett encounters after the war. Big Sam claims that he doesn’t like being treated as an equal - he would rather have a mistress who treated him as a pet, feeding and doctoring him and ordering him around. Besides, once Big Sam is out from under the white man’s benevolent thumb, he strangles someone accidentally. He isn’t condemned for it - being less than human, he can’t be held responsible for his own actions - but it Just Goes to Show You what happens when the n*ggers get loose.
I think Mitchell recognizes that this happens, but it is a horrible injustice in the case of Reconstruction. Because the South fought for a noble but lost cause, to defend their way of life against the Yankee aggressors. The South lost, not because their cause was unjust, but because the Yankees dirtied themselves in trade and industry and hired a lot of foreigners to fight for them. Fortunately, despite their defeat, the gallant former masters of the plantations are continuing the struggle thru the Ku Klux Klan, and even thru Rhett Butler’s ingratiation of himself into politics. Eventually, they will be able to kick out the Yankees, put the darkies back in their place, and regain their position as the aristocrats of their society.
All of your objections, IOW, are perfectly cogent and true. But if Mitchell were able to accept them, she would never have been able to write the book. Because the book is specifically there to push a point of view which denies every one of them.
Regards,
Shodan
Scarlett is NOT a compassionate person. She’s not likable and even the “love” she has for people she believes she loves doesn’t hold up to scrutiny. She is a self consumed bitch with a strong survival streak and an almost equally strong self-destructive streak. I don’t have the least problem believing that she could see a slave whipped to death and not feel any compassion (unless perhaps it was Mammy). She lets convicts be starved, she steals India Wilkes’s beau just because he’s rich and can send some sort of spiteful message to Ashley, she throws herself constantly at a man who’s not only married but married to a woman who adores her. The woman doesn’t even love her own children, except for Bonnie somewhat and that’s largely because she’s so pretty and charming and a perfect accessory who doesn’t bring any memories of terrible times.
The most bewildering thing about Scarlett to me is how in the hell she’s been an role model and icon to so many southern (and not just southern) women for almost 80 years. Melanie is the one with a soul, and she has more backbone than usually given credit for as well. As Grandma Fontaine says in one of the best scenes of the book:
Scarlett’s a survivor, but she’s a spiritual equal of any robber baron or cold hearted dictator who ever lived. She’s probably the least likable protagonist ever in a major bestseller. She’s damned near a sociopath. I can’t imagine that’s unintentional.
Note: her shooting the Yankee wasn’t an example of her sociopathy- that was self-defense.
I’m not taking issue with thoughts that Mitchell puts into Scarlett’s head. I’m taking issue with Mitchell’s authorial voice.
At one point she says in so many words that they were happy as slaves, but under Reconstruction they’re discontented. (Hey, the Virginia History text we used in fourth grade back in 1962-63 conveyed the same message.)
And yet at the same time, she invests some of the negroes (Mammy in particular) with a great deal of wisdom.
I dunno. (And I’m not disagreeing, so much as I’m just not sure one way or the other.) We’re 500 pages into the book before the war ends, so Scarlett, Rhett, Ashley, and Melanie and their interrelationships are already pretty well developed before we get to Reconstruction.
From the POV of the book being all about them, and ante/postbellum Georgia being just the setting for it all, the only important plot element that really depends on what I’d regard as a dishonest view of Reconstruction is the property tax bill on Tara that Scarlett gets at the beginning of 1866, that sends her to Atlanta to try to get money out of Rhett. (And marries Frank Kennedy for the money when she finds Rhett in prison and unable to help her.) It’s not hard to imagine that she could have come up with a substitute for that.
But if you’re saying that selling a comforting fable of Reconstruction is really ‘what the book was about’ in large part, then I can’t argue with that. Lord knows it was an effective bit of propaganda, seen from that angle.
She’s a spoiled brat. When the novel starts, she’s sixteen (with an emotional age of about eight at best) and at the end she is twenty-seven when she has her first adult insight. Which she immediately discards in favor of the belief that she can get any man or anything she wants.
Can you imagine how much bigger a bitch Bonnie would have been if she lived? The mind boggles, especially with that creepy semi-incestuous relationship with Rhett. Talk about daddy issues. Bonnie would have been screwing her way across the South, with only the family money between her and the nineteenth century equivalent of a trailer park.
Regards,
Shodan
Hell, yeah! She views other people simply as things to be possessed, manipulated, or used. And she doesn’t understand other people at all - I’d say she doesn’t really believe in their reality - and as a result, sucks at every last one of her relationships with other people. Even sociopaths often have enough of a working understanding of other people to manipulate them to their own ends; other than with her father and her pre-war beaux, Scarlett lacks even that sort of understanding.
You know how at some point as we’re growing up, it sinks in that other people aren’t just part of the wallpaper and background of our own lives, but are actual people, with thoughts inside their heads that we don’t see, the way we have thoughts that they don’t see? It’s as if Scarlett never reached that developmental stage.
That’s a mystery to me, too.
I’ve already quoted my favorite Melanie dialogue:
Scarlett:“Why did you have to hit me?”
Melanie: “Because, my darling, your back was on fire.”
If you’re in a tight spot, Melanie is a good person to have on your side.
I agree totally.
Her use and mistreatment of convict labor, which you mention, reminds me of something else going through my mind: in the book, her choices for sawmill workers seem to be either ‘free issue niggers’ (i.e. former slaves who have committed the unpardonable sin of forgetting that that’s their place) or convict labor.
While I was reading this, I started wondering: aren’t there any free white people who can work in the lumber mill? Or is labor of that sort beneath the dignity of even poor whites? Apparently in Mitchell’s postbellum Georgia, a sawmill goes almost immediately from being a license to print money to a white elephant that can only make a profit if you’ve got workers you can exploit to the point of starvation.
I would agree with the POV that says the book is “really” about Scarlett (and Rhett and Ashley and Melanie). To the extent that one can say that any book is “really” about only one thing. That story is set against the backdrop of the war and of Reconstruction. So in that sense, yes, it’s a fable.
What makes it offensive is that Mitchell didn’t think it was a fable. I think she really believed in it all - that the Southern cause was just, that blacks were happier as slaves, that the Klan was necessary to protect the virtue of Southern womanhood, etc. The parts of the novel that work well are the parts that either aren’t about the fable at all - the life of the South under siege is interesting, the machinations of an utterly determined woman to survive at all costs, the emotional turmoil of a woman badly lacking in self-understanding dealing with men - or in parts that are subversive of the fable altogether. Mammy is the main example of this, but so is Belle Watling and so is Rhett at times.
I think that is part of the reason the sequel (Scarlett) was so bad. It didn’t have, or perhaps couldn’t allow itself, to either embrace the fable, or to subvert it. Thus it tried only to be a simple romance novel, and without the background to drive the characters or give them something to react to, it sucked.
Full disclaimer: my mom read and liked Scarlett, and I tried it on her recommendation. I should have remembered that my mother and I have radically different literary tastes.
Regards,
Shodan
It would have been easy to get into her bloomers: just turn out the lights.
What I hated about the sequels are that Scarlett grows a heart. I just don’t think people do that. If I wrote the sequel to GWTW Scarlett would sabotage Rhett’s chances of happiness, then mangle another relationship with a toyboy she ends up killing, and probably die in genteel poverty, losing her money in waves through the panics of 1873, 1893, and legal battles with her children (who can’t stand her) before losing whatever’s left in the Depression as an old woman. I see her spending her last days in a ruined mansion she’s too stubborn to give up.
Scarlet didn’t want to pay the higher wages.
Convicts were the closest to slave labor you could get. They were probably fed a lot less than slaves because embezzlement by prison officials was the norm (Scarlett’s Irish foreman embezzles) and if a prisoner died nobody was out any money and probably no questions would be asked- just send for another prisoner. They remained so for about a century.
All true.
I’ve never tried to read any of the sequels, authorized or not. There’s just nowhere interesting for them to go. The end of the book is really the end of the story, full stop.
I’ve had the same problem lately. I’ve had a recent rash of people buying books for me that I hadn’t asked for and that I either had no interest in upfront or couldn’t develop any interest in - and all the givers are people I’ve known since the 1960s (or, in the case of my older sister, the 1950s). Guess the local library’s annual used book sale will be the beneficiary.
Jewish, actually.
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IOW you are a Gentile.
Regards,
Shodan
Reminds me of the end of Edward Abbey’s The Monkeywrench Gang where one of the characters gets off on her status as the only Jewish Gentile in a small Utah town.