I would love that…how do we do that around here?
My Great Aunt Lexie lived in the family home in Finley, Tennessee. Most of it was closed off, and I was very little and never explored much to my regret. She lived in a bedroom (although what is was in 1860 I have no idea) and the kitchen.
Slaves built first the kitchen for the family, then the slave quarters for themselves. They were used as a smokehouse at some point, and for storage in the 1960s.
The rest of the house was then constructed. The kitchen retained a fireplace and a cistern. Lexie always gave me a silver dollar and a bag of plastic dinosaurs when we visited.
Whether Tara had a separate kitchen to prepare for something the size of a barbecue, I have no idea.
Detached kitchens were the rule in large houses. My father grew up in a dogtrot log farmhouse with 4 rooms and even it had a detached kitchen (later connected to the house once gas stoves replaced the open fire). In colonial Savannah and Charleston they were the law in some areas of the city. Kitchen fires weren’t uncommon and if part of the house could take the entire house down and, in a city, a burning house with the right winds could take down blocks.
From a search for kitchen in the Gutenberg (Australia) version of the book:
The kitchen at the Atlanta house would more likely have been in the basement as that was the general rule for mansions of the time. Also by then, in a rich house especially, there were better stoves and fire safety measures.
PS- In my unauthorized sequel I use this house(a mansion built by Brigham Young [who died before completion]) as the template for the Atlanta house. It’s not exactly the book’s description but it looks to me more like what Scarlett wanted that an actual chalet- something vulgar and “ultra modern” and far away from the basic 4 over 4 planter’s houses.
From the book (edited a bit):
and
My impression was that kitchens were also in separate buildings because they generated so much heat–especially in a big house where the oven fires would be kept burning pretty steadily.
The question I have about Aunt Pittypat’s stairs is What is that picture on the wall near the foot of the stairs? It’s a white oval–you can see it, for example, when Scarlett says goodbye to Ashley after he’s been home on Christmas leave.
To me, the picture always looks like a lady in a large hat playing chess with an elephant, but I can’t think my perception is accurate. Anyone get a better look at it?
I’ll check it out on the DVD later. You have me curious.
The hanging layers of artwork were extremely popular at that time. Several paintings would be suspended from something like a curtain rod at the top of the high ceilinged room, usually in a sort of pyramid formation. Interior design was in general described as “busy” in those times- loud wallpaper, loud matching sconces and lamps on the mantels, and as little visible wall space as possible in houses of the well off. Wood floors were the rule but considered gauche if visible; they were usually covered with shellacked canvas mats that in turn had some kind of painted design. Wasn’t a pretty era. (Check out this section of Abraham Lincoln’s parlor- while it was in Springfield IL it was decorated by his wife [a southerner- sort of] and considered extremely fashionable at the time; today… puke.)
In general all of the houses used in the movie were about two notches above what they were in the book, except for Twelve Oaks which was about 18 notches above what it was in the book.
For Twelve Oaks Margraret Mitchell suggested Bulloch Hall(the plantation mansion where Teddy Roosevelt’s mother grew up) though they went instead with something more along the line of Versailles (serious overkill- there was nothing like that mansion anywhere in Georgia and probably not anywhere in America until the robber barons started building a generation later).
Tara would probably have looked more like this*, big and rambling with lots of nooks and crannies. The house begins with what sounds like the standard Federal 2 over 2 I style (2 rooms up 2 rooms down hallway in the middle) which was nationwide in the early 19th century and was the plain black dress of houses; you could dress them up or down, add a porch when you got richer or tack on wings or spend money on a fancy staircase and mantelwork or just leave it plain. Tara per the book grew constantly til it included a grape arbor off one side, a one story wing, a basement, an attic (Mammy’s quarters were in the attic), a wooden wing, and basically “here a room there a room” until it was huge but plain. (If you’ve ever been in many big old houses you’ll know how they sprawl; you might walk through a bedroom to get from a dining room to the study.)
Pittypat’s house would have been slightly plainer than in the book but not a lot. It was fairly new (as was Atlanta, which had just been Terminus before which it was Marthasville and at the time of the Civil War was not yet the capital city). Pittypat’s money came from warehouses and farms she was bequeathed in the area, mostly ruined by the war of course. In the book Ashley and Melanie choose to rent what’s described as a once large two story house whose top floor has been blown off and with a basement that’s home to a lot of transients Melanie takes in (most famousy Archie, the wifekiller jailbird who loves her but hates Scarlett).
*(That’s in Utah actually, a country home of Heber Kimball incidentally, LDS Apostle and friend of Brigham Young; Kimball was the one with the bigger family [dozens of wives and 65 children].)
Pitty, IIRC, must have inherited money from her father since her brother, Uncle Henry, managed it for her. They’d had a falling out, but she always insisted on the monthly visit for her stipend, and her family assumed it was the only real drama she had in her sheltered life.
I always thought Rhett was referring to a whorehouse when he told Scarlett he’d seen a house like the one she described, only not in Switzerland.
Sampiro, can we assume your sequel will cover the history of Belle and Rhett’s relationship and resolve once and for all if Belle’s son is Rhett’s? (I don’t think so, I think he was helping her out as an old friend, but that’s one of the debates.)
Now if I told you then you wouldn’t need to buy it.
In my take, Belle’s child isn’t Rhett’s. If I were to give a back story for her she’d be just a “white trash” girl who fled a bad teenaged marriage, entered the trade, made her way to California for the gold rush, and met Rhett. At some point before she meets him she has a kid whose father is of the “when a rabbit runs through a thorn bush who knows which one scratched it” variety.
Her father is a major character in Rhett Butler’s People. He’s a brigand, a bit like the villain in Cold Mountain. In my take she probably hasn’t had any contact with her birth family in many years.
Stranger is the choice of villain in the Australian sequel, The Winds of Tara. (Under Aussie copyright laws GWTW is public domain so the book can be legally sold, but only in countries with the same or similar copyright laws.) The villain is Jonas Wilkerson, the former overseer, who is killed in the novel (though not the movie) Gone With the Wind.
Speaking of Wilkerson, I always thought a parallel novel from the perspective of Emmy Slattery would be good. In the novel and movie she’s a villain, though the only real ‘crime’ that’s specific is being one of the “poor white trash Slatterys”, having an illegitimate baby with “the Yankee overseer” at Tara (doesn’t make one a saint but doesn’t prevent it either), and having a contagious disease that Ellen O’Hara catches. None of these are exactly evil, and certainly no worse than what Scarlett does (marrying two men she doesn’t love, both of whom are in love with other women).
But to me the odd twist in Emmy’s story, one that’s more or less thrown away in both novel and movie, is that apparently her relationship with Wilkerson isn’t just a roll in the cotton patch, because at the end of the war when he’s rich and could have many women of quality (Scarlett herself would probably have at least considered marrying him if he’d asked) he goes back to his poor white trash dead-baby’s mama. Emmy’s real evil is coming up in the world socioeconomically at the same time the O’Haras and others are plummeting.
I think it’d be interesting to hear the tale from her perspective. (One major spoiler I’ll grant is that in a conversation twixt Mammy and Dilcey you learn that Ellen [who’s not so much a villain as a seriously disturbed ice queen in my rendition] did more than baptize the illegitimate child to help it along to heaven.)
When does Flashman escort a Madame and her employees from New Orleans to California during the gold rush? 
He also manages the trust that Melanie and Scarlett (by virtue of her first husband and in right of her son) share, which is essentially worthless after the war but he slowly builds it back up. It certainly never says so of course, and he’s a very minor character, but I got the opinion that Uncle Henry might be a tad on the gay side. He’s a prissy old fussbudget, has little regard for society, and an aging bachelor who thinks women are silly except for Scarlett (who he doesn’t particularly like but comes to respect for her business acumen) and Mellie (who’s his niece and, well, Mellie, so he loves her).
The book gets a lot of guff for its perceived racism, and certainly the racial views of the time when it was written were archaic to say the best, but the black characters are not all simpletons (especially Mammy, one of the most complex characters in book or film). Case in point is that Uncle Henry and Aunt Pittypat made me think of Uncle Peter (played by Eddie “Rochester” Anderson in the movie), who in the novel is more than just a funny old butler but very much a father figure to Melanie and Charles. He was with their father when he was killed in the Mexican War and swore an oath to raise his kids, and he keeps it, even standing up to Scarlett (who he doesn’t much care for) for the way she ignores her son/his master’s grandson.
There’s also a scene where a carpetbagger’s wife insults Peter, calling him essentially a simpleton and an old pet (and the N word but I can’t imagine taht had much of a punch in that day) and that absolutely infuriates Scarlett (though she doesn’t say anything to the woman for business and political reasons). One of the interesting things in the book that I know from my own family oral history was true was that to Southerners who had more than two dimes it was automatic that the children were to be entrusted to black women, but UNTHINKABLE that they would be entrusted to hired Irish women (or hired white women in general), while to the carpetbaggers (who weren’t used to black people) it was the complete opposite.
This was also true in the Lincoln household incidentally. Mary Todd had an irrational hatred (many really) of Irish girls and woudln’t have them as domestics unless it was absolutely necessary, but she’d hire blacks and trust them completely. Not only was it really true that “some of her best friends” were black, but the accounts of her by black people- her dressmaker Elizabeth Keckley and Harriet Tubman and Frederick Douglass [who had at best mixed opinions of her husband] were consistent- they sensed no prejudice in her. Irish girls who gave oral accounts… different story. They described a total horror.
From my personal experience, the space under the spiral staircase is where I’m expected to fit several equipment racks, each two feet wide, seven feet tall, and three feet deep (with cables), PLUS some way to get to the back of them. And it needs its own cooling system because those racks put off a lot of heat and, especially in Florida, you probably don’t want to run the furnace to it (I defined the amount of COOL air the cabinet containing a projector needed, and its temperature range. It took us months to figure out they were not just piping cool air to it, but also HOT air!). Depending on how long the salesman and project manager wish to keep working for us, we either manage to get our own room with additional ventilation, or the equipment breaks down daily. The owner is more interested in his toys than in having another storage room. Er, no matter how much he needs it. [rant] Jeeze Louise! Just how incompetent do you need to be a licensed architect? People own shit. Make room so they don’t need to go off to U-Stor-It to change their clothes! Adding to the floorplan is cheap and shows you know what you are doing! [/rant]
Okay, I was raised Lace-Curtain Irish, so even I was raised with a prejudice against what were known as “Pig-Shit Irish” (IE: My BIL; my Irish ancestors came over in the 18th cent by choice, not in the 19th because they had to–this is how such prejudices evolve), and you cannot deny the O’Haras were the latter, despite Scarlet’s airs and graces (Thomas tried to cover up his peasant origins with his talk of Tara, but we all knew), so I can understand that. And Mary Todd was raised by black people, while the Irish were outside her experience.
Of course, as a boy from St Paul who wasn’t Swedish, the main prejudice I was raised with was against Swedes. You can guess how long THAT one lasted once I met Swedish girls. OTOH, I belong to the Norwegian church in town, though I often suggest we merge with the Swedish church 8 blocks away.
Gerald and his brothers came over because they had to, but not because of poverty. They were involved in an insurrection and had to flee the country, twenty or more years before the famine. This is no doubt how they’d distinguish themselves from the Potato Irish: they’re political refugees, not indigent day laborers.
Also the O’Haras are Creole aristocracy through Ellen. The book gives some details of Ellen and Gerald’s marriage, but suprisingly doesn’t talk about the really big one: cultural backgrounds. Ellen’s father was a Huguenot, while her mother was a devout (but multimarried) Catholic from Haiti (St. Domingue), which would be interesting as a prequel in and of itself. (Mammy would know that Scarlett’s grandmother had an interesting ancestry herself, but that’s speculation completely.)
Gerald’s 43 and Ellen’s 15 when they marry. He’s a well-off but not rich self-made planter and they’re filthy rich aristocracy. He and Ellen are both Catholic, but that’s about where any similarities end. She’s not in love with him of course (she’s on the rebound from a disastrous relationship with her cousin). I’d say it’s the most unlikely match in the book, but if you read history and genealogy stranger things have happened.
That’s another mystery I’d like to explore…Ellen and Phillipe’s relationship. I’m sure her parents disapproved, but his name was the one she called out when she died, not Gerald’s.
I hadn’t thought about Jonas and Emmy. That’s an interesting perspective. Surely with all the available young women around he could have had his pick. Kathleen Calvert had to marry her Yankee overseer too.
I’m not familiar with how the legal system worked back then…Scarlett and Charles were only married for two months before he died of illness in the army. She inherited his property, warehouses and such. Would he have thought to make a will out considering it was wartime, or as his widow would Scarlett have inherited automatically?
Charles’s uncle Henry Hamilton was an attorney, so I’m sure he made sure Scarlett and Wade were taken care of. When Rhett is in prison, Scarlett hopes to get him to marry her before he is hanged so she can get his estate.
IIRC, it upset Peter; he says no white person’s ever called him that before.
This is great stuff guys - particularly the archtectural info from Sampiro and the thoughts on Emmie Slattery. It’s a testament to Margaret Mitchell that one novel can have such an interesting and vibrant life beyond just the book and movie.
Any thoughts on where I can get a “user-friendly” non-fictional book on the cultural side of the South during this time, and maybe one that uses the GWTW characters/lifestyle as a guide? I’m a nerd, but don’t have time for a deep, scholary tome.
Ellen always annoyed me as a character. Okay, so yeah. She had a broken heart. At age fifteen! There comes a point when you grow up and get over it. Why couldn’t she have realized that she was married to a kind, lovable man who adored her? That she had three lovely daughters and a beautiful home–that she had no reason to be so cold.
Scarlett always held her up as a Great Lady, but I don’t think she was, really. She had the act down perfectly on the outside–she said and did all the right things, but a true Great Lady (like Melly) would have been loving and kind to her family. And what’s sad is that so much in Scarlett’s life would have gone differently if she had had a more realistic view of what her mother was.
I’d also love to find out what happened to Rhett after he was kicked out by his dad and when he turned up at Twelve Oaks. Not so much the action/adventure, but the experiences that turned him from a brash young hothead to the intelligent and self-aware adult. The emotional experiences must have been unbelievable, particularly for a man of that era.