Scarlett annoyed me for the exact same reason. That’s another motif–the idea that both mother and daughter fell for the wrong man and ignored the right one that was right under their noses.
I’d love to right a novel where Scarlett & Frank’s daughter Ella goes mooning after Beau Wilkes instead of Rhett Watling (Rhett & Belle’s son) who is standing right in front of her.
I’ve never liked her either. She comes off as a total ice queen, and had she lived I can’t imagine her getting through the war and reconstruction like Scarlett did- she’d have probably willingly died rather than pick cotton or have her daughters pick it (not that ultimately it did any good since the last band of Yankees burned what they picked anyway). I think she (speaking as if she was a real person) probably lost her virginity to Philippe and therefore thought it was Romeo & Juliet and saw marriage to Gerald (a middle aged plump Irish Catholic) as the absolute ultimate revenge on her Huguenot father, and at 15 you don’t think about the fact that “dad has to put up with slight embarassment, I’m this man’s wife for the rest of my life”.
Frank Kennedy has only slightly less age difference over Suellen; at the beginning of the book he’s around 40 and she’s 15. Even in 1861 this would have raised eyebrows in most upper crust families, but I suppose Gerald thought it would be hypocritical since he nabbed a child bride, and the book says he was considered a great catch as the richest unmarried man in the county and from a good family, which is probably why Ellen didn’t object. I don’t think the book ever mentions whether the fact Scarlett’s husbands are (presumably) Protestant is an issue.
An age difference I thought was interesting- not sure if it was more than coincidence- is that Rhett and Ellen are the same age. They’re both 16 years older than Scarlett.
My unauthorized take: In the book Ashley, with secret money from Rhett, bought the lumber company but Scarlett still has the store. Not in the book but in my imagining and I think realistic, Ashley “Dr. Quinn’s” the lumber business- no more convicts, liveable wages to his employees, top dollar paid for leases, etc., and of course completely runs it into the ground in no time flat from a combination of too much outgo/not enough income/being rooked left right and center by managers who would never on their boldest day have dreamed of thinking about pulling the same crap with Scarlett.
Scarlett, though cash poor due to divorce and the volatile market and 1873 losses, manages to rescue the lumber yards with a cash infusion from hocking jewels and a mortgage on her mansion, not so much because it’s Ashley as because the lumber business was her baby. Once again she uses it to rebuild her fortune (she’s never indigent by any means, but not as rich as she was). Ashley descends into alcoholism and depression and winds up in Milledgeville and Scarlett takes over the care of Beau (which means boarding school of course, but an expensive one).
A few years pass (including the Charleston earthquake which is a rather major part of the plot). Beau grows up to be much like King Philip in The Lion in Winter (i.e. a hard ass businessman who’s tired of Scarlett’s crap and hates his father’s weakness). He does marry Ella, and the two of them together sue Scarlett for control of the Kennedy Wilkes store, which is Ella’s by right but which Scarlett rules with an iron grip (and derives her Atlanta status from). They succeed, Kennedy-Wilkes becomes a great department store ala Macy’s (if only in the Atlanta area), but Scarlett completely disowns them. (In my version she also disowns Wade but for other reasons; she morphs a bit into a turn of the century Norma Desmond, middle aged and stinking rich and “still the belle of the county” but alone and pathetic, though Rhett is nowhere near her Max [actually in my take he’s dead by this time, but that’s another story]).
In my book Rhett dies soon after Melanie’s death when the gun he was cleaning goes off accidentally, and Scarlett marries Edward, the handsome bastard 22 year old son and takes in Rhet Watling. Wade grows up and goes into business with Ashley, sharing a “bachelor house” with him. When Ashley dies suddenly, Wade dies soon after when the gun he was cleaning goes off accidentally.
Beau marries Ella, and Scarlett lives a very long time, raising her and Edward’s three children. She dies at age 98, having seen the first half of the 19th century.
Remind me not to read the stuff you guys write. 
I can see her with a 22 year old, but not with 3 more kids. Motherhood wasn’t something Scarlett particularly enjoyed, and if she ever did get a notion to take it up… well, she’s got two ready-mades right there.
My version goes through the 1930s (well, actually through the present, but Scarlett’s part goes through the 1930s).
In 1936 three of Scarlett’s great-granddaughters are coming out of a theater from seeing Romeo & Juliet. One liked it, one loved it, and the third (Charlotte) is pissed because she wanted to see Cain and Mabeland can’t understand how any woman could possibly find anything even slightly romantic about a sullen hopelessly miscast and way-too-old for the part Leslie Howard when Clark Gable was an option. After gossiping over Judge Mitchell’s daughter who almost just got run over in front of the theater (and spilled her manuscript) they’re confronted by a…
Well, I won’t give away the end, but we’ll say that there’s only one mourner at their great-grandma’s funeral and it ain’t one of them.
Back to Ellen, I think she cared for Gerald (she tells Mammy he’s a kind man) and at 15, she was considered marriage material (the book mentions she knew how to run a large household.) Funny, she married out of spite, like Scarlett married Charles. But I think she was kind enough to Gerald (who was a bit of a thickhead anyway) that he never knew he got the shell and not the whole woman, whereas if Charles had lived Scarlett would have made his life a living hell.
Ellen did fear Scarlett was marrying Charles too quickly (maybe remembering her own quick wedding?) but got bulldozed by Gerald and Scarlett and Charles, who got a backbone.
I’m just glad Suellen got a good husband in Will Benteen.
There’s a story I’ve probably told before, and I don’t know how true it is but Pat Conroy told it himself. I heard him tell it and it took the audience 5 minutes to stop laughing.
The undisputed part: Conroy (Great Santini, Prince of Tides) was commissioned, for a hefty sum, to write the authorized sequel to GWTW. He equivocated several times and finally took the job for a great deal of money and with the prerequisite that Scarlettby Alexandra Ripley never happened, he could completely write over it (as did Rhett Butler’s Peopleeventually). The estate agreed.
He said it took him forever to find an angle, and because his voice is very different from Mitchell’s he didn’t want to try for a third person narrative to match her’s. The opening line he ultimately chose was something to the effect of “In Atlanta if anybody remembers me at all it’s only because of who my wife was”- the novel was a memoir by Rhett.
Unfortunately Conroy, who was not used to yielding any kind of creative control except perhaps on movies), was not prepared for the Mitchell Estate, a small and greedy and litigious cabal made up of Margaret Mitchell’s brother’s family and slightly more zealous than the Templars. He received access to Mitchell’s papers and interviews and notes but also received constant instruction and criticism from them which was rarely if ever welcome. His early drafts of chapters were given back to him bled over like a paper from a mediocre freshman comp student, not a common occurrence from an author who’s sold millions of books and has closets of awards and honorary degrees.
Evidently one of his characters is a very light skinned illegitimate and gay or gay seeming biracial relative of Rhett’s. The Mitchell Estate told him in no uncertain terms that they would not authorize any manuscript in which miscegenation or homosexuality played a part. (Ironic, since while I don’t recall any confirmed queer characters in GWTW [fuss budget bachelors and a couple of women with masculine interests but nothing explicit], there’s definitely discussion of miscegenation.) Conroy conferred with the lawyers handling the deal and while technically he had creative control over his manuscript it basically just meant that he could write whatever he wished, but there were lots of loopholes by which the Mitchell Estate could veto or have a hack re-write parts they didn’t like with his name on the cover. When he complained and made his case to them they basically reacted with “We’ve paid you a LOT of money” (“No more frequent flier bitch miles for my boy… G5, that’s how you’re gonna roll…”.)
Now I’m unknown and far from rich but even I would have a problem being told what I could and couldn’t write regarding characters whose author died long before I was born and wouldn’t still be copyrighted anyway if it weren’t for Disney and other unreasonable copyright extension lobbyists. (I might still take the money, but I’d bitch about it from then on cause I have my principals.) Conroy however is in a financial and professional position to say “screw you” and that’s what he did, but with panache.
Per Conroy (and again I don’t know if it’s true) he sent them in a new opening chapter. The first sentence was
“After a long tortuous and passionate afternoon of sex Rhett turned to Ashley and said 'Did I ever tell you I’m part n*gger?”
He also returned a check for his advance and a hearty “Meanwhile and as always go f8ck yourself!” sentiment if not in those words. And there’s probably a reason that Rhett Butler’s People was written by an author most people have never heard of: he needed a big payday and was willing to play ball.
Anyway, I would love for him to release his sequel in Australia and other countries where the copyright has expired. It’s ridiculous that generations of family Mitchell didn’t even know are the ones benefitting from her labors (far more than she ever did in fact- she made a lot of money but not compared to what the estate has taken in since she died, plus she made it when income taxes were a whole lot higher).
You have to feel sorry for Will though.
Grandma Fontaine’s assessment of the Will/Suellen match is to me one of the most believably rural Southern parts of the book. It reminds me of practically all the women in my family. It has just been announced (at Gerald’s funeral) that Will and Suellen are engaged, and Grandma Fontaine is speaking to Scarlett in private.
There are several ironies in this chapter. One is that Suellen is reviled and blamed for Gerald’s death and considered a total traitor by the whole community, except by Scarlett who secretly thinks her scheme (to get Federal reimbursement for damage to Tara by claiming to have been Union sympathizers) was brilliant. Another is that while several people are like Grandma Fontaine who think the world of Will but can’t stand the thoughts of a cracker marrying a purebred (actually more a half-blood princess), Scarlett is actually completely okay with- even happy for- the match. (The novel deals a lot more about surviving a massive paradigm shift than the movie does, for the south couldn’t have been much more changed if zombies had roamed the land and Scarlett survives by changing with it.)
For a first person account, if you can find it, you might want to check out the journals of John Horry Dent. Dent was an Alabama planter, who after the war, moved to North Georgia. It’ll give you at least one man’s view of reconstruction Georgia.
I dont’ think this is anywhere near an abridgement of fair use (especially since the book is available full text on the Internet) so I wanted to quote part of the rest of Grandma Fontaine’s comments. IMO, they’re the heart of the novel. Slightly edited.
The diary ofMary Chesnut is probably the single most quoted first person account of the time. She was a very wealthy plantation mistress and the wife of a U.S. Senator who became a Confederate general and politician. She speaks with surprising bluntness about things like mixed-race children
to 19th century notions of romantic love
to her hatred of politics
She talks of the privations of war including carnage and seeing bodies and even things proper ladies didn’t speak of (e.g. she mentions a mother and daughter she and others begged to evacuation as Sherman’s forces came through but who refused; both were gang raped and the daughter died- Wheeler’s cavalry supposedly avenged the slight [meaning they captured and killed some Yankees who hopefully were the right ones]).
The historiography of the diary is a fascinating subject in and of itself. Its original version, and the version that’s full-text online, was heavily expurgated. There are several fuller versions released much later. There’s also a lot of suspicion that she and her heirs may have doctored the diaries in later years but most authorities believe that all of the essence of the diary was her.
At home I have some books on how “the common folk” (i.e. most of my ancestors) lived but I can’t recall the names. I’ll be glad to share them later if you’re interested. Some are general and go into the things about working class houses, planting, economics, etc., while some specific [correspondence from a Confederate private/yeoman farmer and his wife, or the life of deserters in the state of Alabama).
For the view from the slave quarters you can’t do much better than the Federal Writers Project. During the Depression the many surviving slaves (very old people who remembered being slaves as children or for the oldest as young adults) were deposed and their recollections (controversially transcribed in dialect) were composed into an incredible oral history.
While I’m irked by those who have a simplistic view of “happy darkies singing in the fields to serenade fair hoop skirted ladies sipping tea on the veranda” view of antebellum history I am just as irked by those who see it as all brutalized and inhuman Simon Legree flogging Uncle Tom 24/7 nonsense. Not only were race relations very complex in general, but basically if you’d seen slavery at one plantation then you’d seen… slavery at one plantation. Some slaveowners were absolute sadistic monsters and some really were as near christlike as you could be if you owned slaves and the vast majority were somewhere in between. Consequently when you read these narratives you’ll read one account of a former slave who thinks his master or mistress was the most wonderful person s/he ever met and recalls it as without compare the happiest time of his life, you’ll read another who 70 years later still remembers the moment s/he learned they were free as a moment no less glorious than if Christ Himself had appeared before them, and, again, most are in between.
Something you’ll often hear is that house slaves were usually the most loyal and field slaves the ones most likely to run off, but you’ll find that’s also not necessarily true and for obvious reasons. If your master/mistress were kind people then your life as a domestic slave would probably be wonderful (though it would still be very hard work from before to dawn to after dark) while in the fields you’re more subject to hard work and brutal overseers. OTOH, if you’re a domestic slave to a total bitch or bastard mistress/master your life was a nightmare while a field slave would rarely have to encounter this person and the overseer or foreman may actually be a lot easier to work for than his employer.
Sorry, this is too long by far. I will say though that while the whole “slaves were like members of the family” [that you could rape with impunity or sell] is nonsense on many levels, it is provable that many whites and blacks felt kinship and bonding together and on the individual level there was very often intense affection as well as hatred/mistrust/etc… It is not at all inconceivable that Mammy, Pork and Dilcey for example would have stayed and shared the privations of post War Tara or that Big Sam would still have felt he belonged there even after going North, and there are precedents for this. (One example: Thomas Jefferson’s slaves were seized and sold at public auction in the years after his death and scattered to the winds. Seventy years later one of the last surviving of them was living in the midwest, a man who’d been free for 30+ years and away from Virginia for almost 70+ years, and he was actually the subject of a fundraiser in the local press to grant his last request, which was to go back to Monticello, for it was where he considered home; the money was raised and he returned to Monticello, spent the last few months of his life there and was buried in the slave cemetery there.)
It’s wonderful how this thread has blossomed.
Haven’t seen it myself, but this looks like a possibility.
One of my favorite Mammy moments in the novel that’s not in the movie is Scarlett’s catching of Frank Kennedy. Mammy, as seen in the film, grasps instantly what Scarlett’s about to do and is appalled by it, and back at Pitty’s house she gets Scareltt alone and reads her the riot act about how hateful and sinful it is. Scarlett points out that if she lets nature take its course Frank will marry Suellen, bring her to Atlanta, Tara will be lost, Suellen will be ‘out of sight out of mind’ with the people displaced and the absolute best case scenario is everyone who lived there will end up in poverty. Or, Scarlett can trick Frank into marrying her and while they won’t be rich they’ll at least keep what’s left of the house and have food regularly again. Mammy thinks about this… and ends up helping Scarlett catch him; she’s just as much “ripe buckwheat” as Scarlett.
Scarlett does use the image of Emmie Slattery walking on the sainted floors of Tara that Ellen walked on, and Mammy was nothing if not a pragmatist. Scarlett was her favorite, so she was on her side, even when she was bullying her for not being a lady.
I wonder if the “aristrocracy” of the South was destroyed as much by marriages after the war as the devastation of the war itself. After all, there weren’t a lot of men around for young women to marry, and girls who’d grown up during the war didn’t find Yankees all that bad (I believe the book talked about some Old Guard families with scandals of young girls who eloped with Yankee occupying soldiers). So, when it came to a choice between being an old maid and marrying someone of less than fine family, I think a lot of girls, like Suellen, “settled.” That plus the hardship of trying to rebuild the family farm without slave labor meant there were probably a lot less barbecues and debutante balls.
Understandably. Suellen was a little “me me me me” drama queen and Carreen was a child who grew into a bit of a flake (and like Scarlett and Ellen makes a major life decision at 15; at least the church would probably release her from her vows if pressed.)
I’ve wondered this also. Looking at my own ancestry, the lines that were doing very well before the war (lots of property and slaves anyway) flatlined socioeconomically; within two generations they were pickin’ and a grinnin’ and building cinder block tabernacles, while some lines that hadn’t had the proverbial pisspot before for the first time prospered.
Of course the whole southern aristocracy (which only lasted about 2 generations west of the Appalachians anyway) had clay feet. They were usually so up to the eyeballs in debt that a bad harvest one year/low cotton prices the next could often sink the richest of them. One of the surprises when I started studying genealogy was that I’d always assumed most of the rich families practiced some form of primogeniture (i.e. if the oldest son didn’t get it all he at least got a lot more than his sibs) but at least in my limited experience that was rarely the case: if there was no will the estate was divided into X shares. X was the number of children plus the widow if she was alive; if any of the children were dead but left children of their own then they would inherit their parents’ share, and if any children were dead but left no children but did leave a widow/er, then s/he would inherit the dead spouse’s share.
In most cases where there was a will there will be some personal bequests of a farm here and a slave there but the bulk of the estate is to be split evenly. So even if you’re a wealthy planter with 2000 acres and 100 slaves, if you have 9 surviving children the family fortune won’t long survive you. Ashley would have been well off but some of the Tarleton boys may well have ended up pushing a plow by the end of their life even if the war hadn’t happened.
When Gerald dies intestate Tara is split 3 ways. Since there’s no way to sell it of course they just share it because its value is negligible, but had Gerald died in 1860 then that means his three daughters would have been 1/4 as wealthy as he had been (1/4 to each daughter and 1/4 to Ellen), plus it would probably have required the sale of the place to satisfy the bequests.
Another thing I was surprised to learn in looking at estate probate records was just how much of a planter’s wealth was tied up in his slaves. I knew slaves were expensive of course, but I didn’t know how expensive they were relative to other things. One of my richer ancestors left an estate that caused a little civil war within the Civil War as his many kids battled their stepmother and her kids and then her new husband, etc., a major ordeal at the time but a treasure trove for a genealogists due to the records, and there were several accountings and appraisals right down to the level of the decedents leather boots (20) and chickens (.25 apiece). There was a slave named Joe who was in his 60s and depending on the appraisal (there were 3) he was estimated between $150 and $250, which may not sound like much until you see that this man owned farms estimated at $4-$10 per acre [depending on cultivation], or that his cattle were appraised at $5 per head for beef cows and $20 for milk cows, and his hogs at $3 and $4. In other words this old man who only had a few years left on him was still worth more than a 40 acre farm and a herd of hogs and cows to go on it, and he was the cheapest on the list. (Most expensive was a blacksmith and wagoner appraised at $2,800-$3,400; that was far more expensive than the gross worth of most Alabama farmers.)
Another record is the “Disposition of the Negroes” of an ancestor who had 64 slaves (the most of any of my ancestors) as well as 8 surviving children and a widow. The slaves were appraised and then put into separate lots of approximately equal value, and the heirs literally drew for them. At least a couple of them (including my ancestor who was in Louisiana and this being in Georgia) sold them instantly for a note payable in 2 years time, others took their particular slaves home with them. It’s hard to believe how recently this happened (as in the homeplace on that plantation is still lived in and I have photographs of one of the ancestors).
Sorry… call me Nebuchadnezzar, for I do babble-on.
And this thread is as good as any for my ever changing dream cast for a HBO big budget GWTW remake extravaganza. Links are to pictures rather than imdb. Please feel free to add your own or critique.
Scarlett- Emma Watson
Rhett- George Clooney(with a full beard to distinguish him from Gable somewhat)
Mammy- Oprah
Melanie- Jennifer Garner
Ashley- James Franco
Gerald O’Hara- Brendan Gleeson
Ellen O’Hara- Angelina Jolie(though I wouldn’t want to be the one to tell her “they want you for GWTW… you’ll be playing Scarlett’s mom!”)
Belle Watling- Jodie Foster(who shares something else with my take on Belle incidentally---- they both speak fluent French
Will Benteen- Lucas Black
Frank Kennedy- Alec Baldwin
Grandma Fontaine- Carol Burnett (or, maybe, Dolly Parton, sans wigs and make-up… I doubt she’d do it though)
Uncle Henry- Leslie Jordan
Archie (the wife killer)- Robert Duvall
Charles Hamilton- Robert Pattinson (handsome but also has that inbred “I could bleed to death from cutting myself shaving” look)
Jonas Wilkerson- Steve Buscemi
Aunt Pittypat- Patrika Darbo
Lots more but that’s enough for now.
I see Anne Hathaway as Melanie.
I don’t see Will Benteen on your list…and surely you would have worked Orlando Bloom into the cast? Maybe one of the Fontaine boys?
This is a fascinating thread…it’s like Star Trek…no matter what the OP, you’re going to get a multi-page thread exploring other aspects.
Slaves were also expensive to keep, I would imagine. You had to feed, clothe and house them and take care of them while they were sick. I assume the owner also had to provide bedding, cookware, and the means to manage their own gardens. IIRC, very few Southerners owned more than 50-100 slaves…it was beyond the reach of most of them, financially.
I would recommend Mary Chesnut’s diary to anybody, because it’s such a fun read (largely because she was such a bitch.) The reason I didn’t reccomend it in this case, though, is because Gone With the Wind primarily takes place during Reconstruction, and Chesnut’s diary ends in August of '65.
