Completely forget what Alexandra Ripley wrote. It was the most disappointing piece of garbage ever published.
Did Margaret Mitchell see Scarlett O’Hara EVER getting Rhett Butler back???
The official answer is that she never answered the question, but surely the woman had an ending in mind beyond how the written story stopped.
Moderator’s Note: Blowing this over to Cafe Society.
I agree that Ripley’s sequel was completely forgettable. My *own * personal feeling is that Scarlett *was * destined to get Rhett back. Her steely determination at the end of the book - “After all, tomorrow is another day” - seems to suggest that to me.
Ripley’s book wasn’t forgettable. Neither was the time that my dog threw up in the back seat of my car! But, I digress…
Still haven’t heard an update on Meg giving any kind of denouement.
I would vote no. Rhett was older, more mature, and had given up on Scarlett. As he said, they were both a couple of rascals, rogues, opportunists. He loved her to distraction, but she realized it too late. He’d given his heart to Bonnie after Scarlett ripped it to shreds, then when Bonnie died, there was no heart left.
He’d tried to show Scarlett for twelve years that he was her knight in shining armor. Funny enough, I think if she’d accepted it, he would have gotten bored with her and moved on. I don’t think theirs was a love that would have lasted either way.
I read the book about fifty times before I reached high school. My dream would be to see an epic 12-hour television mini series, complete with Wade Hampton, Ella, Archie and Will Benteen. My greatest horror was the television series Scarlett, where they cast a brown-eyed :eek: Joanne Whaley Kilmer. Dear Og, did no one read the book! :smack: (Once I learned who was cast as Scarlett, I refused to watch it. And I found the book palatable as a possible sequel to GWTW, although nowhere near in the same league.)
I was thinking about this the other day, specifically the rather sympathetic treatment Mitchell gave the KKK. Was there a point at the very beginning of Reconstruction where the KKK was needed to protect white women against the ravages of a horribly biased Yankee court system, or did MM romanticize what was from the beginning a nasty bigoted organization?
You don’t know anything about authors, do you? 
Especially since, IIRC, she wrote the last chapter first, and mercifully, changed the lead character’s name from Pansy to Scarlett. Pansy O’Hara just doesn’t trip off the tongue, you know.
That’s always been a dream of mine too. I’d correct the houses- make Tara a big sprawling unattractive architectural mess like it was in the book and Twelve Oaks more like the movie version of Tara instead of the Romanov palace monstrosity it was in the movie. I’d have the back-story of Gerald and Ellen (in the movie you never even realize how huge the age difference or how young Ellen is [about 32 when the movie begins to her husband’s 60]) and an Ashley Wilkes you could believe a young girl falling in love with (an Orlando Bloom or Johnny Depp-ish impossibly great cheekbones but highly vulnerable) and bring in the county folk (especially Grandma Fontaine).
As to the OP, Margaret Mitchell was offered truckloads of money for a sequel, especially by movie studios (who didn’t care if it was released in print or not). At one point Selznick even considered having hacks write a movie entitled The Daughter of Scarlett O’Hara starring Vivien Leigh as, evidently, Scarlett’s lookalike daughter by a fourth marriage and set in the 1890s, but was talked out of it since Mitchell wanted nothing to do with it. Supposedly she was at work at the time of her death on a novel with the working title Europa Carmaginia, a story of a mulatto who passes for white. If so it’s ironic since her estate was managed by her brother until his death a few years ago and is now handled by her nephews, who are notoriously conservative and insisted that there be no miscegenation in any authorized sequels (which led to Pat Conroy returning a very big advance in disgust).
And the tragic story of Cathleen Calvert, and the Scallywags and Carpetbaggers Scarlett associated with after her marriage to Rhett…and not to collapse so much the timeline between Scarlett’s miscarriage, Bonnie’s death, and Melanie’s death. In the movie that all happened bang bang bang.
Now, in the movie, the KKK association was glossed over. Should that, for political correctness, continue to be glossed over in the mini-series? I ask because I don’t know if MM’s depiction was accurate or not.
I would also like to see a prequel of Ellen and Gerald. Her story of defying her father after the death of Phillippe would make a novel all by itself. Especially since “Phillippe” was the name she cried out at her death, not “Gerald.” Do you think she really loved Gerald? Or was she on the rebound and decided to make the best of it after she came to her senses, since she knew Gerald loved her?
It’s in the book. She married Gerald to get out of the house. Told her Presbyterian father she’d become a nun if he didn’t give his consent, and that was worse(to him) than her marrying Gerald. Mammy tried to tell the young Ellen she couldn’t do that, but Ellen said she could, and would. And another thing that harrowed Ellen’s heart was the three boys she bore after the girls, all of whom died in infancy, and all who were named “Gerald O’Hara Jr.”
I don’t think they went very far into the motivation as to whether she was grateful to Gerald for taking her away and them came to regret it, or just wanted to escape and came to love him later. Certainly Gerald could be a bit thoughtless (firing the overseer and then letting Ellen handle the details while he went off to the barbecue, leaving her behind) but he loved her, as evidenced by how he lost his faculties after she died.
It is quite plain MM never had any children. No parent would name three infants the same after each one died, because no parent could ever “replace” a baby. Also, I know Scarlett was selfish, which is why she showed little interest in her children, but I think it was also MM’s way of avoiding a situation where she had little experience.
Returning to the OP question, and FWIW, I skimmed Anne Edwards’s biography of Vivien Leigh years ago, and it mentioned a press conference (long after GWTW’s release) at which Leigh was asked what she thought became of Scarlett afterwards. Her reply, IIRC, was “I think she became a better person, but I don’t think she ever got Rhett Butler back.”
The boxer-turned- barbeque pitchman, George Foreman, has 3 sons. Their names are George Jr., George III, and George IV. And they’re all still alive!
I’ve read the book, probably hundreds of times, and despite some of the criticisms of the plot and racial overtones, I still believe it to be one of the best pieces of American story telling of the 20th century.
I don’t think Scarlett could ever become a good person. She’s innately selfish and cruel. She was realizing the consequences of it toward the end of the book (particularly the part where she thinks of all of the old friends she has alienated and how nice it would be if she could just reminisce with them for a while) but I don’t think she could ever fundamentally change her character.
What I can imagine is Scarlett pestering Rhett for the rest of his life, showing up at parties in dramatic outfits, flirting with others to try to make him jealous, and generally hounding him the way she did Ashley. But I think Rhett was completely done with her-- he pitied her, which is worse than being hated.
I work in a museum, and we have a lot of geneological records in our vaults. I have seen examples of families do just that: re-use names. One family of my recollection had two daughters named Petrea.
It was a common desire to name a son after its father. It wasn’t a matter of trying to “replace” the child that died-- it was having someone literally carry on the father’s name.
Remember, too, that a woman could fully expect to lose a child or two. It was something women were raised to accept. That was one of the criticisms of Mary Todd Lincoln-- that she fell to pieces when her children died (as a modern woman would do) instead of accpeting it with quiet grace.
Though people of that time loved their children deeply, just as we do today, there seems to have been an effort to try not to become too attatched to them before their survival was relatively certain.
Thus, the infant’s* identity* was not as wrapped up in a name. Parents today who lose infants have a firm sense of the child’s identity. There was a recent thread about re-using baby names, in which one woman referred to her stillborn daughter as “Emily,” as in, “When I was pregnant with Emily . . .” You don’t see that very often in the past. I have seen diaries of women in the 1800s who refered to deceased infants as “my first child who died,” or “the baby who was taken by a fever.” The name wasn’t essential to the child’s identity.
This was actually quite a common practice pre-20th century.
Vincent Van Gogh had a stillborn sibling named Vincent Van Gogh with whom he shared a birthday, exactly one year apart.
IIRC, he often walked past the cemetary containing a headstone with his own name and birthdate on it. Eeeeewwww…
As previously stated this was quite common in times past when it was a miracle if all one’s children survived infancy. Doing family research I found many, many examples of women having a dozen or more children, more than half of whom died early, and reusing the same couple of names over and over until they got a survivor.
My Scottish grandparents were the youngest in their families, and lost many siblings during the 1918? flu pandemic and from childhood illness or injur. Both their families had several incidents of reused names in their immediate families.
My grandparents themselves weren’t too imaginative: two children, boy boths. One named Ian, one named John.