A Study of Scarletts , livre ebook

A Study of Scarletts
A Study of Scarletts
Scarlett O Hara and Her Literary Daughters

Margaret Donovan Bauer

The University of South Carolina Press
2014 University of South Carolina
Published by the University of South Carolina Press
Columbia, South Carolina 29208
www.sc.edu/uscpress
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Bauer, Margaret Donovan, 1963-A study of Scarletts : Scarlett O Hara and her literary daughters / Margaret Donovan Bauer.
pages cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-61117-373-4 (hardbound : alk. paper) - ISBN 978-1-61117-374-1 (ebook)
1. Mitchell, Margaret, 1900-1949. Gone with the wind. 2. Frazier, Charles, 1950- Cold Mountain. 3. Glasgow, Ellen Anderson Gholson, 1873-1945 Barren ground. 4. Morrison, Toni. Sula. 5. Meads, Kat, 1951- Invented life of Kitty Duncan (Benedict Roberts Duncan) 6. O Hara, Scarlett (Fictitious character) 7. Women in literature. 8. Social role in literature. 9. Man-woman relationships in literature. 10. Female friendship in literature. I. Title. II. Title: Scarlett O Hara and her literary daughters.
PS3525.I972G677 2014
813 .52-dc23
2014004294
This book is for the fabulous Starlight women.
What should I wish for? Don t say a boyfriend . If you say a boyfriend then the world will shrink so small that only toads will be satisfied to live and dream here.
Marianne Gingher, Teen Angel and Other Stories of Wayward Love
Contents
Acknowledgments
List of Abbreviations
Introduction
Chapter 1. In Defense of Scarlett O Hara
Chapter 2. Gone with the Men: Scarlett and Melanie Redux in Cold Mountain
Chapter 3. Put your heart in the land : An Intertextual Reading of Barren Ground and Gone with the Wind
Chapter 4. Sula: More sinned against than sinning
Chapter 5. Disregarding the female imperative : Kat Meads s Kitty Duncan, a 1960s-Era Scarlett O Hara
Afterword
Bibliography
Index
Acknowledgments
An early version of chapter three was published (with the same title) in Ellen Glasgow: New Perspectives (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1995) and is reprinted here with permission. More material in that chapter is also drawn from an article I created out of material cut from that essay and published as Echoes of Barren Ground in Gone with the Wind: A P[re]. S[cript]. in the Ellen Glasgow Newsletter 29 (1992).
Several East Carolina University students served as my research assistants during this book s development, and I thank the ECU Department of English for graduate research assistantships for Debbie Shoop, Maggie Rogers, and Cheryl Scott to work on this project; the ECU Honors Program (now College) for assigning Ashley Arens as an undergraduate intern for this project; and ECU s Office of Undergraduate Research for awarding Rachel Ward a research grant to help me prepare the final manuscript. And of course, I thank all of these former students for their contributions.
My colleague and friend Randall Martoccia also provided useful feedback on the Cold Mountain chapter, and I thank him for taking so much time with it. I appreciate too the time I spent with writers Charles Frazier and Kat Meads talking to them about their books.
I thank the readers of the original manuscript submitted to the University of South Carolina Press, who recognized the value of this book and whose revision suggestions were invaluable-particularly the big-picture questions that helped me to figure out what it all means. Thanks, too, to the University of South Carolina Press editors, particularly Jim Denton, and copyeditors. I also appreciate the fine work of my indexer, Bob Tompkins. And I thank Martha Cook, who stepped in for my late mentor to read the semifinal manuscript.
I remember here and am forever grateful to Dorothy M. Scura, my mentor, who made me read Gone with the Wind. I acknowledge too the support I have always received from my father, Carl W. Bauer, who did not set limits on his daughters ambitions, and from my mother, Jane Colvin Desonier, who loves me for who I am. I appreciate Andrew Morehead, who does not fear strong women, for his patience and good humor during the many hours I work. And to those fabulous Starlight women, thank you for being here and for your friendship, love, and acceptance. I am truly blessed.
List of Abbreviations BG Barren Ground, by Ellen Glasgow CM Cold Mountain, by Charles Frazier GW Gone with the Wind, by Margaret Mitchell KD The Invented Life of Kitty Duncan (Benedict Roberts Duncan), by Kat Meads S Sula, by Toni Morrison
Introduction

Like the interpretation of dreams, the interpretation of an aesthetic object is motivated not by a wish to know the artist s intention but by the desire to create knowledge on one s own behalf and on behalf of one s community from the subjective experience of the work of art.
David Bleich, Subjective Criticism (93)
Almost every reader will well remember a book from childhood, the circumstance of its reading, and the atmosphere it represented in his mind. Although it is probably not possible to recover original historical circumstances, if the memory of such events has lasted, such residues have important truth value and demonstrable relevance to current, conscious tastes.
David Bleich, Subjective Criticism (154)
I well remember my first viewing of the movie Gone with the Wind with my eighth-grade class in the mid-1970s. Our history teacher took us to see the movie on the big screen as it made its last rounds in theaters before going to cable. I was so disturbed by the movie s ending, Rhett leaving Scarlett just when she finally realizes she loves him, that I came home and read the last few pages of my mother s copy of the novel in search of a less troubling conclusion. I didn t find such comfort in the novel s closing pages, so I didn t read the novel. I did see the movie again a few times over the ensuing decade and a half and continued to be crushed by Rhett s desertion of Scarlett. Then as we discussed my doctoral exams, my advisor mentioned this novel, which I confessed to never having read. Well, you certainly need to do so before your exams, she replied. I tried to explain the trauma that made this novel anathema to me, but she would have none of it and reminded me that since I was taking the very first doctoral exam on southern literature that the University of Tennessee would give, I simply had to read this southern literary phenomenon-and she added that she would be certain there was a question that could not be answered by familiarity with the movie:
I ll ask about Will Benteen.
Who s Will Benteen?
Read the novel.
So I read it-and was devastated again by its ending-and then read it again, wrote about it, and continued to return to it over the years, first, compelled to find a happy ending for Scarlett, and then, looking for evidence with which to defend her against her critics.
My focus in this study is on the character Scarlett O Hara. I do not spend much time defending the rest of the novel. Others have addressed the issue of its historical accuracy, the extent to which it perpetuates plantation mythology, and its depiction of African American characters. Beyond what follows in this introduction, these issues will come up within this study only as they are relevant to the discussion of Scarlett. Here I will repeat and expand on my answer to a question posed to me in an interview on the occasion of the seventy-fifth anniversary of the novel Gone with the Wind: The most common criticisms of the book are that it romanticizes the Old South and that it uses racist stereotypes. How do you respond to those criticisms? (SSSL). * I noted in my answer that the novel is not romantic from the woman s perspective either. Recall the tableau Scarlett observes during the Wilkes picnic, a scene left out of the movie, as it requires Scarlett s musings on what she sees (and the narrator s musings on what Scarlett misses):
Under the arbor sat the married women, their dark dresses decorous notes in the surrounding color and gaiety. Matrons, regardless of their ages, always grouped together apart from the bright-eyed girls, beaux and laughter, for there were no married belles in the South. From Grandma Fontaine, who was belching frankly with the privilege of her age, to seventeen-year-old Alice Munroe, struggling against the nausea of a first pregnancy, they had their heads together in the endless genealogical and obstetrical discussions that made such gatherings very pleasant and instructive affairs.
Casting contemptuous glances at them, Scarlett thought that they looked like a clump of fat crows. Married women never had any fun. It did not occur to her that if she married Ashley she would automatically be relegated to arbors and front parlors with staid matrons in dull silks, as staid and dull as they and not a part of the fun and frolicking. Like most girls, her imagination carried her just as far as the altar and no further. ( GW 100-101)
Over half a century before Elizabeth Fox-Genovese s book Within the Plantation Household, Mitchell had shown with the description of Ellen O Hara s numerous duties and responsibilities at Tara that the life of a plantation owner s wife was not easy, nor was it happy, but she did not expect life to be easy, and, if it was not happy, that was woman s lot. It was a man s world, and she accepted it as such ( GW 58). While Ellen works herself to an early death, stoically accepting her lot in life, Gerald O Hara does not seem to do much work at all, his overseer handling the kind of outdoor responsibilities that would parallel what Ellen takes charge of indoors. A St