Gone with the Wind
Scarlett is a woman who can deal with a nation at war, Atlanta burning, the Union Army carrying off everything from her beloved Tara, the carpetbaggers who arrive after the war. Scarlett is beautiful. She has vitality. But Ashley, the man she has wanted for so long, is going to marry his placid cousin, Melanie. Mammy warns Scarlett to behave herself at the party at Twelve Oaks. There is a new man there that day, the day the Civil War begins. Rhett Butler. Scarlett does not know he is in the room when she pleads with Ashley to choose her instead of Melanie.
Gone With the Wind, an all-time best-seller by Margaret
Mitchell, is a legendary recollection of the last brilliance of the Old South. The writer's debut novel was an instant success. And the story has been bestowed an even further reaching popularity since Vivian Leigh presented a vivid translation to the screen of Katie Scarlett O'Hara, a southern belle raised in her father's white-pillared plantation Tara. A climax of Hollywood, from Director Victor Fleming for MGM, Gone with the Wind is more than a vicissitude, it is also an old, lost culture revisited.
It is Old South, which today is no more than a dream remembered. People were once there, living with the high strong slaves' songs in the quarters, in security, peace and eternity. Here, Scarlett spends her young maiden years. She is well disciplined by her mother, but her blazing green eyes always betray her covert capricious self; the one who enjoys parties and the surrounding ofbeaus. She dreams to marry the noble Ashley Wilkes. The impending war shatters the golden peace of the South, and leaves many lives permanently changed. Plantations, treasures, and honor are ruined. Scarlett is made a most peculiar widow by the war, and then compelled into a second marriage in continuation of her struggle for the salvation of Tara. And her third marriage to Rhett Butler is also jeopardized because of her secret, stubborn ardency
for Ashley.
In the end of the movie, Scarlett is left only with her Tara, a plantation which symbolizes the culture of the Old South, a place where she could ever gather her strength.
