Gone with the Wind Essay

Gone with the lift is an adaptation of an historical romance. The icon, set in Civil warfare-era southern United States, tends to be highly senti handstal. Paradoxicall(a)y, the circumstances in which it is set atomic number 18 often harrowing and serve to highlight the fear littleness required to survive during that time. The frothiness of the plot is in stark contrast to the utter seriousness of its context. The film opens in the nonmodern South, on a Georgia plantation where the heroine entertains two gentlemen callers. The talk is of imminent war, a piece which guests carry through the subsequent picnic.Talk then turns to action and the men depart to enlist in the participator Army. Confidence and jubilation cursorily become disappointment which gives way to horror as the realities of war irrupt upon the genteel tableau. Under assault, the Southerners grapple to keep their society together in the face of poerty, filth, and chaos. We perk the major historical points of t he period, especially Shermans inch through Georgia and the burning of Atlanta, a scorched earth policy. The women are the main timbres in the film. In the effects of war and its aftermath we see destitution, famine, terror, desperation.The wounded are legion and supplies dwindle and disappear. The war ends and the spends come billet to regroup. Carpetbaggers descend and begin an uneasy alliance with enterprising individuals, nonably Scarlett. She casts deviation honor to regain prosperity, marrying for money and using her combination of feminine wiles and cleverness to rise above abject poverty. Finally she marries Rhett, a selfish self-seeker like her. At the end he realizes that she will never kip down him and leaves Scarlett with that which has sustained her an abiding love for Tara.This narrative is history seen from the womens perspective. They are alternately brave, childish, and childlike, treading on the line between what they are and what they must be. They do it for the men of the South, themselves, and for the South itself. The depiction of the war and the events surrounding it is heroicly unvarying with the historical record. The factual portions of the film are in part accurate. For instance, at a benefit supporting the war, the ladies are asked to relinquish their jewelry. Such a depiction is consistent with the account in The American Civil War by beak J.Parish and it highlights one of the sacrifices women made during this time. George A. Trenholm, who replaced Secretary of the Confederate exchequer Memminger, asked for these concessions as the finances of the South became particularly desperate. This detail concerns one of the points at which Gone With the plait succeeds as history. wealthy female buckle downholders escaped probative disruption in their lives at the outset of the war, for they had money to maintain their antebellum lifestyle and the slaves to maintain plantation production. (Frank 514) Thus the sheltered beat visualised in the film is wholly consistent with replete womens lives until the ending stages of the period. In opposition, several events as depicted in Gone with the Wind are inaccurate. At the end and after the war, b lose citizenry did not leap to the aid of their former masters as the film asserts. The character Mammy would guide sought paid employment rather than delay on a ruined plantation. In reality, the vast majority of the planters employ violence to subjugate their property. In one scene, the character Ashley Wilkes chides Scarlett for treating the convict workers in her lumber mill cruelly in supposed contrast with their intervention of the slaves. It is true that in the darkest days for the South they did choose to prevail upon the Negroes to advertize for their own oppression. There was no greater irony in all the efforts of the Confederacy to find adequate means to match its ambitious goals than the plan to arm Negroes. (Parish 561) But the slaves did no t fight for the South as more for a newfound and cherished liberty, greater than they had ever known.And once they had tasted that liberty, they did not willingly acquiesce in the imposition of a terrible, unjust burden. The grandness of the Civil War and its aftermath can hardly be overstated. The struggle has been the completely armed conflict fought on our territory. It consumed nearly 500,000 lives, the largest wartime death price in American history. It to a fault was a jump step in remedying the shame of slavery which Americans had perpetrated in a country which largely had been the acknowledgement of a vision of freedom and equality.They fought with not only the political reality of the Souths secession of 1861, but with the regions set out psychology. By 1860 the South was a state of mind as swell up as a place on the map. A definition of Southernness was and is at least as often a task for the psychologist as for the geographer. (Parish 303) This steadfast mindset notwithstanding, had the South won, not only would the crime of slavery bring in been continued, it is doubtful that the U. S. would have grown into the superpower it is today.The war determined that an constitutive(a) part of the union would remain. The significance of the war for the world at large in the mid-nineteenth century beprospicients in part to the realm of might-have-beens its long-term consequences derived less from what did happen from what did not. (Parish 381) Among the events that very well might have happened were interference from extraneous governments, international recognition of the Confederacy, and the widening of this internecine war into a commonplace conflagration abroad.Such luck for the union was due to the relative closing off the U. S. has enjoyed throughout its history. Americans fought their war amid constant curses from abroad. There was nothing inevitable nearly the fact that it remained a domestic fight. It remained a purely American affair through a combination of good fortune and great adroitness on the part of those who wished to keep it so, gross errors on the part of those who did not, and cagey calculations of national and self-interest on the part of those who might have been caught in its toils. (Parish 381) Although some continue to fight this war in their minds, they benefit from over 200 years of federal association and its attendant largess. As I stated earlier, with regard to the historical accuracy of the film as document, it is a womens narrative. Though there was no Scarlett OHara per se, the things we see her experience and perpetrate on others is consistent with the accounts of those who actually lived in that time and place. The threat of starvation was indeed present in all households in the subsequent stages.Domestic production and ingenuity staved off a state of crisis for bondage women for a while, but, by the end of the war starvation and material loss shook even the most affluent households . (Frank 515) When Scarlett was forced to hide her hearts under a bridge with three highly vulnerable people in it while Union soldiers passed overhead, she was surviving a circumstance known to many Southern women. many faced the hazards of living in the avenue of the Union army.Those who resided near the battlefront risked having their property commandeered, stolen, or destroyed by Northern soldiers. (Frank 515) Such dangers were in addition to the threat, both potential and realized, of corporeal violation. Scarlett valiantly, not to say desperately, keeps herself and her loved ones against a looting Union soldier when she shoots him in the face. It is an act not uncommon to those willing and able to defend themselves. The depiction of slave and ex-slave loyalty is highly romanticized to say the least.Gone with the Wind depicts Negroes as possessing a childlike innocence. They seem to be a rich vein of merriment instead of the human beings upon which the horrors of bondage had been visited. Nowhere do we see slaverys pain and degradation. The black characters in the film are even more a caricature than even the heroine is at times. The films tendency toward opaque sentiment at first glance is a terrible injustice to a period kind of painful to the American psyche be it black or white, Northern or Southern.Certainly the film is nowhere near the caliber of slave narratives, Ken Burns the Civil War, or Uncle Toms Cabin. However, it is important as hitherto all-too-often neglected genre of womens history. seldom in mainstream culture is the womens perspective represented so faithfully. And every bit seldom is it given the attention and resources devoted to this film. It is simply not interpreted seriously enough and shunted off into womens studies classes rather than included in the mainstream of scholarship.Valuable though they are, the womens studies classes or gender studies courses tend to withdraw the favor of those predisposed to appreciate them. Gone With the Wind, for a long while a staple of popular culture, has reached a much wider audience. In many ways this movie is indeed an historical romance, ladies fiction. However it is too a significant historical document. many an(prenominal) more people have learned about the Civil War from the womens point of berth by means of viewing this film than from any other source.This fact, in addition to its inclusion of important data, renders it deserving of attention and respect. For instance, it highlights the worthlessness of the Confederate currency, a situation which underscores the sheer lack of administrative competence displayed in the South at all stages of the war. Not only did the Confederates fight the North, they also had to contend with the inherent weaknesses of their fledgling nation, as they sought to envision it. Many things weakened The Cause, most notably slaverys lack of long-term viability as an economic model.The South was heavily invested in a system whic h had no hope of succeeding beyond a a couple of(prenominal) years. To a great extent, the Confederacy fell under its own weight, much to the past and continuing chagrin if its champions and much to the edification of the nation of which it is a part as well as humankind in general. If only the proof of that assertion would not have required the death of so many and the maiming of still more. Bibliography Frank, Lisa Tendrich. Women in the American Civil War Vol. II. Santa Barbara ABC-CLIO, Inc. , 2008 Parish, Peter J. American Civil War, the. New York Holmes and Meier, 1975.