This War Ain't Over by Silber Nina;

Author:Silber, Nina;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of North Carolina Press
Published: 2018-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

5

LOOK AWAY! DIXIE’S LANDED!

AFTER WRITING the blockbuster novel of the decade, Margaret Mitchell adjusted her schedule to the overwhelming volume of letters and inquiries that crossed her desk. Even before her book sailed to the top of the bestseller list, Mitchell began answering fans’ questions, responding to countless interviews, and negotiating film rights for her epic 1936 novel of the Civil War. For some of the Atlanta author’s correspondents, Gone with the Wind prompted heartfelt appreciation for a story that resonated strongly with their own experiences. Others wrote about their interest in the upcoming movie, maybe hoping to convince Mitchell they had just the right smile to be Scarlett or were familiar enough with southern Negroes that, even if they were white, they might play Mammy or Pork. A few, of course, didn’t really like the book, mostly for its more explicit presentations of sex and drunkenness. But the bulk of Mitchell’s letter writers begged her to write a sequel, hoping to get the final word on whether Rhett and Scarlett would be reunited. Truth be told, Mitchell showed little interest in clearing up that mystery. Besides, her voluminous correspondence gave her little time for additional fiction writing. For the next ten years, indeed until her untimely death in 1949, Mitchell would write to readers, interviewers, scholars, and others about her one iconic work of fiction, reacting to effusive praise, responding to occasional criticisms, and often pushing back against misunderstandings regarding both herself and her novel.1

Among those misunderstandings, one stood out with particular force: Mitchell had no wish to be cast as some hidebound southerner wallowing in the hazy glow of old-time Dixie. Writing to an Atlanta journalist in 1939, she made her point this way: “I never knew any family that didn’t [talk about the war] if they were Southerners who had any part in the War. But my family were not living in the past and unaware of the present, and the War was not their only topic of conversation.” The inquiring journalist, Mitchell suspected, had fallen prey to the “Margaret Mitchell legend,” a myth that cast the Georgia writer in a time warp where the sectional conflict of the nineteenth century eclipsed all other thoughts and experiences.2

In the 1930s, the “Margaret Mitchell legend” was hardly unique to Margaret Mitchell. “You still fighting the Civil War down there?” was, according to Virginia novelist Clifford Dowdey, a frequent refrain heard by southerners traveling north. The perception, in fact, was widespread that southerners, and the southern region more generally, bore the imprint of the past like nowhere else in the country. With most southerners still living off the land and agriculture often adhering to practices associated with the antebellum plantation system, many came to believe that the history of the South had inextricably merged with its present. Howard Odum, the premier sociologist of the Depression-era South, diagnosed the problem as a regional “time lag” particularly affecting the Southeast, where conditions resembled what “the whole nation was in the earlier decades to the extent that agricultural occupation and ways of life and thought predominate.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.