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"Gone with the Wind" Revisited
Yale University Press
March 2009
On Sale: February 24, 2009
272 pages ISBN: 0300117523 EAN: 9780300117523 Hardcover
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Non-Fiction
How and why has the saga of Scarlett O'Hara kept such a
tenacious hold on our national imagination for almost three-
quarters of a century? In the first book ever to deal
simultaneously with Margaret Mitchell's beloved novel and
David Selznick's spectacular film version of "Gone with the
Wind", film critic Molly Haskell seeks the answers. By all
industry predictions, the film should never have worked.
What makes it work so amazingly well are the fascinating
and uncompromising personalities that Haskell dissects
here: Margaret Mitchell, David Selznick, and Vivien Leigh.
As a feminist and onetime Southern adolescent, Haskell
understands how the story takes on different shades of
meaning according to the age and eye of the beholder. She
explores how it has kept its edge because of Margaret
Mitchell's (and our) ambivalence about Scarlett and because
of the complex racial and sexual attitudes embedded in a
story that at one time or another has offended almost
everyone.Haskell imaginatively weaves together disparate
strands, conducting her story as her own inner debate
between enchantment and disenchantment. Sensitive to the
ways in which history and cinema intersect, she reminds us
why these characters, so riveting to Depression audiences,
continue to fascinate seventy years later.
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