Females' attitude toward love and marriage in Gone with the Wind.doc

Females' attitude toward love and marriage in Gone with the Wind1. IntroductionMargaret Mitchells Gone with the Wind is considered to be one of the most popular novels and movies of all the time. It is the Pulitzer Prize winner of 1936. People continue to watch the adapted film and fantasize about this novel almost seventy years after it was written. Mitchell's work relates the story of a rebellious Southern belle named Scarlett O'Hara and her experiences with friends, family, lovers, and enemies before, during, and after the Civil War. Through describing Scarlett's life, Mitchell examined the effect of the war on the old order of the South, and the aftermath of the war on what was left of the southern planter class. The novel is set in North Georgia at the time of the American Civil War, from 1861 to 1865 and beyond when the Southern plantation owners fought the northern Yankees for the right to own slaves. They lost the war, suffered innumerable losses of life in the process, and the romantic plantation life depicted in the early chapters of the novel was utterly destroyed. During this period the characters in the novel had to undergo the transition from a carefree playful life of picnics and parties (underlain by the hard graft of their slaves) to one of hand-to-mouth living with hard physical labor, and finally, back to prosperity. This paper describes Margaret Mitchells environment of personal growth, life experience, marriage and other aspects of emotional description, and her creative process of this immortal work, as well as inspiration for writing and writing background, and combined with the characteristics of the heroine Scarletts personality as well as her view of love and marriage. It has a further explore the awaking of self-consciousness about marriage and spirit of seeking autonomous right about life. The authors experience in emotion and thought established foundation for this works. 2. Biography of Margaret MitchellMargaret Mitchell was born on Nov. 8, 1900 in Atlanta to a family with ancestry not unlike the OHaras in Gone with the Wind. Her mother, Mary Isabelle “Maybelle” Stephens was of Irish-Catholic ancestry. Her father, Eugene Muse Mitchell, an Atlanta attorney, descended from Scotch-Irish and French Huguenots. The family included many soldiers-members of the family had fought in the American Revolution, Irish uprisings and rebellions and the Civil War. The imaginative child was fascinated with stories of the Civil War that she heard first from her parents and great aunts, who lived at the familys Jonesboro rural home, and later, from grizzled (and sometimes profane) Confederate veterans who regaled the girl with battlefield stories as Margaret, astride her pony, rode through the countryside around Atlanta with the men. The family lived in a series of homes, including a stately home on Peachtree Street beginning in 1912.Margaret Mitchell had always been physically active but fragile. In order to play with her brother, Stephens, and the other boys in the neighborhood, Margaret quickly became a tomboy. She dressed in knickers and called herself "Jimmy." She wrote, produced, and directed plays, casting her friends and inviting the neighborhood over. The front parlor rooms of her home were perfect staging areas. Young Margaret attended private school, but was not an exceptional student. When, on one memorable day, she announced to her mother that she could not understand mathematics and would not return to school, Maybelle dragged her daughter to a rural road where plantation houses had fallen into ruin. Margaret fell in love with Lt. Clifford Henry who was a Harvard man in training at Camp Gordon in Atlanta. They quickly engaged. Margaret started her first year at Smith College in the fall of 1918. While at Smith College, she received word that Clifford was dead. Soon after, her mother became ill, and Margaret rushed home to see her but did not make it in time. Chastened, Margaret Mitchell returned to school, eventually entering Smith College in the fall of 1918, not long after the United States entered World War I. Her fiancé, Clifford Henry, was killed in action in France. In January 1919, Maybelle Mitchell died during a flu epidemic and Margaret Mitchell left college to take charge of the Atlanta household of her father and her older brother, Stephens. Although she made her society debut in 1920, Margaret was far too free-spirited and intellectual to be content with the life of a debutante. She quarreled with her fellow debs over the proper distribution of the money they had raised for charity, and she scandalized Atlanta society with a provocative dance that she performed at the debutante ball with a male student from Georgia Tech.