[100 Challenge] Roberta Gattel_14

Margaret Mitchell, Gone with the Wind, 1936

As a child, I enjoyed the movie "Gone with the Wind." I adored the protagonist Scarlett O'Hara because she was completely different from the heroines of all the other period films: she was not the virtuous, faithful, and obedient woman, ready to set an example or sacrifice herself, but she wasn't even evil, the demonic femme fatale of many noirs. She was a cruel, capricious character, incapable of giving up, full of controversial passions. Her character was as accurate as only some male characters could be since it always seemed that in retro films, women were less multifaceted than their male colleagues or were relegated to limited roles.

Scarlett wasn't like that; Scarlett O'Hara cheated, killed, won, lost, and was always willing to fight. When I was a little white child and I was a fan of the film, I knew nothing about racism, classism, and slavery: reading the novel as an adult was a shock. The character of Mami, the Black woman who acts as the protagonist's adoptive mother, is caricatural and, at times, obtuse. Prissy, the other Black girl who helps Scarlett, is described as naive, lazy, and lustful. All Blacks are represented as servants, humble, and all two-dimensional. In the film, it is the same, but when you're a child, you don't notice it. Not only because you don't know anything about it but, worse, because your gaze is probably already accustomed to a racist vision. It has already absorbed it from other films, from advertising, from the sayings of those around you.

It is difficult to concentrate on the theme of the novel - the city of Atlanta’s inability to surrender - forgetting the racist vision deeply rooted in a writer who probably did not consider herself racist. Despite many jokes reminding me why I loved Scarlett ("Marriage, fun? Fiddle-dee-dee. Fun for men, you mean"), unfortunately, you can't do with History what the protagonist does with life: turn the page and say, “After all, tomorrow is another day.”