The legacy of Gone with the Wind—which recently came back to the pop culture forefront thanks to Netflix’s Hollywood—can be as easily attributed to when it was written as when it’s set. Technically a tale of Southern belles and doomed cavaliers during the Civil War and Reconstruction period that followed, it was also Mitchell’s pure flight of Southern revisionist fancy that filled a void for many (white) American readers during the seventh year of the Great Depression.
At a time of great want, here was a story about a protagonist who is nothing if not insatiable in fulfilling her wants, consequences be damned. As Scarlett O’Hara famously decries after seeing the ruins of her cherished childhood home, the Tara plantation, “As God is my witness, they are not going to lick me. I’m going to live through this. And when it’s all over, I’ll never be hungry again!” It was revolutionary to readers and moviegoers to have a heroine who could be so vain and capricious, yet still have greater grit than any of the men in her world. And unfortunately, it’s still remarkable today for the “hero” of a major piece of pop culture to be an exceedingly flawed woman, one whose sins become almost a virtue.
Of course the world Mitchell builds around this anti-heroine is dishonest: a lie about the innocence of the Antebellum South. With its apologetic and happy-go-lucky depiction of slavery as a simpler, better time for wealthy white Southerners and the black Americans they kept in bondage, Gone with the Wind is far removed from the actual horrors of its world. And while Selznick’s movie attempts to slightly decrease that inherent racism, it also plays up its mythological aspect. With an air of Arthurian fable, the movie’s opening text reads, “Here was the last ever to be seen of Knights and their Ladies Fair, of Master and of Slave. Look for it only in books, for it is no more than a dream remembered.”
But that dream, and its emphasis on a heroine so flawed she becomes unstoppable, lives on in the less controversial modern fiction it influences, including Game of Thrones. For like the well-documented influences of J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, or actual atrocities and triumphs in medieval history, Mitchell’s daydream of a lost world, and the life-destroying want that came after, pours over “A Song of Ice and Fire” and the HBO TV series it spawned.
The most obvious comparison between the texts is how much of Scarlett O’Hara is sprinkled across multiple heroines and anti-heroines who’ve made steel out of their trials by fire, chiefly Sansa Stark. Introduced as a “silly girl” in her sister Arya’s eyes, Sansa was dismissed by some readers and many viewers as the boring half of the Stark sisters. Whereas Arya initially exemplified a popular archetype in the 21st century, particularly in fantasy fiction, of the tomboy who will go on gender norm-defying adventures, Sansa appeared to be a prisoner of her courtesies and naïve love for patriarchal songs about “Knights and their Ladies Fair.” Worse, she enjoys those illusions and the spoiled privilege they bring, leading her to make selfish choices that hurt those around her.
