I had a quiet day yesterday. I'm feeling better each day from my cold/sinus/allergy thing. I watched Gone With the Wind last night, and despite the racism, bias and skewered romanticism, the acting still shines. Vivian Leigh, Hattie MacDaniel and Olivia de Haviland are powerful and brilliant. They are the whole show. If Scarlett had been able to have any kind of power in that culture, she wouldn't have become the self deceiving person she is. She represents women forced to compete between themselves and accommodating men at every turn. I'm not so sure how far we've come, when in today's paper is an article on a tech convention where the few women present have to turn the other way when presentations are blatantly sexist.
Scarlet is one of three sisters, each desperate to marry and believing that marriage will solve their problems. Scarlet becomes the only fully alive and interesting sister because she does a man's work and lives a man's life. Now, Melanie is the "good" woman, but not because she sells herself, she doesn't have to as she marries the man she loves and they share values, but because she is a rebel herself, breaking the bonds of Southern society to value the truly good people, rather than the people with the right blood petigree. She sees Scarlet for who she is, and gets to live a little more through vicariously experiencing Scarlett's fierceness and fearlessness.
I always remember Scarlett at the end, is probably still in her twenties, and her life is hardly over. Rhett, in the end, is a man who takes what he wants, by force at times, and I think she will be able to find a man less timid than Ashley, but more liberated than Rhett. If not, she now knows she does not need a man at all.
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