After all, tomorrow is another day!

And so, this well known final line of a great literary work, begins my post.
Today, August 3, 2010, at 3:35 am, I finished what I believe to be an amazing if bigoted piece of literature; Gone With the Wind by Margaret Mitchell. I have seen the movie numerous times, but lately I had an inclination to read the original work from 1936. Having participated in Civil War reenacting since I was quite young, this story has always held some allure for me, let alone fulfilled the needs of my Hopeless Romantic Syndrome. :) Anyone who has seen the movie adaptation of Gone With the Wind must agree with me that Scarlett O'Hara (Hamilton, Kennedy, Butler) is not a lady under any circumstances. In fact she is quite adequately labeled by other names which decency prevents me from typing here. ;) In the movie Scarlett is a spoiled brat who, due to the Civil War, is thrown with the rest of Georgia into the throes of poverty and is burdened with the almost certain death sentence of starvation and despair. Although only nineteen when she is loosed to survive by herself and presented with the care of her beloved plantation Tara and all it's occupants, Scarlett manages to pull through, although the hardness she developed during the hard years was never to truly leave her. She later becomes a wealthy snob and lords over all her old friends in their prideful poverty that the war left them in. The movie stayed pretty true to the book (which is, as all book lovers know, quite unusual), but the one thing that sets the book apart and I think makes it more appealing in some ways, is that in the book you see what goes on in Scarlett's head; you truly understand the hardships that make her the character that she is. You also begin to sympathize with the Confederates and realize that the Yankees were not all they were cracked up to be...but that's for another post. Anyway, while reading the book, I actually felt genuine sympathy for Scarlett at times because of the cruelties of life that she had to endure at such a young age. That sympathy of course turned once again to disgust and hate when Scarlett begins her marriage with Rhett Butler, since as all my close friends know, he is my favorite character....the poor sad fool who was the only man who ever really loved Scarlett and had his heart broken and trampled on because of his useless ardor. My fascination and preference, stems mostly from the fact that I am in great admiration of Clark Gable's performance as Captain Butler, but I do actually like the character, for all his bad traits, if only for his hopeless love....thus crying out to my Romantic soul. :) Although the lack of conscience in Scarlett sometimes makes you shake your head in disapproving amazement, I don't think that she is quite as unfeeling and bad as the movie portrays, because like I said, you don't see her internal/mental struggle. Besides, if we were nineteen and had more than ten people looking to you for food and comfort and the Yankees had stolen everything from you including your mother, and we had been brought up in a sheltered life without being taught the necessary survival skills to bear life on our own, what would any of us have done? We would have made the best of it and done anything we could to provide for our families, no matter how scanty the provisions. This is exactly what Scarlett did. So despite her selfishness and her cruelty, I have to admire her spirit and her strength...and her Irish refusal to be trampled on and destroyed.