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1.2.1 The View of Land 4
1.2.2 The View of Knighthood, Nobility and Gentleness 5
1.2.3 The Attitudes upon Slaves and the Northern (Yankee) 6
2.The Disruption of the Southern American Culture 8
2.1 The Disruption of the Plantation Legend 8
2.1.1 The Deadly Impact upon the Economy as Agricultural 8
2.1.2 The Impact upon the plantation life9
2.1.3 The Disruption of the Slavery System 9
2.1.4 The Impact on the Superiority Complex of the Southern 10
3. The Reconstruction of the Southern American Culture 11
3.1 The Brand New Destiny of the Negroes 11
3.1.1 The Confusion and Awakening 11
3.2 The Development of Southern American Value 12
3.2.1 The Southern Renaissance: Conservatism (Romanticism) vs Modernism 12
3.2.2 Modernism VS Conservatism (Future VS Past) 13
4. Conclusion16
References 18
Introduction
The masterpiece of Margaret Mitchell, Gone with the Wind once created an awful popularity as Malcolm Cowley cites in the September 16, 1936 issue of The New Republic that “if the pages of all copies were laid end to end they would encircle the world at the Equator two and two-thirds times” (1936:161) and he “goes on to denigrate Gone with the Wind as a popular but flawed monsters, suggesting to his readers that they had nothing to fear but a bestseller written by a hack female novelist” (Adams, 2007: 58). When it was first published, the novel “enjoyed immense popularity but little critical success” (Adams, 2007: 61). However, Gone with the Wind becomes an important subject of the academic study recent years. To figure out the reason for its enduring charm, it is once suggested to exam the novel by putting it into the Southern Cultural Contextual (张玉霞 2009).
Instead of discussing upon the war or love theme which may have become the cliche of this novel, the present thesis is to focus on the process of the disruption and reconstruction of the Southern American culture. The Civil War brought the the old civilization of the South into its end --- “the lost sovereignty” as Erin Sheley call it (2013: 1). And meanwhile a new type of civilization was coming into being under the reconstruction era. John Crowe Ransom revealed his attitudes toward the reconstruction of the South as “Reconstructed but Unregenerate”(1930). He classified Gone with the Wind into the “propaganda for antebellum southern culture” (Adams, 2007: 60). As I will argue, however, the message what Mitchell intends to deliver is just the opposite to the Ransom and the novel reveals even more optimistic reconstruction than Ransom has defined.
A series of questions can be asked about the title of the novel: What has “gone with the wind”? Is it only the love between the heroes and heroines, or the Agrarian society based on the Slavery System; the prosperity of the old South, the plantation legend or something more than that? And what is “going with the wind”? Is it only the great tide of the industrialization and modernization over the South after the War? Or other thing such as the faiths and values which was deeply rooted in the Southern people’s heart? To answer these questions, this paper is circled in the background of its southern and modernist context and is based on the persity as varying examples from every class. The thesis can be pided into three main parts, the Antebellum South, the Disruption Period and the Reconstruction Period.
Part one is the recurring of the plantation legend which is detailedly portrayed by Mitchell in the novel; part two shows the actuality of the Southern planters and the negroes during the war and the feeling of strong loss and grief after defeated by the North; part three analyses the “New South” which Mitchell wants to express by comparing conservatism with modernism. Thus draw Mitchell’s “ideal reconstruction” and dig out the width and depth of the novel.