Fiddle de dee.

One of the first movies I ever saw with my family was Gone With the Wind.  My first movie was more age-appropriate by today’s standards – Bambi. But back in the 1960’s we didn’t have Disney Studios and Pixar, etc. pumping out tons of children’s movies per year. So, when the family wanted to see a movie maybe once every six months, my father usually decided. A favorite of his was Gone With the Wind.  I think I was around 10 years old when we first went to the local drive-in theater that showed classic movies from time to time.

As a young girl, Scarlett O’Hara was everything I thought was important at the time. She was beautiful, popular, well-dressed and the boys and men loved her, even fought over her. Her resilience was unstoppable in all the adversity she faced later in the movie.  As I grew older, Scarlett’s shortcomings were more evident. But she remains a compelling character to me.  I’m still drawn to her.

What I had never done was read the book.  Why? I had watched the movie so many times I couldn’t imagine the book keeping my attention.  Well, I was so wrong. Not only did it keep my attention it filled in so many details that the movie couldn’t. I loved it.

We read the book for our February book club.

The movie and book place the reader in the South during the Civil War. It gives us a Southern view of life with all its beauty and then the horror of the war. We view the destruction of the South during the war and the Reconstruction afterward through the eyes of Scarlett O’Hara.  Once a flighty young debutante without a care in the world to a starved young woman fighting for food. Vowing to never go hungry again, she turns herself into a steeled competitor in a man’s world violating her Southern conventions way before Gloria Steinem and the women’s movement in the 1960’s and 70’s.

The book rounds out Scarlett’s character better than the movie does. You empathize with Scarlett more even if you don’t quite agree with her actions.

In book club we talked about how Scarlett reacted to various situations, like stealing her sister’s finance. Her fierce determination and how it changed her. We also talked about how different sides of a situation view things and, of course, would Scarlett and Rhett get back together.

Our book club tries to read a classic book every year. Why – when most of us have read them before? Because we are reading them at an older, more experience stage in our lives and it’s amazing how different we see these now.

Enjoy!

Rating: 9.5 fffffffff