MOLESKINE ® LITERARIO

Scarlett O’Hara: A Hero for Our Times? se pregunta Steve Coates en el Paper Cuts a partir de la publicación del libro de Molly Haskell Frankly, My Dear. Ahí el personaje de Lo que el viento se llevó de Margaret Mitchell, interpretado inolvidablemente por Vivian Leigh, deja de ser ese ser humano caprichoso y engreído, incapaz de abrir los ojos al dolor ajeno así arrasen su vida y la de su pueblo, para convertirse en una heroína proto-feminista. ¿Puede ser? ¿Por qué no? Algo de Emma Bovary tiene, sin duda:

Harriet Beecher Stowe may have been “the little lady that started this great war” with “Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” but, horrifyingly, it was “Gone With the Wind,” Haskell reminds us, that together with D.W. Griffith’s “Birth of a Nation” imprinted a false image of Reconstruction and its aftermath that is still being corrected today.
On the other hand, it should always have been clear that Scarlett O’Hara is a proto-feminist heroine, “the post-suffragette flapper meets the post-feminist power girl,” as Haskell puts it, “who grows more astonishing over time.” Scarlett is “eerily timely, channeling the spirit of an age, Mitchell’s youth-obsessed ’20s, that resembles ours to a jarring degree.” In “A Jury of Her Peers: American Women Writers From Anne Bradstreet to Annie Proulx” (reviewed March 8), Elaine Showalter considers Mitchell as a Depression writer: Mitchell’s message “endured because it spoke to the universal uncertainties of the 20th century as well as to the particular struggles of the Confederate past. Her mother had told her that with the Civil War, the seemingly secure world of the South ‘had exploded beneath them,’ and ‘my own world was going to explode under me, some day, and God help me if I didn’t have some weapon to the meet the new world.’ ” Showalter goes on to quote the critic Blanche Gelfant, who said that “Gone With the Wind” was “about the American ’30s — about dispossession and loss, homelessness, hunger, the collapse of a society and its miraculous recovery.” When asked what “Gone With the Wind” was about in a 1936 interview quoted in the satisfyingly hefty Scribner trade paperback edition of 2007, Mitchell put it this way: “If the novel has a theme, it is that of survival. What makes some people come through catastrophes and others, apparently just as able, strong and brave, go under? It happens in every upheaval. Some people survive; others don’t. What qualities are in those who fight their way through triumphantly that are lacking in those that go under? I only know that survivors used to call that quality ‘gumption.’ So I wrote about people who had gumption and people who didn’t.”

Etiquetas: eeuu, margaret mitchell, NOTICIA

Aunque entre la película Lo que el viento se llevó y la novela de Margarete Mitchell hay muchas diferencias, algo que se mantuvo en las dos versiones es el misterio que envolvía a Rhett Butler, en la película extraordinariamente retratado por la sonrisa cínica de Clark Gable. Muchas secuelas oficiales y no oficiales han aparecido en EEUU de la célebre historia, pero una que acaba de aparecer recientemente, titulada Rhett Butler’s People y escrita por Donald McCaig, intenta explicar el origen de esa sonrisa, "rehabilitar" al personaje y desenmascarar el misterio de Rhett para mostrarlo igual que cualquiera de nosotros. La pregunta es: ¿Por qué? ¿Qué puede estar pasando por la cabeza de McCaig para intentar hacer algo así y malograr el efecto más logrado de la novela y de la historia del cine norteamericano? Aunque este es un blog para recomendar libros, obviamente recomiendo NO leer éste. Stephen Carter, quien hace una reseña para el NYT, no lo dice tan tajantemente pero estaría de acuerdo.

Dice la nota: "But mostly his goal is to rehabilitate Rhett. The Klan question, the woman he dishonored, the rumors of a bastard in New Orleans, the money supposedly pilfered from the Confederate treasury — all of this McCaig explains away while keeping the story moving at a nice clip, faster even than the original. Or perhaps one should say the “stories,” because McCaig’s novel, as the title suggests, weaves interlocking tales of different people whose lives and Rhett’s were intertwined. We meet, among others, his beloved sister, Rosemary; his boyhood Negro friend Tunis; and his schoolmate Andrew, who becomes a Confederate war hero. We learn more about Archie, the frightening, violent, racist ex-con who works for the sainted Melanie in Mitchell’s novel and does not exist in the film: he, too, turns out to have a past connection to Rhett. Perhaps his ending is a bit predictable, but the power of Mitchell’s climax would be difficult to match. McCaig pierces the mystery in which Mitchell shrouded Rhett Butler. He gives Rhett a life. We begin to understand where he came from, and why he was the way he was and did the things he did. McCaig discards Ripley’s cumbersome tale and invents fresh lives even for the characters necessarily common to both sequels. The new story has its own integrity. It makes sense. And yet McCaig’s Rhett, for all that he becomes a plausible character, is perhaps not an entirely plausible Rhett. Or rather, even if plausible, he may not be the Rhett we need. Rhett’s charm in the original novel (and in the film) stems precisely from his dashing mystery. Neither we nor Scarlett ever quite know what is going on behind that mocking grin, and our inability to define him draws us to him. He surprises and impresses us because we never can guess what he is going to do next. McCaig’s Rhett worries. He aches for Scarlett, is wounded by her tantrums and her indifference, and confides his fears to his sister. By stripping away the veneer, McCaig transforms Rhett into a version of the angst-ridden, on-the-make, love-struck antihero of modern fiction: Rhett Butler as channeled by Rabbit Angstrom or T. S. Garp. Is this really the Rhett we want? Donald McCaig’s fine novel is not an hommage. In reducing Rhett to a perplexed and worrying Everyman, McCaig reduces the power of Mitchell’s original. Readers adore the enigma that is Rhett — because he is an enigma. Probably that was Mitchell’s intention: to persuade us to love the world that would produce a man like Rhett. McCaig insists that Rhett is actually a lot like everyone else. That’s why, after finishing “Rhett Butler’s People,” it may be impossible to read “Gone With the Wind” in quite the same way.

Etiquetas: eeuu, lo que el viento se llevo, margaret mitchell, mccaig, NOTICIA, RESEÑA