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A comparative examination of the original and reproduction Gone With the Wind costumes at the Harry Ransom Center is at the heart of this study, which proposes to trace the relationship between the analogue original costume, the replica garment, and the digital image reproduction. A discussion of definitions of authenticity and “the original” within such areas as conservation, film studies, and audience perception explores the questions: what is the role of the reproduction, and can it challenge the authority and “aura” of the original? This inquiry illustrates that authenticity is negotiated; it is not always fixed in a clear line ranging from “the real thing” on one side to “the copy” on the other. The study concludes with examining digital image reproductions of costume. The online digital database record can potentially reveal more than a face-to-face encounter with the object in a gallery space, illuminating the biography and history of the garment, changes in curatorial decisions and exhibition practice, and the experience of tactility and embodiment. / text

Anyone who is familiar with Margaret Mitchell’s life and her novel, Gone with the Wind, should notice that Mitchell’s work in some fashion parallels events from her life. Exactly how and why these parallels function, however, has been the subject for much scholarly debate. In my thesis, I examine Mitchell’s biography to get closer to the truth of the events in her life up to the publication of her novel. I then synthesize this information with a side-by-side analysis of some important figures in Mitchell’s life and characters from her novel; from there, I provide a feminist critique of selected characters, relationships between those characters, and scenes from the novel. In particular, I focus upon Mitchell’s relationship with her mother, Maybelle, and how this relationship compares with Scarlett O’Hara’s relationship with her mother, Ellen.

This thesis examines the condition of the “Curtain Dress” of Gone With the Wind (GWTW) with the purpose of advising a conservation plan that would allow its exhibit in 2014 as part of the 75th anniversary of the film. The dress has been stored since 1981 in the Harry Ransom Center (HRC) at the University of Texas at Austin as part of the David O. Selznick (DOS) Collection. The project addresses the book, the film, the creation of the dress, and what happened to it after filming was over. A collaborative team was formed including HRC staff, a conservator, and graduate students from the Textiles and Apparel Division at the University of Texas at Austin. The author of this study provided historical context, document analysis, construction evaluation, and fiber testing. A timeline for the book, film, and garment was established; communications from Selznick referencing the dress were analyzed; construction details were photographed and documented for reference; and colorimetry and spectroscopy techniques were used for fiber analysis. / text

That slavery was largely excised from the cultural memory of the Civil War in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, particularly by white Americans, is well documented; Slavery and the Civil War in Cultural Memory moves beyond that story of omission to ask how slavery has been represented in U.S. culture and, necessarily, how it figures into some of the twentieth century's most popular Civil War narratives. The study begins in the 1930s with the publication of Gone with the Wind--arguably the most popular Civil War novel of all time--and reads Margaret Mitchell's pervasive tale of ex-slaveholder adversity against contemporaneous narratives like Black Reconstruction in America , Absalom, Absalom!, and Black Boy/American Hunger , which contradict Mitchell's account of slavery, the war, and Reconstruction. Spanning nearly seven decades, this study tells the story of how cultural productions have continued to reinterpret slavery. Focusing primarily on novels and films but also drawing on interviews with ex-slaves, private journals, and court records, each chapter explores how slavery is represented in a particular historical epoch and highlights each narrative's contribution to the creation of cultural memory, particularly its conformity to earlier works or its revision of antecedents. In addition, Slavery and the Civil War in Cultural Memory traces representations of slavery through recurring themes such as hunger, disease, marriage, and madness and seeks to understand how the narratives in question comment directly on the concept of memory. Among the topics discussed are the Civil War centennial; how Margaret Walker's Jubilee relates slavery, the Civil War, and Reconstruction to the civil rights movement of the 1960s; the controversy over The Confessions of Nat Turner; the Roots phenomenon, and the copyright lawsuit filed against the publisher of Alice Randall's unauthorized parody, The Wind Done Gone. The study concludes in 2005, with March, Geraldine Brooks's reimagining of Little Women, and E.L. Doctorow's The March, about Sherman's campaign through Georgia and the Carolinas. A pattern emerges in the final chapters that shows recent authors conjuring, in order to revise, elements of Absalom, Absalom! and Gone With the Wind.

Margaret Mitchell’s one and only novel, Gone with the Wind, was an instant hit when it waspublished in 1936. The novel is a romantic tragedy that takes place in a very traditional society inthe state of Georgia in the United States before, during, and after the Civil War. Keeping the oldtraditions is one of the priorities for the Southerners, particularly the ones that have to do withgender roles. However, the war brings changes of which most prominent families highlydisapprove. A few seize the opportunities during Reconstruction, while most of them remain inpoverty in order to keep the old traditions. My essay will focus on the four main characters in thenovel, Scarlett O’Hara, Rhett Butler, Ashley Wilkes, and Melanie Hamilton. Rhett represents theNew South and is attracted to Scarlett who is a mixture of the old and the new. She is madly in lovewith Ashley, who represents the Old South. Ashley is attracted to Scarlett but choses to marryMelanie, who is more like him. The purpose of this essay is to look at gender roles and social norms in the novel, notjust in relation to individuals but also how society as a whole treats those who refuse to follow theunwritten rules. How does this affect the lives and relationships of the four main characters? Whatsocial norms define the society these characters live in, and what are their individual attitudes tothese norms? Southern society is secure as long as the established social norms are not challenged,and these include traditional gender roles. The characters in Gone with the Wind are heavilyinfluenced by gender roles and social norms, and some to such an extent that their conduct andreputations can matter more than the actual person. It is possible to rebel against the system only ifone has the self-sufficiency and financial means to do so, as is the case with Scarlett and Rhett.They break away from the traditional gender norms, but their freedom has serious consequences.Ashley Wilkes, on the other hand, has the financial means to succeed but he is so affected by hisrole as a perfect Southern gentleman that he dares not apply new ideas in his life in order to survivefinancially, and this makes him feel unfulfilled. His wife Melanie Hamilton fulfills her role as agreat lady, which means she is socially and financially dependent on her husband. In analyzing theconstraints and consequences of gender roles, I will make use of feminist theory, with particularfocus on Simone de Beauvoir’s concept of the Other and her definition of narcissism, and Hilary M.Lips’ explanation of social-cultural theories and prescriptive gender stereotypes. In Gone with theWind, traditional gender roles, like the old South, are imaginative, unattainable and ultimatelydestructive. The most conventional characters cannot fully attain or embody the gender roles, whilethe most non-conformist characters nevertheless long for them, and everyone suffers for it.

E.L. Doctorow implements ideas of intertextuality and metafiction in his 2007 novel, The March, which is most notably apparent through its resemblance to the 1939 film, Gone with the Wind. Using Michel de Certeau's theory of spatial stories and Linda Hutcheon's of historiographic metafiction, this thesis discusses the layering of Doctorow's The March from the film seen in the character of Pearl from the novel and Scarlett from the film and Selznick's version of the burning of Atlanta and Doctorow's burning of Columbia.

This thesis starts with an overview of the historical record tied to the birth of a new nation studied by Alexis de Tocqueville and Henry Steele Commager. It singles out the works of Henry Nash Smith and Eugene D. Genovese for an understanding, respectively, of the "myth of the frontier" tied to the conquest of the American West and the "plantation myth" that sustained slavery in the American South. Both myths underlie the concept of hybridity or cross-cultural relations in America. This thesis is concerned with the representation or lack of representation of hybridity and the roles played by female characters in connection with the land in two seminal American novels and their film versions---James Fenimore Cooper's The Last of the Mohicans, and Margaret Mitchell's Gone With the Wind---and Alice Randall's rewriting of Mitchell's novel, The Wind Done Gone , as a point of contrast. Hybridity is represented in the mixed-race bodies of these characters.

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Published in 1936, Margaret Mitchell's Gone with the Wind achieved massive literary success before being adapted into a motion picture of the same name in 1939. The novel and film have amassed numerous accolades, inspired frequent reissues, and sustained mass popularity. This dissertation analyzes evidence of audience reception in order to assess the effects of Gone with the Wind's version of Lost Cause collective memory on the construction of the Old South, Civil War, and Lost Cause in the American imagination from 1936 to 2016. By utilizing the concept of prosthetic memory in conjunction with older, still-existing forms of collective cultural memory, Gone with the Wind is framed as a newly theorized mass cultural phenomenon that perpetuates Lost Cause historical narratives by reaching those who not only identify closely with it, but also by informing what nonidentifying consumers seeking historical authenticity think about the Old South and Civil War. In so doing, this dissertation argues that Gone with the Wind is both an artifact of the Lost Cause collective memory that it, more than anything else, legitimized in the twentieth century and a multi-faceted site where memory of the South and Civil War is still created. My research is grounded in the field of memory studies, in particular the work of Pierre Nora, Eric Hobsbawn, Andreas Huyssen, Michael Kammen, and Alison Landsberg. In chapter one, I track the reception of Gone with the Wind among white American audiences and define the phenomenon as rooted in Benedict Anderson's conception of the nation. I further argue that Gone with the Wind's Lost Causism provided white national subjects with a collective memory of slavery and the Civil War that made sense of continuing racial tensions during Jim Crow and justified white resistance to African American equality. Gone with the Wind, in other words, reconciled the lingering ideological divisions between white northerners and southerners who then were more concerned with protecting white supremacy. In chapter two and three, I analyze Gone with the Wind's continuing popularity throughout the twentieth century and its significant influence on other sites of national memory. Chapter four uses contemporary user reviews of Gone with the Wind DVD and Blu-ray collector's editions to reveal that the phenomenon remains popular. Throughout this study I analyze the history of black resistance to the Gone with the Wind phenomenon. For African Americans, Gone with the Wind's Lost Causism has always been understood as justification for racism, imbuing the white national conscious with a mythological history of slavery and black inferiority. As I argue, black protestors to Gone with the Wind were correct, as the phenomenon has always resonated most during moments of increased racial tension such as during the civil rights era and following the Charleston Church Massacre in 2015. / Ph. D. / This study analyzes the continuing popularity of the popular culture phenomenon Gone with the Wind, from its initial publication as a novel in 1936 to 2016. I first argue that Gone with the Wind is an artifact of the Lost Cause, which is defined as an amalgamation of myths about southern history that relies on negative racial stereotypes, the veneration of the Confederacy, and the position that slavery was unimportant to the causes of the American Civil War. The Lost Cause, as scholars have argued, has always been an ideological justification for anti-black racism, particularly Jim Crow apartheid. As a product of this white supremacist mythology, I further argue that Gone with the Wind is not merely an artifact of the Lost Cause, but its most powerful statement that defined what twentieth-century white Americans believed about southern history. As I reveal, Gone with the Wind resonated most among white audiences during periods of heightened racial tensions, in particular during various points in the civil rights era and following the 2015 Charleston Church Massacre. The Lost Cause remains a potent ideological force that underpins American white supremacy. In chapters one and two, I analyze Gone with the Wind’s popularity in the twentieth century using reviews by readers and viewers. I reveal that Gone with the Wind’s popularity was more due to its Lost Cause mythology rather than its narrative plot, and was widely popular among white audiences across the North and the South. In chapter two, I also look at Gone with the Wind’s influence on later novels and films about the South before, in chapter three, highlighting how Gone with the Wind’s version of the Lost Cause became the primary historical narrative at sites of southern heritage tourism, in particular plantation museums and Georgia’s Civil War sites. In chapter four, I highlight contemporary user reviews of Gone with the Wind’s DVD and Blu-ray collector’s editions to reveal that its version of the Lost Cause remains a potent ideological influence among its fans. Throughout the chapter I also analyze the history of black resistance to the Gone with the Wind phenomenon, including organized pickets during its original theatrical release and the arson of a Gone with the Wind museum. For African Americans, Gone with the Wind’s Lost Causism has always been understood as justification for racism, imbuing the white national conscious with a mythological history of slavery and anti-black stereotypes.