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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