1000+ images about Margaret Mitchell on Pinterest | Scarlett o'hara, Museums and Scavenger hunts apartment where Margaret Mitchell wrote Gone With the Wind See More Gone With the Wind (Film) | New Georgia Encyclopedia Gone With the Wind (Film) Original entry by Hugh Ruppersburg , University of Georgia, 01/22/2004 Last edited by NGE Staff on 08/02/2016 Explore This Article Premiere and Posterity Few films are so closely identified with a geographical region as Gone With the Wind is identified with Georgia and the Old South. The 1939 adaptation of Margaret Mitchell 's 1936 novel , produced by David O. Selznick, featured such well-known actors as Clark Gable (Rhett Butler), Olivia de Havilland (Melanie Wilkes), and Leslie Howard (Ashley Wilkes), and made a star of actress Vivien Leigh (Scarlett O'Hara). It remains one of the most popular and commercially successful films ever made. Its main theme, from the Max Steiner score, is recognized throughout the world. In its use of color, scene design, and cinematography, it set new standards.

The film won eight Academy Awards, more than any film up to that time. Adapting the Novel Gone With the Wind Commemorative Stamp film is a relatively faithful adaptation of the novel, despite a handful of significant changes. The novel offers detailed information about the early lives of Gerald and Ellen O'Hara that is largely missing from the film. The film significantly simplifies Scarlett's life (removing, for example, two of her children) and discards much of the novel's social context. The novel's racial attitudes were softened—offensive language and references to the Ku Klux Klan were removed, and the sexual overtones of the attack on Scarlett in the freedmen's settlement were deleted. The novel was sexually explicit for its day, but this too was toned down, in accord with the Hays Code; Rhett Butler's rape of Scarlett and Melanie's childbirth were treated in indirect or euphemistic terms. Seldom has a successful film been the product of such chaos and disorganization. The time between Selznick's purchase of the rights to the novel and the actual premiere was three and a half years; in the 1930s most movies were produced and premiered within a matter of months.

The search for actors to play the leading characters became the stuff of American legend: 1,400 interviews and ninety screen tests were necessary before Selznick cast Vivien Leigh, a twenty-six-year-old British actress, as Scarlett. Clark Gable was a popular choice as Rhett Butler, though Selznick had to sell MGM an interest in the film to gain permission to use him. Gable did not want to play the part. Leslie Howard was embarrassed by the Ashley Wilkes role. Olivia de Havilland, on the other hand, actively sought to play the part of Melanie Wilkes. Perhaps as a way of generating publicity, and to create the proper atmosphere, Selznick did look for southern actors. A casting call in Atlanta , held at the Biltmore Hotel, brought a mob of hundreds of young women hoping to play Scarlett. In the end, only a few minor roles went to southerners. Gable was from Ohio and refused to use a southern accent; Leigh and Howard were from England. Two Georgians, Susan Myrick and Wilbur Kurtz, served as advisors to Selznick on matters of cultural and historical accuracy. Selznick wanted to produce an epic drama that was historically accurate.

The film was largely shot in California, with artists, painters, scene designers, and architects working together to create a convincing simulation of the southern landscape. The work of production designer William Cameron Menzies and costume designer Walter Plunkett, and the attention to detail in costumes, buildings, and set design, are major reasons for the film's success. George Gone With the Wind Premiere Cukor was Selznick's original choice as director. Cukor spent two years on the project and was actively involved in casting the film and developing major characters. Nineteen days after shooting began, however, Selznick fired Cukor, because they disagreed on how filming should proceed. Selznick then turned to Victor Fleming, who was just completing work on The Wizard of Oz (1939). Fleming reshot many scenes already filmed by Cukor and demanded that filming proceed in a more conventional fashion. Although Fleming was credited as director, a number of others also had a role in directing, especially Cukor, who had a lasting influence on the film.

Fitting the events of this 1,000-plus-page novel into a film that could be viewed in one sitting would have been a formidable task for any screenwriter. (At just under four hours, it was one of the longest Hollywood films ever made.) Any screenwriter would have found it a challenge to satisfy Selznick. Pulitzer Prize –winning dramatist Sidney Howard wrote several drafts of the screenplay before withdrawing from the project, frustrated by Selznick's interference. Selznick attempted to write and rewrite sections of the screenplay himself, often composing scenes the night before they were shot. Others worked on the script as well. The playwright Ben Hecht was hired to work on the script, and finally Howard was brought back to get it in shape, even as filming was under way. The Film Often touted as the epic story of the Old South, Gone With the Wind focuses almost entirely on the Civil War (1861-65) and the years immediately following, ending around 1872.

Such events as the start of the war, Gettysburg, the siege of Atlanta , Sherman's march through Georgia, and Reconstruction provide a historical background for the main focus—Scarlett O'Hara, her unrequited love for Ashley Wilkes, and her marriages, especially her turbulent relationship with her third husband, Rhett Butler. Gone With the Wind Premiere Geographically, the film moves between the O'Hara plantation, Tara, which Scarlett struggles to save, and Atlanta, which both film and novel treat as a symbol of hope and promise for Georgia's future. Scarlett is identified with Tara, but more strongly with Atlanta, especially because of her fierce independence, her disdain for convention, and her growing concern with money (a concern more evident in the novel than the film). Ultimately, both Scarlett and Atlanta symbolize the post–Civil War South, struggling to survive and rebuild. Politically, the film offers a conservative view of Georgia and the South. In her novel, despite her southern prejudices, Mitchell showed clear awareness of the shortcomings of her characters and their region. The film is less analytical.

It portrays the story from a clearly Old South point of view: the South is presented as a great civilization, the practice of slavery is never questioned, and the plight of the freedmen after the Civil War is implicitly blamed on their emancipation . A series of scenes whose racism rivals that of D. W. Griffith's film The Birth of a Nation (1915) show Reconstruction mainly as a time when southern whites were victimized by freed slaves, who themselves were exploited by northern carpetbaggers. Although the film provides a compelling if romanticized portrait of the southern planter class, it vilifies the white lower class (mainly represented by the overseer Jonas Wilkerson), and slaves and exslaves are viewed both as clowns and as faithful servants. Gone With the Wind was hardly alone in the 1930s in its caricature of African American characters, and it did offer previously unavailable opportunities to such black actors as Hattie McDaniel (Mammy), Butterfly McQueen (Prissy), and Eddie Anderson (Uncle Peter). A major theme in the film is the contrast between the land, which the O'Haras value, and the commercial environment of the city.

Some of the most compelling scenes center on the land: Gerald O'Hara's insistence to his daughter Scarlett that "land's the only thing in the world worth working for. Worth fighting for, worth dying for. Because it's the only thing that lasts"; Scarlett's discovery after her retreat from Atlanta that Tara still stands, unburned by the Union army; and the scene in which she raises her fist to the sky and vows, "As God is my witness, I'll never be hungry again." Other notable scenes focus on the Battle of Atlanta, wounded soldiers laid in the city's immense railyard , and a gruesome battlefield traversed by Scarlett during her retreat. Premiere and Posterity Margaret Mitchell and Clark Gable The theater's façade had been renovated to resemble a southern mansion. A three-day celebration preceded the premiere. Mayor William B. Hartsfield declared a holiday and gave the city's workers a half day off. A crowd of 18,000 gathered in front of the theater on opening night, eager for a glimpse of the stars. Most of the major actors in the film attended the premiere, with the exception of Howard and McDaniel (the black actors were not invited).

Margaret Mitchell attended as well, and after being escorted to the stage by Gable and Leigh, she gave the film and Selznick her blessing. Gone With the Wind was widely praised as a landmark achievement, and critics continue to regard it as important for its cinematography, art direction, and special effects, and for its ambitious portrayal of history. In a year that produced some of the best American films ever made, Gone With the Wind received thirteen Academy Award nominations in twelve categories (plus two nominations in special categories) and won eight awards, including Best Picture, Best Screenplay, Best Director, Best Actress (Vivien Leigh), Best Supporting Actress (Hattie McDaniel, a first for a black actress), Best Art Direction, Best Film Editing, and Best Cinematography, as well as a special award to William Cameron Menzies for use of color. In its first run the film played for slightly more than two years and was seen by more than 25 million viewers. Many more have seen it in subsequent releases and on home video. Frank S. Nugent asked in his New York Times review of the film, "Is it the greatest motion picture ever made?

Probably not, although it is the greatest motion mural we have seen and the most ambitious filmmaking venture in Hollywood's spectacular history." A McCall's reviewer wrote that the film, "fantastic in scope, extraordinary in detail, played better than any movie I've ever seen, and more colossal, stupendous, gigantic and terrific than any picture ever has been." Gone With the Wind is fourth on the American Film Institute's list of the "100 Greatest American Movies of All Time." It is probable that more people have seen Gone With the Wind than any other film ever made. You Might Also Like On Vanessa Place, Gone With the Wind, and the Limit Point of Certain Conceptual Aesthetics - Atticus Review On Vanessa Place, Gone With the Wind, and the Limit Point of Certain Conceptual Aesthetics By John Keene May 27, 2015 When it appeared in 1937, Margaret Mitchell’s sole novel, Gone with the Wind, was a publishing sensation, selling one million copies in its first six months and winning its author that year’s Pulitzer Prize for the Novel, as the fiction category was then known.

The book would sell even more copies after the movie version, starring Vivien Leigh and Clark Gable, appeared in 1939 and won its own spate of highest honors, among them Academy Awards for Leigh as Best Actress for her portrayal of Southern belle Scarlett O’Hara; for Victor Fleming as Best Director; and for Selznick International Pictures and Metro-Goldwyn Mayer as the Best Film of the Year. The Academy also broke new ground by nominating, for the first time, and awarding the Oscar to an African American, actress Hattie McDaniel, who reprised Mitchell’s novel’s “Mammy,” who was not just a character in the novel and film but a social archetype and offensive stereotype, with deep roots in the white Southern and broader American racist imaginary. That stereotype, it cannot be emphasized enough, still resonates today. The film remains an icon of American cinema, its characters, its quotations, and its portrayal of the Civil War and its aftermath seared into the national–and international–consciousness, much like its ideological predecessor, D. W.

Griffith’s 1915 film, Birth of a Nation, based on white supremacist and arch-segregationist Thomas Dixon’s novels, had done with the Reconstruction period in the South. It is not going too far to say that Gone with the Wind’s images, its themes, and its revisionist master narrative, like other forms of racist ideas, and visual and material culture, including Blackface minstrelsy, have suffused American popular culture, and exist just beneath the surface of a good portion of what we still see today onscreen and in books. Both Mitchell’s novel and the film Gone with the Wind are racist and revisionist in ideological terms, infused with a “Lost Cause,” anti-Unionist perspective that can be traced directly back to its author’s and the larger Southern society’s belief in and justifications for the Confederacy.

As that seditionist state’s former Vice President, Alexander Stephens, underlined in his Cornerstone Speech of May 1861 in Savannah, Georgia, “[the Confederacy’s] foundations are laid, its cornerstone rests, upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery, subordination to the superior race, is his natural and normal condition.” There you have it, white supremacy and anti-black racism in distilled form, from the viper’s mouth itself. Gone with the Wind, in its cinematic version, retains many aspects of the novel, down to direct quotations of the text, but it is one thing to watch Scarlett, Rhett, Melanie, Ashley, Mammy, and Prissy, among others, cavorting on screen, often beguiling, sometimes cringe-inducing as the entire spectacle, especially the latter characters’ scripted, stereotypical and caricatured actions may be, and it is another to read Mitchell’s written text, which brims over with her historical revisionism, grotesque depictions of the enslaved African Americans, and her flawed renditions of black speech, including liberal use of the n-word.

In 1937, such characterizations and language would have provoked few to no negative responses from white or many black readers, as the book trafficked in white American literary and cultural conventions; today, in a novel or story collection, they would, I trust, spark criticism from critics of all races. That is, unless they were part of an ongoing “conceptual” project that mostly flies under the public radar, with some versions appearing in literary journals, and others in extended, durational form on social media platforms, in which case until someone noticed and paid attention to them, little if any criticism or critique might arise. Then all hell would break lose.

*** Conceptual art, or more accurately, conceptual artistic practices, have a long provenance that one might date back to various antecedents; from the perspective of Euro-American art, one could point back to Plato’s ideal forms, or Kantian formalism, or various experiments in music, the plastic arts, or Medieval and Early Modern forms of group and appropriative writing, or to performances by Modernist and post-Modernist figures on multiple shores of the Atlantic, with the various iterations of Yves Klein, Happenings, Fluxus, socially engaged projects in the US, South America, Europe, and elsewhere, and more formal dematerialization practices and performances of the late 1960s through the 1970s marking “conceptual art” as an established category. In its many guises, conceptual art underlines one of Plato’s central aesthetic insights, which is that art gains its power in part because it can be a vehicle for ideas and practices, which is to say, that ideas themselves can be incredibly powerful, and, as Plato warned, dangerous. However you chart the genealogy, conceptual practice remains a valuable path in contemporary imaginative culture.

Not every conceptual project or action succeeds, however, and none exists outside a given framework or frameworks that do not automatically endow and invest it with value and meaning. Content, form, style, and the project’s originators and practitioners (if there are any) matter as much as the contextual frame of the conceptual piece. For example, a conceptual project that plays on the idea of unspeakable but publicly objectionable ideas has a different meaning in a society in which types of speech are banned or criminalized by possible imprisonment or death than it does in a society in which all types of speech are possible, though liable to social sanction. To put it another, self-evident way, no conceptual project is value-free, and all are political in some manner or fashion.

In the case of Kenneth Goldsmith’s March 16, 2015 Brown University performance, in which he “remixed” and “read” Michael Brown’s autopsy report, the very fact that he, as a wealthy, socially privileged cis-gender straight white male, chose to appropriate and perform the remixed report, within (and despite) the broader and longstanding social and political context of the crisis of police harassment, the prison-industrial context and the New Jim Crow, and the state-sanctioned murder of black people, especially black men, made it an overtly political act. That he remixed it, ending with a riff on the murdered black man’s genitalia, to entertain a mostly white audience at one of the nation’s most elite universities, underlined the political valence of the performance. The dismemberment and display of black bodies before white audiences has an ugly history in the US, such that one might view Goldsmith’s performance as a form of symbolic lynching.

Here the appropriate practice was neither “uncreative” nor apolitical; in its commodifying and reifying action-as-spectacle, it reinscribed the violence of Brown’s (and other black people’s) tragic death and its aftermath, and the erasure of his humanity, in an effort at ironic, clever entertainment. It was thus an act of oppression-as-art that fits well with the logic of white supremacy as it has long functioned in American society. It also broaches the question, beyond this specific conceptual act, of what is the formal manifestation of the sociopolitical philosophy and ethic/aesthetic modus operandi of anti-black racism and white supremacy, and aren’t there many such manifestations? Don’t we see them all the time? To perform such an act is Kenneth Goldsmith’s right, as an artist and person. He and anyone else should be able to and ought to do whatever they feel brave enough to do. I do not know him, but I would imagine that even if he did not realize that his actions would brook harsh criticism, once the critiques began he recognized that they weren’t going to end, especially if the videotaped version of his performance aired, which is perhaps why he asked that it not be.

Perhaps he even has considered the implications of his performance, and asked himself why he did it, why he felt it was necessary, and what he believes it contributed, to the Brown community, to the larger body of art in the US and the world, to his own oeuvre. Meanwhile, since Michael Brown’s murder last year and Goldsmith’s performance, at least several dozen black people, including Walter Scott in North Charleston, South Carolina, Tony Robinson in Madison, Eric Harris in Tulsa, and Freddie Gray in Baltimore, have been killed by police, and the system that makes such murders possible has not changed, though concerted protests all over the country strive to effect the changes–as opposed to the sloganeered “Change”–we badly need and are literally dying for. Perhaps Kenneth Goldsmith has thought about this as well, as have his supporters, who defended this work or remained silent in the face of it, which is, of course, their right. Every artist takes such risks if she or he dares to do something truly transgressive, but certain forms of transgression are easier and less fraught than others.

Given the racist and white supremacist history of the United States, and the ongoing systemic and structural forms of racism that still exist in what some commentators have been pushing to label a post-racial–if not post-racist–society, especially since the first election of Barack Obama in 2008. So it is with attorney, author and artist Vanessa Place’s apparently ongoing conceptual project–and I am characterizing it as such, though she may view it differently–involving variations on Margaret Mitchell’s novel and the subsequent film version of Gone with the Wind. Although I have contributed reviews to and periodically read Drunken Boat, I had missed her 2006 work of “fiction” in the journal, “ Gone with the Wind .” A trip to Germany and encounters with the “multifarious reminders of Nazism” sparked this fiction. In her own words, This piece—the gleaning of all passages in Gone with the Wind in which “nigger” features prominently (omitted are other racial epithets or denigrating enactments), then set in a block of text, a slave block—aims to remind white folks of their goings-on and ongoings.

Self included, for there is personal guilt there as well, given my family is not just Caucasian American, but Southern, Virginian, as they say, “by the grace of God.” And God’s grace carries with it a certain responsibility for the error of blind loyalty (see, Abraham & Isaac). Too, GWTW is still a very much beloved bit of Americana (Molly Haskell recently published a book on Scarlett O’Hara as feminist icon, and last year’s Best Actress Oscar was announced to the soaring strains of “Tara’s Theme”), with very little attention paid to its blackface, or that its blackface is blackface. Or that, in such texts, characters are to people as people may be to property. So I have stolen Margaret Mitchell’s “niggers” and claim them as my own. In a funny way, I am replicating Huck Finn’s dilemma/conversion: to understand that keeping (not turning in runaway) Nigger Jim is stealing, for which one may well go to hell, and to do it anyway. There is so much to criticize here, from the idea that this text will remind “white folks of their goings-on and ongoings”–really?

did this text have this effect on any of its white readers?–to the personal guilt which elides the larger social and historical guilt, violence and trauma not only of chattel slavery, but of Civil War and post-bellum violence, forms of debt peonage and forced imprisonment, Jim Crowism and de facto and de jure segregation, redlining, and on and on. The elision of the societal and social in favor of the personal is a common liberal gesture, and it fits with a perspective that can call out individual racist moments or events (which is a good thing), but maintains naieveté and innocence before the systems and structures of racism and white supremacy that make white (skin) privilege and power possible, and does not seek to dismantle them. Moreover, who must be elided or erased for GWTW to be a “much beloved bit of Americana”? Whose graves and bodies must be trampled on, without a second thought?

And, as I need not say, not only is it deeply disturbing to hear a queer white woman talking about stealing Mitchell’s “‘niggers'” and claiming them as her own–in the process commodifying and reifying them–but placing herself in the affective space of the naïf Huck, with his partial “innocence” of the fact that, at one level, as Jane Smiley has pointed out, he was taking his “friend” into ever greater danger, made literal when Jim was re-re-enslaved in Arkansas. In other words, she was reproducing the very power relations she allegedly aimed to be critiquing. Another version of this project appeared in the July/August issue of Poetry, in which “ Miss Scarlett ” appears. I will not quote the piece here, but I will reprint the note beneath the poem, which reads as follows: NOTES: Taken from Prissy’s famous scene in the movie version of Gone with the Wind, Place phonetically transcribes the “unreliable” slave’s words, which are then set in Miltonic couplets.

Through the simple act of transcription, Place inverts our relationship to Margaret Mitchell’s best-selling and beloved American epic by prioritizing the formal aspects of language over Mitchell’s famous narrative. With this deconstructive move, Place illuminates the many subtexts embedded in the text concerning plays of power, gender, race, and authorship. By ventriloquizing the slave’s voice as well as Mitchell’s, Place also sets into motion a nexus of questions regarding authorship, leading one to wonder: who is pulling whose strings? Again, so many issues. A conceptual, which is to say formalist white-gaze gesture, involving the screenplay version (whose authors included the white screenwriters Sidney Howard, Oliver Garrett, Ben Hecht, Jo Swerling, and John Van Druten) of racist author Margaret Mitchell’s rendering of purported black speech, is supposed to represent a “deconstructive move” that reveals subtexts in the text concerning power, gender, race, and authorship.

As if those are not already legible in the very fact of who wrote the novel and the screenplay, and who directed the film, let alone the life experiences of any black American person living in the United States in the era in which the film was set, or was made! Quite a few people reading Mitchell’s novel, or watching the film, or reading Place’s poem, realize quite clearly “who is pulling whose strings.” The question is, who doesn’t? Or who isn’t even being considered–who is being elided and effaced?–in the conceptualization Place’s poem engages and enacts? Which brings me to the most recent manifestation, in my viewing, of this project, Place’s durational tweeting of Mitchell’s novel’s text. As part of this effort, Place replaced her Twitter avatar with an image of Hattie McDaniel as Mammy, and featured an image of a minstrel “Mammy” featured on the cover of the sheet music for Martin Saxx’s 1899 song “Jemima’s Wedding Day ,” visible on Brown University’s online library depository.

I do not follow Place on Twitter, so I had missed it until I noticed that the Mongrel Coalition Against Gringpo not only had rightly called attention to it (and has forcefully critiqued the entire Gringpo biz, as have others in academic and non-academic forums), but was seeking to get the Association of Writers & Writing Programs to rethink Place’s role as an official arbiter of the panels at next year’s annual AWP conference in Los Angeles. Many others joined in the effort, on Twitter, Facebook, and elsewhere. (This effort, and a Change.org petition initiated by Tom Volpert, appears to have succeeded.) As I noted on Twitter, I believe Place, like Goldsmith, has the right to post such things, and if she feels compelled to continue doing so, she should. Their supporters should continue to support them, and make arguments on their behalf as they see fit. I do not believe in censorship, and she or anyone else ought to say whatever she likes, however offensive to one or many groups, with an awareness of what the effects of such behavior are, as well as the potential consequences might be.

In the case of the tweets and the petition, it struck me as valid to call AWP’s attention to the fact that someone engaging in repeatedly replicating racist speech, whether singly or in multiple forms, whatever the vehicle, might not be the right person to make judgements about the panel submissions of people targeted by or whose panel topics, ideas and themes were the targets of the racist speech, but that was a decision for AWP and any organization to make. Most importantly, though, I think it is crucial to call racist speech what it is and not dance around it, and as I stated at the Thinking Its Presence conference at the University of Montana in Missoula, it is especially incumbent upon white people, especially progressive white people and allies in the anti-racist cause, to publicly call out not just personal instances of racism, but to actively critique white supremacy and its effects. Even at the cost of the privileges and power it conveys. While it might be theoretical or conceptual to some people, I and many millions of other people have to deal with the reality of racism and white supremacy as part of our daily life experiences.

An onslaught or even single instance of racist speech–or homophobic, or sexist and misogynistic, or ableist speech, to give other examples–whether spewed by a human being standing before you or appearing daily in a Twitter feed, on a news website, on blogs, or wherever, is quite different for people who are the targets and objects of such invective. *** What is the limit point of conceptual practice of this sort? Does such conceptual acts really and truly represent a counterstatement or argument to the implicit ideological violence and trauma of the source idea–and text, in the case of the projects–when it reinscribes and commodifies that violence and trauma? How does it undermine or deconstruct the social, political and economic relations that make such violence and trauma possible? Let me ask again: what is the formal manifestation of the sociopolitical philosophy and ethic/aesthetic modus operandi of anti-black racism and white supremacy? Are not the multiple forms of literary and cultural apartheid today, among other tangible artifacts, so frequently and casually deployed and allegedly unintentional, not part of the larger American ideological matrix whose corollary was the Nazism Place rightly noted to be still evident, in various ways, in Germany? What is the terminus in terms of extremity?

These are not questions with easy answers, but if we are exploring the possibility of conceptual aesthetics, we should be asking them. They come down once again, I would argue, to the factors I enumerated above, chief among them to the social, political and cultural contexts in which the concept act or project is enacted. Under what contexts would reading Michael Brown’s autopsy report have been acceptable, or the reinscription been acceptable? And to whom? You could say that if a member of Michael Brown’s family, or protesters speaking against his murder, made the decision to perform a verbal re-autopsy, you might have a case that would stand up. That is not what happened in the case of Goldsmith. What about retweeting Gone With the Wind? Place, in her book Tragodia 1: Statement of Facts, for example, presented horrifying accounts, drawn from real court transcripts, of sex crimes cases. Did this text go too far? Or did the justifications of Place’s aims for this material and project suffice?

I also was wondering whether another artist’s next step, after Place has exhausted the storehouse of Gone With the Wind, would be another text from the vast trove of racist Americana, with black Americans or black people in general, as its target, which would be in keeping, as I said above in relation to Goldsmith’s text, with this society’s white supremacist and anti-black racist social and political logic. Would it even be ironic in the face of the revealed phantasm–how many more black people have to be shot dead by cops? How many attempts at striking down voting laws need to be pushed and passed by state legislatures, and ratified by the US Supreme Court? How much resegregation, disinvestment and displacement through gentrification needs to occur?–of post-raciality (if not post-racism). Indeed, since Place sought to call attention to racism by enacting it in her Drunken Boat poem, if she or someone else wanted to continue along this trajectory, would not another anti-black racist text be appropriate? Why not go to one of the American fonts, like Thomas Dixon, or William Pierce themselves? Or could the textual target be other racial or ethnic minorities in the US?

Would it be mixed race people, who have long been a hobbyhorse of white supremacists? Would it be Asian Americans, or Arab Americans or Indigenous peoples, all of whose bodies have been historically subject to state violence, repression and oppression in the US? What about other socially or politically targeted or marginal people in the US, like LGBTIQs, or undocumented people, or differently abled people, especially people of color intersectionally embodying more than one of these categories? Would it be a text that parodied or singled out religious minorities, like Muslims? Would not any of these targets, if not as easy as going after black people, nevertheless be expected? Would any of the conceptualists dare engage in the very anti-Semitism whose “formal manifestation” as sociopolitical philosophy and ethical/aesthetic modus operandi, as Place pointed out in her Drunken Boat “Artist’s Statement,” was Nazism? Why would anyone feel the compulsion to do this, and how would she explain it? Would a conceptualist dare tweet or make “fictions” or poems from Mein Kampf, or the extreme racist text The Protocols of the Elders of Zion?

Would this represent a limit point, and how would not just the artist, but supporters and friends react to the certain criticism to follow? Would any mainstream national or international institution hesitate, even for a second, to respond to such a provocation? Would that close the book on this strain of conceptual practice temporarily, or for good? Originally appeared on the author’s blog, J’s Theater . Reprinted with permission by the author. Gone with the Wind (novel) | Mediander | Topics image credit Gone with the Wind (novel) Gone with the Wind is a novel written by Margaret Mitchell, first published in 1936. The story is set in Clayton County and Atlanta, both in Georgia, during the American Civil War and Reconstruction Era. It depicts the struggles of young Scarlett O'Hara, the spoiled daughter of a well-to-do plantation owner, who must use every means at her disposal to claw her way out of poverty following the destructive Sherman's March to the Sea. This historical novel features a Bildungsroman or coming-of-age story, with the title taken from a poem written by Ernest Dowson. MORE Gone with the Wind is a novel written by Margaret Mitchell, first published in 1936.

The story is set in Clayton County and Atlanta, both in Georgia, during the American Civil War and Reconstruction Era. It depicts the struggles of young Scarlett O'Hara, the spoiled daughter of a well-to-do plantation owner, who must use every means at her disposal to claw her way out of poverty following the destructive Sherman's March to the Sea. This historical novel features a Bildungsroman or coming-of-age story, with the title taken from a poem written by Ernest Dowson. Gone with the Wind was popular with American readers from the outset and was the top American fiction bestseller in the year it was published and in 1937. As of 2014, a Harris poll found it to be the second favorite book of American readers, just behind the Bible. More than 30 million copies have been printed worldwide. Written from the perspective of the slaveholder, Gone with the Wind is Southern plantation fiction. Its portrayal of slavery and African Americans has been considered controversial, especially by succeeding generations, as well as its use of a racial epithet and ethnic slurs common to the period. However, the novel has become a reference point for subsequent writers about the South, both black and white.

Scholars at American universities refer to it in their writings, interpret and study it. The novel has been absorbed into American popular culture. Mitchell received the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for the book in 1937. It was adapted into a 1939 American film. The book is often read or misread through the film. Gone with the Wind is the only novel by Mitchell published during her lifetime. Mitchell used color symbolism, especially the colors red and green, which frequently are associated with Scarlett O'Hara. Mitchell identified the primary theme as survival. She left the ending speculative for the reader, however. She was often asked what became of her lovers, Rhett and Scarlett. She replied, "For all I know, Rhett may have found someone else who was less difficult." Two sequels authorized by Mitchell's estate were published more than a half century later. A parody was also produced. 1000+ images about Margaret Mitchell on Pinterest | Scarlett o'hara, Rhett butler and Clark gable Forward As a young girl, Margaret Mitchell wrote stories like “The Little Pioneers” and sometimes adapted them into plays which she and her friends performed on the front porch of her house.

Little did she know that she would one day write one of the most famous love stories of all time, Gone With the Wind. See More Gone with the Wind eBook: Margaret Mitchell: Amazon.com.au: Kindle Store By Robert Geagea on 18 July 2015 Format: Kindle Edition Verified Purchase And, at what price? What price would you pay for the soul of a man or a woman, open and bare ... raw emotion in a time of tumult and continuously blown by the winds of change, a remorseless war destroying everything and everyone in it's path, a beautiful and wilful child growing to understand the true meaning of commitment, friendship and love. I tell you what, since I'm a Christian ... let's all pretend just for a moment that Margaret Mitchell is listening to what we say and reading what we write. "Margaret, I gave you a few dollars and in exchange you took me on a journey which touched my heart. I travelled with you through a foreign land and came to admire and indeed love each of your characters.

When we finally meet in heaven I have a feeling that Scarlett and Rhett will be arm in arm beside you, finally drawn together by the love they both shared." I got the better part of the deal since you gave me something that I could not count if I spent from this moment to the end of my days. I will not forget your kindness to a travelling stranger. Was this review helpful to you? Yes No Sending feedback... Thank you for your feedback. Sorry, we failed to record your vote. Please try again By Catmistress TOP 50 REVIEWER on 6 July 2015 Format: Kindle Edition Verified Purchase I first read this book forty years ago. At the time of writing this it is now 150 years since the American Civil War ended in 1865. Margaret Mitchell's Pulitzer Prize winning novel was published in 1936 and became an instant best-seller. I'm not going to go over the story in detail, after all, it is a very long book (Franklin D Roosevelt apparently said of it that "no book need be that long").

In a nutshell, Southern belle Scarlett O'Hara has a hankering for her neighbour Ashley Wilkes, but he is engaged to his cousin Melanie. Rhett Butler, a man on the fringes of polite society, is perhaps the only person who knows of the depth of Scarlett's passion for Ashley. The war and the reconstruction of Atlanta bring enormous changes to Southern society and everyone's lives, and the book shows how Scarlett and the other characters around her deal with these changes. Scarlett is one of the most engaging and maddening characters in fiction, described by the author as a "normal person thrown into abnormal circumstances and doing the best she could". As a psychological portrait, Scarlett stands up as well today as she did when the book was written. In fact, the author's brother dubbed the book "a psychiatric novel", and in a sense he was right, but don't worry, there's plenty of action and drama. The most dated aspects of the story are the way the author portrays the negroes, sundry other ethnic slurs, and the members of the Ku Klux Klan. The book was published nearly 80 years ago and deals with events up to 150 years ago, so don't expect it to be completely PC.

This edition has a list of characters at the end, but the author is so skilled at telling her story you shouldn't need it. There is also a list of adaptations and parodies of GWTW, which information you can find on the Internet in about 30 seconds if you have a mind to. Was this review helpful to you? Yes No Sending feedback... Thank you for your feedback. Sorry, we failed to record your vote. Please try again By ellison on 1 May 2016 Format: Kindle Edition A 16-year-old girl sees a guy she has not seen in three years as he has been in Europe. She tells him she loves him, he declines her off as he is to be engaged. A scamp (Rhett Butler) sees the whole thing. She gets a quick marriage to a guy who until that moment has never been able to put two words together in front of a woman (plot contrivance). Soon she is a widowed/teen mom, and uninterested in child care. Depressing war history, she hangs out with butler as he brings gifts as he is a block cade runner.

Lumbering thing, needs 'The Princess Bride' Treatment in that the sections about hats and clothing need to be removed. The way slaves are depicted is either wishful thinking or a big surprise. A guy receives a slave as a birthday gift! (ICK!) Was this review helpful to you? Yes No Sending feedback... Thank you for your feedback. Sorry, we failed to record your vote. Please try again By Rebecca King on 7 April 2015 Format: Kindle Edition Verified Purchase This book was filled with captivating characters, a plot that made me want to read on, and historical facts that taught me about an era and place I knew little of before I began reading. I have spoken to others often about its subject matter whilst reading, as I could not put it out of my mind even when I had put its pages down. I am sad now it is over and I know it's deeper meaning will resonate with me. Was this review helpful to you? Yes No Sending feedback... Thank you for your feedback. Sorry, we failed to record your vote.

Please try again Gone With the Wind: The Zodiacal Parade | Gone With the Wind: The Zodiacal Parade Originally published in the Astrological Association Journal, September 2005 On 4 July 1776, the United States was born, declaring its independence and freedom from British rule. One complete Uranus cycle later, on 12 April 1861 at 4:30 am, the first shots of what would be a long and bloody battle rang out in the spring air at Fort Sumter, North Carolina. The Civil War–and the ugliest chapter of American history– had begun. Standing as one of the central issues of this terrible war was slavery. By the time the war had ended, Abraham Lincoln and some 630,000 American soldiers were dead, the highest number of casualties killed in any war in US History. As an aside, it is a fascinating “coincidence” that D Day took place one Uranus cycle after Fort Sumter. It is on the grim Civil war and its survivors that Margaret Mitchell based her best-selling, Pulitzer Prize winning novel, Gone With the Wind (published in 1936).

Set in the pre-war Old South, Mitchell writes about the fictional life of one of literature’s and the silver screen’s most memorable heroines, Scarlett O’Hara. Scarlett was a sixteen year-old girl living on her father’s plantation when the war broke out. The 1000- page plus, doorstopper of a novel chronicles her life as she struggled not only for her own survival but also for that of her family and other household members (slaves) as they fought off Yankees. Running parallel to this storyline is Scarlett’s rather tumultuous love life (she was married three times) and most famously, the love triangle between Scarlett, Ashley Wilkes and the dashing Captain Rhett Butler. “If the novel has a theme it is that of survival,” said Mitchell when Gone With the Wind was published. “What makes some people able to 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 who go under…?

I only know that the survivors used to call that quality ‘gumption.’ So I wrote about the people who had gumption and the people who didn’t.” It is interesting that Mitchell based her blockbuster on the losers of the Civil War, the Southern Confederates rather than the popular winners, the Northern Yankees. But then, as we shall see, Margaret Mitchell was no ordinary woman. Even more interesting is the divided opinion that the book and subsequent movie provokes: is Gone With the Wind one of the greatest love stories of all time or is it the most racist book–with its southern sympathies and portrayal of simple, happy slaves–ever published? Perhaps for this reason, avid readers have failed to notice that Gone With the Wind is, as Neil Spencer describes: “a thinly disguised astrological allegory.

Margaret Mitchell based the characters of her torrid epic on the zodiac, leaving a blatant trail of clues which were only picked up in 1978 when US astrologer Darrell Martinie was shown photocopies of notes from Mitchell’s library.” Mitchell, using the Civil War as a backdrop, displayed these strong, memorable characters in a potent zodiacal parade that is led, appropriately enough, by the feisty, fiercely independent heroine, Scarlett O’Hara whose determination and energy personifies the sign of Aries. Mitchell is careful not to beat the reader over the head with astrology and, given the extremes of people’s reaction to astrology, perhaps this is wise. But one first becomes suspicious of her inspiration in the opening pages when one of the Tarleton twins blurts out the gossip, in what could only be true Gemini style, of the engagement of Melanie Hamilton to Ashley Wilkes. Of course, the twins could not possibly know that this news would devastate Scarlett and would affect the central characters almost as much as the war itself (Mitchell had Pluto in Gemini). One thereby can also appreciate the name of Ashley Wilkes’ plantation: Twelve Oaks.

Then there is Scarlett’s land-loving, farm owning, stubborn father, a rather obvious Taurean, who in perfect synastry (as far as star signs are concerned), is married to social do-gooder, Ellen, a very helpful and efficient Virgo. Cancerian Melanie, small of bust and who dies following a miscarriage, is the wife of Scarlett’s true love, Ashley Wilkes whose love of classics and preoccupation with promotion and honour could only be the stereotype of Capricorn. And the star of the show (as he would like to think) is a very dapper Rhett Butler who manages, as a Leo, to get everyone’s attention wherever he goes. Rounding out the zodiac is Mammy, big, powerful, controlling and yes, black, representing the sign of Scorpio. Poor Sue Ellen, who waited patiently to be married to Mr Kennedy is the Libran who lost her man to her own sister, the scheming Scarlett. Frank Kennedy, Scarlett’s second husband, whose connections to dubious political organisations refer to Aquarian interests. Dr. Meade, a selfless doctor, Scarlett’s youngest sister, Carreen, as well as Scarlett’s first husband are self-sacrificing Piceans.

There were a few reckless, horse-loving folk but the most prominent was the progeny of Rhett and Scarlett, Bonnie Blue, who was thrown from a horse and died whilst attempting the stunt of jumping a fence on her steed. A true Sagittarian to the end, little Bonnie Blue, with her parents, completed the element of fire. Spencer had stated that Aunt Pitty Pat and Prissy were “twittering Geminis”. Prissy, a slave who bragged she knew everything about birthing babies and then confessed she “don’t know nothing about birthing babies,“ when Melanie went into a difficult labour (leaving the young Scarlett to deliver the baby) displayed the duplicity of the heavenly twins. However, Aunt Pitty Pat whose watery eyes, little feet and fondness for drink–for medicinal purposes, of course–could only belong to an archetypal Pisces. Mitchell was born at 2:12 am on 8 November 1900 in a segregated Atlanta. Her fascination with the American Civil War can be seen with her moon’s close conjunction with Mars (6 degrees of Gemini) in the war chart.

That she grew up surrounded by war veterans all willing to tell their tales is demonstrated by this conjunction occurring in the third house of the war chart, in the sign of Gemini. Mitchell’s sun at 15 degrees Scorpio opposite to the war’s moon at 15 degrees Taurus gives an indication she might find it difficult to identify with the common feelings of the war and take to the opinion of the other side. She had grown up with the glorious stories of the Old South and was stunned when she eventually learned the south had lost the war. Chiron conjunct the IC shows how she may have used the energy of the wounded healer to write about her defeated Atlanta. Perhaps most telling is the war’s Uranus opposing Mitchell’s Jupiter-Uranus conjunction. Also noticeable are the squared Neptunes, perhaps further captivating Mitchell’s imagination as well as the public‘s, whose interest and buying-power would eventually boost the book’s sales to the stratosphere in post-war gloom. Mitchell’s desire to write can be seen with a concentration of planets in the third-ninth house axis.

With a third house Mercury, Jupiter and Uranus stellium in Sagittarius it seems a little talking went a long way–or perhaps a lot of talking went a little way: “. . .she (Mitchell) would get up in the middle of the night and write things. She was always obsessed with expressing herself.” However one looks at it, the presence of a Uranus and Jupiter conjunction would make none of her manner of communicating boring or predictable (and it’s easy to see how Mitchell would have been interested in Astrology). This conjunction created a veritable hot spot in her chart and its activation by transiting and progressed planets featured in many events in her life. By her first Jupiter return, Mitchell had begun dressing as a boy and demanding that people call her “Jimmy.” By her second Jupiter return, the stage was set for her to begin writing her epic novel. And by it’s third return the book had been accepted for publication. The third house stellium is opposed by Mitchell’s ninth house moon in Gemini (the Gauquelins found a correlation between ninth house moons and writing as a profession).

The Moon opposite Mercury shows an argumentative nature, a fact certainly confirmed by members of Atlanta’s Debutante society who were scandalised by Mitchell’s suggestions for the distribution of money raised for charity and then outraged as Mitchell performed a provocative Apache war dance with a male student at one of their social balls. Far too free spirited for the likes of Atlanta’s debutantes, Mitchell abandoned this scene and became a chain-smoking, whiskey-chugging, jazz-loving flapper and danced “the Charleston” wherever, whenever and with whomever she liked. Mitchell’s Moon also opposed Uranus, again showing emotional stress but this stress manifests through complicated or unusual romances. In her late teens, Mitchell became engaged to a man who was almost certainly homosexual and would have married him had he not been killed in the First World War. This would be the man on whom Mitchell loosely based the character of Ashley Wilkes. In 1922 as both Saturn and the progressed ASC passed over her natal Venus, Mitchell became involved in a love triangle not unlike the one she would eventually write so memorably about. She eventually married the wrong man, divorced him, and went on to marry the other man all within the space of a few years.

And at a time when divorce was not only discouraged but positively frowned upon. Her progressed Sun passed over her Mercury (opposite the moon natally) and her progressed Moon had been visited by a transiting Uranus in the seventh house. As an aside, it is interesting to note that although Mitchell dedicated her novel to JRM, the initials of her second husband, the initials RKB appear on Rhett Butler’s handkerchief and they are the transposed initials of her first husband, Red Berrien Kinnard Upshaw. During her first marriage, Mitchell began working as a reporter at the Atlanta Journal Magazine, becoming one of the first women to cover hard news for that magazine. But shortly after her second marriage, she had to leave this job because of arthritis in her ankles and feet. Forced to spend most of her time in bed, she used this time to read, leading her husband to joke by saying she would have to write the kind of book she would like to read. And so, in 1926 and through to 1929, as her progressed sun made its connections to her natal Jupiter and Uranus, Mitchell worked on Gone With the Wind.

In between bouts of illness and injury, Mitchell had completed the bulk of, what she was describing to only two of her friends, as “the Great American novel”. In 1926, the progressed lunar phase was Gibbous, indicating any hard work she invested into her novel would soon bear fruit. By 1929, when the bulk of her novel was completed, the progressed lunar phase was full and this progressed moon was approaching her natal Pluto and MC. Mitchell was truly seeing the fruits of her labour and her progressed sun on lucky Jupiter would have stoked the fire of her writing aspirations. Pluto’s presence showed how much the novel would change her life. To top it all off, it was her Saturn return. The novel bubbled and brewed. In 1935, Harold Latham of Macmillan Publishing was in search of new writers. A friend asked Mitchell to show Latham around Atlanta and during his visit she mentioned her novel—but she refused to let him see it.

After, an acquaintance cattily remarked to her that she is “not serious enough” to be a writer, a furious Mitchell gave in, gathered up her tattered manuscript and drove it to Latham and said: “take the damn thing before I change my mind”. The manuscript spellbound Latham and on 1 August 1935, Mitchell signed the contract with MacMillen publishers as a transiting Jupiter passed her natal sun. The typewriter Mitchell used to write Gone With the Wind As transiting Jupiter again activated her natal Mercury, Mitchell was putting the finishing touches on her novel. She completed the final revision on 22 January 1936, just in time for her Jupiter return. The book was published on 15 May 1936 and two days later–before the book was made available for sale to the general public–Hollywood producer David O. Selznick bought the film rights for the manuscript for $50,000, top dollar at the time. The book hit the shops on 30 June 1936 and by October that year had sold one million copies.

The book had so changed her life that not only was Mitchell besieged by letters but she was unable to use public changing rooms because people kept opening the curtains to see what the now famous author looked like. In 1937, Mitchell won the Pulitzer Prize for her best selling book, just as the P. Sun contacted her IC. Mitchell had matured and quieted much by then and had long since left her flapper days behind. But whether she liked it or not, she was catapulted into fame. With her progressed Lunar phase approaching Balsamic, Mitchell’s energy was winding down but her progressed Sun connected to Chiron in 1939. Mitchell, who had not actively sought fame, was about to have her private pain, her feelings and reflections for the Old South in the spotlight. The film would become the biggest selling movie of all time and it would defeat movies of that year such as The Wizard of Oz, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington and Good-bye Mr Chips at the Academy Awards.

With Neptune hovering over her ASC, Mitchell could hear the theme tune from Gone With the Wind for the first time Alex Trenoweth with photos of Margaret Mitchell and some of the cast Gone With the Wind premiere along with the cast and other influential people on 15 December 1939. Atlanta rolled out the red carpet for the movie’s premiere at Loew’s Grand Theatre–for the white actors and actresses only. The Black actors, who included the Jazz singer Hattie McDaniel (“Mammy”) and Butterfly McQueen (“Prissy”) were subjected to the ludicrous segregation laws of the time. “. . .Selznick learned that southerners were second to none in their affection of Negroes ‘in what they regard as their proper place‘. Atlantans would warmly receive Hattie McDaniel and Oscar Polk (“Pork”) and the other actors–but they would not dine with them, invite them to their Junior League Ball in honour of the other Hollywood visitors or sit with them in an auditorium.

And since the Grande Theatre was a white’s only theatre, McDaniel and the other black “guests” would have no dressing rooms, no proper place to enter and exit the theatre and no proper place to use the bathroom.” Two different programs for the premiere. Note Hattie McDaniel is missing from the program on the left (bottom right of program) If there is a small consolation then it must be that a young Martin Luther King sang in the boys choir as part of the evening’s entertainment–and Hattie McDaniel went on to win Best Supporting Actress at the Academy Awards, defeating the popular Olivia DeHavilland (“Melanie Wilkes”). After the movie, with her progressed lunar phase now firmly Balsamic, Mitchell essentially rested on her laurels and wrote no more. She devoted her time to raising funds for the Red Cross and was also the anonymous benefactor of many college students. On 11 August 1949, Margaret Mitchell, who had been plagued by injury and illness throughout her life, was crossing a street near her home and was struck by a speeding taxi. She died of internal injuries several days later.

Gravesite of Margaret Mitchell with author Alex Trenoweth Ephemeris Gone With the Wind: The Zodiacal Parade - Entertainment Talk Awards Gone With the Wind: The Zodiacal Parade On 4 July 1776, the United States was born, declaring its independence and freedom from British rule. One complete Uranus cycle later, on 12 April 1861 at 4:30 am, the first shots of what would be a long and bloody battle rang out in the spring air at Fort Sumter, North Carolina. The Civil War–and the ugliest chapter of American history– had begun. Standing as one of the central issues of this terrible war was slavery. By the time the war had ended, Abraham Lincoln and some 630,000 American soldiers were dead, the highest number of casualities killed in any war in US History. It is on this grim war and its survivors that Margaret Mitchell based her best-selling, Pulitzer Prize winning novel, Gone With the Wind (published in 1936). Set in the pre-war Old South, Mitchell writes about the fictional life of one of literature’s and the silver screen’s most memorable heroines, Scarlett O’Hara.

Scarlett was a sixteen year-old girl living on her father’s plantation when the war broke out. The 1000- page plus, doorstopper of a novel chronicles her life as she struggled not only for her own survival but also for that of her family and other household members (slaves) as they fought off Yankees. Running parallel to this storyline is Scarlett’s rather tumultuous love life (she was married three times) and most famously, the love triangle between Scarlett, Ashley Wilkes and the dashing Captain Rhett Butler. “If the novel has a theme it is that of survival,” said Mitchell when Gone With the Wind was published. “What makes some people able to 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 who go under… ?

I only know that the survivors used to call that quality ‘gumption.’ So I wrote about the people who had gumption and the people who didn’t.” It is interesting that Mitchell based her blockbuster on the losers of the Civil War, the Southern Confederates rather than the popular winners, the Northern Yankees. But then, as we shall see, Margaret Mitchell was no ordinary woman. Even more interesting is the divided opinion that the book and subsequent movie provokes: is Gone With the Wind one of the greatest love stories of all time or is it the most racist book–with its southern sympathies and portrayal of simple, happy slaves–ever published? Perhaps for this reason, avid readers have failed to notice that Gone With the Wind is, as Neil Spencer describes: “a thinly disguised astrological allegory.

Margaret Mitchell based the characters of her torrid epic on the zodiac, leaving a blatant trail of clues which were only picked up in 1978 when US astrologer Darrell Martinie was shown photocopies of notes from Mitchell’s library.” Mitchell, using the Civil War as a backdrop, displayed these strong, memorable characters in a potent zodiacal parade that is led, appropriately enough, by the feisty, fiercely independent heroine, Scarlett O’Hara whose determination and energy personifies the sign of Aries. Mitchell is careful not to beat the reader over the head with astrology and, given the extremes of people’s reaction to astrology, perhaps this is wise. But one first becomes suspicious of her inspiration in the opening pages when one of the Tarleton twins blurts out the gossip, in what could only be true Gemini style, of the engagement of Melanie Hamilton to Ashley Wilkes. Of course, the twins could not possibly know that this news would devastate Scarlett and would affect the central characters almost as much as the war itself (Mitchell had Pluto in Gemini). One thereby can also appreciate the name of Ashley Wilkes’ plantation: Twelve Oaks.

Then there is Scarlett’s land-loving, farm owning, stubborn father, a rather obvious Taurean, who in perfect synastry (as far as star signs are concerned), is married to social do-gooder, Ellen, a very helpful and efficient Virgo. Cancerian Melanie, small of bust and who dies following a miscarriage, is the wife of Scarlett’s true love, Ashley Wilkes whose love of classics and preoccupation with promotion and honour could only be the stereotype of Capricorn. And the star of the show (as he would like to think) is a very dapper Rhett Butler who manages, as a Leo, to get everyone’s attention wherever he goes. Rounding out the zodiac is Mammy, big, powerful, and controlling and yes, black, representing the sign of Scorpio. Poor Sue Ellen, who waited patiently to be married to Mr Kennedy is the Libran who lost her man to her own sister, the scheming Scarlett. Frank Kennedy, Scarlett’s second husband, whose connections to dubious political organisations refer to Aquarian interests. Dr. Meade, a selfless doctor, Scarlett’s youngest sister, Carreen, as well as Scarlett’s first husband are self-sacrificing Piceans.

There were a few reckless, horse-loving folk but the most prominent was the progeny of Rhett and Scarlett, Bonnie Blue, who was thrown from a horse and died whilst attempting the stunt of jumping a fence on her steed. A true Sagittarian to the end, little Bonnie Blue, with her parents, completed the element of fire. Spencer had stated that Aunt Pitty Pat and Prissy were “twittering Geminis”. Prissy, a slave who bragged she knew everything about birthing babies and then confessed she “don’t know nothing about birthing babies,” when Melanie went into a difficult labour (leaving the young Scarlett to deliver the baby) displayed the duplicity of the heavenly twins. However, Aunt Pitty Pat whose watery eyes, little feet and fondness for drink–for medicinal purposes, of course–could only belong to an archetypal Pisces. Mitchell was born at 2:12 am on 8 November 1900 in a segregated Atlanta. Her fascination with the American Civil War can be seen with her moon’s close conjunction with Mars (6 degrees of Gemini) in the war chart.

That she grew up surrounded by war veterans all willing to tell their tales is demonstrated by this conjunction occurring in the third house of the war chart, in the sign of Gemini. Mitchell’s sun at 15 degrees Scorpio opposite to the war’s moon at 15 degrees Taurus gives an indication she might find it difficult to identify with the common feelings of the war and take to the opinion of the other side. She had grown up with the glorious stories of the Old South and was stunned when she eventually learned the south had lost the war. Chiron conjunct the IC shows how she may have used the energy of the wounded healer to write about her defeated Atlanta. Perhaps most telling is the war’s Uranus opposing Mitchell’s Jupiter-Uranus conjunction. Also noticeable are the squared Neptunes, perhaps further captivating Mitchell’s imagination as well as the public’s, whose interest and buying-power would eventually boost the book’s sales to the stratosphere in post-war gloom. Mitchell’s desire to write can be seen with a concentration of planets in the third-ninth house axis.

With a third house Mercury, Jupiter and Uranus stellium in Sagittarius it seems a little talking went a long way–or perhaps a lot of talking went a little way. . “..she (Mitchell) would get up in the middle of the night and write things. She was always obsessed with expressing herself.” However one looks at it, the presence of a Uranus and Jupiter conjunction would make none of her manner of communicating boring or predictable (and it’s easy to see how Mitchell would have been interested in Astrology). This conjunction created a veritable hot spot in her chart and its activation by transiting and progressed planets featured in many events in her life. By her first Jupiter return, Mitchell had begun dressing as a boy and demanding that people call her “Jimmy.” By her second Jupiter return, the stage was set for her to begin writing her epic novel. And by it’s third return the book had been accepted for publication. The third house stellium is opposed by Mitchell’s ninth house moon in Gemini (the Gauquelins found a correlation between ninth house moons and writing as a profession).

The Moon opposite Mercury shows an argumentative nature, a fact certainly confirmed by members of Atlanta’s Debutante society who were scandalised by Mitchell’s suggestions for the distribution of money raised for charity and then outraged as Mitchell performed a provocative Apache war dance with a male student at one of their social balls. Far too free spirited for the likes of Atlanta’s debutantes, Mitchell abandoned this scene and became a chain-smoking, whiskey-chugging, jazz-loving flapper and danced “the Charleston” wherever, whenever and with whomever she liked. Mitchell’s Moon also opposed Uranus, again showing emotional stress but this stress manifests through complicated or unusual romances. In her late teens, Mitchell became engaged to a man who was almost certainly homosexual and would have married him had he not been killed in the First World War. This would be the man on whom Mitchell loosely based the character of Ashley Wilkes. In 1922 as both Saturn and the progressed ASC passed over her natal Venus, Mitchell became involved in a love triangle not unlike the one she would eventually write so memorably about. She eventually married the wrong man, divorced him, and went on to marry the other man all within the space of a few years.

And at a time when divorce was not only discouraged but positively frowned upon. Her progressed Sun passed over her Mercury (opposite the moon natally) and her progressed Moon had been visited by a transiting Uranus in the seventh house. As an aside, it is interesting to note that although Mitchell dedicated her novel to JRM, the initials of her second husband, the initials RKB appear on Rhett Butler’s handkerchief and they are the transposed initials of her first husband, Red Berrien Kinnard Upshaw. . During her first marriage, Mitchell began working as a reporter at the Atlanta Journal Magazine, becoming one of the first women to cover hard news for that magazine. But shortly after her second marriage, she had to leave this job because of arthritis in her ankles and feet. Forced to spend most of her time in bed, she used this time to read, leading her husband to joke by saying she would have to write the kind of book she would like to read. And so, in 1926 and through to 1929, as her progressed sun made its connections to her natal Jupiter and Uranus, Mitchell worked on Gone With the Wind.

In between bouts of illness and injury, Mitchell had completed the bulk of, what she was describing to only two of her friends, as “the Great American novel”. In 1926, the progressed lunar phase was Gibbous, indicating any hard work she invested into her novel would soon bear fruit. By 1929, when the bulk of her novel was completed, the progressed lunar phase was full and this progressed moon was approaching her natal Pluto and MC. Mitchell was truly seeing the fruits of her labour and her progressed sun on lucky Jupiter would have stoked the fire of her writing aspirations. Pluto’s presence showed how much the novel would change her life. To top it all off, it was her Saturn return. The novel bubbled and brewed. In 1935, Harold Latham of Macmillan Publishing was in search of new writers. A friend asked Mitchell to show Latham around Atlanta and during his visit she mentioned her novel-but she refused to let him see it.

After, an acquaintance cattily remarked to her that she is “not serious enough” to be a writer, a furious Mitchell gave in, gathered up her tattered manuscript and drove it to Latham and said: “take the damn thing before I change my mind”. The manuscript spellbound Latham and on 1 August 1935, Mitchell signed the contract with MacMillen publishers as a transiting Jupiter passed her natal sun.. As transiting Jupiter again activated her natal Mercury, Mitchell was putting the finishing touches on her novel. She completed the final revision on 22 January 1936, just in time for her Jupiter return. The book was published on 15 May 1936 and two days later–before the book was made available for sale to the general public–Hollywood producer David O. Selznick bought the film rights for the manuscript for $50,000, top dollar at the time. The book hit the shops on 30 June 1936 and by October that year had sold one million copies.

The book had so changed her life that not only was Mitchell besieged by letters but she was unable to use public changing rooms because people kept opening the curtains to see what the now famous author looked like. In 1937, Mitchell won the Pulitzer Prize for her best selling book, just as the P. Sun contacted her IC. Mitchell had matured and quieted much by then and had long since left her flapper days behind. But whether she liked it or not, she was catapulted into fame. With her progressed Lunar phase approaching Balsamic, Mitchell’s energy was winding down but her progressed Sun connected to Chiron in 1939. Mitchell, who had not actively sought fame, was about to have her private pain, her feelings and reflections for the Old South in the spotlight. The film would become the biggest selling movie of all time and it would defeat movies of that year such as The Wizard of Oz, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington and Good-bye Mr Chips at the Academy Awards. With Neptune hovering over her ASC, Mitchell could hear the theme tune from Gone With the Wind for the first time along with the cast and other influential people on 15 December 1939.

Atlanta rolled out the red carpet for the movie’s premiere at Loew’s Grand Theatre–for the white actors and actresses only. The Black actors, who included the Jazz singer Hattie McDaniel (“Mammy”) and Butterfly McQueen (“Prissy”) were subjected to the ludicrous segregation laws of the time. “… Selznick learned that southerners were second to none in their affection of Negroes ‘in what they regard as their proper place’. Atlantans would warmly receive Hattie McDaniel and Oscar Polk (“Pork”) and the other actors–but they would not dine with them, invite them to their Junior League Ball in honour of the other Hollywood visitors or sit with them in an auditorium. And since the Grande Theatre was a white’s only theatre, McDaniel and the other black “guests” would have no dressing rooms, no proper place to enter and exit the theatre and no proper place to use the bathroom.” If there is a small consolation then it must be that a young Martin Luther King sang in the boys choir as part of the evening’s entertainment–and Hattie McDaniel went on to win Best Supporting Actress at the Academy Awards, defeating the popular Olivia DeHavilland (“Melanie Wilkes”).

After the movie, with her progressed lunar phase now firmly Balsamic, Mitchell essentially rested on her laurels and wrote no more. She devoted her time to raising funds for the Red Cross and was also the anonymous benefactor of many college students. On 11 August 1949, Margaret Mitchell, who had been plagued by injury and illness throughout her life, was crossing a street near her home and was struck by a speeding taxi. She died of internal injuries several days later. Alex Trenoweth, author of “Growing Pains” is a highly qualified astrologer and practicing secondary school teacher. She uses the tools of astrology in every day classroom management to motivate and interest adolescents in the subjects of History, Religious Education and Geography. In addition to her very busy professional life, she is also a musician and writer of fiction.

Question: Who won the 1937 Pulitzer Prize for her only novel, Gone with the Wind, which was subsequent made into a somewhat popular movie?
Answer: Margaret Mitchell.