A Patriarch of One’s Own Clutching the Chains That Bind: Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind

Abstract

History has been the tool of patriarchy to establish and perpetuate its hegemonic hold on society by presenting the male narratives and marginalizing, often excluding, female and minoritarian perspectives and experiences. War history, likewise, has been the record of victories and failures of men. It seeks to idealize the figure of ‘war-hero’ who for the sake of nation or community had abjured personal desires and comfort and devoted himself to one goal alone, that is to protect and serve his country. Margaret Mitchell employs one such war, namely the American Civil War (1861-65) as the backdrop of her famous novel Gone with the Wind (1936) presenting itself to be the narrative of popular romantic story and attempts to foreground the history of female experience that is excluded from the official records of public history. This paper, therefore, intends to show how in spite of set against the backdrop of a war history the novel, that is chiefly dominated by female characters, does not engage in idealizing a male narrative rather brings to the fore the story of a changed nation traced through the female struggle. Mitchell shows how before the birth of any prominent feminist movement the domestic life of America that was ravaged by the Civil War was not protected and run by any ‘hero’, rather by women chiefly. This thesis, thereby, intends to explore how the domestic life, which is relegated at the back in any history of war, is chiefly handled and brought to normalcy by the women of the society and how the women being desperate and instrumental, became the entrepreneur in time of need and though not given any praise became the shaping force of the new social order as the nurturer, much unacknowledged even by themselves and the two manifestation of the spirit of women which is pushed to the margin in the male narrative of war. This thesis will bring into account the critical perspectives of Dianna Wallace, Linda Hutcheon, Jean-Francois Lyotard and Gerda Lerner in order to establish how Mitchell’s novel present a counter narrative through its appropriation of patriarchal hegemonic historical meta-narrative.