No Happy Loves: Desire, Nostalgia, and Failure in Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind

Abstract

In Love in Western World, Denis de Rougemont claims love has no (15). This essay seeks to explore converse: why do fictional portrayals of history seem to include no happy loves? Writing about past and seeking to retrieve it through mode of historical fiction is essentially always an act of desire, reflective of longing to take emptiness created by of a time and place and fill it with an imaginative reconstruction. In reconstruction, for past often becomes emblematized as for another individual. Affection for a lost world becomes true object of textual desire, a lover figure for whom actual lovers stand as shadowy substitutes. As such, intersubjective becomes marked by ambivalence and, ultimately, futility, with impossibility of reclaiming past forestalling hope of any satisfying resolution. Fiction is always invoking desire. Peter Brooks notes narratives both tell of desire--typically present story of desire--and arouse and make use of as a dynamic of signification (37). The desires inscribed in texts an extend to any number of objects: they need [about] sexual desire; Odysseus wanted to get home; Captain Ahab wanted whale (Belsey 208). In historical fiction, chief object of is lost past. Always irretrievable, it remains generative of longing: both in direct form of nostalgia and in representations of desires experienced by characters. In fact, status of past as that which is not or that which has ceased to be only strengthens its facility for producing desire. Catherine Belsey suggests desire is predicated on lack, and even its apparent fulfilment is also a moment of loss (38-39) while Deborah Lutz notes lives in emptiness at back of being: it points to essential openness at heart of (ix). Susan Stewart argues is, in fact, generative mechanism of desire, such the place of origin must remain unavailable in order for to generated (151). Roland Barthes links and specific to its use in fiction, noting when absence becomes an active practice ... there is a creation of a fiction which has many roles (doubts, reproaches, desires, melancholies) (16). Historical fiction, born out a to recreate a lost past, tends toward multiple, and multiplying, representations of in an effort to accommodate these roles. This shadowy presence of hovers around all historical fiction operates with a particular poignancy in cases where yearning is more than for a specific fragment of time, but, rather, an entire world and system of meaning now seems irrevocably lost. The clan-ruled Highlands of Sir Walter Scott's Waverly novels, antebellum American South of Margaret Mitchells Gone with Wind, and Old New York haunts novels of Edith Wharton--all embody entire orders of existence transcend specific geographic and temporal boundaries defined them, so that, in these fictions, the home we miss is no longer a geographically defined place, but rather a state of mind (Chase and Shaw 1). At least sixty years removed from Scott's foundational text, (1) these novels recall, desire, and mourn times, places, and, more importantly, practices of living. Mitchell succinctly elegizes a lost worldview of planter aristocracy when she writes that, in South, prior to Civil War, raising good cotton, riding well, shooting straight, dancing lightly, squiring ladies with elegance and carrying one's liquor like a gentleman were things mattered (26). The impulse to document this problematic and intricately ordered system of existence has been seen as giving rise to some of best historical fiction South has produced ... rich in evocation of quality of a way of life (Holman 45). In its status as an irrevocably absent object, past generates longing, and depth of this nostalgia in which nothing is forgotten or abandoned requires a suitable vehicle by which it can conveyed. …