Abstract

Gone with the Wind is Margaret Mitchell’s masterpiece which is like a mirror to reflect the transition of the Southern American Culture. The present thesis is centered in the southern and modernist context. And based on the diversity as varying examples from every class, the thesis tries to explain the “strong feeling of loss mixed with hope” through the fiction from the perspective of the disruption and reconstruction of the Southern American Culture. Unlike what others have defined the theme of Gone with the Wind as sentimental, the information Mitchell intends to deliver, as I will argue, is respectively progressive --- to accept the drastic changes of the South, to admit the deficiency of the old pedantry, and to believe a tomorrow even better than the plantation legend through the reconstruction both economically and spiritually. The “perfect reconstruction” in Mitchell’s mind manifests in the combination of the two characters Scarlett and Rhett. And this ideal is not “Reconstructed but Unregenerate”, yet “Reconstructed and Regenerate”; not abandoning the total past, but taking the essence and discarding the dregs from the old times. Thus welcome a new South mixed with the marrow of past and the expectation of the future.

Keywords: Gone with the Wind, Southern American culture, disruption, reconstruction, modernist

Contents

Abstract

摘  要

Introduction-1

1.The Characteristics of the Antebellum Southern American Culture2

  1.1 The Agrarian Society Based on Slavery System of Antebellum South2

 1.1.1 The Agrarian Society and Plantation Life 2 

 1.1.2 The Slavery System3

  1.2 The Value System of Antebellum Southern People4

 1.2.1 The View of Land 4

 1.2.2 The View of Knighthood, Nobility and Gentleness  5

 1.2.3 The Attitudes upon Slaves and the Northern (Yankee)6

2.The Disruption of the Southern American Culture 8

  2.1 The Disruption of the Plantation Legend  8

 2.1.1 The Deadly Impact upon the Economy as Agricultural8  

 2.1.2 The Impact upon the plantation life9

 2.1.3 The Disruption of the Slavery System 9

 2.1.4 The Impact on the Superiority Complex of the Southern10

3. The Reconstruction of the Southern American Culture  11

  3.1 The Brand New Destiny of the Negroes  11

 3.1.1 The Confusion and Awakening  11

  3.2 The Development of Southern American Value  12

 3.2.1 The Southern Renaissance: Conservatism (Romanticism) vs Modernism  12

 3.2.2 Modernism VS Conservatism (Future VS Past) 13

4. Conclusion16

References18