Quote:
Originally Posted by Hitch
I read GWTW when I was 12, if memory serves and of course, loved it then.
I won't "not read" books that depict other times, ways, mores, etc. Otherwise, how could you read P&P? Or anything, written, ever, particularly around women and their place in society? How could you read about "poor Lydia" and her ruined life? Talk about abusive! There's hardly anything romantic or not chattel-like about having to whore oneself out to a husband in order to eat. So...my thinking is always, in for the penny, in for the pound.
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In fact, I agree with you. I think the real reason I couldn’t read
GWTW now is that I damned near memorized it when I was a girl and I’d be too bored. But I also suspect it hasn’t aged well, at least for me. Taking the easy one first, I’ve totally gone off that romantic dark brooding Gothic hero carp. Rhett, Rochester, Heathcliff and so forth - they’re all controlling and abusive. And when that’s presented in a way that the reader is supposed to take it as great love, my reaction is to think, “Honey (Scarlett, Jane, Catherine), run. Like the wind.”
As for the racism, I think the issue in regard to this particular book for me is threefold. Not so much the Civil War era stuff, that’s a given. More problematic is it as an expression of attitudes in the 1930s when the book was written. And then you have my lack of awareness when I read it as a girl decades later, and bingo. That’s the one. If I were to read it, which I’m not for the reason of boredom I gave at first, I’m pretty sure I’d cringe at my own unthinking girlhood self who loved it so much. But it’s a pity in a way, because there was something about it. I once read a review which recalled the “glazed inattention” of those who were immersed in it for the first time and that describes my own reaction. Would that I could recapture that sense when I read now!