| dc.description.abstract | This project aims to investigate the power of Margaret Mitchell’s 1936 novel Gone with the Wind, its impact on readers, and their responses to the text and the ideologies Mitchell conveys in it, a particularly timely interrogation as the United States grapples with the consequences of white supremacist hate speech. An analysis of Mitchell’s narrative techniques, specifically we-voice and third-person omniscient narration, reveals the novel’s ability to circulate emotions and ideologies including white supremacy and anti-Blackness via Sara Ahmed’s theory of affective economies. The terminology of unresistant and resistant reader are used to differentiate between types of readers and draws on reader response theorist Kathleen McCormick’s writing on the negotiation between the reader and the text. The unresistant reader is one who either already has a nearer ideological proximity to Mitchell’s worldview or one who, unlike the resistant reader, has no knowledge or lived experience that would lead them to problematize it. Using a reader reception lens, contemporary book reviews and other media relating to GWTW are examined and collated for themes. After tracking GWTW’s transition from a book to a cultural idea through various mediums, Alice Randall’s The Wind Done Gone is presented as an appropriate response novel to address the harms GWTW enacts. This project illustrates that, despite the seemingly obviousness of its erroneousness, GWTW still benefits from, as well as requires, critical readers’ nuanced engagement with it as both an idea and as a text. | en_US |
