Friday, January 13, 2012

Jane Eyre, Scarlett O'Hara and Edna Pontellier

My three favorite heroines! Women who set their sites early on and stuck to them despite overwhelming physical, historical, cultural and political difficulties. Honestly, I think I could read The AwakeningJane Eyre and Gone With the Wind alternatively the rest of my life and never be bored.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

This is interesting. I stumbled upon the site through Google, in search of any commentary out there as to whether, in a weird sort of twist, Margaret Mitchell was getting so very inside the minds of her characters in "Gone With the Wind" that she might have had Rhett Butler and even Melanie having read "Jane Eyre." Certainly, the Bronte book would have been published in the childhood of Rhett, and he spent time in England. And he asked Scarlett if in any of her novel reading she'd come across the circumstance of a wife falling in love with her husband. AND, he brought up the issue of "suttee," while dancing at the Atlanta bazaar. There is at least one scholarly essay "out there" as to the allusions to suttee in "Jane Eyre," and how the title character was even familiar with the concept. After all, Rhett "knows" all about women somehow, and certainly proved himself in all regards to study his quarry well before taking action, so it seems to me he'd have been familiar with and probably had read "Jane Eyre," and so too might have Ashley and Melanie. Wouldn't it be great trivia to be able to use modern technology to suss out from a film still if "Jane Eyre" was on a shelf in the Twelve Oaks library? (You know, I should get doctoral thesis credit for this instead of randomly posting on the Internet.)