2009.04.04
Review: Frankly My Dear
"Frankly, My Dear: 'Gone With the Wind' Revisited." By Molly Haskell. Yale University Press. 272 pages, $24.00
Reviewed by Amelia Roberson
AMELIA ROBERSON is an English instructor at the Natural Bridge Juvenile Corrections Center.
"Frankly, My Dear" is an admirable treatise on Mitchell’s unexpected classic "Gone With the Wind" that deeply examines the motives and talents of those intimately responsible for the novel’s screen debut.
Molly Haskell’s scholarly work is a must-read for students and lovers of GWTW, to which the work is now affectionately referred.
The work reads as painstakingly passionate research that acknowledges the huge social, historical, sexual, and racial implications of the time by placing a transparent template of Mitchell’s romantic and evocative work squarely and realistically upon our country’s history, who we were and how we came to view ourselves against the backdrop of the Civil War.
According to the author, Mitchell “was no intellectual and no social revolutionary…never left Atlanta, never expressed a radical political viewpoint.” Haskell deliberately delves into the psychological mindscape of the author, revealing her Catholic upbringing and break from organized religion, and her father’s continually denigrating attitude toward his daughter’s writing ability.
Haskell’s work serves as a cross-curriculum reader, putting the reader squarely in place to understand the multitude of influences, most subliminal, that magnetized themselves to this enigmatic literary work that is great because it yet causes self-examination for all in this 21st century; it delights the thoughtful mind.
