Word: gwtw
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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MARGARET MITCHELL A court lifts injunction of GWTW parody. Frankly, my dear, it didn't give a damn about the copyright...
...Wind Done Gone indisputably uses characters, events and settings from GWTW. Randall changes names--Scarlett O'Hara becomes "Other," Rhett Butler "R," Ashley Wilkes "Dreamy Gentleman"--but these draw whatever substance they have in this version from the people fleshed out in Mitchell's novel. Randall's invention is the character Cinnamon/Cynara, the slave Mammy's mulatto daughter and the half sister of Scarlett, er, Other. Cynara's diary forms the basis of The Wind Done Gone. She writes of her childhood at Cotton Farm and Tata (Tara) and then of events after the period covered in GWTW: her freedom...
...nigger"--and sometimes poetic: "Mothers grow flaccid, rich in babylove, each baby taking some of the mother's beauty as if the baby knows it needs to protect its babyself by making Mama less kiss-daddy pretty." Why shouldn't the loyal slaves enshrined in the magnolia myth of GWTW, novel and film, be given their say? "Alice Randall has an absolute right to criticize Gone With the Wind," says Martin Garbus, the Mitchell estate lawyer. "But she can't do what she has done, namely take 15 characters and basically recycle the material...
Unfortunately, this reasoning is a twist on the normal meaning of parody. Randall makes no attempt to lampoon Mitchell's prose or the narrative devices of GWTW. In fact, she sometimes echoes the romantic swells of the original: "How is it that the South, the world of chivalry and slavery and great white houses and red land and white cotton, is gone, forever gone, in the dust, blown off and away...
...faults--and it is weakest where it relies most heavily on GWTW--The Wind Done Gone deserves a better fate than suppression. The notion that this slim, intense book will deplete the reservoir of readers being served periodic sequels by the Mitchell estate seems ludicrous. Houghton Mifflin has appealed, and the clash between the rights of property and speech will continue in the courts well beyond the disposition of this case. But readers everywhere should be uneasy when a book, for whatever reasons, is banned...