Gone With The Wind- Reflection

    During class, we watched the beginning half of Gone With The Wind. This movie was a fabulous representation of America during the 1800s. Slavery is beginning to fade away, and we can see this being shown in the movie by the positive relationship between the white family and the black care-takers. The relationships between slaves and slaveowners start transitioning into a more positive one where the slaves care for the white children and therefore the white children seem to have a loving mindset towards the caretakers and creates a positive relationship. 

    We can also see the progress of America in this movie when they have to flee the south because of the Civil War beginning. This part of the movie symbolizes how shocking the war was to the people living in the south because of how panic and chaos was seen in all southerns words and expressions. The characters get to a point where they have to sneak out to escape or else they will be killed, and this can be seen in the scene where Scarlet and her friends are in a wagon sneaking out while the trains and other items around them start blowing up and the fires start spreading. After a while when they come back, they look around and see how much of the land has changed. The fires and bombs have smoked every house away, the amount of smoke in the air which has tainted the sky, and there are many dead bodies around. This is when we learn more about how much the Civil War impacted the south and how much of the economics changed since then. 

    Another progressive movement we see in this movie is how marriage and the status of women in the South. In this movie, we see how men are highly regarded because this is America in the 1800s, and the women are expected to find a man and become a housewife. We can see this ideal happening by Scarlet obsessing over the man she wants to marry, but he's currently engaged to his cousin. It seems that finding a wife or husband seems to be easier because no one really dates and they just purpose and get married in a very small window. We can see this happen when Scarlet gets purposed to by multiple men in a small time frame, and she does not seem to be phased by it. This part of the movie also depicts how men are sent off to war and the women are expected to sit around and wait for them. 

    All and all, this movie has a very good description of what America was like in the 1800s. They had conflict between the North and the South in terms of slavery. We can see the progress in slavery by the sweet caring relationships between the slaves and slave owners, how badly the South was effected by the Civil War and how many people died during that time, and how women and marriage is related and impacted by the status of men in the south.