Gone with the Wind (film and to some extent book) were weirdly important growing up in Georgia in the 90s, which is later than I think a lot of people might think. I was gifted Scarlett O'Hara ornaments every year for Christmas and have a number of white Southern friends who had the same experience.
I never know what to do with it! I think a lot of my love of historical romance fiction and melodrama comes from iteratively watching the movie (I've only read the book once, maybe when I was 12). I also think it is impacts genre fiction a lot more than a lot of people are willing to acknowledge--a lot of those early bodice rippers were plantation set or colonial Caribbean stories and even if they don't get read now, they were wildly popular, borrowing a lot of modes from Scarlett (there used to be a lot wider berth for a heroine to have multiple marriages like Bertrice Small's Skye O'Malley).
My grandmother insisted that she was in the crowd at the premiere of the film in Atlanta and she always told my mom that Clark Gable was short in real life, but I think she perhaps just liked lying because he was supposed to be over six feet tall!
I mostly grew up in East Tennessee (childhood was New Orleans --> Maryland --> Tennessee) and I would say that in my specific milieu Gone With The Wind was a little… kitschy is too strong, it was regarded affectionately but as A Lot. That was _not_ a politically motivated sentiment, though, as I definitely knew / met people who were pretty unrepentantly pro-Confederate.
In some ways, looking back, I almost wonder if the problem for some people might have been Scarlett herself—like if the heroine had been Melanie, they would have liked it better. However, I had to look up Melanie's name to write that, so if the heroine had been Melanie GWTW probably would never been what it was.
Melanie the character had me for years on the side of Joan Fontaine in the Fontaine/de Havilland wars because she is soooooo insipid and annoying to me. Then I watched The Heiress and now I am neutral/enthused by both women.
Nice job of expressing the experience of abnormal sensitivity. I used to have a lot of trouble with it, and my best friend still deals with it a bunch from time to time, so I imagine it's a fairly common symptom of mood disorders.
As far as dealing with it, a lot of my improvement may just be a matter of age. I have done various things to try and deal with it and I feel like some improvement is possible. Some suggestions -
- Learn how to not act out the feeling in your interactions with others, and as a part of this make a point of remembering when you were able to not blow up at someone. It's important to recognize when you're acting like an adult even though you don't feel like an adult.
- If you have the free time available, spend a little time reflecting on the feeling and seeing how it works. See what thoughts stir it up most effectively. See if you can see similarities in the situations that evoke it. See if there's some deeper emotion that you're using the anger to try and avoid.
If you're someone who deals with a mood disorder, feeling nothing can be a major improvement, but a better long range goal is to have appropriate emotional reactions to the things you go through. Like having the anger come up when someone close to you has hurt you, so they know how important it is to you. Or being able to feel sadness together with other people when you are all suffering a loss together.
I'm not there yet, but I suspect that a life filled with appropriate emotions takes care of a lot of the compulsion to work.
fwiw I don't really blow up at people, I just kind of isolate until things are better, but ofc withdrawal is something that can also hurt people, their feelings, etc, even if you communicate why. If I were actively blowing up at others I think I'd be a little more worried about what was going on.
Then amend my comment to read "give yourself a gold star whenever you manage to engage insincerely with people." I'm not saying to push yourself to do it, but when you manage to have a normal interaction with someone in spite of feeling raw, it's important to acknowledge that you did something hard.
My AP English teacher at a Catholic high school in Ohio in the mid 1990s assigned "Gone With the Wind" my junior (senior?) year - it had apparently been on the syllabus for decades. We were all mad about it because it was racist, but we probably should have been mad about it because it's not particularly good or worth reading.
Dang. My Catholic school a decade later assigned a ton of reading, more for a class in a single quarter than I can now assign students all year, and we never read anything even REMOTELY as long as GwtW. I guess things had already significantly declined by my time lol
Undine Spragg left me thinking "Undine's curse" (the old-timey name for central hypoventilation syndrome) – which led me to this quaint, or maybe just weird, historical photo of a breastplate-shaped iron lung, a partial exoskeleton that doesn't give you a coackroach heart, but does remember to breathe if your body forgets to, while being less cumbersome than the full-body iron lungs that usually make the history books:
The story goes that a knight named Hans fell in love with a water spirit, Undine/Ondine. They marry, and a consequence of their marriage (not necessarily a consequence Undine wills) is that Hans's autonomic processes now depend on his fidelity to Undine. But is a nobleman really married if he's married to a nonhuman? He's expected to marry a human woman, and eventually does, only to find that now he must will his every bodily action to survive. So he dies in his sleep or while giving one last kiss to Undine.
From Jean Giraudoux's 1938 play "Ondine" (translated from French):
"Ondine: Live, Hans. You too will forget.
"Hans: Live! It’s easy to say. If at least I could work up a little interest in living, but I’m too tired to make this effort. Since you left me, Ondine, all the things my body once did by itself, it does now only by special order.
"It’s an exhausting piece of management I’ve undertaken. I have to supervise five senses, two hundred bones, a thousand muscles. A single moment of inattention, and I forget to breathe. He died, they will say, because it was a nuisance to breathe."
Andersen originally entitled his "Little Mermaid" tale "The Daughter of the Air", commenting, "I have not, like de la Motte Fouqué in Undine, allowed the mermaid's acquiring of an immortal soul to depend upon an alien creature, upon the love of a human being. I'm sure that's wrong! It would depend rather much on chance, wouldn't it? I won't accept that sort of thing in this world. I have permitted my mermaid to follow a more natural, more divine path. No other writer, I believe, has indicated it yet, and that's why I am glad to have it in my tale."
After double checking, it looks like all this goes straight back to Paracelsus too, who seems to have codified everything about water-women creatures, marriage, and immortal souls.
Funny, I was just discussing GWTW a couple of days ago, and its influence on the South's continued romanticization of the Civil War's "lost cause" which still continues to this day. Hard to believe, I know, but it wasn't until 2021 that Mississippi finally changed it's state flag away from one having the confederate symbol of the "stars and bars."
Is ‘cockroach heart’ a bdm original or is it also from Elsewhere? Absolutely beside myself with what a fabulous term it is. Cockroach heart.
Here’s a tangential question. Gregor Samsa isn’t a cockroach (and he’s not even bug or man sized as Nabokov emphasized) but he’s often styled as one. What if any possible connection can be made between that pathetic young man and his dull endurance, and the endurance of these amorally heroic non-heroines?
Also, is Havisham one of these bad women or too flat to be one?
I think it's not quite original to me because I feel like it was a sort of a meme in an earlier social media era to talk about people who survive as cockroaches.
Re: Gregor. He also basically commits suicide, right? Like he's like, it's true. I shouldn't be alive. It's wrong of me to be alive. If Undine Spragg woke up as a bug she'd just make being a bug the fashion that season I feel. But this is also funny bc I recently made the famous illustration of the bug in the bed into a "sticker" on my phone that I use when I'm like "the horrors persist, but so do I," and that's almost definitely why I thought of cockroaches lol. Am I saying: fuck your family, Gregor? There's a whole beautiful world of garbage out there for you! Maybe.…
Havisham is not imho… she's not driven to survive and thrive as it were. Even her revenge quest is weirdly abstract. She doesn't want to get back at her ex-betrothed but at like the "concept of men in general." A woman who sits in front of a decaying cake for decades is not gonna size up the curtains and go "I could do something about that." I'm not sure Dickens has any women like this.
In Gregor's defense his first thought after "wtf am I a bug now????" Is "oh shit I can still make it to work!!! I can just explain to the boss that I'm late because I'm a bug now and it'll never happen again, I can make this work"
Gone with the Wind (film and to some extent book) were weirdly important growing up in Georgia in the 90s, which is later than I think a lot of people might think. I was gifted Scarlett O'Hara ornaments every year for Christmas and have a number of white Southern friends who had the same experience.
I never know what to do with it! I think a lot of my love of historical romance fiction and melodrama comes from iteratively watching the movie (I've only read the book once, maybe when I was 12). I also think it is impacts genre fiction a lot more than a lot of people are willing to acknowledge--a lot of those early bodice rippers were plantation set or colonial Caribbean stories and even if they don't get read now, they were wildly popular, borrowing a lot of modes from Scarlett (there used to be a lot wider berth for a heroine to have multiple marriages like Bertrice Small's Skye O'Malley).
My grandmother insisted that she was in the crowd at the premiere of the film in Atlanta and she always told my mom that Clark Gable was short in real life, but I think she perhaps just liked lying because he was supposed to be over six feet tall!
I mostly grew up in East Tennessee (childhood was New Orleans --> Maryland --> Tennessee) and I would say that in my specific milieu Gone With The Wind was a little… kitschy is too strong, it was regarded affectionately but as A Lot. That was _not_ a politically motivated sentiment, though, as I definitely knew / met people who were pretty unrepentantly pro-Confederate.
In some ways, looking back, I almost wonder if the problem for some people might have been Scarlett herself—like if the heroine had been Melanie, they would have liked it better. However, I had to look up Melanie's name to write that, so if the heroine had been Melanie GWTW probably would never been what it was.
Melanie the character had me for years on the side of Joan Fontaine in the Fontaine/de Havilland wars because she is soooooo insipid and annoying to me. Then I watched The Heiress and now I am neutral/enthused by both women.
Nice job of expressing the experience of abnormal sensitivity. I used to have a lot of trouble with it, and my best friend still deals with it a bunch from time to time, so I imagine it's a fairly common symptom of mood disorders.
As far as dealing with it, a lot of my improvement may just be a matter of age. I have done various things to try and deal with it and I feel like some improvement is possible. Some suggestions -
- Learn how to not act out the feeling in your interactions with others, and as a part of this make a point of remembering when you were able to not blow up at someone. It's important to recognize when you're acting like an adult even though you don't feel like an adult.
- If you have the free time available, spend a little time reflecting on the feeling and seeing how it works. See what thoughts stir it up most effectively. See if you can see similarities in the situations that evoke it. See if there's some deeper emotion that you're using the anger to try and avoid.
If you're someone who deals with a mood disorder, feeling nothing can be a major improvement, but a better long range goal is to have appropriate emotional reactions to the things you go through. Like having the anger come up when someone close to you has hurt you, so they know how important it is to you. Or being able to feel sadness together with other people when you are all suffering a loss together.
I'm not there yet, but I suspect that a life filled with appropriate emotions takes care of a lot of the compulsion to work.
fwiw I don't really blow up at people, I just kind of isolate until things are better, but ofc withdrawal is something that can also hurt people, their feelings, etc, even if you communicate why. If I were actively blowing up at others I think I'd be a little more worried about what was going on.
Then amend my comment to read "give yourself a gold star whenever you manage to engage insincerely with people." I'm not saying to push yourself to do it, but when you manage to have a normal interaction with someone in spite of feeling raw, it's important to acknowledge that you did something hard.
My AP English teacher at a Catholic high school in Ohio in the mid 1990s assigned "Gone With the Wind" my junior (senior?) year - it had apparently been on the syllabus for decades. We were all mad about it because it was racist, but we probably should have been mad about it because it's not particularly good or worth reading.
Dang. My Catholic school a decade later assigned a ton of reading, more for a class in a single quarter than I can now assign students all year, and we never read anything even REMOTELY as long as GwtW. I guess things had already significantly declined by my time lol
okay I'm kind of impressed with that teacher though bc Gone With The Wind is like 1000 pages long
I'm a big fan of Undine and Becky. No pretense about what they want. I can't help rooting for them. They're ruthless underdogs.
I really want to reread Custom of the Country… or read Age of Innocence for the first time.
They are my two favorites of EW. Because of Undine, I guess I prefer Custom.
Undine Spragg left me thinking "Undine's curse" (the old-timey name for central hypoventilation syndrome) – which led me to this quaint, or maybe just weird, historical photo of a breastplate-shaped iron lung, a partial exoskeleton that doesn't give you a coackroach heart, but does remember to breathe if your body forgets to, while being less cumbersome than the full-body iron lungs that usually make the history books:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_lung#/media/File:Two_types_of_20th_century_respirator._Wellcome_L0001309_(Fig_A).jpg
I feel as if a rich amount of connections are being made down here in the comments… I had never heard of that term or this type of respirator!
The story goes that a knight named Hans fell in love with a water spirit, Undine/Ondine. They marry, and a consequence of their marriage (not necessarily a consequence Undine wills) is that Hans's autonomic processes now depend on his fidelity to Undine. But is a nobleman really married if he's married to a nonhuman? He's expected to marry a human woman, and eventually does, only to find that now he must will his every bodily action to survive. So he dies in his sleep or while giving one last kiss to Undine.
From Jean Giraudoux's 1938 play "Ondine" (translated from French):
"Ondine: Live, Hans. You too will forget.
"Hans: Live! It’s easy to say. If at least I could work up a little interest in living, but I’m too tired to make this effort. Since you left me, Ondine, all the things my body once did by itself, it does now only by special order.
"It’s an exhausting piece of management I’ve undertaken. I have to supervise five senses, two hundred bones, a thousand muscles. A single moment of inattention, and I forget to breathe. He died, they will say, because it was a nuisance to breathe."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ondine_(play)
Huh. Is The Little Mermaid a conscious inversion of this story? It seems like they were related somehow.
They were!
https://endicottstudio.typepad.com/articleslist/a-million-little-mermaids-by-virginia-borges.html
Andersen originally entitled his "Little Mermaid" tale "The Daughter of the Air", commenting, "I have not, like de la Motte Fouqué in Undine, allowed the mermaid's acquiring of an immortal soul to depend upon an alien creature, upon the love of a human being. I'm sure that's wrong! It would depend rather much on chance, wouldn't it? I won't accept that sort of thing in this world. I have permitted my mermaid to follow a more natural, more divine path. No other writer, I believe, has indicated it yet, and that's why I am glad to have it in my tale."
After double checking, it looks like all this goes straight back to Paracelsus too, who seems to have codified everything about water-women creatures, marriage, and immortal souls.
Funny, I was just discussing GWTW a couple of days ago, and its influence on the South's continued romanticization of the Civil War's "lost cause" which still continues to this day. Hard to believe, I know, but it wasn't until 2021 that Mississippi finally changed it's state flag away from one having the confederate symbol of the "stars and bars."
I believe this bc I knew people growing up who insisted on the term "war between the states" (but truly preferred "war of northern aggression" lol).
Is ‘cockroach heart’ a bdm original or is it also from Elsewhere? Absolutely beside myself with what a fabulous term it is. Cockroach heart.
Here’s a tangential question. Gregor Samsa isn’t a cockroach (and he’s not even bug or man sized as Nabokov emphasized) but he’s often styled as one. What if any possible connection can be made between that pathetic young man and his dull endurance, and the endurance of these amorally heroic non-heroines?
Also, is Havisham one of these bad women or too flat to be one?
I think it's not quite original to me because I feel like it was a sort of a meme in an earlier social media era to talk about people who survive as cockroaches.
Re: Gregor. He also basically commits suicide, right? Like he's like, it's true. I shouldn't be alive. It's wrong of me to be alive. If Undine Spragg woke up as a bug she'd just make being a bug the fashion that season I feel. But this is also funny bc I recently made the famous illustration of the bug in the bed into a "sticker" on my phone that I use when I'm like "the horrors persist, but so do I," and that's almost definitely why I thought of cockroaches lol. Am I saying: fuck your family, Gregor? There's a whole beautiful world of garbage out there for you! Maybe.…
Havisham is not imho… she's not driven to survive and thrive as it were. Even her revenge quest is weirdly abstract. She doesn't want to get back at her ex-betrothed but at like the "concept of men in general." A woman who sits in front of a decaying cake for decades is not gonna size up the curtains and go "I could do something about that." I'm not sure Dickens has any women like this.
In Gregor's defense his first thought after "wtf am I a bug now????" Is "oh shit I can still make it to work!!! I can just explain to the boss that I'm late because I'm a bug now and it'll never happen again, I can make this work"