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Another sequel

One hundred and forty two years after America’s civil war, 71 years after the fictional Scarlett began pining for Ashley, 53 years after the desegregation of education, and 16 years after the last attempt to recreate the saga of white damsels in hoop skirts and their strangely contented slaves, do we really give a damn?

Apparently we do. At least, that is what the keepers of the Gone With the Wind legacy believe.

On Tuesday readers will get another opportunity to indulge a nostalgia for the antebellum south that just won’t die with the release of yet another take on the Margaret Mitchell novel.

“The public itself wanted another sequel,” Paul Anderson, a member of the committee that advises Mitchell’s estate, told reporters.

Rhett Butler’s People, by Donald McCaig, is both prequel and sequel, and purports to tell that sweeping story of love and loss from the point of view of the rakish scoundrel who is really Scarlett O’Hara’s great love, as she realises too late.

The work is the third revisiting of the Margaret Mitchell saga. In 1991 Alexandra Ripley published the first Gone With the Wind sequel, called Scarlett, which was excoriated by critics, but sold six million copies and was turned into a television mini-series.

Rhett Butler’s People is further testimony, as if any were needed, to the hold Mitchell’s novel has on the popular imagination. In the more than 70 years since publication, the novel has sold more than 28 million copies, making it among the five bestselling novels of all time.

Mr. McCaig, a bestselling author of civil war fiction of his own, peoples his version with the familiar figures from Mitchell’s work: the saintly Melanie Wilkes, Ashley’s sister, goes to her grave believing in the barely perceptible goodness in Scarlett’s soul. Belle Watling, the consort, also makes an appearance; only now do we learn the truth of her connection to Rhett Butler.

In a nod to modern mores, we also see far more clearly than in the original the brutality of slavery. In McCaig’s version slaves are lashed to death, lynched and framed after being falsely accused of molesting a white woman. But Rhett Butler’s People also banks on our seemingly unending infatuation with the romantic stereotypes of the Old South.

There is Rhett Butler and the other swashbuckling males of the day, bound up with their vanishing ideals of honour. And there is the great passion of Rhett and Scarlett.

In McCaig’s telling their romance leads to a contented domesticity at Tara. As Scarlett muses: “She and Rhett might rebuild Tara. Or maybe they’d just travel for a time. There were a world of places Scarlett had never seen. Maybe she and Rhett would go to Yellowstone and see those natural wonders.” — ©Guardian Newspapers Limited, 2007

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