as a boy, the little girl acquired a male identity and got the nickname “Jimmy” (Pyron 29). It was fine for her to dress in boy’s clothes and behave like a tomboy until she started school. School in-troduced a new discipline. Back came petticoats, bows, and sashes. Mitchell was raised to behave decorously and fit into the social role of a southern belle, which meant she had to attend the classes in deportment and the dancing lessons. It was important that the girl knew the rules and perform her part as belle. However, her mother, an active feminist, wanted Margaret also to be able to question male dominance and female subordination, and demanded that her daughter “do what the boys do.” Marksmanship and horseback riding proved two of the more…show more content… Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind is one of the most success-ful novels ever published, and was in 1939 made into one of the most popular movies to emerge from Hollywood. The book became an instant best-seller when it was published on June 30 1936. It sold a million copies in the first six months and 25 million more have been sold since then. There are at least 155 editions and it has been translated into 27 languages and published successfully in 37 countries (Taylor 2). Mitchell won the National Book Award for most distinguished novel of 1936, and the 1937 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. She never wrote another book after Gone with the Wind but spent the rest of her life dealing with the publicity and fame which accompanied its outstanding success. She died in a road accident in…show more content… Haskell’s point is to show that Mitchell is fully aware of how women are “pointed toward marriage like well-trained hunting dogs” (17), but how some women want another lifestyle. The attitude in society is that nice Southern women, especially nice married upper-class women, did not work. If a woman insists on working it would reflect badly on her husband. Poverty is the only acceptable reason for a woman to work. In Scarlett, the Southern belle meet the shrewd businesswoman who challenges the social norms in the novel, and threatens the gender roles. Haskell describes “Southern womanhood” as a small upper class group that excludes all women except the aristocratic. Therefore, the education of the belle is to learn everything there is about men so that they will know how to please men in everything. Ac-cording to Haskell, Mitchell detests all of these and thinks the aspects of war, in Gone with the Wind, would plunge the Southern world into crisis, and release women from the confining rules and petty obsessions of everyday life. Furthermore, Mitchell’s heroine, Scarlett, does not have time to worry about whether the readers love her or not; she drops the coquette act and ignores the formali-ties and all those important
