Why do you suppose that Mitchell made Scarlett's father Irish?

[Anonymous]

Comparatively speaking, there weren't many Irish slaveholders during the antebellum period.

There was also a lot of discrimination against the Irish during that era


So, I found it curious that Scarlett's father was an Irishman.

What do you make of that? Why do you think that Mitchell chose to do that?


Btw, this is not homework.

[Anonymous]

This is def homework.

[Anonymous]

I never read the novel, but I love to Google search, even if it is to help you with your homework.

Here's all you need:

http://irishamerica.com/2011/08/scarlett-is-75-and-still-going-strong/

[Anonymous]

Secondly, at a time when literary modernism was on the rise and the Southern novel, in the hands of someone like William Faulkner, was becoming deliberately more obscure in style, Mitchell displayed an awesome ability as a storyteller by writing in a style that was accessible to ordinary readers. And, thirdly, a point that is important from the perspective of the 21st century, Mitchell told her story through the eyes of a young woman (Scarlett O’Hara) who was the daughter of an immigrant with an Irish and Catholic sounding name. She wrote, historically speaking, against the background of the Know- Nothing “Nativist” politicians who had declared war on such people.

The power of the Nativist movement had crested in the election of 1856 but the Know-Nothings did not go away. Rhett Butler, one of the main protagonists in the novel, speaks for the Know-Nothings in his many putdowns of Scarlett, her family and its Irish origins. His comments range from “Now don’t fly off the handle and get your Irish up,” to “The Irish are the damnedest race. They put so much emphasis on so many wrong things. Land, for instance,” to the overall trashing of Scarlett’s people as “that bunch of wild Irish.”

Although Rhett is physically attracted to Scarlett, his sense of caste and class keeps setting off alarm bells in his mind about her social origins. As an aristocratic son of Charleston, he is thus a true “native American,” while Scarlett is the daughter of an Irish immigrant who speaks with a foreign accent, lacks social polish, and is separated from poverty in only a tenuous way – her father, Gerald O’Hara, won the land that he owns in a card game.

There is an important parallel to be drawn, one that the academic critics have missed, between Scarlett and Mitchell. For just as Scarlett grows up with the anti-Irish Know-Nothings in the background, Mitchell also went through her adolescent and young adult years during a time when Tom Watson (1856-1922), Georgia’s home grown anti-immigrant and anti-Catholic bigot, newspaper editor, politician and ally of the resurgent Klan, was garnering headlines. Watson, who grew up on his grandfather’s plantation, wrote a novel in praise of the slave system. Entitled Bethany: A Story of the Old South, it appeared in 1904 and was diametrically opposed to Harriet Beecher Stowe’s 1852 abolitionist novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin.

Catholic reaction to Watson, who suspected Irish Catholics of “Popery” (more loyal to the Pope than to country) and a lack of commitment to the “Southern way of life,” was based at Sacred Heart Church in Atlanta, where Mitchell’s mother, Mary Isabelle, or “Maybelle” (1872-1918), was a committed and activist member of the congregation. In fact, despite her gender in the patriarchal Southern culture of the time, Maybelle was a founding member of the Catholic Laymen’s Association of Georgia, the group that took on the powerful Klan bigots arrayed against the state’s Catholic and Jewish populations.

Be sure to paraphrase correctly, or cite your source!

[Anonymous]

I think bc he was very different from the traditional Southern gentleman, and supposedly Scarlett's unladylike tendencies/gumption came from him, rather than her mother. Also, he was a self-made man (though didn't he win the plantation through gambling?) and Scarlett has to use her sharpness/business sense to rebuild the family fortune after the war, while traditional Southerners like Ashley and Melanie sunk into genteel poverty. At least that's the perspective the book takes.

[Anonymous]

OP here:

9:28 has a very good point. I also suspect that Mitchell had a political agenda.

[Anonymous]

Interesting, I never really though about that. My mother really loved the movie. She named my sister and me Scarlett and Tara.

[Anonymous]

I always thought that Scarlett's patrician mother (Old South aristocracy) was the contrast with her "Mick" (Mitchell uses this term throughout the novel) father. Just as Scarlett is a contrast with the Old Guard with her willingness to scrap and fight for her survival. Sort of the aristocracy who are refined and mannered but weak and will die out in a crisis vs. the unmannered proletariat who are equipped to survive.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:I always thought that Scarlett's patrician mother (Old South aristocracy) was the contrast with her "Mick" (Mitchell uses this term throughout the novel) father. Just as Scarlett is a contrast with the Old Guard with her willingness to scrap and fight for her survival. Sort of the aristocracy who are refined and mannered but weak and will die out in a crisis vs. the unmannered proletariat who are equipped to survive.

Yup. I think it's new south vs. old south symbolism.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I always thought that Scarlett's patrician mother (Old South aristocracy) was the contrast with her "Mick" (Mitchell uses this term throughout the novel) father. Just as Scarlett is a contrast with the Old Guard with her willingness to scrap and fight for her survival. Sort of the aristocracy who are refined and mannered but weak and will die out in a crisis vs. the unmannered proletariat who are equipped to survive.

Yup. I think it's new south vs. old south symbolism.

Agree. And Mitchell makes an interesting parallel to/foreshadowing of this conflict when describing how Scarlett's mother's and father's features clash in her face and expression:

"In her face were too sharply blended the delicate features of her mother, a Coast aristocrat of French descent, and the heavy ones of her florid Irish father."

[Anonymous]

Maybe Mitchelle was trying to be inclusive toward the different European groups in America.

Perhaps, she wanted to unify all the different groups of white people.

[Anonymous]

I think as PPs have alluded to it has to do with Scarlett's attachment to her land (Tara) and her gumption.

I adore that book!!!

[Anonymous]

You know every time I see Lady Mary chastely flit from suitor to suitor in Downton Abbey, I want Rhett Butler to show up and ravage her. I think many American women in the 1930s were looking for a Rhett Butler and it wouldn't be believable for some southern aristocrat like Melanie to be the target of Rhett's attention. So they needed a woman with moxie like Scarlett to fulfill their imagination. Her dad had to someone other than the southern stereotype to begat such a daughter

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:You know every time I see Lady Mary chastely flit from suitor to suitor in Downton Abbey, I want Rhett Butler to show up and ravage her. I think many American women in the 1930s were looking for a Rhett Butler and it wouldn't be believable for some southern aristocrat like Melanie to be the target of Rhett's attention. So they needed a woman with moxie like Scarlett to fulfill their imagination. Her dad had to someone other than the southern stereotype to begat such a daughter

I think you mean ravish.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:You know every time I see Lady Mary chastely flit from suitor to suitor in Downton Abbey, I want Rhett Butler to show up and ravage her. I think many American women in the 1930s were looking for a Rhett Butler and it wouldn't be believable for some southern aristocrat like Melanie to be the target of Rhett's attention. So they needed a woman with moxie like Scarlett to fulfill their imagination. Her dad had to someone other than the southern stereotype to begat such a daughter

I think you mean ravish.

Or perhaps PP meant "rape" because that famous scene where he carries her up the stairs is the great American cinematic rape scene. He kisses her, and then he forcefully carries her upstairs. Next scene, she's in bed all content and smiles. It was a great message to men out there--if your woman says "no," she really means "yes" and you should make her have sex with you because that's really what she needs and wants