An Interpretation Of The Tragic Connotation Of Gone With The Wind

Margaret Mitchell’s work Gone with the Wind is a top best-selling novel released in 1936 and has a huge readership throughout the world.The novel blossomed shortly after its publication and harvested the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1937.And its 1939 screen adaptation with the same title remains one of the most popular movies and a great commercial success ever made.The unprecedented popularity indicates Gone with the Wind strikes a responsive chord with readers.As Henry Steele Commager reviewed,the novel is "a dramatic recreation of life itself"(1).Some elements of life underlying this novel bring about psychological resonance with readers and draw them to it.Hence it is a remarkable cultural phenomenon worth study.This novel is a piece of literary work for popular consumption and popularity is a main criterion on which it is judged.However,although lots of research both abroad and at home has been done on it,its everlasting popularity has not been sufficiently focused on for study.And few choose to address the issue in terms of its tragic connotation.This research is based on a new assumption that the tragic connotation is actually what holds the large readership.The interpretation is based on the mass psychology that the existence of the tragical elements in the novel resembles the true life of mankind and so appeals to the readers.This thesis explores the tragic connotation of this novel to reveal the tragical appeal by digging into the tragical elements such as the missed love,the collapse of the old social system and the loss of old culture.Very likely it’s the tragic connotation conveyed by the tragical elements that endows the novel with especially great appeal for its readers.