Flowers In The Wind

Margaret Mitchell's Gone with the Wind and Colleen McCullough's The Thorn Birds tell two love stories which happen in different times, in different countries. Each of theses novels has its own unique artistic style:Gone with the Wind combines American Civil War and hard life of the Southerners after the collapse of their old world into an organic whole. And this novel makes the tragic love story of an independent female character impressive and touching, setting in the background of a savage depression both physically and mentally, while The Thorn Birds is an epic family saga, which vividly follows the lives, love and death of Cleary family. Yet they have many similarities in the arrangement of the plot, the selection of the characters and the shaping of their characteristics and so on, especially in the tragic love stories of the two heroines. Therefore, it is possible to make a comparative study of the two novels.Love is regarded as an eternal theme in literary creation. And it has become one of the most ancient themes since the beginning of literature. For hundreds and thousands of years, the main melody of love is giving musical performance in Chinese and foreign literary history and it continuously touches the heart of the readers. And with the acknowledgement of the impact of Greek mythology on the Western literature which follows it, we can surprisingly find out that the love stories told by Gone with the Wind and The Thorn Birds have actually retold the famous love story between Venus and Adonis, an old myth well-known in western countries and frequently adopted by different writers with different artistic styles in different times. What's more, the short and concise myth can help us to discover the real thing that makes the love between Scarlett and Ashley and Maggie and Ralph so touching yet so helplessly tragic. This thesis tries to reveal clearly the very thing mentioned above by comparing the two love stories, not only the comparison of the lovers involved and the love stories narrated in these two books, but also by the introduction of the Greek myth Venus and Adonis. It is believed that the image of the unearthly beautiful wind flower and the deep thoughts and humane elements of the myth will enable us to explore the two books in a new angle and provide a new view of the charm of the love stories told. By adopting the image of the wind flower, the thesis illustrates that the love between Scarlett and Ashley, and Maggie and Ralph are actually every bit as deep and beautiful as that in the myth, and they three are all doomed to end in a heart-breaking tragedy. Then the thesis also makes attempts to discover the reasons why the wind-flower love should be so doomed from the aspects of culture and society.Based on the analysis of the beauty and fragility of the love stores in the two literary works, the thesis delineates the ever carried-on esthetics of human life that expectations and pursuits are the approval of human desires and the real strength which sublimates human nature.