The Role Of Garment Description On Shaping Images In Gone With The Wind And Little Women

“Costume, as the unique culture symbol of human civilization, progresses withhuman society development. Costume culture reflects specific human material andspiritual life of a certain social formation.”①Costume is not only a simple symbol ofculture, but a glorious part in literary as well. Varieties of garment descriptions, favoredby both ancient and modern writers, have become the remarkable fortune in literaturehistory. In addition, the appropriate garment description can be a powerful way to expressthe thoughts of the authors, and it is closely related to characters, backgrounds and thethemes. As we all know, character is the soul of literary work. Garment description,which is the most direct and significant way of creating characters, depicts outsidefeatures of a character. What’s more, it can reflect colorful internal mental world rootedin the character.As the most classic popular fictions in American literary history, Margaret Mitchell’sGone with the Wind and Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women had been made into films formany times and impacted generation after generation. The classic characters in thesemasterpieces have become greatly impressive and immortal. However, the mostimportant key of shaping characters is the vivid garment description. This paper, basedon the two novels that mentioned above, is intended to discover the role of garmentdescription on shaping images.My paper will conclude several functions of garment description from the point ofcostume’s culture significance first，then have a brief introduction of Gone with the Windand Little Women, and state the reason why these two works are selected. The main partof this thesis, taking Gone with the Wind and Little Women as the examples, will revealthe charm of the classical characters from the following points of view: garmentdescription and mental world of characters, garment description and personality ofcharacters, garment description and identity of characters, garment description andcircumstances of characters.