The Making Of An Ideal Male:Rhett Butler’s Masculinities In Gone With The Wind

This thesis aims to introduce Connell’s masculinity theories into Gone with the Wind to analyze Rhett’s masculinities systematically and further explore his masculinities’ contribution to his popular public reception. As a romantic novel with an epic and nostalgic style, Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind has gained popular reception and won world fame ever since its publication in 1936. However,despite wide readership, Gone with the Wind has long been considered a middlebrow bestseller at its most sentimental and popular, rather than a piece of literary canon.Accordingly, the novel has received less academic attention than it deserves.Still, Gone with the Wind is a typically women-centered novel, and the centrality of females directly results in the scholarly neglect and marginalization of male characters, including the hero- Rhett Butler. But as an ideal male in popular imagination, Rhett Butler actually represents certain exemplary masculinities followed by many later works, so he definitely deserves more scholarly research.This thesis comprises four chapters. The introduction presents the previous studies on Gone with the Wind and introduces the relevant theories about masculinities. Chapter two and three respectively discuss Rhett’s masculinities before and after his fatherhood with the aim to explore in what specific aspects the hero haschanged and how this change shapes his image as an ideal male. Finally, the conclusion summarizes the change process of the hero’s masculinities and further explores its contribution to the hero’s popular public reception.