Video Trailer!

After many, many technical difficulties (and then a final editing process which took about half an hour), here is the trailer video for the paper! The first draft will be finished on Monday. Whew! 

Music by Kevin MacLeod: "Morning Snowflake", 2005 (public domain)

Special thanks to my lovely bilinguals: 

Rea (Tagalog), Louisa (German), Cynthia (Spanish), Sarah (Portuguese), Rachel (Chinese), Kathleen (Swedish), Alissa (Japanese), Melody (Russian), Catherine (Thai), and Rebecca (American Sign Language).

Thank you for watching!

The video can be found on Youtube at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q9ULP0DR3TA&feature=youtu.be

"Frankly, My Dear...": Women Changing the World Through the Internet

Gone With the Wind is a story of Southern plantation owners trying to get through the pain and tragedy of fighting, losing, and rebuilding after the Civil War. After the Southerners lose much of their way of life, they are forced to deal with huge societal changes in the best way they can. Some of them, like Ashley Wilkes, are stuck in the past, unable to move forward. The two main female characters, Scarlett and Melanie, represent the ways in which women were able to break social boundaries for their gender while at the same time remain true to their identities as women. Like Scarlett and Melanie from Margaret Mitchell’s Gone With the Wind responded to the Civil War and Reconstruction, women today are responding to the new digital age by using the Internet to break social boundaries while preserving their traditional gender role.


Scarlett and Melanie show the importance of women's traditional role as social butterflies. Women are generally considered more relationship-oriented than men are. In GWTW, Scarlett eventually gets fed up with always trying to please other people, and eventually abandons any attempt to build good relationships. She turns to her love of money, running a business and marrying rich Rhett Butler. In the end of the book, Rhett concludes that one of the only things Scarlett ever wanted was "to be rich enough to tell the world to go to hell." And where did Scarlett end up?

Alone. 

Melanie, on the other hand, uses the societal change as an opportunity to both preserve and transform her social role. She is not afraid to befriend Belle Watling, a prostitute, which would have been impossible for her before the war. She volunteers at a war hospital, which again, would have been impossible without the Civil War. Rather than abandoning her gender role, Melanie expands it. 

Scarlett O'Hara's Prerogative

I've discovered that the homemade Youtube music video is alive and well in 1800s Georgia.

I didn't expect much from GWTW music videos, but I actually really enjoyed them! Not to mention, I thought they were very interesting interpretations of the story and the characters (mainly Scarlett).

This video is set to the song "Apologize" by OneRepublic. At first, I found it ridiculous and nearly laughed my head off in the computer lab. I mean, come on--do you really think OneRepublic could beat the amazing original score? It seemed to trivialize the story to put it to a modern song.