I don’t remember when I first saw the movie Gone With the Wind, but I must have been only four or five years old. By the time I was ten, it had become something of an obsession. And the main reason was Scarlett O’Hara. She was, in many ways, all the things I was not. Bold and decisive, as courageous as she was selfish. She went after what she wanted in ways I could only dream of and, of course, she wore the most glorious dresses all the while. My desire to understand her led me to read the original book by Margaret Mitchell, and not long after my Mom and I bought dress patterns to try and remake some of the costumes from the film. I started doing research on the movie for a school project and soon found out that the film had long been criticized for its glorification of slavery. This led me to read books about the history of Antebellum America—I would hole up in my school’s library every day during recess and pore over everything I could find about the lives of women during the nineteenth century.
Looking back on all this now, I wonder whether Scarlett O’Hara is actually the reason why I ended up becoming a specialist in the history of art during exactly that time period. Scarlett was a hero to me all through my childhood, but she was never an easy or straightforward one. I found her deeply complicated, one of the few women I’d encountered in movies from that era that felt real in all her thorny glory. She opened up universes for me, provided a window into the past and the women who struggled through it. And even today, I find myself sometimes still repeating what Scarlett said in tough moments: “Tomorrow is another day.”
– Dr Allison Leigh