Alice Randall's first novel The Wind Done Gone rewrites Margaret Mitchell's Gone With the Wind. Alice Randall recounts Mitchell's original story from a different perspective and foregrounds some parts of the story that were either untold or distorted ...
Alice Randall's first novel The Wind Done Gone rewrites Margaret Mitchell's Gone With the Wind. Alice Randall recounts Mitchell's original story from a different perspective and foregrounds some parts of the story that were either untold or distorted by the white writer.
In Gone With the Wind, Mitchell has distorted the image of the black by portraying them as inferior, stupid, ignorant, and childish. So she makes it necessary for the white to subjugate and protect them. In her novel, no cruelty against the black is detected.
Randall corrects such distorted image of the black by creating Cynara, a heroin of the novel, who is a half sister of Scarlet O'Hara in the original story. Cynara was born of a white Planter and a black slave Mammy. Because of her black origin under the slavery which destroys the parental and filial relationships particularly, she undergoes a trial represented by her hatred against her own parents and the world. She is suspicious toward the world including her mother, and extremely jealous about her opponent Other. The victim of the slavery is not only Cynara; Lady, Planter's wife, is also a victim of "One drop rule."
In The Wind Done Gone, Randall elaborates how the black survive in the hostile world and find hope eventually. As the novel progresses, Cynara becomes aware of the distorted quality of her love for R. and stops hating her mother and her sister and rival Other. Moreover, she begins to esteem her black origin and acknowledge her value thanks to her new lover Congressman. Randall also asks who is a genuine owner of Tara by foregrounding Mammy and Garlic who make all efforts to keep in shape the plantation, even to kill their owner's legitimate heirs. In the novel, it is Garlic who inherits the Planter's watch, by which Randall maintains that Tara belongs to the people who actually work on it. Her rewriting thus inscribes the black's lives hidden and oppressed in the white author's text and traces the trajectory of a black heroine's self-discovery.