The Gilmore Book Club

How Scarlett O’Hara can help you find your home

What do my mom and Lorelai Gilmore have in common? There could be several answers to this, and a few of those will appear in the blog in the future, but for right now, the answer is the devotion to the cultural education they give their daughters. Over all seven seasons, Lorelai and Rory watch numerous movies ranging from Casablanca to Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory. While some of their film choices are a tad bizarre, most are classic films that are an essential part of cinematic history and worth watching at least once. Lorelai set out to give Rory the best, most well-rounded education possible, and movies are certainly an integral part of that Gilmore education.

My mom provided the same education for my sister and me. Although we often grumbled and made sarcastic comments about it, we watched some of the most well-known movies because of my mom. She’s the reason I fell in love with films like Roman Holiday, White Christmas, and An American in Paris.  But for every movie I adored, there was one I couldn’t stand. Gone With the Wind sadly fell in that category because from the very beginning I did not like Scarlett O’Hara.

Normally, the audience is supposed to root for the protagonist. We identify with them, befriend them, and experience things with them, but in a few cases, the protagonist isn’t created to be liked. Instead, they are created to prove a point or to reveal something about that society and culture. Scarlett O’Hara is one such protagonist.

Focused on her seventeen-inch waist, a man that is someone else’s husband, and dancing the night away, Scarlett O’Hara immediately struck me as selfish and frivolous.  Of course, she endured terrible hardships and survived one of the bloodiest American wars, but none of that seemed to make a difference on her character.  Though famous in the world of film and literature, Scarlett O’Hara was definitely not one on my list of top heroines.

Yes, movies are different from the books, and in most cases, the books are far better. So, I tried to push all my issues with the cinematic Scarlett aside and read the novel with fresh eyes. However, once I started reading, my frustrations quickly returned.  But I had made a promise to read these books to the end, and so I would. I finished the book, and that was that. 

A few months later, I found out that I needed to look for an apartment. My roommate was married, and it was time for me to find a place of my own. Anyone who has ever lived in New York knows that it’s the worst place to try and find a home. This is the third major U.S. city I’ve lived in, and nothing had prepared me for the maelstrom that is trying to find a place to live in New York. There’s not only the issue of finding a new place, but also filling out extensive applications, interviewing to live there, packing up your current home and moving it to the new place.  And of course, every step of this process costs an exorbitant amount of money which, if you’re just starting out in your career, is a major cause of stress. Moving is never easy, but as fate would have it, I was going through the moving process at the worst possible time.

I work for a lingerie sales agency and we take all the brands we manage to a big expo show at the Javits Center twice a year. These shows take massive amounts of planning, prepping, and packing- and I coordinate it all. During the month before the show, I was dealing with all kinds of issues everyday both at work and at home, trying to get both of these massive things done at once. You’ve heard of Murphy’s law, right? Well, things can and did go wrong. Each day brought up so many new problems, and I was a complete wreck trying to deal with it all. So much so, that one day after I found out about a few more hurdles I had to jump through, I had to give myself a time-out in the bathroom, because I couldn’t stop the tears from rolling down my face.  The more days that passed, the more impossible everything was becoming.

So, there I was, barely holding it together and still getting up every morning to do it all over again. My mind was a chaotic jumble of to-do lists, deadlines to meet, and upcoming problems, but one thought kept repeating itself: I’ll think about it tomorrow.

And no one is the queen of “thinking about it tomorrow” more than Scarlett O’Hara. How were the words of someone I disliked so much the only thing that seemed to be holding me together? How had I come to a point where I was identifying with Scarlett? It doesn’t really matter how it happened; what matters is that it did happen. Scarlett, her devotion to Tara, and her reactions to war were a constantly flickered through my mind.

I didn’t know then that I was fighting for Tara too, and my battle had just begun.

Continue to Part 2

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