Gone with the wind

A post about my candidate paper (C-uppsats), knitting and ladders on a sock. This is how my sock look right now:

The very long sock is really fun to knit even though I’m having severe problems with “ladders” between the knitting sticks. Ugly and annoying – but no matter how hard I knit the first and last stitch of each stick the trace is still there.

I’ve been reading 10 papers this week for commenting on and talking about in class. Half a paper, than coffee, some knitting on the growing sock (that is going to be very long) – and then back to the papers.

I’ve just finished writing my own paper, a project work at the level of candidate (C-uppsats = C thesis) in Literature. Something I’ve worked on during November and December of last year. It is about gender roles, and one specific woman’s role in the society of Margaret Mitchell’s bestselling novel Gone with the wind from the 1930’s. It was fun writing, and I hope my classmates (who will comment on it on Friday) will think the same when they read it.

As a feminist I think it’s important to see how gender plays games with us, even though we invented “gender roles” as a concept ourselves. We might think that we are free, but as long as pink is a girl’s color (a gender specific color), everyone is not equally free to pick a favorite colour. And no mother, who doesn’t want to explain herself to every new acquaintance she makes, can choose pink for her boy. It’s sad. Maybe it’s just a colour, but it’s not just colours is it? If different things are expected from a boy then it is from a girl, when we raise a child, their expectations on themselves will never be “equal” – and the world will not be either.

In Gone with the wind (the book I mean, read the book and don’t watch the movie!) it is very clear that Scarlett O’Hara is intelligent but has to conceal this to get married, since her gender role is to be “womanly”! Quote:

She knew how to smile so that her dimples leaped, how to walk pigeon-toed so that her wide hoop skirts swayed entrancingly, how to look up into a man’s face and then drop her eyes and bat the lids rapidly so that she seemed a-tremble with gentle emotion. Most of all she learned how to conceal from men a sharp intelligence beneath a face as sweet and blank as baby’s. (p. 61)

This is one of my favorite books of all times. One thousand pages of love and war. Have you read it yet? What did you think?

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