In "The 24-Hour Man" from AMAZING ADVENTURES #35, Don McGregor makes one reference to Margaret Mitchell's GONE WITH THE WIND, apart from his general strategy of setting the tale in Atlanta, where the main action of Mitchell's novel takes place. At the story's opening, McGregor writes:
Scarlet O'Hara led Rhett Butler to distraction in this city, till finally he swept her into his arms with Clark Gable finesse-- only to leave her with a casual farewell-- "Frankly, Scarlet, I don't give a damn!
Following a caption designed to bring the reader into the (futuristic) present, Mc Gregor adds:
--and there are still women, even here, in these ruins, who can make a man curse, yet still be lost!
There's no way of telling from the story whether or not McGregor read the novel, but the mention of Clark Gable leads me to guess that he's referencing only the movie-- though strangely, he gets one of the most famous lines in cinema wrong. It's "My dear, I don't give a damn" in the book, and the movie adds the emphatic (and rather courtly) "frankly," but neither line addresses Scarlett by name-- a name which McGregor manages to misspell twice.
My analysis of "24-Hour Man" will touch on some of the larger issues of rape, both in its literal and metaphorical aspects, but I feel constrained to point out that McGregor's interpretation of the story is strangely off-kilter, even if his main motivation was to enlist the icons of GONE WITH THE WIND to enhance his very different theme.
Still, given that McGregor must have known how well the events were known to educated readers, it's peculiar that he would misrepresent Mitchell's events so egregiously. He telescopes the event of Scarlett's spousal rape with Butler's leavetaking, as if Butler left once he's had his fun. Even the ill-chosen word "casual"-- which doesn't apply to the Butler character, either in the book or the film-- seems calculated to make Butler seem like a "love-'em-and-leave-'em" cad, when in fact he's in love with Scarlett for a much longer period than she is with him. Here's my summation of the spousal rape and the emotions behind it, from the second part of the FAKE-RAPE series:
Yet GWTW's rape is more than a mere "bodice-ripper:" it speaks to specifically female issues, not in terms of the relationships of women to men, but of women to other women. Few if any female readers will fail to realize my earlier point, that Rhett has fallen in love with Scarlett even at a time when she primarily thinks of him as an attractive scoundrel who has a lot of money. Scarlett commits many sins for which readers will want to see her punished, as do her detractors within the novel-- but for many readers this will be her worst sin: failing to love the man devoted to her, and forbidding him from her bed simply because she does not want more children. In addition, her continued pursuit of Ashley Wilkes-- although somewhat on the wane by the time the spousal rape takes place-- adds fuel to the fire that causes Rhett to lose all control. Of course, as both the book and its film-adaptation make clear, the "punishment" is something less than punitive. By the generally sunny disposition Scarlett displays the next morning, Leslie Fiedler surmises that Scarlett has had her first orgasm, though Fiedler admits that Mitchell does not say this in so many words.
It's at least true that Scarlett drives Rhett "to distraction," though McGregor isn't concerned with the Southern belle's specific, quasi-adulterous actions. "Finesse" is a word that could apply to a lot of Clark Gable's courtship of Vivien Leigh in the film, but it hardly applies to the spousal rape, and indeed it's not finesse that seems to have impressed Scarlett in the book/movie. McGregor's final reference to Mitchell's heroine comes closest to capturing the icon's original appeal, that she has the power to make men curse, and yet cannot save herself from being "lost."
With this bit of cross-comparison out of the way, I can concentrate better on the story proper in the forthcoming mythcomics analysis.
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