My lab, Emily, and I recently watched Gone with the Wind together. Of course, I had to do a lot of translating, and Emily fell asleep for most of the second half (the years after the war).

 I swear I cannot walk by a TV when Gone with the Wind is playing. Maybe it is because there are so many confederate graves strewn across my family history. I feel it is my patriotic duty to watch.

Petulant Scarlett O’Hara is usually saying something peevish. It gets my dander up. Still. I stop  to see Scarlett get her just desserts. She is beautiful, but proud, gracious but selfish, genteel but volatile. She is a parody of the Old South. Why am I always sucked into this delusional romance?

Maybe it is because of my Irish roots. The O’Hara family is Irish of course. So! You missed that the first fifty times you saw the film? Did you think it was a coincidence that the O’Hara’s plantation is named Tara, after the ancestral home of the ancient Irish kings? Remember Scarlett, the much ballyhooed TV sequel to GWTW? It was set in Ireland of course.

I grew up in the fading glow of the “Lost Cause.” Little confederate flags on sacred graves of fallen heroes were part of ritual and memory. Confederate statues dominated the central square in every respectable southern town. Family stories told of hiding the family silver, so Sherman’s marauders could not steal it during the “March to the Sea.” Generals Lee and Jackson were deified in a hundred ways. Our school history lessons always stopped with Lee’s surrender at Appomattox, like a video that just would not play to the end.

Still, none of this explains the film’s powerful allure for my northern friends and relatives (formerly known as Yankees). Now that they have reoccupied Atlanta more than a century and a half after they won the war, they show no sign of weakening in their fascination with Scarlett and Gone with the Wind’s cardboard version of the Old South. Maybe it is because the boldly determined Scarlet is the embodiment of the modern woman, “self-actualized” at a time when the term was unknown.

I relieve my love-hate angst for Scarlett by working out alternative endings to her saga. How about casting her in the Meg Ryan role in You’ve Got Mail? Ashley Wilkes (in the Tom Hanks role) comes across a singles’ listing online that reads: “MWF. Youngish widow seeks soul mate who enjoys horseback riding and fancy dresses, loves cotillions and old uniforms. Ideal partner will be married to an angel, dignified and courteous, ambivalent and unavailable.”