“The Prong of Love”

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“The Prong of Love”

by Jacquelyn Dowd Hall
Southern Cultures, Vol. 5, No. 1: Spring 1999

"Drew Faust's central and important insight is that readers of Gone with the Wind must attend to how representations of race and gender work together."

Drew Faust’s central and important insight is that readers of Gone with the Wind must attend to how representations of race and gender work together. I could not agree with her more. But I also think that she oversimplifies that dynamic by failing to place it firmly in historical context and underestimates the roots of the book’s appeal in what Anne Jones, following Zora Neale Hurston, calls, so wonderfully, the “prong of love”— the racialized myths of heterosexual romance.

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