I was thinking about this when I was reading The Age of Innocence – the book is set in the early 1870s, yet when you read it you’d barely notice the story happened only a few years after the war; but in Gone with the End (the story is set between 1861 to 1873, so the later part of it actually happened at the same time as the story of The Age of Innocence), everyone’s life was forever changed by the war, and was still going through changes in the reconstruction era. It feels like people from the North just fought a war, won it, and went back to their normal life, going into a new era as time went on; while the South somehow got stuck in time, some characters in Gone with the Wind didn’t even want to start over and rebuild their life, they just wished to reverse time, live in an old dream, and make things go back to the way they were.
My question is: did the two books accurately reflect how people from the North and the South felt after the war? Did people from the North basically forget about it in the 1870s, while the South felt affected by it much more severely, and wanted to ‘go back in time’ instead of ‘move on’? Or was it because Edith Wharton herself perhaps didn’t think much about it, while Margaret Mitchell clearly bought into the ‘lost cause’ myth, so she made her characters feel stronger about it?
by Chocolate_PannaCotta