True Blood, the Sookie Books and Gone With the Wind

Throughout the Sookie books, you see references that Sookie makes to that most famous of the Southern Mystique, Gone With the Wind. I remember the first time I saw the movie as a little girl and I remember the first time I ever read the book (I was 12) and when I started watching True Blood, then reading the books, I could really see a parallel to both stories. Of course Scarlett is not a telepath and Ashley and Rhett are not Vampires, but there is enough to go on.

Sookie as Scarlett O'Hara- It is really easy to see Sookie as Scarlett O'Hara. There are good and bad things about Scarlett. She is stubborn, determined, pretty (though GWTW opens up with the words "Scarlett was not beautiful but men rarely notice it,") and sometimes a little ruthless. She is not lucky in love and she has to deal with the world of men who see her as a weak woman who must be taken care of.

When we meet Scarlett, she is in love with Ashley Wilkes, her neighbor and heir apparent to Twelve Oaks. She has a pretty idealized notion in who Ashley is and resents anything that gets in her way of that idealized image. She sees Ashley as the ultimate romantic figure and has the impression he feels for her the same as she feels for him, and the same way most of the beaus in the county feel about her. She is the daughter of a wealthy plantation owner, the darling of his eye, and she acts accordingly.

Sookie, on the other hand, knows that she is pretty but she is "disabled". Her telepathy limits her ability to relax in a clinch, so to speak, so there is no romance in her life. She is hard working and lives with her grandmother who loves her a great deal and worries about her, but has a certain amount of pride in her because she is pretty and bright and seems destined for a lonely life. When she does begin to have romantic relationships, she too is unlucky in love, and resents that the men in her life see her as the quintessential southern belle and needs to be looked after and protected.

After the war, Scarlett really comes into her own, though she has to take on responsibilities that are seen as unbecoming, like being in business for herself, driving her own buggy, harassing her friends and neighbors for money owed to her business and doing business with Yankees. This makes her something of a social outcast. Her only defender is Melanie, who sees her as the paragon of strength and beauty and courage.

Sookie also sees herself as an independent woman and loathes the notion that she might be a "kept" woman, that she cannot fend for herself, and then there is the matter of her choice of suitors. This above all things make her more of an outcast than people's perceptions of her mental state. The fact that she dates, works with and makes money from Vampires makes her a suspicious character in the minds of people who may already be wary of her. Her one defender is her gran, who loves her and sees her ability as a God-given talent and sees Sookie as a real catch to the lucky man able to see past her specialness.

In love, Scarlett wants to be with Ashley, this is the one she pinned her hopes on. But Ashley betrays her by not falling in love with her and marrying his cousin Melanie instead. Betrayed, she goes to the solace of the first man she encounters, the sweet, baby like Charles Hamilton, Melanie's brother.

Sookie falls pretty hard for her neighbor, Bill Compton, and makes him her first lover. In a way that Scarlett could never have done, she goes to him and claims him...but like Scarlett, she has always claimed Bill. From the moment she sees Bill in Merlotte's she refers to him as "her Vampire".

Both Sookie and Scarlett tend to put off tomorrow what is too painful to think about today. After all, tomorrow is another day. They have both killed a man, Scarlett kills a Yankee who is going through the house, stealing the last of her bits and pieces. One could argue that she killed Mr. Kennedy, her husband, by riding alone in her buggy without an escort and being attacked by the outlayers. Sookie has a considerably higher body count under her belt.

Bill as Ashley Wilkes- Bill is the handsome, sad, gentleman neighbor who meets Sookie and promptly has to be rescued by her. Scarlett does pretty much the same thing by taking Ashley to Atlanta with her to have him run one of her lumber mills. This saves him from having to go to New York and live (gasp) among Yankees.

Bill sees war in the same context as Ashley. Ashley's references to the Civil War's close as "Gotterdammerung" or the Twilight of the Gods, the end of the ideal, pretty much echoes Bill's telling Sookie: "The Glorious Dead, there is nothing glorious about dying in a war, starving scarecrows fighting so that rich people can stay rich...madness," It is sheer waste and it effected Bill strongly.

Ashley is of course very courtly, perhaps to a fault, seeing as how he took Scarlett around all summer and treated her with such deference that Scarlett was sure that he was going to ask her to marry him. Of course he doesn't. Bill, on the other hand, makes it quite clear that he is interested in Sookie but, unlike modern men, he is quite reserved and courts her carefully. There is always the Vampire issue, but that element is of no value in the comparison at this time.

Ashley does not express sexual desire, he is that much of a gentleman, til he is splitting rails in the ruined orchard around Tara and Scarlett comes to him about the taxes on Tara. They find one another in a clinch and Scarlett is very near surrender when Ashley holds back and stops it, saying he almost forgot about the sweetest wife in the world and drug her down on the earth with him and had her right then and there. Bill isn't that courtly, but he is quite different from the men Sookie has encountered either physically or mentally.

Ashley, when he arrives in Atlanta, joins up with a certain secret society, the Klan. Bill too belongs to maybe not a secret society, seeing as how his kind are out of the coffin, but he is a member of a social group that has secretive ways about them and secret structures and laws about them that are often at odds with the government, that have a way of dealing with both their kind and humans who interfere with their world.

Bill also holds pretty old fashioned notions about women (He remarks on how little Sookie's dress covers her, that he liked petticoats, and oh yeah, the whole 'I am here to protect you' thing that puts our Sookie into a snit) But he does let her have her own life, he doesn't try to make her stop working and he tries to support her in her independence as much as his masculinity and his Vampiric nature will allow.

But then, there is a wrinkle in the two stories and his name is Rhett/Eric.

Eric as Rhett Butler- Looks aside, Eric and Rhett could be twins. They are both mercenary, self promoting and rough and tumble men with a taste for adventure. They also love Sookie/Scarlett for what they think she is: the female version themselves.

Rhett is with Scarlett on the road to Tara and he pulls Scarlett down from the buggy, "You and I are alike, bad lots the both of us, but we see things and call them by their real names," Eric says pretty much the same thing when he offers what he considers a high compliment: "You would make a fair Vampire, Sookie," suggesting that she has just enough ruthlessness about her to make a good Vampire. In the show, Eric tells her in the dream "You have the right temperament to be a Vampire," Both Sookie and Scarlett demur, they don't see it quite that way.

Eric is a born money maker, wealthy, ambitious, who likes to live by his wits. So does Rhett. He was a blockade runner, running guns and supplies to the rebels (for a price) during the war. Eric is fairly ruthless in the protection of his bit of Shreveport and his empire with Fangtasia as his base of operations. He makes a lot of money for himself and his minions.

Sexually, Eric and Rhett are alike. They like women and they know what to do with them and to them. They treat women with a certain level deference but they also like sex and they are not above teaching a gal a few things. Rhett is the first man who french kisses Scarlett and presses her so close to him that she can feel exactly how he feels about her. Eric is not shy, he is very straight forward "I have always been very fond of you....Plus, I want to f@ck you," (Gotta love that straightforwardness girls). He is the also the first man we suspect Sookie has given oral sex to. Eric may not believe in the hereafter, but when he is around, you know what he is here after.

But, like all the men in Sookie/Scarlett's life, the men are jealous, well, in Sookie's life. Ashley may care for Scarlett and feature her in a couple of fantasies, for which he probably chastises himself, but he is not jealous of her. The same cannot be said for Sookie. Aside from the other men in her life (Sam, Alcide and Quinn) Eric and Bill both are jealous of each other and the other men (Sam, Alcide, and Quinn) in Sookie's orbit.

But how does it end? For Scarlett, after mooning after Ashley for so long, she finally has her chance with the death of Melanie to step into the arms of her beloved Ashley to find that he is lost in sorrow and his dreams, where he was happy to remain all his life had Melanie lived. Then it dawns on her who had always loved her, Rhett Butler. But he is the act of leaving her and tells her "Frankly Scarlett, I don't give a damned,"

For Sookie, we don't know yet. Bill has been a bit of a scoundrel, taking a page out of Rhett's book, and been underhanded, so the glamour, so to speak, has rubbed off Bill a bit, though I think he has regained some of that in the last book. She is cuddled up in the arms of the Big Viking relationship wise, but even that has a barrier with the blood bond.

We shall have to see how it all turns out and see if this becomes something of the new Southern Mystique.