The Fashion of the New World Woman. A Semiotic Reading of the Myth of Scarlett O’Hara: From Novel to Film

DOI

10.2991/978-2-38476-140-1_26How to use a DOI?

Keywords

Gone with the wind; fashion; mythologies; meaning system

Abstract

With this work, we aim to conduct a semiotic structural analysis of women’s clothing in the New World, with particular attention to the analysis of the novel and film “Gone with the Wind.” To accomplish this, we refer to several texts by Roland Barthes, focusing on the so-called “semiological phase”. We employ a semiotic research method grounded in Peirce’s semiotic triangle theory and Barthes’ semiological system. Both approaches will be used to explain the field of fashion, focusing on the analysis of Scarlett’s dress. This study expands on Barthes’ semiotic analysis by also incorporating Peirce’s semiotic triangle theory as a model that can aid in grasping and understanding how a specific garment-object is interpreted by employing an interpretant. In the introduction, we analyze certain aspects of the society in which the myth of “Gone with the Wind” and its heroine, who identifies with the mythical Tara, unfold as the leitmotif of the novel and film. We attempt to analyze the fashion of the era from a semiotic perspective, taking as our object of analysis the famous “improvised dress”, that Scarlett created using the curtains from Tara (a case of clothing-parole), understood as a semiotic system capable of accounting for the signs, added meanings, or fragments of ideology that are related to the culture and history of the era (clothing-langue). Furthermore, we endeavor to apply Peirce’s theory of the semiotic triangle to the construction of Scarlett’s improvised dress. In the conclusions, we highlight how it is possible to apply semiotic categories to the field of fashion, finding both a signifier and a signified, a clothing-parole and a clothing-langue analyzed in a diachronic/synchronic manner. This also allow us to psychologically frame the wearer of the garment, her defiance of the gender codes of the era, and her incompatibility with traditional American myths. Even the colors and fabrics of the clothes play a fundamental role, they are chosen with care and attention according to the scene to be represented: we have colors such as white, green, black and scarlet red, which reflect the different shades of the protagonists’ personalities.

Copyright

© 2023 The Author(s)

Open Access

Open Access This chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/), which permits any noncommercial use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license and indicate if changes were made.

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TY  - CONF
AU  - Valeria Dattilo
PY  - 2023
DA  - 2023/11/07
TI  - The Fashion of the New World Woman. A Semiotic Reading of the Myth of Scarlett O’Hara: From Novel to Film
BT  - Proceedings of the 5th International Conference on Language, Linguistics, and Literature (COLALITE 2023)
PB  - Atlantis Press
SP  - 249
EP  - 260
SN  - 2352-5398
UR  - https://doi.org/10.2991/978-2-38476-140-1_26
DO  - 10.2991/978-2-38476-140-1_26
ID  - Dattilo2023
ER  -