¶ … Wind Done Gone: A legitimate parody, not a violation of copyright law
Alice Randall's The Wind Done Gone was conceived of as a sequel to Margaret Mitchell's Gone with the Wind, much in the way that Jean Rhys' Wide Sargasso Sea was written as a sequel to Jane Eyre. Randall's work was an implied criticism of the values of the original work, not simply fan fiction designed to capitalize upon the popularity of an original work of fiction by an author, now dead, who cannot produce new works (like the Jane Austen mystery series). The Mitchell estate's contention that The Wind Done Gone was a "blatant and wholesale theft" of Gone With the Wind seems spurious, given how The Wind Done Gone so "ardently contests the romanticized view of the antebellum South set down in Gone With the Wind and proposes an Afrocentric version of history in its stead. It is both a commentary on an iconic work of fiction and a repudiation of that novel's worldview" (Katutani 2001).
Randall never claimed her work to be an authorized sequel. The fact that the Mitchell estate failed to prosecute the author of the poorly written, popular sequel Scarlett that was written in the spirit of celebrating the racist, antebellum South is testimony to its hypocrisy. The Randall novel also violated several caveats placed by the Mitchell estate upon authorized sequels: "that Scarlett never die, that miscegenation and homosexuality be avoided" and Randall further suggests that "Scarlett had a black ancestor, that Tara was really run by savvy slaves who knew how to manipulate their white masters and that Rhett pursued Scarlett only because she looked like her mulatto half-sister, Cynara, who was the true love of his life" (Katutani 2007).
As noted by the Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals in its "Comprehensive Opinion Vacating Preliminary Injunction" dated October 10, 2001, finding in favor of Randall's publishers, copyright law does not protect an artist against criticism or commentary -- far from it, copyright was designed to promote freedom of expression, yet that was exactly what the Mitchell estate was attempting to stifle. (17).
Works Cited
"Comprehensive Opinion Vacating Preliminary Injunction." Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals
October 10, 2001. November 7, 2009.
http://www.houghtonmifflinbooks.com/features/randall_url/pdf/Comprehensive_Opinion.pdf
Katutani, M. "Critic's notebook: Within its genre, a takeoff on Tara gropes for a place." The New
York Times. 2001. November 7, 2009.
http://www.racematters.org/thewinddonegone.htm
