Tomorrow is another day in the Confederate south

Struggling to survive as a woman in the Confederate south: Vivien Leigh as Scarlett and Clark Gable as Rhett Butler on a poster for the 1939 film of Gone with the Wind. Photograph: Courtesy Everett Collection/Rex

I agree wholeheartedly with Deborah Orr that Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind is a racist novel and also that banning it is not a helpful move (Yes, Gone with the Wind is racist, 27 June; and US critic: ‘undeniably racist’ Gone with the Wind should be banned from cinemas, 25 June). It is, as she says, a cultural artefact and one that reveals many attitudes from the time (it was published in 1936). It is as much about survival as a woman as about slavery.

I would rather they kept the Confederate flag and dumped the guns

Philip Pavey

The book, unlike the movie, sees Scarlett having to pursue marriage in order to live. She marries three times and has four pregnancies, the last conceived when Rhett Butler rapes her and then miscarried when she falls down the stairs during an argument with him. But she is unable to leave him because she would be outcast from society. Her last lines are not just about owning the land but about going on doing what she has to do to survive after Rhett walks out on her. It is indeed about many hard, brutal truths that should not be buried.
Jean McKendree
York

• I would rather they kept the Confederate flag and dumped the guns (Letter, 25 June). Isn’t it rather convenient that public wrath is deflected in this way towards an offensive symbol rather than to what is actually killing people?
Philip Pavey
Epsom, Surrey