I can empathize with Bonnie Blodgett's appreciation of Scarlett O'Hara ("Why 'Gone with the Wind' should not be gone," June 15). I, too, once loved Scarlett's defiance of gender norms. However, I can no longer see Scarlett as the admirable heroine Blodgett admires.

In elementary school I read "Gone with the Wind" three times, inspired by seeing the film with my mother. I didn't understand my mother's tight-lipped disapproval of the book, but perhaps when she saw the film again in the 1970s, she saw things in it that made her uneasy. But she didn't yet have the words to explain. Certainly those misgivings crept into my own thoughts about the text as I grew up.

Blodgett claims that the film "is not racist," that the removal of the film from HBO Max is "sexism," and that the novel "has seldom, if ever, been properly interpreted." I can only surmise that she is unaware of the vast amount of critical attention that has been paid to both book and film in academic circles over the years.

If she were aware of that criticism, she would know that Mitchell herself told of being "practically raised on" Thomas Dixon, whose work inspired D.W. Griffith's "Birth of a Nation," widely considered one of the most racist works in American cinema.

Mitchell's novel continues a long tradition of fiction that portrays a romanticized version of slavery in which masters are benevolent and human beings are happy in their enslavement. As if any human being could be happy to be a slave.

Andrew Leitner notes that "plantation fiction tended to highlight an ideally ordered and genteel society of manners that engaged in slavery as a benign institution." Before the Civil War, such novels served as propaganda to convince the country that slavery was an institution that should be preserved. Blodgett notes that in the world of the novel, slaves and former slaves "admire," "love," and are "devoted" to Scarlett. But these are simply fictional portrayals that perpetuate the plantation myth.

The film also reinforces stereotypes of African-Americans, such as the limiting roles of mammy and maid. Patrician Hill Collins explains how such stereotypes "justify U.S. Black women's oppression" in her book "Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment."

Further, Scarlett's "rebellious spirit," crumbles when she encounters another of Mitchell's damaging stereotypes, the dangerous black man, and the Ku Klux Klan sweeps in to avenge her honor. This characterization may be the most harmful in the film, given the plague of lynchings of black men in the United States during the 1930s and 1940s, which continue to this day.

Blodgett claims that Scarlett was both "challenged" and "redeemed" by the collapse of the South, but it is after that collapse that her actions lead to the murder of a black man. Further, it's hard to see her as a strong woman when her primary goal throughout story is to manipulate a married man into loving her.

Like Blodgett, I can feel a sort of nostalgia for feisty female characters like Scarlett O'Hara and Laura Ingalls. But these characters have taught us much that we must unlearn. Might we not be better allies for our neighbors if we had not read these stories full of horrific stereotypes and violence against people of color?

Blodgett argues that we should think for ourselves rather than accept censorship, and that's an important point. But these are powerful texts that rewrite American history and promote white supremacy. Perhaps we can agree that a film that advances the idea of a mythical past in which people were happy to be in bondage, and that promotes stereotypes that limit and endanger people of color, should not be viewed without resources and conversation about the fallacies of those notions and the harm they cause.

Anne Elstrom Park is a former English professor.