War and Womanhood as Palimpsests: Adaptation and the Female Protagonists in Gone with the Wind and Cold Mountain

This paper examines film adaptations of Gone with the Wind (1936) and Cold Mountain (1997), particularly how their female protagonists, Scarlett O’Hara and Ada Monroe, respectively, are transformed by war and survival. With Linda Hutcheon’s concept of adaptation as a layered process, as discussed in A Theory of Adaptation, this paper explores how the films inscribe new ideas over the novels, yet continue to leave the source texts visibly imprinted, exactly like a palimpsest. The American Civil War serves as the backdrop for both texts, which portray war as a transforming force that breaks and changes socially accepted gender norms, rewriting female identity, emotion, and agency in ways that typically reconfigure or soften the contentiousness of these original characters. Concluding that adaptation is not just replication or a mere copy, but a layered process of cultural redrafting that mirrors shifting historical, ideological, and gendered perspectives.