1037
pages, Macmillan Publishing Company, ISBN-13: 978-0025854000
Gone With the Wind, Margaret
Mitchell’s one-and-only novel, may or may not be a good book, depending upon whom
you ask, but it has always been a popular book. First published in the summer
of 1936 at the startling Depression price of $3 (that’s $50 today, folks!), it
sold a million copies by Christmas and now ranks among the best-selling books
ever published in the English language. For all that it is difficult to
encapsulate this book in a few sentences: a tale of war and peace, of love and
loss, of despair and hope. It is also an historical epic that looks at one of
the most wretched and uncertain times in American history – the Civil War and
Reconstruction Eras – while also depicting the moral and psychological growth
of its characters as they undergo the destruction of their very way of life. Whew!
Gone With the Wind quickly became
one of those cultural products that transcend criticism, like Star Wars or Madonna, while never losing
its relevance. The story centers around the infamous protagonist, Katie Scarlett
O’Hara (Hamilton Kennedy Butler, in the fullness of time), chronicling her
journey from a spoiled 16-year-old Southern belle in 1861 to a weathered yet
determined grown woman in 1873. Of course, the significance of these years goes
far beyond Scarlett’s life, as much of the book is devoted to intricate details
of the South during the Civil War, from mere talk amongst townspeople to the brutality
of battle when the fight reaches their own backyards. There is bloodshed and
lives lost for the Cause – a way of life that Southerners (particularly in
Georgia, where the story is set) held onto with a determination they were ready
and willing to die for. Margaret Mitchell does a thorough job of showcasing
what life was like on the plantations before the war broke out, from barbecues
and balls to the dynamic between the families and their slaves (though mostly of
the household variety).
After
the war, there is Reconstruction, and as may come as a surprise to those who
haven’t read Gone With the Wind, hunger
is a constant theme, with Southerners’ humiliation at having lost the war compounded
by the sickening knowledge that they never had a chance of winning in the first
place. While reading the novel I thought back to what I had learned about the
South during this period from movies and books and compared it to what Margaret
Mitchell writes here: how the Yankees were viewed, the deceptive practices of
Carpetbaggers, and the hatred of Scalawags. These terms didn’t really present
their full impact until I was reading them from Scarlett’s point of view, as
well from the perspective of other Georgians. Furthermore, the reckoning that
came after for so many families is on brutal display here, as more than a
quarter-million men were dead, many cities and villages lay in near-total ruin,
and the region was denuded of nearly a third of its usable horses. Most people
see Gone With the Wind as a romance
novel, but the force that drives Scarlett O’Hara the hardest – what pushes her
to steal her sister’s businessman fiancé, rob a Yankee soldier she shoots in
the face, and run a mill that sells wood at punishing prices to former friends
– is the very mundane need to pay the property taxes on Tara, taxes that were
required to rebuild, and as everything else was gone, the only thing left to
tax was the land itself (the Slavocracy no longer had slaves or pigs or cotton
or pretty French dresses, but it still had land).
The
success of Gone With the Wind has
always defied the understanding of the powers-that-be: in a typical review from
the time, Malcolm Cowley in in The New
Republic found the novel to be not bad, really, but puzzling; he wrote that
Mitchell “blundered into big scenes that a more experienced novelist would
hesitate to handle for fear of being compared unfavorably with Dickens or
Dostoyevsky”. I mean…so? If Mitchell had the cajones to attempt “big scenes” more power to her, for, somehow,
she pulls it off. Cowley continued, saying “I would never say that she has
written a great novel, but in the midst of triteness and sentimentality her
book has a simpleminded courage that suggests the great novelists of the past”.
Well, thank you, Cowley, but perhaps what appeals to people, then and now, is the
undeniable pulse of romance. The opening line of the novel may be, “Scarlett
O’Hara was not beautiful,” but as Mitchell explains, men seldom realized it for
she possesses an undeniable charm that leaves them as putty in her hands. But
charming though she may be, she is not always willing to conform to the
standards of a “great lady” in her day. She can be coarse, brutally honest and,
as you’ll see when the plot unfolds, far too smart for her own good (tongue
firmly in cheek). Of course, when Scarlett meets Rhett Butler, things really
start to get interesting.
Scarlett
may turn out to be a venal grasper, but she (and Rhett Butler) has little
patience for war talk, even as the plantation boys around them become intoxicated
by the idea of war in 1861. Ashley is also wary; at the Twelve Oaks barbecue he
tries to quiet the wild enthusiasm before Bull Run, saying “Let's don’t have
any war”, he tells the roomful of hotheads. “Most of the misery of the world
has been caused by wars”…yet he goes off to fight, and so does Rhett (eventually).
The conflation of honor with the duty to fight defeats all other impulses, for
like most feudal societies, the South had to defend its honor, and so the
hotheads prevailed. Some would argue that Gone
With the Wind is retrograde and unforgivably racist, but I would argue
instead that Mitchell simply accurately captures the thoughts and spirit of the
Southern Slavocracy, which were, after all, retrograde and unforgivably racist.
For all that a kind of modernity emerges; the book is not really a tale of
North vs. South, but rather of Old South vs. New South, with Ashley
representing the Old – he “was born of a line of men who used their leisure for
thinking, not doing, for spinning brightly colored dreams” – and Scarlett representing
the New – she finds out that “that money is the most important thing in the
world”. With its loving descriptions of organdy and horsemanship, Gone With the Wind seems genteel, but it
is actually an unrelenting tale of how honor gives in to necessity; Mitchell
knew that loss was as tragic and inevitable as the South’s self-imposed
despoiling.
What
I perhaps admired most about Gone With
the Wind was the way in which Margaret Mitchell developed her characters; each
one is so full of life and personality that you come to appreciate them
regardless of whether you would think and act the same way they do. They share
commonalities but can also be irreconcilably different. Are you a Scarlett or a
Melanie? An Ashley or a Rhett? These are questions you may find yourself
smiling about as you work your way through those 63 chapters and 1000+ pages.
And they are worth it. Read this book first and foremost because it is a
classic deserving of its awards and praise, but also read it if you enjoy
immersing yourself in other periods of history. Margaret Mitchell paints a
vivid picture of life in the South, from belles and beaux, to Yankees and
Confederates, and everything in between.
