Gone with the Wind (1936)

by Margaret Mitchell

Gone with the Wind endures while other racially offensive novels are no longer read. The complex, interesting characters of Scarlett O'Hara and Rhett Butler must account for the novel's being a perennial favorite. Scarlett is selfish and spoiled — but also self-reliant, unabashedly going after what she wants, proving herself a shrewd businesswoman generations before women left the household. Rhett is cynical and not respectable — but also honest, brave, and capable of caring. They are survivors. Their stormy relationship foreshadows the soap operas that became a daytime television mainstay.

Those who haven't read the book probably already know the broad outlines of the plot from the 1939 movie starring Vivien Leigh and Clark Gable. The setting is Civil War and Reconstruction–era Georgia: Tara, the O'Hara plantation, and Atlanta. Scarlett nurtures a love for her childhood companion Ashley Wilkes even after he marries his cousin Melanie. She enters into two loveless marriages while the swarthy, charming Rhett is hovering in the wings. Rhett hides his love for Scarlett behind mockery and propositions but is always there to save her with a loan of money or a carriage to flee Atlanta and the marauding Union army.

Scarlett's story is told against the backdrop of the devastating losses of the South, both in people and livelihood, during the war and its aftermath. Scarlett goes from being a pampered Southern belle to working the fields to save her family from starvation and Tara from ruin. She does whatever it takes to survive, even if it takes murdering a Yankee soldier. She raises the tax money to save Tara by stealing her sister's store-owning fiance and discovers she has a nose for business herself, scandalizing Atlanta as a female running a lumbermill.

Rhett finally claims Scarlett, but the marriage is doomed by Scarlett's continued longing for Ashley, and by the time Scarlett realizes she loves Rhett, he doesn't "give a damn."

As for the racism, Mitchell sympathized with the slave system and the Ku Klux Klan, and her black characters are nobel in so far as they serve the whites. Yet there is a historical value in reading the book. Gone with the Wind offers a Southern perspective on slavery, state's rights, the Confederacy, and the atrocities suffered during Reconstruction. Its look into the Southern mind, at least as it once existed, is instructive and unsettling for a Northern reader, even one several generations removed from the detested Northerners of the book.

Home               My reviews               My friends' reviews