Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell
I’d never read this book, nor seen the movie, but anyone who doesn’t know at least something of Gone With the Wind was probably not raised in America. This book, for better or for worse, defines the Civil War for many people. It’s epic in scope, encompassing both antebellum Georgia and reconstruction. Moreover, it’s got a few unforgettable characters whose lives entangle and complicate one another. I got this as an audiobook, so I’m going to guess on how the names are spelled.
Scarlett O’Hara is the daughter of a lady of great family in Charleston and an upstart Irishman who still carries tales of the hated Orangemen and Cromwell. When the novel opens, Scarlett is a young teen, the belle of the county, who holds great power over the young swains because of her position, her breeding, her vivacity, and her utter lack of morals. (Note, I mean the genderless “lack of morals” meaning “evil” not the feminine “lack of morals” of the day meaning “giving the appearance of possessing a sexual nature.”) Scarlett loves collecting beaus, pitting them against each other, and generally tormenting them. She loves balls, pretty frocks, and social gatherings, especially when the men don’t bore her by talking about war.
But of course war comes anyway. In case you weren’t raised in America, here’s a grotesque oversimplification of the causes of Civil War.
North: We’re outlawing slavery.
South: You can’t do that. What, and pick this cotton ourselves?
North: Well, no one’s doing it in Europe anymore, and slaves don’t fit with our lifestyle.
South: We really need slaves. If you keep trying to stop slavery, we’re leaving the union.
North: You can’t leave. We’re united. We’re going to make you stay.
South: Oh yeah, you and what army?
North: This one.
(spoiler, the South lost.)
I’m not an expert on the Civil War. I’ve read maybe four books that dealt with the subject, and most of those were historical fiction. For the sake of argument, I’m going to presume that Gone With the Wind is a historically accurate novel. After all, when it was written, there were still people alive who had fought in the war, so Mitchell was closer to the source material than we were. I’d always wondered why the “poor crackers” were willing to fight to keep their states entrenched in a feudal, agricultural society. Surely it would benefit the non-slaveowning south to maintain an alliance with the industrial North? But people don’t always look at the big picture, especially people who all seem to have an utter disdain for education. Based on the society presented in this book, this was a very backwards, tribal, honor-bound society, obsessed with male violence and control of women. It reminded me closely of a book I read about an anthropologist in Iran.
Example: Rhett Butler at the beginning of the novel has scandalized society because of his scandal. He went walking with a young lady, they got lost and didn’t get back until late. Her reputation was ruined and he was therefore supposed to marry her because they had the means and opportunity to have sex, which is just as good as having done it. Her brother challenged Rhett to a duel and lost. The girl was ruined, her brother was dead, and Rhett was considered a rake and a cad but because of his parents’ families he still got invited to parties. This is a society in which you can literally be ostracized if you’re caught hugging an opposite-gendered person who is not family. If a woman does wrong, she is basically “ruined” and exiled socially. If a man does wrong, he might be challenged to a duel.
So you’ve got these men for whom fighting is the most manly thing you can do, and cowardice is the worst thing you can do. Also, family is everything. Everyone is connected through marriage and blood, and since so many people die, they often marry two or three times. Got it?
Okay, plot. Scarlett loves Ashley Wilkes, mostly because he’s a true Southern Gentleman, bred (like her) to be strictly ornamental. He reads a lot of books and references Greek tragedies and a lot of other things Scarlett can’t understand, but she thinks she’d like to have him as her own and live at his pretty house of Twelve Oaks, so she falls in love with him. But he’s going to marry his cousin Melanie, because inbreeding is very fashionable if you’re from a clannish insular culture obsessed with family connections.
Scarlett decides to marry Melanie’s brother Charles because doing so would hurt the greatest number of people. That is literally her thought process. One of her sisters was sweet on Charles, and she wanted to hurt Ashley, and she thought it would keep her closer to him to marry his bride’s brother. Charles dies and Scarlett goes to live with Melanie and her aunt in Atlanta, which at the time is a bustling brand-new town full of exciting people.
Melanie is too-good-for-the-world. She’s a sugar-sweet paragon of virtue who is loyal and kind and true to Scarlett no matter what happens. Scarlett hates her, because Melanie has Ashley, but Ashley makes Scarlett promise to take care of Melanie while he’s at war. Scarlett does so, and in one of her few selfless acts, remains with the very-pregnant Melanie when the union army marches towards Atlanta and everyone else evacuates. All the doctors are busy helping the dying men, so Scarlett helps Melanie give birth. With help from a horse and wagon that Rhett steals for her, she flees Atlanta and goes back to her plantation, Tara.
When she gets there, she finds that almost everything has been burned, and Tara has been looted more than once. She and the remaining house slaves (all the field slaves having left) try to eke out a subsistence on the plantation, using hard work and guile. This is Scarlett’s dark night of the soul. Her mother had died, and her father lost his mind, so it’s up to Scarlett to keep the household fed. She even picks cotton, a task so menial that the house slaves flat-out refuse to do it. You may think that this shared hardship would erode some of the hierarchy which governed their lives, but no. Example: they are going to slaughter a young pig, and it is understood that the white folks will get the ham and the “darkies” will get the fat back and chitlins. This is the only part of the book where I started to feel sorry for Scarlett. She’s maybe 19 at this point, a mother and widow, working long hours with the threat of starvation and ruin always at her back. Plus, soldiers come by and rob them on occasion, either union soldiers who rob them at swordspoint, or confederate soldiers who take from them because of the the iron rule of southern hospitality. One man, a hardworking paragon of virtue named Will, comes to the plantation and ends up helping her run it. He eventually marries Scarlett’s brainless sister, and Scarlett’s neighbor is surprised Scarlett will allow it, since Will is not aristocracy. They don’t actually say “aristocracy,” but that’s basically what the planter’s class was.
It’s been said that his book is overly favorable to the glorious antebellum south, very pro-confederate, but if you think this puts the south in a positive light, you’re not paying attention. Because Scarlett is the point of view character, we’re filtered by her complete and utter self absorption, but the clues are there. At the beginning of the book, Scarlett’s father Gerald O’Hara has purchased Dilsy, who is the wife of his manservant Porque. She’s expensive, and we’re meant to take from this that Gerald is an old softy, who takes good care of his slaves even when it doesn’t directly benefit him. Dilsy is so pleased, she gives her daughter to Scarlett “for your very own.” From anyone other than Gerald or Scarlett’s point of view, this whole situation is so horrible that I can’t think about it too much or it will upset me. As horrible as it would be to find oneself enslaved, the idea of my child being enslaved would crush my soul. When the field slaves abandon Tara, Scarlett chastises them for disloyalty, and says they are too stupid to know how dangerous it was out there with all the union soldiers around. Slavery was better for them. They couldn’t take care of themselves. They were never suffering and miserable, she says. People don’t abandon the only home they’ve ever known to flee into a war-torn and hostile country because they had a happy home life and were happy being enslaved. She says the world will not be right again until the cotton is picked by dark hands instead of white. Hrm. Later, when Scarlett gets a sawmill, she claims that she can’t use “free issue darkies” because they won’t work hard enough and she’s not allowed to whip them. She gets convicts instead, and a cruel overseer who will literally work them to death. Really, Scarlett? If you are incapable of managing employees without whipping or chaining them, you are not a good manager. But no, Scarlett, it’s all the fault of reconstruction. Bless your heart, of course you can’t be expected to have employees who are allowed to go home at night.
Most of the injustices heaped upon the south involve taking power away from the old, ruling-elite families ossified by intermarriage and contempt for outsiders. I say good riddance. Scarlett has nothing but contempt for Belle Watson, the town madame, even though Scarlett herself nearly enters into the same kind of bargain. Scarlett would gladly kill Miss. Slattery, blaming her for Scarlett’s mother’s death, when Miss Slattery’s only crime was getting typhoid. Like the rest of her caste, Scarlett thinks that value comes from breeding, not actions. Also, those damn Yankees insisted on hanging poor innocent Southern gentlemen whose only crime was joining the Ku Klux Klan and murdering a few people for saying something offensive or for saying something to make someone else say something that offended a white woman. It was hard to feel sorry for these people. It was easier to feel sorry for the Romanovs.
Rhett Butler is an interesting character because he’s almost identical to Scarlett, excepting that he’s 17 years older and male so he always has the upper hand in their interactions. She is able to bully everyone in her life except him, though she treats him abominably. She can’t seem to handle any relationship in which she does not have power, whereas Rhett is able to handle one relationship (with his daughter Bonnie) in which he doesn’t have utter control. Rhett acts as deus ex machina more than once, swooping down to rescue Scarlett at convenient moments. He scandalized the town by dancing with her when she was still in official mourning for her dead first husband, and he scandalized them again by marrying her soon after the death of her second. He loves her, but he’s too proud to admit it, because he knows how cruel she is to those who love her. He’s constantly jealous of Ashley, and tries unsuccessfully to control her access to him.
Scarlett herself never really learns to change her ways until far too late. She’s a total bitch. I’ve met women a little like her in real life, the kind of woman who doesn’t have any female friends, because she only cares about using her sexuality to control and manipulate men. Men have power, and are therefore of use to her. Women offer only friendship, which she doesn’t understand. She is incapable of being vulnerable and therefore is incapable of any true friendship. Melanie is Scarlett’s only friend, but the friendship is carried exclusively by Melanie. These people are sad. In real life, men can live like this their entire (lonely) lives, but women like this usually lose their looks at some point and have nothing to replace them with. Scarlett eventually loses everything that might have given her life true meaning due to this utter cruelty and neglect. Because she’s such a horrible person, the collapse of her world is more satisfying than it might have been, but it’s still frustrating because it would have taken so little effort for her to keep from ruining everything. We’re supposed to admire her “fiery” spirit and “Irish temper” but as Rhett says, she’s a spoiled child who says things she doesn’t mean and then acts surprised that people took her at her word. She acts like a brat, which is mildly tolerable in a child too young to speak full sentences, but utterly contemptible in and adult. She’s the kind of woman who gives women a bad name.
This audiobook was 50 hours, and delightfully performed because the narrator, Linda Stephens, not only did the voices brilliantly, she also occasionally broke into song when the narration warranted it. She had a lovely voice. Still, after 50 hours of this audiobook, I feel like I should get 5 credit hours or something. Dang, that’s a long book. I’m amazed that Margaret Mitchell was able to stick with such an awful protagonist long enough to complete it. Scarlett is one of the most loathsome protagonists ever, and I commend Mitchell for churning out so many chapters without having Scarlett ever change her fundamental nature. I would have gotten frustrated and killed her off in chapter 5. Seeing evil finally get punished is only somewhat satisfying. I would have preferred to see good triumph, but I guess an occasional change is refreshing.
