Gone with the Wind

I seldom review books that I hate. I seldom have a love/hate relationship with a book and read 400 pages into it. I also seldom mark books this long as read when I DNF them. This book seems to have altered my normal pattern.

I did like this...in parts. I enjoyed the repartee between Rhett and Scarlett (although I loathe Scarlett). I like Melanie and Ashley. I enjoyed the writing style...up to a point.

And herein lies my difficulty with this book.

Scarlett O'Hara is a mean girl through and through. She behaves like a child, although she *is* a child for a good portion of the beginning of the book. She's selfish, self-centered, and callous. She throws fits if she doesn't get her way, much like a small child would. She's never been confronted with such hardship. That would make for a compelling novel, even if I dislike the protagonist. That wasn't the real issue.

My real issue with this book is just how glaringly, horribly, disturbingly racist it is. Mind you, when I first read this book, I was twelve. I suppose at the tender age of twelve, one can overlook a lot. At thirty-six, it's much harder.

This book glorifies the Confederacy, villainizes the North/Yankees, and, the straw that broke this reader's back, depicts slaves/black people as subhuman. They are alternatively cowards, savages, disloyal to their "families" (because nothing says family like buying and selling people like chattel!), stupid, ignorant, and simple-minded as a whole. Mitchell paints a broad brush with this. One can argue that since it's third-person limited, these might be Scarlett's thoughts. Except...they're clearly not. They're the overarching opinion of the narrator.

I should mention that I'm white, but I grew up in the North. Maybe that has something to do with it. I know that the mores have changed since this book was written. I know that blacks are no longer slaves/subjugated to this extent. I know since the protagonist is a Southern belle, she probably shares the narrator's opinions.

You want to say that this book is a product of its time? That's true, for its author. Perhaps. I'm not so convinced.

But the way the blacks are portrayed in this novel is infuriating to me. John Jakes' North and South series is much better in this regard, although of course it is, since it was published much later. I want to be invested in the story, but I can't because every time a black person is described as traitorous to their "family" by fleeing slavery or considered stupid/cowardly/what have you, the Yankees are depicted as savages (war makes savages of us all, but I digress), every time that happens, I get yanked forcefully out of the book.

I wonder if I read the same book all of these other readers did. There must be something wrong with me to react this strongly and aversely to this book. But here it is.

I apologize if this stirs the hornet's nest. I probably won't be responding to many, if any, comments on this review, just for the sake of my sanity.

I love you, Scarlett, because we are so much alike, renegades, both of us, dear, and selfish rascals. Neither of us cares a rap if the whole world goes to pot so long as we are safe and comfortable.

I loved

Gone with the Wind so much—and I highlighted so many passages—that I’ve had a hard time writing a review. For a 1,000-page book, it absolutely flies by.

There’s so much I could talk about ad nauseam, but in the name of finally getting this review written I’m doing a bullet point version, in no particular order:

• Scarlett is a terrible person and absolutely fantastic character. Fiery, intelligent, and willing to do absolutely anything to get what she wants, she does not care a whit for anyone else (there’s an especially heartbreaking chapter from Wade’s perspective). She uses her femininity as a weapon in a society that would otherwise use it to cripple her. Her downfall is not just her selfishness, but that she always wants what she

can't have and doesn't want what she

does until it's too late.

• The chemistry between Scarlett and Rhett is off the charts from their very first scene together. Their repartees are fireworks. Actually, the romance is a bit trashier, for lack of a better word, than I would have expected—it gets pretty steamy.

• The color green is everywhere, most prominently as the color of envy, of greenbacks, of Scarlett’s emerald wedding ring, of her eyes.

• The writing is fantastic. In and of itself it’s not especially showy, but Mitchell paints beautiful, atmospheric pictures of the settings. Some scenes feel a little clumsy, like when

Rhett comes back with Ashley and they pretend they were at the whorehouse

, but in general Mitchell marries an accessible style and fast-paced plot with more literary descriptions and character nuance. Sometimes the dialects she gives to characters is a bit hard to make out, but that’s a minor complaint.

• Here is the rare work of historical fiction that does not impose modern morals onto the characters and society. Mitchell’s extensive research replicates (an albeit idealized version of) the South in its self-professed glory days, for better and for worse. Some of the slavery imagery and discussions are absolutely nauseating. Some of this authenticity unfortunately seems to come from Mitchell herself being racist: the Black characters are portrayed as childlike and simple, often in language that might be used to describe a pet dog (eyes rolling in excitement, etc.), and she goes out of her way to portray the Confederacy and KKK in unerringly positive terms beyond the limited perspectives of the characters. It makes for a complicated novel and complicated characters (who would still be racist even in the non-racist version of this novel).

Gone with the Wind is a definite and instant favorite that I’m sure I’ll be rereading.

Some favorite passages:

She loved him and she wanted him and she did not understand him. She was as forthright and simple as the winds that blew over Tara and the yellow river that wound about it, and to the end of her days she would never be able to understand a complexity.

Cotton was the heartbeat of the section, the planting and the picking were the diastole and systole of the red earth.

Scarlett did not hear the rest of the laughing words. For one short instant, it was as though the sun had ducked behind a cool cloud, leaving the world in shadow, taking the color out of things. The freshly green foliage looked sickly, the dogwood pallid, and the flowering crab, so beautifully pink a moment ago, faded and dreary. Scarlett dug her fingers into the upholstery of the carriage and for a moment her parasol wavered. It was one thing to know that Ashley was engaged but it was another to hear people talk about it so casually. Then her courage flowed strongly back and the sun came out again and the landscape glowed anew. She knew Ashley loved her. That was certain.

Because she hated herself, she hated them all with the fury of the thwarted and humiliated love of sixteen.

“Sir,” she said, “you are no gentleman!” “An apt observation,” he answered airily. “And, you, Miss, are no lady.”

He thinks the war is all wrong but he’s willing to fight and die anyway, and that takes lots more courage than fighting for something you think is right.”

The hot nights brought a measure of quiet but it was a sinister quiet. When the night was still, it was too still — as though the tree frogs, katydids and sleepy mockingbirds were too frightened to raise their voices in the usual summer-night chorus. Now and again, the quiet was broken sharply by the crack-cracking of musket fire in the last line of defenses.

And the lazy streams were redder now than ever Georgia clay could make them. Peachtree Creek was crimson, so they said, after the Yankees crossed it. Peachtree Creek, Decatur, Ezra Church, Utoy Creek. Never names of places any more. Names of graves where friends lay buried, names of tangled underbrush and thick woods where bodies rotted unburied, names of the four sides of Atlanta where Sherman had tried to force his army in and Hood’s men had doggedly beaten him back.

Was Tara still standing? Or was Tara also gone with the wind which had swept through Georgia?

She did not think of it consciously but in the back of her mind, whenever she was confronted by an unpleasant and difficult task, the idea lurked giving her strength: “I’ve done murder and so I can surely do this.”

“Cheer up,” he said, as she tied the bonnet strings. “You can come to my hanging and it will make you feel lots better. It’ll even up all your old scores with me — even this one. And I’ll mention you in my will.” “Thank you, but they may not hang you till it’s too late to pay the taxes,” she said with a sudden malice that matched his own, and she meant it.

She looked from the alcove into the huge drawing room and watched the dancers, remembering how beautiful this room had been when first she came to Atlanta during the war. Then the hardwood floors had shone like glass, and overhead the chandelier with its hundreds of tiny prisms had caught and reflected every ray of the dozens of candles it bore, flinging them, like gleams from diamonds, flame and sapphire about the room. The old portraits on the walls had been dignified and gracious and had looked down upon guests with an air of mellowed hospitality. The rosewood sofas had been soft and inviting and one of them, the largest, had stood in the place of honor in this same alcove where she now sat. […] Now the chandelier hung dark. It was twisted askew and most of the prisms were broken, as if the Yankee occupants had made their beauty a target for their boots. Now an oil lamp and a few candles lighted the room and the roaring fire in the wide hearth gave most of the illumination. Its flickering light showed how irreparably scarred and splintered the dull old floor was. Squares on the faded paper on the wall gave evidence that once the portraits had hung there, and wide cracks in the plaster recalled the day during the siege when a shell had exploded on the house and torn off parts of the roof and second floor.

But she wasn’t going to be poor all her life. She wasn’t going to sit down and patiently wait for a miracle to help her. She was going to rush into life and wrest from it what she could.

Then he had thought it all beyond her mental grasp and it had been pleasant to explain things to her. Now he saw that she understood entirely too well and he felt the usual masculine indignation at the duplicity of women. Added to it was the usual masculine disillusionment in discovering that a woman has a brain.

“Good Lord!” he cried impatiently. “Don’t you ever think of anything but money?” “No,” she replied frankly, turning hard green eyes upon him. “And if you’d been through what I have, you wouldn’t either. I’ve found out that money is the most important thing in the world and, as God is my witness, I don’t ever intend to be without it again.”

She fell to trembling and, for the first time in her life, she saw people and events as something apart from herself, saw clearly that Scarlett O’Hara, frightened and helpless, was not all that mattered.

But they were, as a class, childlike in mentality, easily led and from long habit accustomed to taking orders.

Her pleasure in these thoughts of the future was un-dimmed by any realization that she had no real desire to be unselfish or charitable or kind. All she wanted was the reputation for possessing these qualities.

The word itself horrified her. Frank always referred to her pregnancy embarrassedly as “your condition,” Gerald had been won’t to say delicately “in the family way,” when he had to mention such matters, and ladies genteelly referred to pregnancy as being “in a fix.”

She could tell him. She could tell Rhett anything. He'd been so bad himself that he wouldn't sit in judgment on her. How wonderful to know someone who was bad and dishonorable and a cheat and a liar, when all the world was filled with people who would not lie to save their souls and who would rather starve than do a dishonorable deed!

"Hush," he said. "I am asking you to marry me. Would you be convinced if I knelt down?"

"But Rhett, I—I don't love you." "That should be no drawback. I don't recall that love was prominent in your other two ventures."

I just don't like being married." "But, my poor child, you've never really been married. How can you know? I'll admit you've had bad luck—once for spite and once for money. Did you ever think of marrying—just for the fun of it?" "Fun! Don't talk like a fool. There's no fun being married." "No? Why not?"

"It's fun for men—though God knows why. I never could understand it. But all a woman gets out of it is something to eat and a lot of work and having to put up with a man's foolishness—and a baby every year."

"I said you'd had bad luck and what you've just said proves it. You've been married to a boy and to an old man. And into the bargain I'll bet your mother told you that women must bear 'these things' because of the compensating joys of motherhood. Well, that's all wrong. Why not try marrying a fine young man who has a bad reputation and a way with women? It'll be fun."

She felt again the rush of helplessness, the sinking yielding, the surging tide of warmth that left her limp. And the quiet face of Ashley Wilkes was blurred and drowned to nothingness. He bent back her head across his arm and kissed her, softly at first, and then with a swift gradation of intensity that made her cling to him as the only solid thing in a dizzy swaying world. His insistent mouth was parting her shaking lips, sending wild tremors along her nerves, evoking from her sensations she had never known she was capable of feeling. And before a swimming giddiness spun her round and round, she knew that she was kissing him back.

"Say Yes!" His mouth was poised above hers and his eyes were so close that they seemed enormous, filling the world. "Say Yes, damn you, or—" She whispered "Yes" before she even thought.

"No, my dear, I'm not in love with you, no more than you are with me, and if I were, you would be the last person I'd ever tell. God help the man who ever really loves you. You'd break his heart, my darling, cruel, destructive little cat who is so careless and confident she doesn't even trouble to sheathe her claws."

It was modeled after a Swiss chalet." "A Swiss what?" "A chalet." "Spell it." She complied. "Oh," he said and stroked his mustache.

Encouraged by Rhett's amused tolerance, freed now from the restraints of her childhood, freed even from that last fear of poverty, she was permitting herself the luxury she had often dreamed—of doing exactly what she pleased and telling people who didn't like it to go to hell.

"Do you remember," he said and under the spell of his voice the bare walls of the little office faded and the years rolled aside and they were riding country bridle paths together in a long-gone spring.

He read her like a book. He had always read her and he was the one man in the world from whom she would like to hide her real thoughts.

God damn him, what ails him? He can't be faithful to his wife with his mind or unfaithful with his body. Why doesn't he make up his mind?

"Yes, sorry because you're such a child, Scarlett. A child crying for the moon. What would a child do with the moon if it got it? And what would you do with Ashley? Yes, I'm sorry for you—sorry to see you throwing away happiness with both hands and reaching out for something that would never make you happy. I'm sorry because you are such a fool you don't know there can't ever be happiness except when like mates like.

And apologies, once postponed, became harder and harder to make, and finally impossible.

"He never really existed at all, except in my imagination," she thought wearily. "I loved something I made up, something that's just as dead as Melly is.

She stepped onto the dark porch and closed the door behind her and the moist night air was cool upon her face. The rain had ceased and there was no sound except for the occasional drip of water from the eaves. The world was wrapped in a thick mist, a faintly chill mist that bore on its breath the smell of the dying year. All the houses across the street were dark except one, and the light from a lamp in the window, falling into the street, struggled feebly with the fog, golden particles floating in its rays. It was as if the whole world were enveloped in an unmoving blanket of gray smoke. And the whole world was still.

But, Scarlett, did it ever occur to you that even the most deathless love could wear out?"

I loved you but I couldn't let you know it. You're so brutal to those who love you, Scarlett. You take their love and hold it over their heads like a whip." Out of it all only the fact that he loved her meant anything. At the faint echo of passion in his voice, pleasure and excitement crept back into her.

I can't even lie to you now. I wish I could care what you do or where you go, but I can't." He drew a short breath and said lightly but softly: "My dear, I don't give a damn."

"I'll think of it all tomorrow, at Tara. I can stand it then. Tomorrow, I'll think of some way to get him back. After all, tomorrow is another day."

Detail, rich historical detail