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wrenreads2025 's review for:
Gone With the Wind
by Margaret Mitchell
Like many, I first watched the film before picking up the book. However, it's been 25 years between watching and reading and in the years between I earned a graduate degree in English, which gave me the opportunity to study feminism, Marxism, regional literature and post-colonialism. This made me a lot more aware of the treatment of gender, economics/class, depictions of both the North and the south and the depiction of slaves and slave owners (as well as freed slaves and white non-slave owners).
This novel is not a romance. It's much more complicated than that. And this novel has a richness about it that prevents me from tossing it for its glaring prejudices.
Gone with the Wind contain a lot of information about how the South represents itself. It's not a simple apologist view for why the South was wronged by the North. Nope. In the first half of the novel (Ft. Sumner to the burning of Atlanta), Mitchell has several characters describe and analyze the relationship between the North and South in the war. It's not comprehensive, but it's more nuanced than I expected from an woman from Atlanta writing the novel from 1925 to 1935.
As a teen, I thought this novel was a love triangle with Scarlett caught between two men--a Southern gentleman and a scalawag. While reading the novel, I can see that these two men function like symbols for the Old South and the New South. Ashley is rural, decorous, intellectual, artistic, diplomatic and a bit effeminate. Rhett is urban, blunt, practical, crass, aggressive and possessing an animal magnetism. Scarlett dreams of possessing the Old South by dreaming of possessing Ashley, but she keeps going to Rhett to get resources in order to survive her immediate challenges.
The book also has a broader landscape than these three. It has a lot of detail in the early chapters about the textile industry. I thought this was just the choice of the movie makers to have elaborate costumes, linens, drapes and upholstery. No. All this detail and more is described richly in the novel. Also the battle scenes and strategies are described in detail. And the social circles of Atlanta get a lot of attention as well.
Another richness is the diversity of depiction of women from various walks of life--white and black, upper class, working class, and the underclass. Now that I'm older, I can see how the novel shows younger women all the various ways a woman can function in society (at least Civil War Era Georgia): debutante, widow, old maid, devoted mother, mammy, high society ladies, business women, prostitutes, ravished women, house servants, women who do charity work, women of leisure and so on.
In some ways, the novel can be read as a big circle with Scarlett being raised by her mother and black mammy and then supported by them and by Melanie as the three moral compasses throughout the novel. And when Scarlett fails to maintain a relationship with a male (dad dead, Charles dead, Frank dead, Ashley proven unfit, Rhett leaving her), the end of the novel has her thinking of her mother and her mammy and of Melanie's goodness. It's a bit maddening to see the "good girls" work tirelessly with no fanfare while Scarlett gets all their physical labor and emotional labor. So Scarlett gets to have her cake and eat it too. (The heroine is more "earthy" than the others and then end up the saint based on these mother-saint figures' love and sacrifice for her.)
Anyway, I imagined this novel as being great material for multiple book-length critiques--and I'm sure those exist. I just haven't looked for them yet. So I will stop my dissertation-length review and end with: WOW! So much richer than I imagined (but I'm still a bit disturbed by the sexism, bigotry and class-ism of the novel).
This novel is not a romance. It's much more complicated than that. And this novel has a richness about it that prevents me from tossing it for its glaring prejudices.
Gone with the Wind contain a lot of information about how the South represents itself. It's not a simple apologist view for why the South was wronged by the North. Nope. In the first half of the novel (Ft. Sumner to the burning of Atlanta), Mitchell has several characters describe and analyze the relationship between the North and South in the war. It's not comprehensive, but it's more nuanced than I expected from an woman from Atlanta writing the novel from 1925 to 1935.
As a teen, I thought this novel was a love triangle with Scarlett caught between two men--a Southern gentleman and a scalawag. While reading the novel, I can see that these two men function like symbols for the Old South and the New South. Ashley is rural, decorous, intellectual, artistic, diplomatic and a bit effeminate. Rhett is urban, blunt, practical, crass, aggressive and possessing an animal magnetism. Scarlett dreams of possessing the Old South by dreaming of possessing Ashley, but she keeps going to Rhett to get resources in order to survive her immediate challenges.
The book also has a broader landscape than these three. It has a lot of detail in the early chapters about the textile industry. I thought this was just the choice of the movie makers to have elaborate costumes, linens, drapes and upholstery. No. All this detail and more is described richly in the novel. Also the battle scenes and strategies are described in detail. And the social circles of Atlanta get a lot of attention as well.
Another richness is the diversity of depiction of women from various walks of life--white and black, upper class, working class, and the underclass. Now that I'm older, I can see how the novel shows younger women all the various ways a woman can function in society (at least Civil War Era Georgia): debutante, widow, old maid, devoted mother, mammy, high society ladies, business women, prostitutes, ravished women, house servants, women who do charity work, women of leisure and so on.
In some ways, the novel can be read as a big circle with Scarlett being raised by her mother and black mammy and then supported by them and by Melanie as the three moral compasses throughout the novel. And when Scarlett fails to maintain a relationship with a male (dad dead, Charles dead, Frank dead, Ashley proven unfit, Rhett leaving her), the end of the novel has her thinking of her mother and her mammy and of Melanie's goodness. It's a bit maddening to see the "good girls" work tirelessly with no fanfare while Scarlett gets all their physical labor and emotional labor. So Scarlett gets to have her cake and eat it too. (The heroine is more "earthy" than the others and then end up the saint based on these mother-saint figures' love and sacrifice for her.)
Anyway, I imagined this novel as being great material for multiple book-length critiques--and I'm sure those exist. I just haven't looked for them yet. So I will stop my dissertation-length review and end with: WOW! So much richer than I imagined (but I'm still a bit disturbed by the sexism, bigotry and class-ism of the novel).