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alex_ellermann 's review for:
Gone with the Wind
by Margaret Mitchell
GWTW is a very well-written book. It’s required reading for those interested in learning more about the Lost Cause mindset.
For people from the Eastern U.S., particularly the South, the psychology of the Lost Cause mindset may seem self-evident. Those of us who grew up in the California public school system, however, didn’t get much more than the basics of Civil War history. Junipero Serra and the Mission Trail? Oh, yeah. Chickamauga and Antietam? They may as well have been talking about the Battle of Red Cliffs or the Siege of Mafeking. Our education on the matter, as far as I can recall, boiled down to “Lincoln freed the slaves. He got shot, which was a bummer. We all got on with the project of becoming The Greatest Nation in World History.” After all, while California gold financed the Union, no major battles were fought on its soil. The Civil War was “them” history, not “us” history. Imagine my surprise when, on my first day at the Naval Academy, one midshipman shouted “The South shall rise again” and another responded, “And the North shall kick its ass again!” Who were these people? Was there even any decent skiing east of the Rockies? Not to mention my lovely sponsor family, who looked after me while I was at Annapolis. When they first spoke of The War of Northern Aggression, I chuckled. I thought they were joking. For a guy like me, someone who’d never been exposed to the Lost Cause mindset that the Antebellum South had been a glorious paradise despoiled by ruthless Northerners, it was all so foreign.
Enter GWTW. Author Margaret Mitchell, a White Southern Lady of the first order, structures the novel around one Scarlett O’Hara, a despicably selfish and amoral teenager who, over the course of the novel, grows into a despicably selfish and amoral woman. Scarlett couldn’t care less about the talk of rebellion percolating among the men in her circle. It all seems like so much blustery foolishness, as pointed out by archetypical scoundrel Rhett Butler when he notes that the South may have fighting spirit, but the North has cannon factories. When things go, um, south for the South, Scarlett realizes that she can no longer get by on her good looks and her ability to be the belle of the ball. She gets to work, growing into a ruthless businesswoman, to the horror of her “ladylike” peers.
Yes, there’s a love triangle. Yes, Rhett Butler really is the archetypical scoundrel in U.S. popular culture: there is no Han Solo without Rhett Butler. And, yes, the whole thing is built on a racism as deep as bedrock. But the thing I’m really interested in is that Lost Cause ideology. Right up until the South loses Atlanta, Mitchell writes about the Rebellion as folly. Men who can’t wait to go to war are soon eclipsed by men who realize they’ve been had, and only bad things come from the conflict. When the war ends, however, notes of nostalgia begin to creep into characters’ conversations. Embittered by the financial power of Northerners come south to make their fortunes and scandalized by Black people who expect to be treated like, well, people, O’Hara and her peers romanticize the Antebellum past, lend respectability to abominations like the Ku Klux Klan, and coalesce around a new, Lost Cause, ideology. Even Butler, often the only clear-eyed character around, gives in and joins “society.” It’s as if, while reading the book, one can see the Lost Cause coming into being.
As a novel qua novel, GWTW is a terrific read. While its protagonist is awful, she’s never boring. One gets the sense that there’s a whole other novel, one about the Black experience of these same events, happening in the background - but that this story’s characters (and its storyteller) are blind to it.
GWTW is well worth reading. Not only will it help the reader understand the ideology of the Lost Cause, but it’ll also entertain for its roughly one thousand pages. I’m glad I finally picked it up.
For people from the Eastern U.S., particularly the South, the psychology of the Lost Cause mindset may seem self-evident. Those of us who grew up in the California public school system, however, didn’t get much more than the basics of Civil War history. Junipero Serra and the Mission Trail? Oh, yeah. Chickamauga and Antietam? They may as well have been talking about the Battle of Red Cliffs or the Siege of Mafeking. Our education on the matter, as far as I can recall, boiled down to “Lincoln freed the slaves. He got shot, which was a bummer. We all got on with the project of becoming The Greatest Nation in World History.” After all, while California gold financed the Union, no major battles were fought on its soil. The Civil War was “them” history, not “us” history. Imagine my surprise when, on my first day at the Naval Academy, one midshipman shouted “The South shall rise again” and another responded, “And the North shall kick its ass again!” Who were these people? Was there even any decent skiing east of the Rockies? Not to mention my lovely sponsor family, who looked after me while I was at Annapolis. When they first spoke of The War of Northern Aggression, I chuckled. I thought they were joking. For a guy like me, someone who’d never been exposed to the Lost Cause mindset that the Antebellum South had been a glorious paradise despoiled by ruthless Northerners, it was all so foreign.
Enter GWTW. Author Margaret Mitchell, a White Southern Lady of the first order, structures the novel around one Scarlett O’Hara, a despicably selfish and amoral teenager who, over the course of the novel, grows into a despicably selfish and amoral woman. Scarlett couldn’t care less about the talk of rebellion percolating among the men in her circle. It all seems like so much blustery foolishness, as pointed out by archetypical scoundrel Rhett Butler when he notes that the South may have fighting spirit, but the North has cannon factories. When things go, um, south for the South, Scarlett realizes that she can no longer get by on her good looks and her ability to be the belle of the ball. She gets to work, growing into a ruthless businesswoman, to the horror of her “ladylike” peers.
Yes, there’s a love triangle. Yes, Rhett Butler really is the archetypical scoundrel in U.S. popular culture: there is no Han Solo without Rhett Butler. And, yes, the whole thing is built on a racism as deep as bedrock. But the thing I’m really interested in is that Lost Cause ideology. Right up until the South loses Atlanta, Mitchell writes about the Rebellion as folly. Men who can’t wait to go to war are soon eclipsed by men who realize they’ve been had, and only bad things come from the conflict. When the war ends, however, notes of nostalgia begin to creep into characters’ conversations. Embittered by the financial power of Northerners come south to make their fortunes and scandalized by Black people who expect to be treated like, well, people, O’Hara and her peers romanticize the Antebellum past, lend respectability to abominations like the Ku Klux Klan, and coalesce around a new, Lost Cause, ideology. Even Butler, often the only clear-eyed character around, gives in and joins “society.” It’s as if, while reading the book, one can see the Lost Cause coming into being.
As a novel qua novel, GWTW is a terrific read. While its protagonist is awful, she’s never boring. One gets the sense that there’s a whole other novel, one about the Black experience of these same events, happening in the background - but that this story’s characters (and its storyteller) are blind to it.
GWTW is well worth reading. Not only will it help the reader understand the ideology of the Lost Cause, but it’ll also entertain for its roughly one thousand pages. I’m glad I finally picked it up.