redswan 's review for:

Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell

5.0

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In the same way that one can despise and disapprove of Humbert Humbert, and yet regard Nabokov’s Lolita as a work of exceptional genius, so too we can register all the flaws and shocking behavior of Scarlett O’Hara and still recognize Gone With The Wind as a literary masterpiece. It’s an epic novel with hardly any likeable or even tolerable characters, and yet its 1000 pages fly by in a fascinating and engrossing narrative that creates the most immersive experience possible in a book of its scope. If you want to understand the Lost Cause mentality, you absolutely must read this book. A word of advice: try to avoid bringing the expectation of disapproval to this book. If you read it expecting an accurate historical appraisal of the Civil War and Reconstruction, you will be angry and disappointed. If you’re looking for anger, you’ll find plenty to outrage you. But if you’re looking for a window into the mindset of Southern plantation families as they lost their controlling grip on the world around them, you’ll be treated to a wonderfully immersive experience. The real fun for historians of memory is parsing out the attitudes that creep in from the 1930s from those imagined to belong in the 1860s. The book is arguably most instructive in what it suggests about Margaret Mitchell’s Atlanta.