Book review: Gone with the Wind
This post is a companion piece to my review of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, the 1852 novel, which is mentioned in Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind (in an unflattering light).
Let’s deal with this first: “The n-word” and the racism it conveys make frequent appearances in Gone with the Wind. This is not unusual for 1936. For many years, I’ve been reading books and plays in the order in which they were first published/produced, and nearly everything I’ve read from the 1930s contains this at some point, frequently for no reason whatsoever. Novels including Nightwood by Djuna Barnes and The Well of Loneliness by Radclyffe Hall suddenly contain a gratuitous racial slur, on a page that could be removed from the book without affecting the story at all. On the other hand, William Faulkner uses the language of racism to depict it full-on, conveying something powerful to his readership (e.g., Light in August).
In Gone with the Wind, Mitchell uses words the way a good writer does: to show how her characters, black and white, view each other and the world around them. There are gradations of terms for white people as well as black, used by both and for both. Cracker, for instance, is used in Mitchell’s Georgia to refer to someone quite different from poor whites or “white trash.” And the way the book’s protagonist, Scarlett O’Hara, thinks and talks about other people changes and coarsens over the hard experiences of her life.
In other words, the language and perspective in Gone with the Wind show at least as much about the characters and their lives as it does about the period in which it was set, let alone written. And that is because Margaret Mitchell is a master of fiction’s most powerful tool—point of view. An epic movie, like the one her only novel was made into, can pull back the camera and show us cinematic sweep, but it’s very limited in what it can show us about a character inside. Mitchell uses the way her characters talk and think, above all Scarlett, to color (no pun intended) the view. And she’s not afraid to shift viewpoint, sometimes to another character, even just once in a book of more than 800 pages, if she thinks it will show us something we’d miss without it.
I came to this novel expecting, or fearing, a glamorization of the antebellum South. What I found was that more than half the book takes place after the Civil War is over, during the period of Reconstruction, which haunts black and white America to this day.1 Scarlett O’Hara is such a famous character—the spoiled, haughty heiress of a plantation with a hundred slaves—that I was picturing Vivien Leigh from the famous film.
On page 1 of the book, we learn two very important things. The first is that Scarlett is just sixteen years old when the story begins in 1861, on the eve of Georgia’s secession from the United States. This means that she’s only a teenager until the end of the Civil War, or as it’s referred to throughout the novel, “the war.” The other, more important thing that we learn about Scarlett from the very beginning is that she is not a very moral or empathetic person.
This, I believe, is Mitchell’s genius. Scarlett loves her mother, Ellen, and wants to be more like her: an idealized figure who rose above her own broken heart and taught Scarlett to treat everyone with the dignity befitting their role in this highly stratified society. But over and over again, throughout the book, the author explicitly shows that her protagonist stops even listening to those around her, halfway through a conversation, and almost never imagines a point of view other than her own. The reader does root for Scarlett, in terms of her determination to survive. But I don’t think we’re meant to like her.
Even in perhaps the book’s ugliest episode, when Scarlett finds to her horror that many of the men in her life are involved with the postwar Ku Klux Klan, this is portrayed as her fault. We are to understand that if it weren’t for her recklessness, not adhering to the complicated rules of how a white woman should behave in this South riven by division, both white and black men would suffer less.
I believe that Scarlett O’Hara is an embodiment or symbol of the South. She’s not interested in the war, and the men closest to her don’t want the war, but they identify with their state more than with the Union, and so off they go. (It’s hard for us to imagine this perspective from the twenty-first century, when “states’ rights” has become synonymous with defending racism or slavery; but it was a genuine thing and why the brilliant general Robert E. Lee fought for Virginia instead of the U.S.A.) What Scarlett does show awareness of is all the conventions that constrain (white) Southern women, requiring them to win over men by making them believe that they, the women, are stupid and helpless. The “Southern lady” stereotype is frequently sent up by Mitchell’s narrative voice, which steps out of Scarlett’s narrow, selfish point of view and shows us the larger world. Women are shown as needing to manipulate their men, and as being far more passionate about the doomed cause of the Confederacy than the men who actually fought the war—especially after it is over:
[T]he women were the implacable and inflexible power behind the social throne. The Lost Cause was stronger, dearer now in their hearts than it had ever been at the height of its glory. It was a fetish now. Everything about it was sacred, the graves of the men who had died for it, the battlefields, the torn flags, the crossed sabres in their halls, the fading letters from the front, the veterans. These women gave no aid, comfort or quarter to the late enemy, and now Scarlett was numbered among the enemy. (p. 703)
Scarlett sees the horrible wounds and the dying, the burning of Atlanta by Sherman’s Federal troops, unsentimentally. She is transformed from the Old South to the New, and it is not a transformation for the better.
Never explicit in the novel, but threaded throughout, is a generalization I’ve heard many times: “Southern whites hate blacks as a race, but love them as individuals; for Northern whites, it’s the other way around.” The Yankees, as perceived by Scarlett and other white Southern characters, believe that black people should be their equals. Yet individual Yankees—with whom the mercenary Scarlett has frequent dealings, to the despair of her idealizing “Lost Cause” compatriots—don’t want black people near them, let alone in their own homes.
One of the most powerful scenes, in a book full of them, involves Peter, a driver whom Scarlett calls “Uncle” because that is how someone of her race and class addressed a valued black member of the household (he is freed from slavery). Peter sits silently on the driver’s seat while a Yankee woman disparages black people in the strongest possible language, as if he is not even present. Scarlett is outraged, but not outraged enough. Afterwards, Peter reproaches Scarlett, asking how she could not stand up for him, or speak up for him—since he can’t for himself. Scarlett, as usual, has no good excuse, and Peter is as dignified a character as you will find in any book. He refuses to ever drive Scarlett again.
The “negroes,” abstractly, whom Scarlett and other Southern whites want to keep down during Reconstruction are out there somewhere, a rabble as anonymous as the white-hooded Klansmen. But the individuals are people whom Scarlett is glad to have in her life—Peter, Sam, Pork, Dilcey. Above all, one character who, until a 2014 prequel2 authorized by the blessing of Mitchell’s estate, did not even have a name of her own: Mammy.
We are so used to cringing at stereotypical “Mammys” over the years, but we must try not to bring that baggage to the Mammy of this novel, because she is Mitchell’s finest creation. I have heard Gone with the Wind fans refer to Mammy as Scarlett’s conscience. While a conscience is certainly something Scarlett needs, it’s unfair to embody it as another character, when Mammy is a woman in her own right. I would go so far as to say that Mammy is the hero of the book, even though Scarlett is the main character.
From the beginning, although enslaved, Mammy does not merely serve the O’Haras; she tells Scarlett what she should do, a role that becomes more important as Scarlett grows up, rather than less important. After the war, there is more than one occasion on which Scarlett tries to tell Mammy what to do—go back to what’s left of the plantation, Tara, for example. Each time, Mammy reminds Scarlett with immense dignity: “I is free.” Mammy chooses to act, with a will and love of her own—perhaps more than other characters who, because of their race or sex, have more power in society than she does. There is even a moment in the novel when the narrator compares Mammy to Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar:
Without waiting for a reply, Mammy turned and left Scarlett and if she had said: “Thou shalt see me at Philippi!” her tones would not have been more ominous.
The plot of Gone with the Wind can be roughly summed up as: a young woman goes back and forth with her feelings for two very different men. Her relationships are as tumultuous as are the epochal events happening around them. If I were to detail the famous characters of Ashley Wilkes and Rhett Butler, this review would be longer than it already is. In support of my view that Mammy is the hero, I think it’s interesting that winning over Mammy seems to mean more to Rhett than winning over Scarlett.
With the exception of the Mammy Shakespeare reference, Rhett is usually the one making classical allusions around Scarlett. And Mitchell is at pains to show that Scarlett doesn’t know what Rhett is talking about and, moreover, doesn’t care. So thorough is the portrayal of Scarlett as someone incapable of seeing the world as someone else sees it. In fact, it’s only five pages from the end of this very long novel (p. 826) that we are explicitly told of Scarlett:
It was the first time in her life she had ever been sorry for anyone without feeling contemptuous as well, because it was the first time she had ever approached understanding any other human being.
The tragedy of Scarlett, and the South I believe she represents, is this colossal failure of human understanding. If Scarlett can’t see the viewpoint even of a man she loves, she would clearly never dream of seeing the world from the point of view of another race.
There is a reason this novel has kept people turning its hundreds of pages for so many years. It’s a great story. It is of another time, no doubt; but readers are likely to come away from it with a more complicated picture of the 1860s South, rather than a simplified one. There is something universal about a saga of a world being swept away, good and bad, such that no one is able to continue the life he or she had expected. Gone with the Wind is a tragedy but, thanks to its great characters, not a sentimental one.
Gone with the Wind, first published in 1936
Richmond, UK: Alma Classics edition, 2021
In Gone with the Wind, the exploitation of black men’s votes is a frequent complaint, and you can see the traces of conservative whites’ belief that giving equality, or rights, to black people meant taking something away from them. Because it did: ex-Confederates were disenfranchised under Reconstruction, and those men (only men) saw their votes literally replaced by the votes of free black men.
Ruth’s Journey by Donald McCaig
A fine review that shines a bright light on the many strengths of this much loved and much derided novel: Scarlett as a narcissistic and reckless "embodiment or symbol of the South"; Mammy as the hero of the novel--just two good examples.