Gone with the Wind, by Margaret Mitchell

 

Gone with the Wind

Margaret Mitchell's Gone with the Wind is an enormous novel with an enormous problem: it is a story about survival and transformation set in the American South during and after the Civil War, and Mitchell tells it from a perspective that romanticizes the antebellum plantation world and marginalizes the enslaved people who made that world possible. Any honest engagement with the novel has to hold both things — the considerable achievement and the considerable moral failure — simultaneously.

Scarlett O'Hara is, purely as a character, one of American fiction's most vivid creations. She is not admirable in any conventional sense: selfish, manipulative, wilfully blind to her own emotional reality, capable of treating people as instruments with startling efficiency. She is also, in the way that genuinely complex characters are, completely alive on the page. Her determination to survive — her refusal to be broken by poverty, hunger, social catastrophe, or emotional devastation — generates a narrative energy that carries a thousand pages without serious flagging.

Rhett Butler is her perfect antagonist and eventual complement: the man who sees through her completely, finds her fascinating rather than repellent for exactly that reason, and loves her with the particular frustration of someone who cannot get the other person to look at what is directly in front of them. Their relationship is one of literature's great mismatches of timing — they are suited to each other, they know it, and they manage to arrive at the same understanding at precisely opposite moments.

Ashley Wilkes is more interesting than he appears. He represents not simply Scarlett's romantic delusion but a specific Southern type — the man whose genuine virtues (sensitivity, culture, historical awareness) are inseparable from his fundamental unsuitability for the world that has replaced the one he was formed in. He knows himself clearly and that knowledge is its own kind of paralysis.

The Civil War's destruction of the plantation economy — and Mitchell's rendering of it — is where the novel's romantic mythology becomes most problematic and most revealing. Tara's survival depends on Scarlett's will, but the labor that sustains it remains largely invisible, the people performing it peripheral to a narrative organized around the white Southern gentry's suffering and adaptation.

Gone with the Wind rewards and requires critical reading — not reading that cancels its considerable narrative energy but reading that doesn't allow the energy to substitute for attention. Scarlett's famous last line, with its insistence on tomorrow, captures exactly the novel's relationship to discomfort: not denial but deferral, the conviction that the hard thing can always be faced on another day.

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