Gone With The Wind - Or - The Scorned Novel

Attempting to understand her pre-adolescent obsession with Mitchell's novel, the writer of this NY Times Op-Ed piece writes:

... in the world of “Gone With the Wind,” romantic thinking trumps everything, including war, civility, morality, starvation and childbirth. The book amazed me with the grandeur of its delusion.

It also made me guilty, perhaps above all because reading “Gone With the Wind” made me feel that a part of myself might be like Scarlett, that I, too, might be capable of caring about the wrong things in life, so long as I was loved by a man.

Then as a divorcing mom she has this insight about her middle-school Gone With the Wind obsession:

And so I forgot about “Gone With the Wind.” Until recently, when I was talking with a friend about our daughters (now in middle school themselves), and their fascination with impossibly lengthy, endlessly repetitive supernatural romances. I casually mentioned my romantic epic of choice, and it occurred to me that “Gone With the Wind” was in fact the ultimate young adult novel. The choice between two starkly different lovers (one gentlemanly, one roguish) appears, for the very young, to be a choice between two utterly distinct potential identities, two possible roads through life.

Still, what is the most insightful, interesting bit she writes is in that first sentence above, "that romantic thinking trumps everything, including war, civility, morality, starvation and childbirth. The book amazed me with the grandeur of its delusion."  She also in another part of the essay includes that this romantic thinking trumps slavery too, about which as a child reader she felt, vaguely, guilty.

Bulloch Hall, Roswell, GA, (1924 View) Family Plantation Home of Theodore Roosevelt's Mother,; Thought to be Margaret Mitchell's Inspiration for Tara

One of TR's Uncles Shot and Killed His "Little Shadow" the Slave Given to Each Bulloch Child at Birth, in a Fit of Bad Temper; This Same Uncle Played a Principal Role in the Confederacy's Attacks on Union Merchant Ships, and Financing Iron Clads for their Navy

Whereas I never liked romance fiction, for a host of non-romance reasons I did like Gone With the Wind very much. Like so many women, I encountered the novel for the first time when very young.  To this day I still believe Mitchell's portrait of Scarlett is brilliant. Scarlett's a character that stands without being put in the shade by Thackeray's Becky Sharpe, and -- dare I say? even Jane Eyre. She's the antithesis of a romance heroine, and I'd never before encountered such a woman as the center of fiction: selfish, mean, vital, hard, non-spiritual.  Shoot, this girl who grew up on reading-and-writing Jo March of Alcott's Little Women had never encountered a heroine who hated to read!  I was fascinated.

The essay's writer and the many commentators to what she wrote point out that the Gone With the Wind novel and the Gone With the Wind movie are quite different in their focus.  The movie is about nothing but the romance.  The novel is about much more. Much of that much more is wrong-headed and forged directly out of the Georgia versions of the Glorious Lost Cause.  But her portrait of post Civil War Georgia and Atlanta is broadly vivid in scope, created out of the personal reminiscences of her relatives and other members of the community.  Scarlett herself, because of the kind of woman she is -- hard-headed, good with figures and good at making money, not particularly maternal -- she fits among the antebellum women of her world no more than she does in the Reconstruction and Jim Crow south.  But the very destruction of the world into which she was born allowed her to exercise all those functions, which, because regarded as non-feminine, were prohibited before the war for women (yes, by law as much as by society), her incredible energy to do, to make, that was in her.

But the film leaves out all this.  I've watched it perhaps three times, once upon a restoration print on a huge urban film theater's screen -- and didn't care for it, for this very reason.  As well, the casual racism and white supremacy, whether it is period or not, is even more unacceptable to today's viewer, one would hope anyway, since there's not a hint anywhere in novel or film of how the formerly enslaved and the emancipated members of their community feel -- other than tremendous love and loyalty to "their white folks."  Yes, some still did, but there were far more who saw all of it very differently.  It struck me hard, even upon first reading of Gone With the Wind, that Scarlett's judgment on the wives of the Yankee officers stationed in Atlanta who showed some interest in the dynamics of how there were so many light-skinned former slaves all around them.  How dare they be so vulgar!  Scarlett, sitting in judgment on vulgarity is a joke by itself, but that the curiosity is worse than the practice that resulted in so many white or light-skinned negroes is -- well not funny at all.

That non-inclusion is the great failure of Gone With the Wind, which, if it were present, might have made it a great novel instead of a great romance novel. Neither Margaret Mitchell nor Scarlett can recognize that slavery was an institution of rape; that slavery was a cruel, unjust, and evil legal economic system. No matter whether some slaveowners were kind of kind, no matter how many of them there might have been through 350 years of slavery, those owners cannot make up for the brutal evil of the system, which has brutality as coercion and as practice built into it.

Which makes one wonder further, why a another re-release of Gone With the Wind is taking place during the sesquicentennial of the Civil War, the war that was fought about whether slavery would be extended throughout the United States, North America, the Caribbean and South America, or ending slavery once and for all.