#100: Gone with the Wind

Well, I made it.  I just spent eight days in Civil War-torn Georgia with Scarlett O'Hara and Rhett Butler.  I'm tired, I'm downtrodden, and I'm heartbroken.  I'm so upset that I almost don't want to talk about it and just cast this post aside with a flip of my hair and a promise to think of everything tomorrow.  But I'm no "Scarlett".


What I Loved... 
was the incredibly rich, historical detail.  If you have only seen the movie, you haven't come close to revealing the true historical significance of Gone With the Wind.  It was published in 1936, and author Margaret Mitchell wasn't even born until almost 40 years after the setting for this book, so one wonders:  How did she get her information?  Well, it's rumored that she spent seven years writing the book and a further eight months just on research.  She was also raised in Georgia amid a hoard of Civil War veterans.  I'm guessing she picked up a thing or two.  

Being aYankee myself, it's easy for me to take the Civil War's impact for granted.  Our history textbooks say we freed the slaves and a war was fought, which appears momentous enough.  It seems a charming one-liner to justify a good cause.  But ugh, wars are so much uglier when you start looking at them more closely!  Worse, the lines of wrong and right, instead of getting clearer, just tend to become blurrier when examined under a microscope.  Yes!  The South needed to give up its slaves!  But did the North really have to crush them, ground them into the red dirt that they loved so much?  If the North was 100% pure in its motivations for war, why did the blacks still face so much discrimination in the northern territories?  Maybe Rhett Butler was right when he said,

“It isn’t the darkies, Scarlett. They’re just the excuse. There’ll always be wars because men love wars. Women don’t, but men do--yea, passing the love of women.” 

But maybe Scarlett was right:

When she looked at Tara she could understand, in part, why wars were fought. Rhett was wrong when he said men fought wars for money. No, they fought for swelling acres, softly furrowed by the plow, for pastures green with stubby cropped grass, for lazy yellow rivers and white houses that were cool amid magnolias. These were the only things worth fighting for, the red earth which was theirs and would be their sons’, the red earth which would bear cotton for their sons and their sons’ sons.

What I Hated...
was the obvious, prevailing racism in the book.  Like when Scarlett's old friend, Tony Fontaine says:


“But the worst thing was the way he kept the darkies stirred up. If anybody had told me I’d ever live to see the day when I’d hate darkies! Damn their black souls, they believe anything those scoundrels tell them and forget every living thing we’ve done for them. Now the Yankees are talking about letting the darkies vote. And they won’t let us vote. Why, there’s hardly a handful of Democrats in the whole County who aren’t barred from voting, now that they’ve ruled out every man who fought in the Confederate Army. And if they give the negroes the vote, it’s the end of us. Damn it, it’s our state! It doesn’t belong to the Yankees! By God, Scarlett, it isn’t to be borne! And it won’t be borne! We’ll do something about it if it means another war. Soon we’ll be having nigger judges, nigger legislators--black apes out of the jungle--”

It makes my skin crawl.  But then I remember, Margaret Mitchell isn't telling me that I should be racist, she is merely giving us a reflection of the South during the Civil War and wrong as it may be, that's how it was and to gloss it over is to be ignorant. 

In addition to racism, another thing that bothered me was Scarlett's complete disinterest in others (with the exception of Ashley) and more importantly, her lack of feeling toward her children.  Like when her "favorite" child dies, Scarlett says that she wishes it was her other daughter!  What kind of mother wishes that?  The memory of her unloved children will haunt me.


And then, of course, there was Rhett's complete disrespect and meanness.  Yes, I felt the customary sadness at the end when he vows to leave and says he doesn't love her anymore, but through the majority of the book, I was appalled at how he treated her!  It serves him right that he got his heart broken, if you ask me.  And why did the book end like it did?  Because Scarlett always gets what she wants and of course, we know that they will reconcile, with time, and live a boring, happy life from that moment forward.  At least, that's what I'm telling myself. :)

What's Next?
Sir Aruthur Conan Doyle's The Hound of the Baskervilles, and I couldn't be more relieved.  After spending eight days breaking my heart with Scarlett O'Hara in Gone with the Wind, I really need a Sherlock Holmes mystery, with an ensured happy ending, to brighten my mood.  Mysteries always end well, don't they?  Don't they??