Can you talk about a book by starting from the ending? Can the ending be the best part (even the hardest part) of an adventure that runs over 950 pages (or 28 hours, if you go with the audiobook like I did)? Can a character be irritating and captivating at the very same time? Apparently, anything is possible in this masterpiece by Mitchell. Yes, I really did just use the word “masterpiece” to describe this book, which has earned its place on the short list of my favorite classics.
We’re in 1800s Georgia, deep in the American South, among cotton plantations, red earth and magnolia trees. In this rural land live wealthy landowning families who watch over the work of enslaved people from their verandas, sipping tea and eating sausages. In these elegant estates, nannies raise the young generation while mothers sew clothes for their husbands and husbands play cards. Here, in this Confederate Georgia, live families like the O’Haras and the Wilkeses, who give us the great characters of Gone with the Wind.
This is proper Southern society; the kind where women never have a hair out of place, and men are the protectors and the masters. In a society like this, there’s little room for women like Scarlett, who turns out to be independent and fearless, driven to break every single rule that’s been drilled into her, both by circumstance and by her own nature. Hard times reveal who people really are. Or who characters really are, in this case.
I know it sounds like a cliché, but this book is exactly about that: how, in difficult moments, people show their true colors, and how there always turn out to be many enemies and few real friends. There are characters like Melanie Wilkes, honest and naive to the very end, and characters like her husband Ashley, who never quite learn how to face change. There are Rhett Butlers, always true to themselves, and the great society matrons who sit in judgment from atop their carriages.
A nation rebuilding, and losing itself
The Civil War shatters the world these families used to live in: a delicate, perfect little bubble made of balls, receptions and lavish weddings. The Yankees arrive, slow but unstoppable, wanting to free the enslaved and wanting Georgia’s fertile land for themselves. Loud soldiers show up, with an accent no one can quite place, modern weapons, and arrogance to match. The North and the South don’t understand each other, and they never really will. In some way, Mitchell seems to have seen the future. A future in which the United States remains deeply divided, with the Confederate flag still flying high over plenty of homes, even today.
The characters of Gone with the Wind move through a nation trying to find its identity at gunpoint. It isn’t just the war that changes their world, claiming lives and leaving widows behind — it’s also what comes after. For many of them, the aftermath is even more devastating, because it’s a world they no longer recognize, one they don’t know how to navigate. Between new fortunes and old rivalries, this story is about war, love and hypocrisy. It’s about the birth of the Ku Klux Klan, a country searching for democracy, and a society clinging to its old rules with its claws out.
The women who held it all together
Through all of this, the real story is about women. They’re the ones who stay behind while the men go to war. They’re the ones who keep the households and businesses running, who invent a whole new way of living. The women of Gone with the Wind are the strength behind the men, even if the men would never admit it. Their memory keeps the soldiers going, and their resourcefulness keeps Georgia alive. But many of them are women who stay clinging to the old world; the one that no longer exists. Not after the end of slavery, the right to vote, and the Klan. In a world that keeps changing and shows no sign of slowing down, some live in the past, and some search for answers in the present.
With an irritating Scarlett, a disgrace of a man in Ashley (I said what I said), a naive Melanie and a heartbroken Rhett, this book tells a story we can all recognize ourselves in, and one we can all appreciate. This isn’t a love story: Gone with the Wind is about our dreams and our fears.
Have you read Gone with the Wind? Or are you still working up the courage to start it?
Let me know in the comments.
One classic down, how many to go?
Leave a Reply