Gone with the Wind

A very well-written blockbuster of a novel. It's DECADES since I saw the movie, so came to it with very vague recollections of the story.
Firstly I liked Scarlett more than I was expecting to. Unsentimental- well, over most things- driven, and utterly out for herself...especially when the Civil War brings an end to her pampered Southern lifestyle.

As a Brit, I'd never really considered what life was like in the immediate aftermath. How did all those Southerners feel about the North ending slavery? I learnt a great deal from reading this- there's history alongside a fast-paced storyline - and the Yankees certainly werent only about bringing in an ethical society. Much corruption, disenfranchisement of Southern whites, overnight empowerment show more of former slaves...all resulting in a fractured, angry society....and the beginnings of the Ku Klux Klan (made me think of post WW1 Germany,fiercely policed and impoverished by the rest of Europe...and the anger and resentment finding vent in escalating anti-semitism.

But this is primarily a story of people...Scarlett O'Hara, the feisty Irish/Creole plantation owner, her two weak husbands, Ashley Hamilton, on whom she pins all her drreams for years, and his wife- and Scarlett's friend....the good-natured Melanie.
And Rhett Butler, the wealthy, handsome, sardonic character- a goodie or a thoroughly bad man? - always around on the fringes...
Stonking good read. show less

“Scarlett was not beautiful”. That’s the opening of the great Margaret Mitchell's novel Gone With the Wind that I just finished. The main character, Scarlett, acted not “beautifully” in many instances, it’s true. Vanity, jealousy, lies, avarice count among her flaws. Yet her attitude toward adversity and her strength to recover after being defeated is the main lesson and source of inspiration I took from this piece of enchanting narrative.
Not being a Southerner, neither an American reader, there are many layers that escape my appreciation. Nonetheless, I made this story my story, I read it eagerly, I took sides in many occasions and judged what I regarded right or wrong. But I also learnt a bit more to comprehend the show more contexts, the passions and all the circumstances that sorround human decisions.
Scarlett was not beautiful… but she wasn’t irrelevant either. She transcended. show less

***NO PLOT SPOILERS***

Gone With the Wind won the Pulitzer Prize and boasts countless fans. I enjoyed it for its sweep and journey and for its array of lively characters. But no work is sacrosanct. It isn’t exempted from criticism just because it was published when it was, which implies that people of the past were timid lemmings lacking consciences, empathy, and critical-thinking skills. It has a KKK storyline. It has a sanitized portrayal of slavery. It has an underage and dysfunctional relationship between Rhett and Scarlett. It has Rhett abusing Scarlett. It has an unabashedly biased portrayal of the Civil War, with a love of Robert E. Lee and a rooting for the Confederacy. It has a proud Southern sensibility oozing with classism, show more racism, and sexism. Those are just a few of its many serious flaws, problematic now and problematic then.

It also has big personalities, a vivacious protagonist, dashing men, a stately plantation home, ostentatious gowns and frilly bonnets, travels on horseback and in carriages, a sometimes-resourceful Scarlett. It has atmosphere and takes readers places. I enjoyed these—but one has to work hard to ignore the outrageously shameful elements, and a review that doesn’t condemn these is incomplete. show less

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Having watched the film, it took me ages to get through the book, which at 1056 pages is the longest I have read since A Suitable Boy. I can see why it was such a best-seller in its day (it tops the Publisher's Weekly lists for both 1936 and 1937, and won the Pulitzer Prize); it's a great story of a strong woman in adverse times, which is both very feminist and also thoroughly racist.

Although it's so long, it wears its length much better than the film. The second half in particular, once the war is over, gels much more effectively plot-wise, with Scarlett becoming tougher and tougher to the point where she steals her sister's lover, uses forced labour show more in her mills, and puts profit above reputation by cultivating the occupiers of Atlanta. The O'Hara family background is given more detail, explaining the oddity of an Irish Catholic immigrant who is also a slaveholder (he won the land in a poker game). There is a lot more about the politics of the time (while making clear Scarlett's own rather limited interest in that side of things). The film jumps between the high points of the second half of the story (skipping only the scene where Tara is raided by Union troops, which perhaps was a bit much for general distribution); it might have been better to concentrate more on a smaller number of plot strands. A couple of really interesting characters in the book are omitted from the film, notably Will Benteen, the Confederate veteran who ends up managing Tara and marrying Scarlett's sister Suellen.

The book's treatment of race and slavery is much worse than the film's. Slavery was a good system, especially for the house slaves, and the field hands were too stupid to deserve anything better. Silly Northerners take Uncle Tom's cabin seriously. The Ku Klux Klan are heroic gentlemen who act only to restore order when the Northern occupiers fail (and Scarlett's carelessness is anyway responsible for them killing people). The end of slavery means a nastier and less civilised society (as personified in Scarlett's journey from Southern belle to hard-nosed entrepreneur); the old days are gone with the wind. show less

The annual airing of [Gone with the Wind] was a big event in our home with my older sisters glued to the television for two nights, aflutter with every smirk and every eyebrow twitch from Clark Gable. I tried to be somewhere else when the opening credits rolled – I still have a vivid memory of an brilliant fire-orange sky silhouetting a large barren tree and an extremely grave orchestral production playing in the background that gives me an urge to run. My sisters on an old, uncomfortable couch – it was orange, as well, now that I think of it – were the ones really glued to the screen. My mother always had something else to do, sewing in her lap or shelling pecans into a bowl. And, like me, this was one of those rare times when my show more father disappeared from his ‘easy chair,’, though I’m not sure where he went or what he did for those two nights.

Scampering through the living room and into the kitchen for a snack – always upsetting the girls who were worried that I might obscure Rhett’s striking profile for two seconds as I ran in front of the television – I captured a few other long lasting perceptions. Women resembled the tiny figurines from grandma’s house, dangerously swollen hoop skirts around cinched-in waists and garish, oversized hats framing china doll skin. The men were as preposterously dressed, at least through a young boy’s eyes, peacocking in bright, shiny suits; they acted funny, too, these strange men, always flitting around the women, one minute grabbing them up in violent embraces and then shoving them away or ignoring them altogether. And the black people spoke a foreign language, as far as I could tell.

Over the years, I always associated [Gone with the Wind] with my sisters. It never occurred to me that my mother was really paying attention, that she followed the story or that it had any impact on her. I found out I was wrong as I read the book for the first time and found Scarlett declaring, “I’ll think about that tomorrow. Tomorrow’s another day.” Countless times mom used those words to soothe me through some adolescent fit. She’d smile at me, fix me with her black, Irish eyes, and say, “Don’t worry, honey. Just remember, tomorrow’s another day.” So, every time I read Scarlett’s mantra in the book, I saw my mother’s face again, felt her calloused, work-worn hands around mine.

Of course, my mother identified with [Gone with the Wind], though I can’t say whether it was the book or the movie that captured her. But it wasn’t that handsome rogue Rhett Butler that drew her in – it was Scarlett. After all, mom was a West Texas rancher’s daughter. She was strong-willed and wild – my grandmother recalled spanking her nearly every morning before she walked down the dirt road to school. After one whipping, she told Gra’am, “When I grow up, I’m going to have baby girl and I’m going to name her ‘mother’ and I’m going to whip her every day.” I can see Scarlett’s defiance in my mother’s steely gaze, feel the same independent grit radiating off them both. But it wasn’t the pre-Civil war Scarlett she saw herself in, not the spoiled child in frills – it was the reconstruction Scarlett, chapped hands and sun-burnt from picking cotton in a near barren field. When Scarlett swears never to be hungry again, my mother’s recycling of useless things and keeping of food long past its freshness made sense to me, because mom was also a depression child. She and her siblings wore cardboard soled shoes, handing them down through five children regardless the size or number of worn through holes. They drank goat’s milk and ate beans and scraped at the dirt for whatever would grow. “Tomorrow is another day,” allowed Scarlett, and my mother, to forget about the day’s hunger and pain by focusing on the next day’s hope, even if it was a dim and vague hope.

Like Scarlett and my mother, Mitchell was a rare breed, penning a book about the Civil War and setting it around a female heroine. The book is as deeply researched and detailed as any other on the war between the states, offering a rich history of the shifting momentums in the war with each battle and a skilled commentary, through Rhett and Ashley’s eyes, on the seeds of the South’s ultimate destruction. Yet the book’s focus never wavers from those who were left behind when the bullets began to fly. We don’t see the battles through the soldier’s eyes, we learn about them as families did, through gossip and word of mouth. We don’t lie on the battlefields with the wounded and dying, we wait on the street outside the newspaper office with the whole of Atlanta for the dead’s names to be published. We don’t march with the hungry, exhausted soldiers, we hide in the house with the women and children, afraid and paranoid as the invading Yankees ride the roads. Woven through it all is Mitchell’s view on life as a Southern woman, relegated to be an object of beauty and desire but required by circumstances to be the independent, powerful nucleus that could sustain a family’s survival. I suspect my mother saw herself, and her own mother, in that incongruity, and reveled in the power that making your place in the world brings.

Bottom Line: Not just your mother’s bodice ripper – there’s untold depths to this classic.

5 bones!!!!!
A favorite for the year. show less

Gone with the Wind stands as one of the greatest American Civil War sagas from the point of view of the Confederates. Southern belle Scarlett O'Hara is the protagonist readers just love to hate (or at least be annoyed by). We first meet Scarlett as a scrappy sixteen year old teenager, manipulative and naïve. She enjoys causing other people pain and thrives on their jealousies. Even at this tender age, she is beyond selfish and spoiled. Scarlett is not beneath marrying the first boy she could, just to make the true love of her young life jealous. Of course it backfires when her beloved Ashley marries Melanie Hamilton instead.
Even after losing her teenage husband to illness during the American Civil War, Scarlett continues to live a show more lie. At seventeen and a new mother, she is not in mourning for poor lost Charles. He did not even die a heroic death that she could brag about! Scarlett does not swell with patriotic pride for the Confederate cause, nor is she grateful for Melanie and her family's generosity and friendship. Instead, she hold a steadfast and unrequited love for Ashley. Enter Rhett Butler, the dashing and controversial blockade runner. Scarlett's life gets a whole lot more complicated and emotionally confusing when he shows up. They are bound together in unconventional ways. He knows her secret. Together, they share the same sarcastic opinion of the war; one they cannot voice. They both use people (even family) for the betterment of themselves. They both do not give a damn what others say.
While I (obviously) did not care for Scarlett, Mitchell's writing is spectacular. She was the master of stylized descriptions. Take Melanie's brown eyes, for a simple example. Mitchell describes them as "a forest pool of water in winter when brown leaves shine up through quiet water" (p 102). A word of warning. While Mitchell has a way with words, she is also an author true to the times. Some language may not be suitable for the easily offended. show less

I hate Scarlett O'Hara. She is a sociopath. Rhett Butler is Ayn Rand with a penis. They're meant for each other. (I guess that's the point of the book.)Melanie and her Aunt Pittypat are the only truly innocent and likable people in the entire book. (Although Archie cracks me up.) Of course, there's many other decent people in the book, like Mammy, but of the central characters there's a distinct lack of character. [b:Gone With the Wind|18405|Gone With the Wind|Margaret Mitchell|http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1166913011s/18405.jpg|3358283] is wonderfully written, and if you can put up with 959 pages of Scarlett, tells an important story. It really gives insight into the hearts and minds of Georgians during the civil war era. In my show more opinion, it overly discounts the evil of slavery, having most of the slaves being loyal and caring to their masters, even after the war. But it also unflinchingly looks at the lives of the freed slaves after the war, and as they struggle to form lives of their own.With all its faults, it's still a tremendous, if long, read, and well worth the effort if you can keep from hurling the book in disgust as Scarlett acts as rotten as imaginable throughout the book. show less