Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell

Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell was published in 1936. Wikipedia tells me that a Harris poll in 2014 found it to be America’s second favourite book, behind the Bible. When I did English with American literature at university, Gone with the Wind wasn’t included on any reading list. All these years later it was with some trepidation that I downloaded a Kindle copy. A bit of initial review reading had revealed accusations of racism in some quarters. Was this book the equivalent of a gun? Guns are popular in America, but that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s a good idea for me to buy one.

Nevertheless, I started reading, finding myself in Georgia in 1861, where huge fortunes are made growing the valuable commodity of cotton using cheap slave labour. The resulting society is one of extremes, wealthy and poor, coarse and refined. Those at the top show off their money with fancy clothes, big houses, or perhaps by cultivating the image of gentlemanly intellectualism. Parallels between wearing fancy dresses at extravagant parties, and sitting around reading Shakespeare, immediately give a feel for what will become a major preoccupation of the book – the nature of value. If this book were racist, for example, one lot of people would be portrayed as better and more valuable than another. Does it do that?

This is a long book and there are so many examples you could reference. But from the early part of the story, showing the South at its decadent height, there are unexpected parallels between the role of slaves and pampered white women. Mammy the black nanny is stuck between plantation matriarch Ellen on the one hand, and Ellen’s head-strong, teenage daughter Scarlett on the other. Mammy has to carry out Ellen’s instructions with regard to Scarlett, even when Scarlett doesn’t want to do as instructed. Theoretically Mammy would be expected to obey both conflicting sets of demands. Considerable guile is necessary to navigate this treacherous situation. Then there’s Jeems, a servant to the Tarleton twins – not allowed to listen in on white conversation, unless his masters tell him that’s what they want him to do. The rules of good behaviour keep changing. And interestingly this is the same for privileged women. For a respectable young woman, winning a husband means cultivating the image of a meek airhead, which is only relevant until the woman is married, after which she is expected to became a competent estate personnel manager looking after a combined household and business perhaps involving hundreds of people, all the while making it look like the husband is in charge. Women and slaves have to balance one set of demands against a totally opposing set.

This all takes on another dimension when war is declared over the issue of slavery, between the northern Union and the Confederacy of southern slave owning states. The Confederacy, deluded in believing its agricultural wealth can challenge the industrial power of the North, suffers a terrible series of defeats, throwing it into a kind of post apocalyptic scenario worthy of Margaret Atwood. What do bonnets or books mean when you haven’t got enough to eat? People and values swap places, as the world tips on its head. Former strengths are now weaknesses and vice versa. Scarlett, bewails the end of slavery, but doesn’t seem to mind that in the confusion she has more freedom to throw off the shackles that weigh her down as a woman. She becomes a mill owner and entrepreneur, something that would have been unthinkable before the war. She manages, at least partially, to escape social rules that are as harsh as anything found anywhere in the world. Following the death of her first husband early in the war, exuberant Scarlett is expected to effectively end her life, spending what remains in mourning. Her admirer Rhett Butler tells her about the former Indian practice of suttee, practiced among high caste women:

‘In India, when a man dies he is burned, instead of buried, and his wife always climbs on the funeral pyre and is burned with him.’ ‘How dreadful! Why do they do it? Don’t the police do anything about it?’ ‘Of course not. A wife who didn’t burn herself would be a social outcast. All the worthy Hindu matrons would talk about her for not behaving as a well-bred lady should—precisely as those worthy matrons in the corner would talk about you, should you appear tonight in a red dress and lead a reel. Personally, I think suttee much more merciful than our charming Southern custom of burying widows alive.’

Racism demands that one set of people is valued above another. That is just not the case here. If Gone With The Wind were a gun used to shoot someone, it could just as easily become a weapon that turns on the person who wields it.

So did I miss out when my American literature course passed over Margaret Mitchell? If her book was nonfiction it would no doubt be misleading. I mean, Rhett’s quote about suttee makes out this is a common practice in India when it’s a tradition almost entirely consigned to the past. But then no account of history is perfect. And besides that, Gone with the Wind is a novel, a fictional form, the best examples of which explore the fictions people deal in. And this novel both projects and undermines a smug, distorted image of closed-minded exceptionalism. Shakespeare is mentioned a number of times, and a play like Henry V, seemingly jingoistic, also subversive, does something similar. These are works of literature helping us to understand strange, interesting, often brutally self-centred societies, and also helping us understand people in general.

The book ends with those famous words, ‘tomorrow is another day’. This is the sort of book I will continue to think about, and people will continue to argue about. Tomorrow I might give it one star. Today, however, I’ll give it five.