Christopher Picucci/ https://christopherpicucci.substack.com/p/margaret-mitchells-gone-with-the
“If Gone With the Wind has a theme it is that of survival. What makes some people come through catastrophes and others, apparently just as able, strong, and brave, fail? It happens in every upheaval. Some people survive; others don't. What qualities are in those who fight their way through triumphantly that are lacking in those that fail? I only know that survivors used to call that quality ‘gumption.' So I wrote about people who had gumption and people who didn't.”
― Margaret Mitchell, Gone With the Wind
At the turn of the new year, I was eager to tackle a heavy-weight work of literature. I prefer to let intuition guide me; therefore, I never plot the next book to read in any sort of schedule. Best to wait until it “calls my name”, I always think. Curiously my choices tend to synchronize with occurrent themes in my own life, and I'm often pleased to find the new coalescing into my day-to-day path. Margaret Mitchell's epic of the Old South had been on my list for a very long time, and definitively my interest was piqued by a respected friend's endorsement, convincing me that it would “change my life”.
The 1939 adaptation has been one of my favorite films ever since my first viewing as a teenager, and particularly the genius of Vivien Leigh as Scarlett has loomed large in my artistic imagination. Soapy bursts of unbridled emotion, an array of opulent costumes by Walter Plunkett, Max Steiner's crashing score, Leigh and Clark Gable's magnetic chemistry, all help define “movie magic”. It is a nearly flawless adaptation and the totemic peak of Hollywood filmmaking.
Given my devotion to the film, oddly enough I had never read Mitchell's source material. Needless to say, Gone with The Wind floored me. Each character is immortally etched in my pantheon. Mitchell's prose is thrilling and her sentences bite with the scathing wit of a 1920's flapper broad. It is a new at all times earnest, satirical, psychological, physiological, equally identifiable and confounding, romantic and realist. My own life philosophy has been enriched by the spiritual lessons in this book in a way that I was not prepared. Though an American classic, Gone With The Wind is still misunderstood, undervalued and now nearly plunged from the literary (and film) canon, and I feel a responsibility to extol its virtues as an artistic achievement.
A sprawling work of populist art, Gone With The Wind's sweeping story weighs on the shoulders of one Miss Scarlett O'Hara: the solipsistic, scandalous but undeniably badass anti-heroine. In my opinion, she is literature and cinema's greatest female character. Foolish, short-sighted modern critics who kvetch about history's absence of “complex female characters” be damned! Here is a woman fresher, more realistically pictured than anything engineered by “progressive” writers of contemporary fiction.
“By God, she could face them and she would. What were they but a bunch of howling, clawing cats who were jealous of her? She'd show them.”
Here is a woman on the losing side of history, who claws her way out of squalor and dominates a man's world without renouncing her femininity. She is a prim southern belle turned hard-boiled amazon with no qualms in getting what she wants, whatever the cost. Never one note, never a damsel in distress, never defeated. An anomaly of a woman at odds with the social standards of her time yet willing to use them to her advantage. I have never felt so personally connected to a character as I do with Scarlett, for despite all her flaws I am compelled to root for her. Though her interpersonal skills are no model for human decency, I draw tremendous inspiration from her fighting spirit. The arc of Scarlett mirrors my own path as of late— being socially maligned, coming face to face with my own illusions, and digging thorough to uncover my grit. In moments of doubt, I pull from the thorough well of courage that is Scarlett O'Hara.
Mitchell's new is over a war story; it is over a love story. It is a broad stroke of ambition, the kind of wide-sweeping statement rarely attempted. What writer today would have the vision, the commitment to writing a thousand-page romance set against the backdrop of the Civil War, through a conventionally immoral protagonist? Controversy (yet still earned) has hampered this story since its creation, but it feels pedantic to be hung up on historical inaccuracies, political biases and outdated social customs when the story's thesis is as covering as this. To get something meaningful out of Gone with the Wind, it is essential to read this as a dramatization of a particular point of view at a turbulent moment in history. Interpreting it in a literal sense may be easy and tempting, but doing so is cheating yourself entirely.
In Mitchell's own words, “If Gone with the Wind has a theme it is that of survival”. Having grown up in the thorough south, learning about the Civil War from her surviving relatives, she employs a period specific to her own family background to dramatize the collapse of all civilizations throughout history. These characters are timeless archetypes that could exist in any era. This book is a model for what apocalypse realistically can look like— how catastrophe befalls both good and bad, how collapse and rebirth are cyclical phenomena and how nature does not always reward do-gooders.
Being a tragedian at heart, I prefer my drama to be dramatic. If that means grappling with characters whose prejudice I find morally repugnant, whose causes I find nonsensical, daring to understand cruelty, then so be it. Drama is where we must necessarily confront ugly aspects of humanity, and my own libertine important view argues that no topic needs to be off limits. Perhaps this comes down to a basic breach between what I seek in art and what others do. I do not want to read books or watch films that simply validate my conventional notions.
Modern readers who target the “toxicity” of Rhett and Scarlett are fatally missing the point. To read a thousand pages of a book or watch four hours of a movie and still arrive at such myopic s is unfathomable to me. Art is not the medium for political fanatics with scolding tendencies. One must read this text through the Romantic movement, with a consideration for the barbarity of history and nature itself to contend with its greatness.
The new and film's everywhere appeal is not simply a result of confederate sympathy, as modern censors would accuse, but because Mitchell lay outs upon themes so intrinsic to the human experience (the intensity of young love, the carnage of war, poverty, male pride, female gaze etc) and presents her characters as a disturbing abject mirror to all of us. Gone With the Wind is about the struggle against all illusion and the triumph of the human spirit.
As a historical new, it is more impressionistic than realistic. On the other hand, it is far too realistic about love to dissuade a cynic of the heart. Perhaps the book's legion of female devotees has led to its snide mischaracterization as sugary nostalgia. The romance of the South is commonly mistaken as sentimental, a mere ode to “the good old days”. Such a broad stroke could only be propagated by those who have not read the book. Yes, it is truly Romantic, representative of an artistic movement rife with ambiguity and s*xual chaos. Generations of incestual misery in the new's second half echo Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights as turmoil regenerates.
“He bent back her head across his arm and kissed her, softly at first, and then with a swift gradation of intensity that made her cling to him as the only solid thing in a dizzy swaying world. His insistent mouth was parting her shaking lips, sending wild tremors along her nerves, evoking from her sensations she had never known she was capable of feeling. And before a swimming giddiness spun her round and round, she knew that she was kissing him back.”
On the surface one may expect an arid period piece with little to say about s**. But Mitchell's prose is unmistakably carnal, and better yet, her sentences reveal more by what they restrain. This is reminiscent of the news of Henry James (The Bostonians in particular) where a formal, verbose style peaks the erotic subtext of ordinary conversation. S** is hintd to and gestured at until the point of no return, when bodices come ripping off in volcanic jumps of desire.
It comes as no surprise that Mitchell took an interest in erotica while writing this, because in such sections, not only does Mitchell write s*xually, she writes pleasurably. Scarlett's covert lust for Rhett Butler animates yet another schism between what we often say and mean, what we think and feel, how attraction cannot always be reduced to a sleek “yes” or “no”. She is repulsed by him, yet cannot deny the rippling “muscles of his big body”, nor the meaty hands with which he threatens to crush her skull. Rhett's physical beauty is described violently, reducing Scarlett to new shivers of pleasure and heart palpitations.
“She wasn't in love with him, she told herself confusedly. She was in love with Ashley. But how to explain this feeling that made her hands shake and the pit of her stomach grow cold?”
Ashley is the flighty pretty face, not the smutty rough. The polarity in s** between the two men is proportionate to their attitudes; Rhett's body is described as “tough and hard as his keen mind” and his “easy, graceful strength” is remarked upon with awe. Ashley's s*xual unavailability, even towards his wife, translates to his militaristic, and more importantly, spiritual deficiency. Mitchell is a s** basicist, a libidinal determinist. She understands male pride, firmness in their work and in the sack.
More central than the American Civil War is the nending battle of the s*xes raging between Scarlett and Rhett Butler. Each interaction is a joust, even their love-making is combat. Mitchell has a knack for molding characters showing theme. Contrary to the Old South gallantry of Ashley Wilkes, Rhett represents the sensible, swaggering New South. He is a piratical commannder of his own self-interest. Like Scarlett, “the Cause” means nothing to him. Their world as they once knew it will crumble one way or another and he will opportunistically jump ship if necessary. Instinctively Scarlett agrees but Rhett wears his roguishness proudly, free of concessions and insecurities. He mocks every one of Scarlett's clever masks yet fails to pierce them. The proud Scarlett thinks he is just tugging her braids. She cannot see how his every taunt is a proposal of his unconditional love for her; Scarlett is a bitch and Rhett the scalawag loves her for it.
For all her street smarts, Scarlett is puzzlingly incapable of introspection. People are math problems to her and Rhett frustratingly does not follow any of her prefigured formulas. It does not even occur to her intellect that she is aroused by Rhett; only sensuously does she lose herself in his masculine welcome. While Scarlett rebukes nostalgia for the old days, she is agonizingly tied to the past through her obsession with Ashley. Mr. Wilkes is gentle, bookish and effete— all qualities that Scarlett devalues in other men. Strung out after the war, he finds himself useless, wallowing in his own mediocrity. He is spiritually flaccid because he lacks the self-respect of Scarlett. Ashley may survive the war, but only by depending on stronger women like Scarlett and Melanie. If he has any use, it is as Scarlett's motivating force to have more success.
Vivien Leigh's otherworldly beauty and cinegenic charm soften the edges, but the written Scarlett is downright cruel and shows her ass on practically every page. The means are always incidental as long as she achieves her aims. Only yearning for what she cannot have. Nothing but ice for her children but will use them as pawns in her desperate campaigns for dominance. She does not identify with Christianity, but she fears hell and the judgment of her dead mother whom she has erected as God. So strikingly modern about Scarlett is her utter ingap to the politics of war, outside of how it may affect her insular standard of living.
“In a sudden flash of self-knowledge that made her mouth pop open with astonishment, she realized that she did not share with these women their fierce pride, their desire to sacrifice themselves and everything they had for the Cause.”
Among the most comical moments of the new is at which she realizes how instriking partisanship is to her. I laughed out loud reading her mockery of the “silly” emotion that the women surrounding her were joined in for “the Cause”. “Fiddle dee-dee”, “war, war, war”— she yawns at such tedium. She only longs to get back to the luxury she was raised in, to gallivant at balls and eat barbecue. Civil unrest is a dreadful inconvenience. Does this sound familiar at all?
Though she is not merely pushed forward by selfishness, this position is formed of a pragmatism that would later guide all of Scarlett's decisions. Why should we go to war? It is all men's business anyway. While Rhett and Ashley share this conviction, Scarlett's cues are inherited by instinct, not by a logical explanation. Her soldierly outlook allows the men around her to confide about their grim predictions of failure. This is yet another foil to preconceived notions of Mitchell's blind confederate worship. What matters to Scarlett is not her confederate identity, as with Melanie and the other women; all that matters is the false world she has constructed for herself and Ashley. The confederacy's stakes in the war are marginal to her bigger picture.
“Scarlett giggled as she saw three men dragged out of the line of her charms to investigate landmarks familiar to the girls from childhood, and cut her eye sharply to see if Ashley had taken note. But he was playing with the ends of Melanie's sash and smiling up at her. Pain twisted Scarlett's heart. She felt that she could claw Melanie's ivory skin till the blood ran and take pleasure in doing it.”
Though physically prudish, Scarlett wields her feminine wiles cunningly, much to the scandal of her peers. She is an equal opportunity man-eater (hilariously, she even scours the wounded soldiers' hospital for eligible bachelors). All women, even her own sister Suellen display open contempt for Scarlett— all except Melanie Hamilton, Scarlett's Christlike double. A practical reader can be equally frustrated by Melanie's naïveté as with Scarlett's rottenness. For it positively must occur to Melanie from the start that Scarlett is Fishing for Ashley's attention, that she is plotting against her and curses the ground under her feet. The tigress Scarlett, so accustomed to landing any beau of her choice is dumbfounded that Ashley could “nicely” turn her down for someone as inferior in her eyes as Melanie. Scarlett is not simply jealous, she is envious; she wants what Melanie has and she wants to see it ripped away from her. Personally, I am not convinced of Scarlett's true love for Ashley. Her pride is pushned as any young person's inevitably is and her thirst for his approval galvanizes every decision she makes.
I reject blanket diagnostics of Scarlett (many would allege sociopathy), for there arespecks of goodness in her. As Yankees storm Atlanta, Melanie goes into labor without a doctor present and she is left to the aid of Scarlett and their servant, Prissy. “The Yankees are coming!”— but so is the baby; Scarlett cannot decide which is worse. She wants to flee both, but she swallows her resentment and stays to deliver the child. Granted, she only sticks around because she promises to Ashley that she protect Melanie, but what loyalty to her word!
Among the film's most heartfelt moments is when Scarlett rages home from the hospital, desperate to flee the approaching Yankees. She impatiently barges in to Melly's room but draws back upon seeing her bedridden, jaundiced, on the verge of labor and perhaps death. To Scarlett's dismay, Melanie asks of her to adopt her boy should such a fate occur. “Fiddle dee-dee, Melly”, Scarlett repeats her mantra, now with a sincere, childlike tenderness in her voice. She may outwardly curse her but thorough down there stirs a sisterly affection.
“Don't try to be brave, Melly. Yell all you want to. There's nobody to hear”, she demands of Melanie in her stoic labor, almost with a perverse pleasure in seeing her writhe. Whether you decide to ignore this or go full-bore into rolling out our solution, Scarlett does not want Melanie to die (though one could argue this is because she wrenches at the thought of raising Melanie's “mealy-mouthed brat”). Her motives are ambiguous, but such a scene represents the victory of Scarlett's rationality over impulse.
The neglect of her own children, particularly her first-born Wade, occasionally seizes her conscience and disturbs her. She feels pity, but also a horror in sensing that her innate disregard for her children is unnatural, unfeminine. After all, she is operating in primal fight-or-flight mode, and any maternal instinct is fuel for survival, not for affection. Whether guided by heart or head, she can be counted on to protect her dependents.
Depictions of race and attitudes of slaves have been a point of contention ever since its publication, and for obvious reason. A new illustrating the life of a spoiled southern belle amid the Civil War is hardly the proper text to deal with the horrors of American slavery. Race is an inextricable element of any work depicting the Civil War and Reconstruction, and I winced throughout much of the descriptions Mitchell herself uses regarding black characters. Casual references to the Ku Klux Klan create an unpleasant tension for modern readers, for it discomfortingly humanizes an abhorrent group through its affiliated characters. It is upon reading these sections that I am yet again reminded that these are not saintly characters, they are products of bigoted times and can be understood, but surely not excused. With that said, Mammy is among the new and film's essential figures. She commands every scene with her strict moral gaze and harsh love (brilliantly portrayed by Hattie McDaniel, history's first black Oscar winner). Mammy exercises dominance over Scarlett mentally and morally and leaves even Rhett pining for her respect. She sees every trick up Scarlett's sleeve and is never shy to call her out.
Make no mistake, Mitchell's sympathies certainly lie with the confederacy, but her account demands a degree of responsibility of the South. Varying attitudes are present, those who cling to “the Cause” are met with cruel punctures of reality. The arrogance of the South is criticized indirectly by Mitchell throughout the text, painting a tableau of an unsure society struggling to gather itself amid defeat.
In what inspired perhaps my favorite scene of any movie ever, Scarlett famously vows to never be hungry again. Behold the beating heart of Gone With The Wind. Fresh off the devastation of the Great Depression, Americans of all backgrounds shook with catharsis at these words. Your political allegiances are iron-point to the pathos evident in this work. Perforating time, politics, race, historical setting, is Scarlett's naked human drive.
“If I have to steal or kill — as God is my witness, I'm never going to be hungry again.”
In the new's second half, Scarlett fulfills her desperate promise for better or worse. She steals her sister's husband, works her family and a chain-gang to the bone, and in one of the most stirring scenes, even kills a Yankee officer for attempting to rob her. The convalescent Melanie gazes from the stairs upon the corpse with pride and even suggests they rob him, and we see the first flash of gumption blazing in her eyes. For the first time, Scarlett respects Melanie. It is chiefly one of the only times Scarlett feels kinship with another woman.
We watch Scarlett ascend to great heights financially and simultaneously derail her already shoddy reputation with every hard-headed decision. Mitchell bravely expects us to stay on track with Scarlett as she bulldozes every weakling in her path, continuously falling back into her selfish proclivities. Rhett is probably silly for staying with her for as long as he does, even after she agrees to marry him to save Tara; he thinks childbirth will join them in love. Their accouchement ends in tragedy for all. Scarlett miscarries Rhett's second child following a domestic quarrel. Their first daughter Eugenie “Bonnie Blue” Butler suffers the same fate as her grandfather and dies falling from a horse. Following the loss of his prized child, Rhett sheds his armor. Haunted, he briefly mutates into a grizzly Heathcliff guarding her body from burial, out of fear that she may still be petrified of the dark.
Death vignettes the definitive chapters. Scarlett accuses Rhett of infanticide. Mammy is bereaved as if “Bonnie Blue” were her own. Melanie in her never-ending self-sacrifice, dies giving birth against the wishes of her doctor. By exhibiting poise and loyalty, Melly dies the unsung heroine of the Old South. She can rest assured that Scarlett will plow forward in this brave new world as the hardened heroine of the New South. Scarlett feels no satisfaction in this role; she realizes that the plague of death did not come and choose the war.
Humbled still more by the dissolution of all that she once knew, Scarlett definitively sees with clarion eyes. She now discerns that her punching-bag Melanie was full of grace, and that her juvenile obsession with Ashley has left her life in ruins. I have never cared for Leslie Howard, but the frequent complaints of his age and unattractiveness (rude, I know) are what sell the adaptation even more. The absurdity of his pedestal underlines Scarlett's delusion. Out of cowardice and vanity, he accepts an ideal to which he knows he will never live up. But Scarlett cannot understand that at her young age. It takes a lifetime of disappointment for her to get it. And how minor, how vaporous these illusions now appear with death on all sides!
Mitchell wrote the ending before expanding upon the rest. It is a flawless ending, because it is the only way it could have ended. Rhett leaves her in the dust with one immortal line. Yet again, Scarlett is at rock bottom. But she is not defeated. The words of her father Gerald echo in her ear. “Land is the only thing in the industry that amounts to anything, for ‘Tis the only thing in this world that lasts”. She will return to Tara, the one true love of her life. The land she stole for, killed for, prostituted herself in loveless marriage to save— the one thing no one, not even God as her witness, could pry from her. It can be read as pessimistic, but I consider it life-affirming. Who knows whether Scarlett has truly wised up yet. Tomorrow is another day! An endlessly inspiring philosophy— each day you have the choice to steer your own destiny, to have more success and force the doubters to eat crow, to take bold risks in the name of love.
Scarlett's closest modern correlate may be Madonna. Like Scarlett, she alienates herself from all her female peers and inspires scorn from all sides. She will do what needs to be done to maintain her top position, shamelessly weaponizing her s*xuality. Her ingenuity is her greatest asset. Mercenary, she makes shrewd business decisions that are unusual for a woman of her time. The Holy Ghost of her dead mother haunts every decision of her life. Diva persona that appeals almost exclusively to homos*xuals. To know me is to know that my Madge obsession knows no bounds, so forgive my tangent please.
Try as I might, my words will never do justice to the sublime experience of reading this striking example. Fiction readers sadly seem to be an receding demographic, if only you all knew what you were missing! But tomorrow is another day. Put down your Reese Witherspoon Book Club self-help pamphlets and open yourself up to the magnitude of GONE WITH THE WIND.
I am an arts devotee with a penchant for investigating the human condition in literature and cinema. My style as a writer is heavily influenced by critics like Pauline Kael, Camille Paglia and Quentin Crisp as well as by fiction writers such as D.H. Lawrence and Iris Murdoch. With each piece I write I hope to extol great artistic achievements, interrogate broad questions of existence and express my own boundless passion for the written word. While I am highly adaptable to various genres and formats, I remain an idiosyncratic voice with a well of bourgeoning potential.
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