According to the Sparknotes, (n.d.) Gone with the Wind differs from most Civil War novels by glorifying the South and demonizing the North. Other popular novels about the Civil War, such as Stephen Crane’s The Red Badge of Courage, are told from a Northern perspective and tend to exalt the North’s values. Mitchell’s novel is unique also for its portrayal of a strong-willed, independent woman, Scarlett O’Hara, who shares many characteristics with Mitchell herself. Mitchell frequently defied convention, divorcing her first husband and pursuing a career in journalism despite the disapproval of society. Gone with the Wind was published in 1936, ten years after Mitchell began writing it. A smash success upon publication, Gone with the Wind became—and remains even now—one of the best-selling novels of all time. It received the 1937 Pulitzer Prize. In the late 1930s a film version of the novel was planned, and David O. Selznick’s nationwide search for an actress to play Scarlett O’Hara captivated the nation’s attention. The resulting film starred Vivien Leigh and Clark Gable as Scarlett O’Hara and Rhett Butler, and it quickly became one of the most popular motion pictures of all time.
Mitchell was less than thrilled by the sweeping popularity of her work. She found the spotlight uncomfortable and grew exhausted and ill. Gone with the Wind is her only novel, though she continued to write nonfiction. Mitchell volunteered extensively during World War II and seemed to regain her strength. In 1949 a car struck and killed Mitchell while she was crossing Peachtree Street in Atlanta.
According to the Editors in Encyclopedia Britannica (n.d.), it is the story of Scarlett O’Hara, a headstrong Southern belle who survives the hardships of the war and afterward manages to establish a successful business by capitalizing on the struggle to rebuild the South. Throughout the book she is motivated by her unfulfilled love for Ashley Wilkes, an honorable man who is happily married. After a series of marriages and failed relationships with other men, notably the dashing Rhett Butler, she has a change of heart and determines to win Rhett back.
According to Hubbert M. (2004) Mitchell chose an epic moment in American history and never flinched in bringing it to life on a grand scale; a creative energy reminiscent of the nineteenth century drives the work. From the memorable first sentence through the Twelve Oaks barbecue on the eve of the war, the fall of Atlanta, Scarlett O'Hara's unforgettable journey back home to Tara, and her beginning struggles during Reconstruction, Mitchell's narrative power propels the reader through the limning of a culture (its grace and color and folly and weakness), a vivid evocation of the cauldron of war, and a bitter picture of the devastation following. Though her four major characters have now become stereotypes, when she drew them, with the exception of the moody Rhett Butler, they were not. Scarlett is a full-blooded woman, selfish, deluded, conflicted, but driven by her own strength of will. Melanie is far from the foolishly duped Amelia of Thackeray's novel. Underlying her sweetness and Christian charity is enormous strength and purpose, and the Hamlet-like Ashley Wilkes is not the beau ideal of the southern planter or Confederate stalwart. Additionally, the novel is sexually charged. Scarlett's self-affirming attraction to Ashley could not be sustained were she not given proof at two significant points in the novel that he responds to her sexually, that he wants, in his own phrase, to "take" her. The powerful sexual chemistry dramatized between Scarlett and Rhett provides a running tension of the novel, countered as it is by Scarlett's incredibly dogged and willful attachment to her first romantic ideal. The inherent racism of the novel is more difficult to defend. Characteristic of her generation of southerners is Mitchell's unquestioning acceptance of the essential inferiority of African Americans, whom she presents, in a few distasteful instances, in nonhuman terms. Melded with that prejudice, contradictorily, is evidence of her great respect for some members of the race. Such a bifurcated vision is the very dilemma that Mississippi author William Faulkner wrestled with his entire writing career. In the novel Mitchell merely accepts the institution of slavery and fails to recognize the strength and courage of those who rebelled against their enslavement. What she presents well is an array of portraits of an uneducated African American peasantry, ranging from the nobility, shrewdness, loyalty, and affection of Mammy to the foolishness of Prissy. Like William Shakespeare, Mitchell writes fools among all classes, and very few have yet criticized her portrayal of Honey Wilkes. Margaret Mitchell was proud of the fact that she had tried to convey accurately the speech of the old African Americans of her acquaintance without resorting to the entangled dialect of Joel Chandler Harris, and she reacted against all the stock figures, white and Black, of the sentimental plantation novels that preceded Gone With the Wind.
With its richly detailed evocation of a former age, its narrative engagement, its compelling portrait of the archetypal human instinct for survival, and its reflection of the contrariness of romantic dreams, Gone With the Wind continues to capture, entertain, excite, and sometimes exasperate readers. As well as being a gripping novel of epic proportions, the book is valuable as a historical document—though one that must be carefully read. A vivid record of a segment of life in the nineteenth-century South, the novel is also the record of a twentieth-century sensibility's engagement with the region's past. Like many of the omnibus novels of the nineteenth century that influenced it, Gone With the Wind is a powerful, flawed, uneven, and sometimes disturbing novel that explores diverse facets of the human experience.
REFERENCES
Editors in Encyclopedia Britannica (n.d.). Gone with the Wind novel by Mitchell. Retrieved from: https://www.britannica.com/biography/Margaret-Mitchell
Hubbert M. (January 20, 2004). Gone With the Wind (Novel). Retrieved from: https://www.georgiaencyclopedia.org/articles/arts-culture/gone-wind-novel
Sparknotes, (n.d.) Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell. Retrieved from: https://www.sparknotes.com/lit/gonewith/context/
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