Gone With the Wind Margaret

Gone With the Wind

Margaret Mitchell's novel, Gone with the Wind, has sold an average of 500,000 copies a year since its publication in 1936 (Faust pp). According to Drew Faust, more Americans have learned about the Civil War from Mitchell's book than from any other single author (Faust pp). Mitchell's historical romance, which is set in the South during the Civil War and Reconstruction era, won the Pulitzer Prize in 1937, and for more than twenty years was the most widely read of all American novels (Faust pp). She explores the interrelationships between racial discrimination, social expectations, and the Southern feminist culture (Faust pp).

Mitchell's novel begins in April 1861 on the day that news that war has broken out reaches a gathering of Southern aristocrats. The novel's protagonist, Scarlett O'Hara, is the epitome of what is known as the Southern Bell. She is coy, flirtatious, selfish, and headstrong, all of which are rather negative qualities however it is by virtue of these very qualities that allows her to survive through the turbulent war years. These qualities are also responsible for her successful rise from the ashes during the post-war years.

Faust writes that Mitchell's portrait of this era is at "odds with both the prevailing national and the southern mythologies of the war" (Faust pp). The war became in her rendering and "inferno of pain" and Scarlett never understood its aims, "never gave a damn about the... Confederacy," and despite their differences, her heroes, Rhett and Ashley, both "knew the war was all wrong" (Faust pp). In fact, Mitchell sums up Scarlett's character in the first chapter of the novel when she exclaims her boredom and frustration with all the talk of war. As the boys around her talk of Fort Sumter, Scarlett says, "I'm tired of hearing about it...Pa talks war morning, noon and night...till I get so bored I could scream" (Mitchell pp). She then goes on to complain that because of all the war talk the spring parties had not been any fun, and then says that she is so glad that Georgia waited until after Christmas to secede or else the Christmas parties would have been ruined too. To strengthen her distaste of the war talk, she says, "If you say 'war' again, I'll go in the house" (Mitchell pp). Mitchell writes that the boys "thought none the less of her for her lack of interest. Indeed, they though more. War was men's business, not ladies' and they took her attitude as evidence of her femininity" (Mitchell pp). And when Scarlett hears of Ashley's engagement to Melanie, Mitchell writes, "How,' Scarlett wonders, 'could Pa talk on and on about Fort Sumter and the Yankees when he knew her heart was breaking'" (Mitchell pp). Clearly in Scarlett's mind, the world revolves around her and her needs and desires, and that is all that really matters.

However, Scarlett's femininity is actually superficial, for she is anything but a feminine simpleton. Rather she is a calculating predator, who if she were living in today's society would be regarded as not only a social climber but also someone who would step on anyone and anything to get to the top of the corporate ladder. As Mitchell writes, "Most of her natural impulses were unladylike...She looked sweet, charming and giddy, but she was in reality self-willed, vain and obstinate," who had learned to use her feminine wiles for the manipulation (Mitchell pp).

Southern economics was based on large agricultural plantations that depended on slaves as the workforces, and Lincoln's policies, which the South considered were against states' rights, had set the stage of destruction for the Southern elite. Thus, the South was willing to fight for their rights and their culture. Their pride ultimately became their downfall, the stand they took for basic principles went too far and far too long.

During the war, traits that Scarlett had been told to repress becomes her salvation, as her masculine qualities emerge. Early in the novel, she had said that she wished she was a man, and by the war's end, "her reactions were all masculine" (Mitchell pp). Faust notes that Mitchell "chooses to make the gradual emergence of her stereotypically masculine traits a significant aspect of Scarlett's growth and maturation" (Faust pp). Faust writes, "When Atlanta burns, Scarlett becomes first a retreating general and then, after she arrives at Tara, her family's patriarch and protector - even shooting a Yankee marauder in their defense" (Faust pp).

The female characters repress their own desires and aspirations, for "it was a man's world...the man roared like a bull when a splinter was in his finger, and the woman muffled the moans of childbirth lest she disturb him" (Mitchell pp).

Mitchell writes that the Old South, was a "happy feminine conspiracy" in which women flatter men in order to be well treated themselves (Mitchell pp). Faust notes that "Scarlett's desires, her natural tendencies towards androgyny, directly confront and challenge the deceptions that have rested at the heart of the civilization of the Old South " (Faust pp). Thus the Scarlett who emerges from the ashes of the war manages more by direct command than by conspiracy (Faust pp).