Gone with the Wind
Read Gone with the Wind Online
Authors: Margaret Mitchell
Thank you for purchasing this Scribner eBook.
Sign up for our newsletter and receive special offers, access to bonus content, and info on the latest new releases and other great eBooks from Scribner and Simon & Schuster.
or visit us online to sign up at
eBookNews.SimonandSchuster.com
Preface
T
HE NOVEL
Gone With the Wind
shaped the South I grew up in more than any other book. For the most part, I was raised in a house without books, but the ones displayed and laid out flat for the inspection of visitors were the Bible and
Gone With the Wind,
in no particular order of importance. My mother bought countless numbers of the novel during my childhood to hand out as gifts or to replace the ones she read so frequently that they came apart in her hands. Few white Southerners, even today, can read this book without conjuring up a complex, tortured dreamscape of the South handed down by generations of relatives who grew up with the taste of defeat, like the bluing of gunmetal, still in their mouths. What Margaret Mitchell caught so perfectly was the sense of irredeemable loss and of a backwater Camelot corrupted by the mannerless intrusions of insensate invaders. The Tara invoked in the early chapters of this book is a mirror image of a Southern Utopia, a party at Twelve Oaks that might have gone on forever if the hot-blooded boys of the South could have stemmed the passions of secession and held their fire at Fort Sumter. It is the South as an occupied nation that forms the heart of this not impartial novel. This is
The Iliad
with a Southern accent, burning with the humiliation of Reconstruction. It is the song of the fallen, unregenerate Troy, the one sung in lower key by the women who had to pick up the pieces of a fractured society when
their sons and husbands returned with their cause in their throats, when the final battle cry was sounded. It is the story of war told by the women who did not lose it and who refused to believe in its results, long after the occupation had begun. According to Margaret Mitchell, the Civil War destroyed a civilization of unsurpassable amenity, chivalry and grace. To Southerners like my mother,
Gone With the Wind
was not just a book, it was an answer, a clenched fist raised to the North, an anthem of defiance. If you could not defeat the Yankees on the battlefield, then by God, one of your women could rise from the ashes of humiliation to write more powerfully than the enemy and all the historians and novelists who sang the praises of the Union. The novel was published in 1936 and it still stands as the last great posthumous victory of the Confederacy. It will long be a favorite book of any country that ever lost a war. It is still the most successful novel ever published in our republic.
Gone With the Wind
is as controversial a novel as it is magnificent. Even during its publication year, when Margaret Mitchell won a Pulitzer Prize, the book attracted a glittering array of literary critics, including Malcolm Cowley and Bernard De Voto, who attacked the artistry and politics of the novel with a ferocity that continues to this day. Margaret Mitchell was a partisan of the first rank and there never has been a defense of the plantation South so implacable in its cold righteousness or its resolute belief that the wrong side had surrendered at Appomattox Courthouse. In this novel, the moral weight of the narrative is solidly and iconoclastically in line with the gospel according to the Confederate States. It stands in furious counterpoint to
Harriet Beecher Stowe's
Uncle Tom's Cabin,
a book that Margaret Mitchell ridicules on several occasions by scoffing at Stowe's famous scene of bloodhounds pursuing runaway slaves across ice floes.
Margaret Mitchell writes of the Confederacy as Paradise, as the ruined garden looked back upon by a stricken and exiled Eve, disconsolate with loss. If every nation deserves its own defense and its own day in the sunshine of literature, then Margaret Mitchell rose to the task of playing the avenging angel for the Confederate States. There have been hundreds of novels about the Civil War, but
Gone With the Wind
stands like an obelisk in the dead center of American letters casting its uneasy shadow over all of us. The novel hooked into the sweet-smelling attar that romance always lends to the cause of a shamed and defeated people. Millions of Southerners lamented the crushing defeat of the Southern armies, but only one had the talent to place that elegiac sense of dissolution on the white shoulders of the most irresistible, spiderous, seditious and wonderful of American heroines, Scarlett O'Hara.
Gone With the Wind
is a war novel, a historical romance, a comedy of manners, a bitter lamentation, a cry of the heart and a long, cold-hearted look at the character of this one lovely, Machiavellian Southern woman. The book is sure-footed and beautifully constructed into fine, swiftly moving parts and sixty-three chapters. Margaret Mitchell possessed a playwright's ear for dialogue and the reader never becomes confused as the hundreds of characters move in and out of scenes throughout the book. She grants each character the clear imprimatur of a unique and completely distinct
voice. Once Miss Mitchell has limned the outlines of the main characters, they live completely and eternally in the imagination of the reader. She was born to be a novelist, but one of that rare, hybrid breed who bloom but once on the American landscape, then withdraw into their own interiors, having given voice to the one novel bursting along the seams of consciousness. Margaret Mitchell sings her own song of a land-proud, war-damaged South, and her voice is operatic, biblical, epic. Her genius lay in her choice of locale and point of focus and heroine. She leaves the great battlefields of Gettysburg and Vicksburg, Bull Run and Antietam to the others and places the Civil War in the middle of Scarlett O'Hara's living room. She has the Northern cannons sounding beyond Peachtree Creek as Melanie Wilkes goes into labor, and has the city of Atlanta in flames as Scarlett is seized with an overpowering urge to return home that finds her moving down Peachtree Street with the world she grew up in turning to ash around her.
The novel begins and ends with Tara, but it is Scarlett herself who represents the unimaginable changes that the war has wrought on all Southerners. It was in Southern women that the deep hatred the war engendered came to nest for real in the years of Reconstruction. The women of the South became the only American women to know the hard truths of war firsthand. They went hungry just as their men did on the front lines in Virginia and Tennessee, they starved when these men failed to come home for four straight growing seasons, and hunger was an old story when the war finally ended. The men of Chancellorsville, Franklin and the Wilderness seemed to have left some residue of
the fury on the smoking, blood-drenched fields in battles, whose very names became sacred in the retelling. But Southern women, forced to live with that defeat, had to build granaries around the heart to store the poisons that the glands of rage produced during that war and its aftermath. The Civil War still feels personal in the South, and what the women of the South brought to peacetime was Scarlett O'Hara's sharp memory of exactly what they had lost.
With the introduction of Scarlett O'Hara and Rhett Butler, Miss Mitchell managed to create the two most famous lovers in the English-speaking world since Romeo and Juliet. Scarlett springs alive in the first sentence of the book and holds the narrative center for over a thousand pages. She is a fabulous, pixilated, one-of-a-kind creation, and she does not utter a dull line in the entire book. She makes her uncontrollable self-centeredness seem like the most charming thing in the world and one feels she would be more than a match for Anna Karenina, Lady Macbeth, or any of the women of Tennessee Williams. Her entire nature shines with the joy of being pretty and sought after and frivolous in the first chapters and we see her character darkening slowly throughout the book. She rises to meet challenge after challenge as the war destroys the entire world she was born into as a daughter of the South. Tara made her charming, but the war made her Scarlett O'Hara.
The cynicism of Rhett Butler is still breathtaking to read about, and his black-hearted, impudent humor resonates throughout the book. He serves as the clarifying eye in the midst of so much high-toned language speaking of the Cause and the Southern Way of Life. His is the first sounding of the New South, rising out
of the chaos left in the passing of the old order. Yet in the arc of his character, it is Rhett and Rhett alone who seems to change most dramatically in this book. He, who never let an opportunity pass in order to mock the pieties and abstractions of Southern patriotism, joined the Confederate Army only when its defeat was certain. Rhett Butler, who profited greatly while blockade running, food speculating, and bankrolling prostitutes, turns out the softest of fathers, the most self-sacrificing of friends, the most flamboyant and ardent of lovers; yet it is his wounded masculinity that haunts the book as the secret toll the war took on the South. His one great flaw was making the terrible and exhilarating mistake of falling in love with Scarlett O'Hara.
