Atlantan Margaret Mitchell's 1936 novel of the Civil War and Reconstruction in Georgia, Gone With the Wind,
Gone With the Wind
occupies an important place in any history of twentieth-century American literature. Dismissed by most academic literary critics for being uneven, flawed, and conventionally written in an age marked by literary experimentation, and attacked by some cultural commentators as promulgating racist myths and undermining the very foundations of its basically feminist paradigm, the best-selling novel of the twentieth century continues to withstand its detractors.
Influences and Historical Background
Upon its publication, reviewers drew comparisons with William Makepeace Thackeray's Vanity Fair and Leo Tolstoy's War and Peace. Margaret Mitchell claimed not to have read Thackeray's novel until after she had completed her Civil War saga and confessed her inability ever to get very far in Tolstoy's monumental work. She did admit her saturation in Charles Dickens and her sense that her work was a "'Victorian' type novel." 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 (at the very top of its form) 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.
The author spoke often of her research in accounts and memoirs of the period, but probably more important was her knowing people who had lived through the era. A child naturally drawn to old people and to the great drama of her region, Mitchell had gone horseback riding with Confederate veterans, sat listening in the parlors of faded belles, and taken every literary advantage of her exposure to the past. The result is a Balzacian sense of the texture of the period—Scarlett O'Hara's green morocco slippers, the bright rag rugs in her bedroom at Tara, Melanie Hamilton's black lace mittens—that leads to the capturing of color and movement in great scenes like the Twelve Oaks barbecue and the ball in Atlanta. Alternating with such scenes are remarkably evocative descriptions of the languorous beauty of the landscape.
Characters and Setting
Though her four major characters have now become stereotypes, when she drew them, with the exception of the Byronic Rhett Butler, they were not. Scarlett is a full-blooded woman, selfish, deluded,
Reprinted with permission from The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Margaret Mitchell
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.
Mitchell's upland Georgia is also not the dreamy land of a Thomas Nelson Page plantation novel. She is insightful on the social structure, its closeness to pioneer days, and its mixture of old blood lines and new men. She is astute about the violence lying not far submerged beneath the surface of all classes. She is unsentimental about the Lost Cause, tracing its origins to unreconstructed women, not to the men who fought the war. And she is remarkably good as a novelist of manners, understanding the mores and shibboleths of the culture she is examining and bringing them skillfully into play
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