Gone with the Wind

I'd never read the book before.  I'd seen the movie a couple of times and always thought the over wrought love affairs and girlishness of the movie plot would be boring or even ghastly to have to read.  I was wrong. Maybe I now needed to read it from an older person's sense of history, an attempt to understand what made the 20th century generations of 'old south' whites fight so hard to somehow return to a pre-Civil War south. Perhaps I needed to try to understand more as Mona and I hope to live so much in Dixie over our next years that I needed to come to grips with this part, and many others, of just what Dixie was and is today.  But 'Gone with the Wind' is not a book about that way Dixie ever was.  It is a book about the way Margaret Mitchell believed, after growing up in a hurting, slow growth Atlanta of the early 1900's, Dixie had really been.

Yes, many of her anecdotes and historical facts are correct. Yes, she went to many original diaries and historical documents for research, as well as the memories of her own extended family from the period.  But it is doubtful she ever checked her facts of white/black relations with any former slaves or their descendants. On any issues in the book regarding slavery and slaves the reader must be left shaking their head, in wonder, or even shame.

Some of her words are hateful, hurtful, and mean, by today's standards of American writing.  Calling the air of a slave cabin 'niggerly', or constantly comparing grown blacks to children, apes and gorillas, even at one point saying the loving 'Mammy' had a puffed face like a gorilla.  These are things Mitchell meant differently in her 1930's Atlanta world than we do today, but never meant to be honoring to blacks.  She only ever wished to show them their place, and the reader where she felt they really belonged under God's blue heaven.

So I invite you to read Gone with the Wind not as historical fact but as a phenomena of the American Civil War, which lasted well into the 1970's, and for some still lasts down to this day. I came away after it's thousand plus pages feeling that I had lived in the world of Scarlet and Rhett, and Ashley and Melanie, and Mammy and Pittypat deeply and well.  But it is a world almost as unreal as the Middle Earth of Tolkien.  His world akin to the middle age Europe of Christendom.  And Margaret Mitchell's, a world she and her kind wish the American South could have really been, in a time far, far away.

-Ken