Gone With the Wind
by Margaret Mitchell , Warner Books, Incorporated; ISBN: 0-446-36538-6
Week 27 (Jan. 6, 2003)

    I finally read it, the big one, the ultimate soap opera historical romance page-turner of all time, "Gone With the Wind." I had seen the movie, of course, countless times, on small TV screens and also blown-up into 70mm in huge theaters. I was expecting a good story but overwrought prose, not exactly Shakespeare. In fact, to my astonishment, the novel is very good, better than the movie, and Margaret Mitchell has a contemporary message that still holds.

      David O. Selznick, the producer of the 1939 film, was in love with Mitchell's prose and forbade the many writers who worked on the screenplay from altering so much as a single word of dialogue. Nevertheless, the famous movie left out a great many interesting things, including the complexity of its main characters, Scarlett O'Hara and Rhett Butler, who are not nearly as likeable as Clark Gable and Vivien Leigh. Scarlett, in fact, does some fairly terrible things in the book, including hiring convict labor with an extremely brutal overseer to run her lumber mills after the burning of Atlanta, all because she is terrified of being poor. The poetic Ashley Wilkes, the man she loves, does not approve, and clearly, neither does Margaret Mitchell. We understand Scarlett, we admire her gumption to survive no matter what, but her selfishness is awful.

      The most important thing David O. Selznick left out of the movie is the fact that "Gone With the Wind" is a book with a profoundly anti-war message. Rhett and Ashley are the characters who convey this message, each of them standing against the prevailing tide, the "Glorious Cause" - cotton, slaves, and States' rights -- that sends the other young men of Margaret Mitchell's South eagerly to the battlefield. "All war is about money," says Ashley: older men with property to lose sending young men to their deaths, filling their heads first with the drumbeat of empty platitudes.

      Ashley does indeed go to war, being a gentleman, whereas the cynical Rhett Butler does not, preferring to profit by running ships through the Yankee naval blockade. But they both understand the same enormous truth: war is dirty business, nothing but slaughter, a grand waste in which no one but the bankers and profiteers gain a thing. It is a truth we would all do well to remember today.

      The great shortcoming of "Gone With the Wind" is Margaret Mitchell's unfortunate, perhaps unconscious racism, based upon the prejudices of her own 1936 South. She truly appears to believe that the "darkies" were better off as slaves, protected from their own innocent natures by wise plantation owners. In the last third of the novel, the Klu Klux Klan makes an regrettable appearance, presented by Mitchell as a necessary resistance to Yankee rule and the indignity of giving Negroes the right to vote.

      All writers have limitations, and of course we are each of us a product of our times. Personally, I am willing to cut Margaret Mitchell some slack, acknowledging the period and culture from which she made her observations. Despite a few serious flaws, "Gone With the Wind" is a monumental achievement and remains today a compulsively good read. If you've only seen the movie, you're in for a treat.