Gone with the Wind - Part 1

My version of Gone with the Wind is 1450 pages long. Lord knows the book is long enough and complex enough to warrant quite a bit of blogging. I don't know how much energy I'll have, so I decided to create several smaller entries rather than one big one.

Now I don't know Margaret Mitchell personally, you may be surprised to learn, but I do know this: she is greedy. Or at least, Gone with the Wind is the greediest novel I have ever read. Mitchell has decided to put everything into one book. Everything.

Gone with the Wind is a novel of manners. The first part of the book plays like an Austen novel as we follow the young, wealthy, and beautiful folks of the County. There are proper ways to behave, proper things to say, proper reactions to have--and Scarlett follows none of them. The novel is more appropriately a novel of manners turned on its head. Scarlett is no Pamela; she is the opposite, using all her energy just to pass as decent and not give her inner demons away.

Gone with the Wind is an apocalyptic tale. Once Atlanta is in flames, the novel resembles The Road, or The Walking Dead, or The Road Warrior. How will Scarlett and her band of dependents survive? From whence will they get their next meal? Oh thank god she found a calving cow! Oh thank god she shot that nasty Yankee in the face and took his good horse!

Gone with the Wind is a buddy story. Like the novel of manners, however, this buddy story is turned upside down, since one of the buddies loathes the other. For all of Scarlett's continual whining about Melanie, Melanie is by her side the whole of the novel. She's there with the saber when the vile Yankee needs a good Dick Cheneying. She's there to support her every step of the way. Scarlett doesn't know she's in a buddy story; she thinks hers is a love triangle story.

Gone with the Wind is an Horatio Algers story. With a little gumption and honesty, the American Dream is open to everyone. Once the apocalypse has subsided and Scarlett marries Frank, her story is one of the search for the American Dream. Only instead of having honesty and spunk be at her back, it is pure selfishness and fear that gets her to get Frank's shop in shape and to buy two lumber mills and employ a ruthless Irish overseer to beat the prisoner labor force. She get to live her American Dream, but of course, it will turn out to be a nightmare in the end.

Gone with the Wind is a romance. Love overlooked, love thwarted, love barred, love denied--this book has it all.

Gone with the Wind is the greediest book I've ever read. It wants it all. It wants to be every story it can be, even if it has to run over a thousand pages long to get there. Perhaps Mitchell knew she would only write one novel, so she crammed six or seven into the one book for good measure.

The amazing thing is that she pulls it all together and makes it all work as a unified whole. It is dazzling in its ability to be all these things and be such a good and solid story the whole way through.