Gone with the Wind - Part 3

In my last two posts, I talked about how ambitious and how successful Mitchell is with her epic tale. As a feat of storytelling, Gone with the Wind is amazing. The characters are vivid and consistent. The main characters are rich and wonderful. The story never sags for long, which is hard to do in a short story, let alone in a book of this magnitude. Each section is interesting and rewarding so that you are never left pining for an older section; you happily move on and let the characters go on their way, happy to follow.

Moreover, Mitchell has incredible timing, bringing each twist and turn together to build up to something amazing. Having Melly's child arrive as Atlanta is under siege is fantastic. The rug is constantly pulled out beneath our heroes at just the right time.

As a feat of storytelling, I loved this book.

Politically, I hated this book.

As I touched upon in my last post, the South is romanticized beyond repair. The two burrs in my saddle are not surprisingly the issues of gender and race.

The book seems obsessed with what is masculine and what isn't. Every male character fails the test of masculinity except one. Every one of them is either effeminate ("He's nervous and timid and well meaning, and I don't know of any more damning qualities a man can have.") or boyish. Only Rhett is strong enough to man-handle Scarlett, to bend her to his will, to forcefully kiss her. As we are told repeatedly, "He was a man, and no matter what he did, she could never forget it." Near the end of the book, when Rhett is drunken and confronting Scarlett, he insists on his marital rights and carries her up the stairs. But instead of rape, we find the best sex of Scarlett's life. Once he kisses her roughly and controllingly, Scarlett melts away and gets what she's been needing the whole novel. Because of his uncontainable manhood, Rhett could even get away with knowing french fashions, which on any other man would be "rank effeminacy."

It's not that Mitchell insists on all women acting like women and all men acting like men. But what she does is romanticize the roles and social structures that bind them. The men may not know more, but the women should let them feel like they do. The tension in the book comes from Scarlett and Melanie and Ellen basically having to take care of all the men around them. But this seems to be a result more of the necessity of the times than a comment about any real social equity. And while we pity Ashley and his like-troubled southern men, we are left with something of disgust at their failures. Rhett is a shining example of what they could be and what they have failed to be.

And I do not have to say much about the politics of race here. Mitchell mocks Uncle Tom's Cabin because every northerner thinks that all slaves are brutalized when really they are treated more like family than slaves. But even Uncle Tom's Cabin shows some slave owners who are not brutal. There is nothing bad about slavery in Mitchell's book. In fact, we meet many blacks who having tasted freedom really just want to go back to their masters. And most disturbingly, we are supposed to share Rhett's outrage that he could be jailed for killing a black man who was "uppity" with a white woman. The Klan in Gone with the Wind never has been and never will be a terrorist organization; they are merely respectable southern gentlemen who are given no other recourse to righting the wrongs done against their womenfolk.

Mitchell's defense of southern social structures made parts of the book very difficult. There were many passages that made me feel dirty just to be reading them, and when I read those passages, I wanted to hide the book when someone walked by so they would not know I was reading this racist shit lest they think I endorsed it. And sadly, I cannot say I wholly enjoyed reading or thinking about the novel because of these passages.

I am very interested to see what the movie does with the politics of the novel, to see what extent they are left intact and to what extent they are washed over to emphasize the romance story.