readingthethings's review against another edition
adventurous
emotional
informative
sad
tense
fast-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? A mix
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? Yes
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
5.0
⋆.ೃ࿔࿐ྂ “Make up your mind to this. If you are different, you are isolated, not only from people of your own age but from those of your parents' generation and from your children's generation too. They'll never understand you and they'll be shocked no matter what you do."
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
I assume you’re here either because you love Gone with the Wind and are glad to have found a like mind who plans to gush praises on the novel in defiance of the haters, or because you see a five star review of this novel & assume I am a romantic thinker without values who adores Gone with the Wind despite its racist message because I have bought into a decades-old lie about the glory of the Old South and am unable & unwilling to see reality.
The truth is, like most humans, I’m a little more complex than either of those two extremes. I’m a writer & intelligent thinker who is absolutely fascinated by the science of story-telling. I have a Bachelor’s degree in English with a minor in History. I’m intrigued by the American Civil War, feminist history, and how exactly a good story works. I’ve read a ton of literature, and nearly none of it can fire my imagination the way Mitchell’s work does. I am extremely skeptical when I read, but she makes me forget I’m reading. How? Why? The questions fire my curiosity enough I’m actually willing to pore through books about her just to find out, and she so tickles my interest I consider her fascinating without ever having met her.
Gone with the Wind is a pretty touchy subject in my nation (the United States). I recently asked an acquaintance her favorite novel, & she said, “Well, my real answer is Gone with the Wind, but that isn’t something I like to put out there, so I usually answer (insert another book that is less heavy with history.)" We ended up discussing Gone with the Wind and what we see as its strengths, and how we both feel a little sad to see it so often not mentioned simply because people don’t want to have to deal with the heavy assumptions about you as a human that often come with naming Gone with the Wind as your favorite novel. (Example: that the reader is racist; that the reader is romantic about Southern history; that the reader spends her life reading romance novels.)
The end result is that few people ever talk about the novel at all, unless it’s to claim it as an unadulterated true history of the American South & its war which makes one weep for the old days, or conversely to dismiss it as racist with a lot of disgusted self-righteousness because one is glad to not be one of the bewildered few who are less enlightened.
Many see the work (having never actually read the work) as a silly romance novel worthy of dismissal. They claim it doesn’t belong in the American canon, didn’t deserve its Pulitzer, & is otherwise consummate trash.
The truth is though? I think there’s value in the novel (beyond its extremely riveting story of a woman caught in the throes of history and fighting back) because of its place in history & what it therefore has to say about history (which like it or not is our American heritage.) I also think it says A LOT more than people give it credit for.
All of my intuition grins at Margaret Mitchell. I see spirit in her, daring, an I-shall-not-be-labeled spirit I agree with HARDILY, and a storyteller jauntiness that makes me want to grab her arm and go along for an adventure. I LIKE HER. A lot. I also see intelligence in her face. And from what I’ve read, she had an extremely strong sense of honor. Not honor as defined by her world — but an inner honor that made her value the truth she saw in people and in life.
Margaret Mitchell is rarely discussed, I find, unless it’s to say flat out she was a genius storyteller who brought the Old South to life, or to dismiss her work wholesale. I feel that she is misunderstood: either believed to be a Lost Cause writer (she emphatically wasn’t), or dismissed as a racist with nothing revolutionary to contribute. I hope to see the complexity in her. She was a realist & wouldn’t want to be propped up as a martyr of the Southern cause, & I believe I can say with authority that it would cause her anguish to think her novel had a part in anything violent or hateful. I do think she was likely tainted by the racism of her era and didn’t see race relations as clearly as many do today, but I’m not sure she intended to defend racism so much as shake up the patriarchal structure that stood as its foundation even in her own era. Her novel starts out as a romantic fantasy about the old days, but all through it — ALL THROUGH IT — is revolution, skepticism, cynicism, and this undercurrent whispering THINK THINK THINK.
Her style reminds me of Austen and Shakespeare, in that she is giving you want you want to see (her anticipated audience was the South, not the North) and undermining that same portrait throughout. If you dismiss her work wholesale without reading it, you’re getting a different message than is intended. Like when you read The Taming of the Shrew and see misogynism when the clear message in that one is the very opposite.
My personal feeling (having read a great deal on her), is that Mitchell was kind, well-meaning, brilliantly witty, full of insight, & very much attempting to say something revolutionary in her work from within a world steeped in institutionalized racism. That such racism makes its way into her work is likely evidence she wasn’t free of it, but was trying. Had she lived another forty years, and seen the Civil Rights Movement, and had the benefit of time, she might have continued growing. But of course all of this is mere speculation. I can never really know. What I do know is that she valued accuracy and honesty as mandatory in history, and saw the distortion and fairy-tale so often touted as history as dangerous. I feel that she would be the first to say, “Examine my novel, & speak your mind.”
To simply ignore this — these steps in history, these efforts — it doesn’t make sense to me. It creates an image of history that is ALL GOOD versus ALL BAD when in fact I feel that people fall somewhere in between. I don’t believe Mitchell was a saint, & I’m sure she wouldn’t claim to be one, having said once of the response to her novel, “Being a product of the Jazz Age, being one of those short-haired, short-skirted, hard-boiled young women who preachers said would go to hell or be hanged before they were thirty, I am naturally a little embarrassed at finding myself the incarnate spirit of the Old South.” I think she was a strong, imperfect soul living in a terrible age whose novel is often misread.
Gone with the Wind is told through the eyes of a selfish Southern girl who lives through the American Civil War and Reconstruction. Mitchell was born only thirty-five years after that war, & had met several Confederate soldiers. She lived in Atlanta, the heart of the Deep South, where the repercussions of the war still sought to dehumanize Black America. Her own grandfather had fought in the war on the Southern side & would often encourage her to run a finger over the bullet wound still scarring his head. She had read many books on the topic — journals, letters, newspapers — & had interviewed real survivors of the war.
I feel that Mitchell did epic things for white women in Gone with the Wind. She writes of women who are actually intelligent, and complicated, and flawed, and courageous, and afraid, and jealous, and selfish — and she suggests that EVERY day is another day to get back up. What she seems to say in Gone with the Wind is basically this: your Southern system stunted us, gentlemen, & we are just about done with obeying. And ladies, this is your fate, if you don’t turn this thing around, right now. Stop going along. Stop being blind. Stop the in-fighting. Stop closing your eyes. There is nothing romantic about fading away. You don’t get a happy ending by sitting around hoping. The books lie. Life is brutal. Stand up and fight.
While her novel never openly rails against the Confederacy, it depicts the Confederacy as alternatively romantic, idiotic, simpering, blind, and dangerously oppressive — filled with good people and bad alike who are indoctrinated into a system far bigger than they are.
Mitchell is CLEARLY satirizing the Confederate patriarchy in Gone with the Wind, while acknowledging throughout that it was made up of humans. Her novel ultimately illustrates the pang of losing a war (& therefore one’s nation & self-made ideals), and the psychology that follows such a defeat.
Gone with the Wind isn’t a novel about the enslaved Americans or their freedom, oppression, or release. It’s a novel about their captors. It’s told through the eyes of the daughter of a Southern plantation owner — a fairly foolish girl who looks at Ashley Wilkes and sees, not a broken soldier, but a knight in gleaming armor; who looks at Mammy and sees, not a justifiably angry or defeated woman just trying to survive, but a happy servant; who looks at Tara & sees, not a shack, but a veritable mansion.
The novel is difficult to reckon with because it is delivered in the point of view of a woman who is blind to reality throughout the entirety of the book. She is an unreliable narrator to the third power. She is both brilliant and unimaginably stupid — and it’s extremely difficult to remember when reading that we are reading through her perspective, and not Mitchell’s.
Mitchell couldn’t write a Confederate like Scarlett & have her understand her delusions. Scarlett sees the world as a Confederate would: with distortion. I think the distortion is the point we are supposed to consider: why is Scarlett’s view distorted? what caused that? how can she get out of that way of thinking? What will happen when she does?
Whether Margaret Mitchell fully saw the distortion herself is a matter of debate. And whether we can get something valuable out of her novel by recognizing it ourselves is another matter for discussion. Is her work racist propaganda? Or is it food for thought? Are our own eyes still distorted?
When we read a classic, we often have to reconcile ourselves to the history that fills its pages. That’s what I love about classic literature, with its insights, its flaws, & its gaps. It is the primary source material of another era — the written psychology of how people thought, how they reacted to their world, how they inspired change, how they remained stagnant — and that human psychology leads directly to us. It is quite often still in us. By reading of other humans’ distortions & struggles we can, if we are courageous enough, better see our own humanity.
Gone with the Wind, for better or worse, illustrates an era in my nation that is ugly, and that remains a blind spot for many Americans to this day. Yet every time I finish this book, I feel shaken, as if I've been through a real EXPERIENCE. I feel hopeful, I feel sad, I feel joyful, I feel cheated, I feel stunned, I feel challenged and incredulous and appalled and horrified and blown away. BUT I FEEL. More than I have ever felt about any book. Because this book is ALL ABOUT weak, and ill-informed, and broken, and courageous, and distorted, desperate, ridiculous, enormous humans. Either I am totally dense, or Mitchell has written a novel so complex and deceptively formulaic that it hides its true message in plain sight.
I remain completely stunned by what I consider a masterpiece, born of the psychology of the defeated in a war whose legacy still lives on in our own era & still wants desperately to weave a story out of it that will somehow reconcile what we stand for with what we permit. ⋆.ೃ࿔࿐ྂ
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
I assume you’re here either because you love Gone with the Wind and are glad to have found a like mind who plans to gush praises on the novel in defiance of the haters, or because you see a five star review of this novel & assume I am a romantic thinker without values who adores Gone with the Wind despite its racist message because I have bought into a decades-old lie about the glory of the Old South and am unable & unwilling to see reality.
The truth is, like most humans, I’m a little more complex than either of those two extremes. I’m a writer & intelligent thinker who is absolutely fascinated by the science of story-telling. I have a Bachelor’s degree in English with a minor in History. I’m intrigued by the American Civil War, feminist history, and how exactly a good story works. I’ve read a ton of literature, and nearly none of it can fire my imagination the way Mitchell’s work does. I am extremely skeptical when I read, but she makes me forget I’m reading. How? Why? The questions fire my curiosity enough I’m actually willing to pore through books about her just to find out, and she so tickles my interest I consider her fascinating without ever having met her.
Gone with the Wind is a pretty touchy subject in my nation (the United States). I recently asked an acquaintance her favorite novel, & she said, “Well, my real answer is Gone with the Wind, but that isn’t something I like to put out there, so I usually answer (insert another book that is less heavy with history.)" We ended up discussing Gone with the Wind and what we see as its strengths, and how we both feel a little sad to see it so often not mentioned simply because people don’t want to have to deal with the heavy assumptions about you as a human that often come with naming Gone with the Wind as your favorite novel. (Example: that the reader is racist; that the reader is romantic about Southern history; that the reader spends her life reading romance novels.)
The end result is that few people ever talk about the novel at all, unless it’s to claim it as an unadulterated true history of the American South & its war which makes one weep for the old days, or conversely to dismiss it as racist with a lot of disgusted self-righteousness because one is glad to not be one of the bewildered few who are less enlightened.
Many see the work (having never actually read the work) as a silly romance novel worthy of dismissal. They claim it doesn’t belong in the American canon, didn’t deserve its Pulitzer, & is otherwise consummate trash.
The truth is though? I think there’s value in the novel (beyond its extremely riveting story of a woman caught in the throes of history and fighting back) because of its place in history & what it therefore has to say about history (which like it or not is our American heritage.) I also think it says A LOT more than people give it credit for.
All of my intuition grins at Margaret Mitchell. I see spirit in her, daring, an I-shall-not-be-labeled spirit I agree with HARDILY, and a storyteller jauntiness that makes me want to grab her arm and go along for an adventure. I LIKE HER. A lot. I also see intelligence in her face. And from what I’ve read, she had an extremely strong sense of honor. Not honor as defined by her world — but an inner honor that made her value the truth she saw in people and in life.
Margaret Mitchell is rarely discussed, I find, unless it’s to say flat out she was a genius storyteller who brought the Old South to life, or to dismiss her work wholesale. I feel that she is misunderstood: either believed to be a Lost Cause writer (she emphatically wasn’t), or dismissed as a racist with nothing revolutionary to contribute. I hope to see the complexity in her. She was a realist & wouldn’t want to be propped up as a martyr of the Southern cause, & I believe I can say with authority that it would cause her anguish to think her novel had a part in anything violent or hateful. I do think she was likely tainted by the racism of her era and didn’t see race relations as clearly as many do today, but I’m not sure she intended to defend racism so much as shake up the patriarchal structure that stood as its foundation even in her own era. Her novel starts out as a romantic fantasy about the old days, but all through it — ALL THROUGH IT — is revolution, skepticism, cynicism, and this undercurrent whispering THINK THINK THINK.
Her style reminds me of Austen and Shakespeare, in that she is giving you want you want to see (her anticipated audience was the South, not the North) and undermining that same portrait throughout. If you dismiss her work wholesale without reading it, you’re getting a different message than is intended. Like when you read The Taming of the Shrew and see misogynism when the clear message in that one is the very opposite.
My personal feeling (having read a great deal on her), is that Mitchell was kind, well-meaning, brilliantly witty, full of insight, & very much attempting to say something revolutionary in her work from within a world steeped in institutionalized racism. That such racism makes its way into her work is likely evidence she wasn’t free of it, but was trying. Had she lived another forty years, and seen the Civil Rights Movement, and had the benefit of time, she might have continued growing. But of course all of this is mere speculation. I can never really know. What I do know is that she valued accuracy and honesty as mandatory in history, and saw the distortion and fairy-tale so often touted as history as dangerous. I feel that she would be the first to say, “Examine my novel, & speak your mind.”
To simply ignore this — these steps in history, these efforts — it doesn’t make sense to me. It creates an image of history that is ALL GOOD versus ALL BAD when in fact I feel that people fall somewhere in between. I don’t believe Mitchell was a saint, & I’m sure she wouldn’t claim to be one, having said once of the response to her novel, “Being a product of the Jazz Age, being one of those short-haired, short-skirted, hard-boiled young women who preachers said would go to hell or be hanged before they were thirty, I am naturally a little embarrassed at finding myself the incarnate spirit of the Old South.” I think she was a strong, imperfect soul living in a terrible age whose novel is often misread.
Gone with the Wind is told through the eyes of a selfish Southern girl who lives through the American Civil War and Reconstruction. Mitchell was born only thirty-five years after that war, & had met several Confederate soldiers. She lived in Atlanta, the heart of the Deep South, where the repercussions of the war still sought to dehumanize Black America. Her own grandfather had fought in the war on the Southern side & would often encourage her to run a finger over the bullet wound still scarring his head. She had read many books on the topic — journals, letters, newspapers — & had interviewed real survivors of the war.
I feel that Mitchell did epic things for white women in Gone with the Wind. She writes of women who are actually intelligent, and complicated, and flawed, and courageous, and afraid, and jealous, and selfish — and she suggests that EVERY day is another day to get back up. What she seems to say in Gone with the Wind is basically this: your Southern system stunted us, gentlemen, & we are just about done with obeying. And ladies, this is your fate, if you don’t turn this thing around, right now. Stop going along. Stop being blind. Stop the in-fighting. Stop closing your eyes. There is nothing romantic about fading away. You don’t get a happy ending by sitting around hoping. The books lie. Life is brutal. Stand up and fight.
While her novel never openly rails against the Confederacy, it depicts the Confederacy as alternatively romantic, idiotic, simpering, blind, and dangerously oppressive — filled with good people and bad alike who are indoctrinated into a system far bigger than they are.
Mitchell is CLEARLY satirizing the Confederate patriarchy in Gone with the Wind, while acknowledging throughout that it was made up of humans. Her novel ultimately illustrates the pang of losing a war (& therefore one’s nation & self-made ideals), and the psychology that follows such a defeat.
Gone with the Wind isn’t a novel about the enslaved Americans or their freedom, oppression, or release. It’s a novel about their captors. It’s told through the eyes of the daughter of a Southern plantation owner — a fairly foolish girl who looks at Ashley Wilkes and sees, not a broken soldier, but a knight in gleaming armor; who looks at Mammy and sees, not a justifiably angry or defeated woman just trying to survive, but a happy servant; who looks at Tara & sees, not a shack, but a veritable mansion.
The novel is difficult to reckon with because it is delivered in the point of view of a woman who is blind to reality throughout the entirety of the book. She is an unreliable narrator to the third power. She is both brilliant and unimaginably stupid — and it’s extremely difficult to remember when reading that we are reading through her perspective, and not Mitchell’s.
Mitchell couldn’t write a Confederate like Scarlett & have her understand her delusions. Scarlett sees the world as a Confederate would: with distortion. I think the distortion is the point we are supposed to consider: why is Scarlett’s view distorted? what caused that? how can she get out of that way of thinking? What will happen when she does?
Whether Margaret Mitchell fully saw the distortion herself is a matter of debate. And whether we can get something valuable out of her novel by recognizing it ourselves is another matter for discussion. Is her work racist propaganda? Or is it food for thought? Are our own eyes still distorted?
When we read a classic, we often have to reconcile ourselves to the history that fills its pages. That’s what I love about classic literature, with its insights, its flaws, & its gaps. It is the primary source material of another era — the written psychology of how people thought, how they reacted to their world, how they inspired change, how they remained stagnant — and that human psychology leads directly to us. It is quite often still in us. By reading of other humans’ distortions & struggles we can, if we are courageous enough, better see our own humanity.
Gone with the Wind, for better or worse, illustrates an era in my nation that is ugly, and that remains a blind spot for many Americans to this day. Yet every time I finish this book, I feel shaken, as if I've been through a real EXPERIENCE. I feel hopeful, I feel sad, I feel joyful, I feel cheated, I feel stunned, I feel challenged and incredulous and appalled and horrified and blown away. BUT I FEEL. More than I have ever felt about any book. Because this book is ALL ABOUT weak, and ill-informed, and broken, and courageous, and distorted, desperate, ridiculous, enormous humans. Either I am totally dense, or Mitchell has written a novel so complex and deceptively formulaic that it hides its true message in plain sight.
I remain completely stunned by what I consider a masterpiece, born of the psychology of the defeated in a war whose legacy still lives on in our own era & still wants desperately to weave a story out of it that will somehow reconcile what we stand for with what we permit. ⋆.ೃ࿔࿐ྂ
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Content Warnings
Graphic: Death of parent, Racial slurs, Racism, and Child death
Moderate: Rape, Sexual harassment, Sexual violence, Slavery, Toxic relationship, and Domestic abuse
Minor: Animal cruelty, Infidelity, Stalking, Grief, Alcoholism, War, Fire/Fire injury, Sexism, Classism, Dementia, Murder, and Misogyny
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