Southern Glamour and Ghosts in Gone With the Wind

Unless you've living under a rock or far away from the southern U.S. states, you already know that Margaret Mitchell's Gone With the Wind is a romance novel set in the days between the start of the civil war, when white southern land owners worked slaves for cotton while they lived luxurious lives in neo-colonial style mansions, and the days of the Reconstruction, when slaves were freed and the former gentry turned upside-down, surviving or succumbing to a poverty they had never known. The heroine is Scarlett O'Hara, daughter of a plantation owner, headstrong, spoiled, and determined to make it out of the poverty she finds herself in after the war. The love interest is the roguish Rhett Butler, who has few admirers during the war for his blockade running, which benefits the war effort yet profits from it as well. The fiery romance between Rhett and Scarlett is one-sided, as Scarlett is forever besotted by the dreamy, and very married Ashley Wilkes, while Rhett recognizes his likeness in Scarlett and ceaselessly attempts to win her over.

One of the early book covers. Image Source

    Though the book is set in 1860-70's Georgia, it was written in the 1930's for the fun of it while the author, Margaret Mitchell, was recovering from an auto accident in bed. She had grown up hearing stories about the pre-war South from her elders, many actual veterans of the war. She wanted to capture the essence of a world that no longer existed after the war, yet a world that many after the war could not give up, like living ghosts, trapped in traditions and memories of a world 'gone with the wind'. The title, however, refers not only to the loss of that world, but to an erotic loss as well, as the origin of the line reveals in the poem, Non Sum Qualis Eram Bonae sub Regno Cynarae, by Ernest Dowson:

Last night, ah, yesternight, betwixt her lips and mine

There fell thy shadow, Cynara! thy breath was shed

Upon my soul between the kisses and the wine;

And I was desolate and sick of an old passion,

Yea, I was desolate and bowed my head:

I have been faithful to thee, Cynara! in my fashion.

All night upon mine heart I felt her warm heart beat,

Night-long within mine arms in love and sleep she lay;

Surely the kisses of her bought red mouth were sweet;

But I was desolate and sick of an old passion,

When I awoke and found the dawn was gray:

I have been faithful to thee, Cynara! in my fashion.

I have forgot much, Cynara! gone with the wind,

Flung roses, roses riotously with the throng,

Dancing, to put thy pale, lost lilies out of mind;

But I was desolate and sick of an old passion,

Yea, all the time, because the dance was long:

I have been faithful to thee, Cynara! in my fashion.

I cried for madder music and for stronger wine,

But when the feast is finished and the lamps expire,

Then falls thy shadow, Cynara! the night is thine;

And I am desolate and sick of an old passion,

Yea, hungry for the lips of my desire:

I have been faithful to thee Cynara! in my fashion.

If you have read the book, enjoying Rhett's amorous efforts and wanting, like I did, to slap Scarlett several times throughout the book when she fails to recognize real love, then this beautiful poem makes the romance elements even more poignant, as the metaphor between the loss of the South and the loss of love play out. The poem's narrator makes love to a prostitute while longing to be with his true love, just as Rhett turns to the prostitute Belle Watling when Scarlett turns him away from her bed, intent on never having children again.

When I started the book, I did not expect to find a very literary structure, yet, surprisingly, the events of physical destruction are paralleled with Scarlett's spiritual destruction, almost event for event, as the story draws to a close, though unevenly. I read up later to find the uneven structure was the main criticism of the work. Still, it is a  compelling story full of historically accurate descriptions and unforgettable characters, a bildungsroman, where the main character's moment of enlightenment comes tragically too late.  

The most bodice-ripping romance styled cover

Celebrated as the novel and the film may be, and celebrated here in Atlanta it definitely is---all our souvenir shops are covered with memorabilia---I can't fail to mention that there IS deep racism in the novel. It was, after all, a book about the end of slavery written by a white southerner in the pre-Civil Rights south. Margaret Mitchell captures the black dialect of the time faithfully, but she also tends to treat blacks like children. I found the pains at which she went to explain the relationships between whites and blacks extremely enlightening: blacks had deep loyalty to their white masters even to the point of despising their Yankee liberators, Mitchell has us believe, especially the 'house niggers' which looked down on both the 'trashy' whites as well as the trashy blacks. In polite circles Yankee women question whites whether they beat their slaves, and the whites are offended by the insinuation. Only blacks that deserved it got beat, apparently. Blacks have to be protected like children, and can't be expected to take up their own personhood like the Yankees prescribe during the Reconstruction. There is no doubt that all of this is pure myth; I personally will never forget reading about a study of extremely violent black men sitting in a North Carolina prison this very moment whose ancestry was traced back to the same plantation owned by one of the meanest slave owners on record at the time. You can't tell me history does not shape the present, no matter that it was over 100 years ago! Though I know Mitchell is carrying on a myth, it intrigues me that this is how whites may have thought about their relationships with blacks at the time. For the truth, we would have to also hear what the blacks said about their relationships with the whites as well...

Original cover

For me personally, references to Jonesboro and the University of Georgia (alumna here!) made me smile, and for anyone who has grown up in the South, the strong regional references to magnolias, neo-colonial architecture, fields of cotton, hot summers, corn bread, and sickeningly sweet, back-stabbing, "southern hospitality" can be lovingly appreciated. No other novel has brought the Old South as alive as this book for me. My other favorite southern writers, William Faulkner and Flannery O'Conner, wrote about much later eras.

A more recent edition published by Scribner

I highly recommend reading Gone With the Wind to anyone who intends to travel to the southern states, and to fellow Southerners who haven't read it, I say, "What you waitin' fer? Read it, honey!"

If you have read Gone With the Wind, how much did you enjoy it? What criticism or praise do you feel towards it?