Is Gone With the Wind the Great American Novel?

The irony of all this is that Margaret Mitchell had actually succeeded in producing that obsession of American writers: the Great American Novel. That phrase, “Great American Novel,” was coined in 1868 in an essay for the Nation by John William DeForest, himself a prolific author. DeForest longed for a kind of fiction that would be essentially grounded in realism and would capture the spirit of “this eager and laborious people, which takes so many newspapers, builds so many railroads, does the most business on a given capital, wages the biggest war in proportion to its population, believes in the physically impossible and does some of it.” In Europe, a slew of novelists had set their protagonists’ struggles against a complex backdrop of larger historical events and social tableaux: Stendhal, Honore de Balzac, William Thackeray, Charles Dickens, Leo Tolstoy. By contrast, McForest argued, American novelists gave their fiction a narrower scope.

DeForest’s essay prefigured Tom Wolfe’s 1989 manifesto for Harper’s, “Stalking the Billion-Footed Beast.” There, Wolfe bemoaned the absence (besides his own recently published Bonfire of the Vanities) of the “big novel” in America, the novel set in multiple social milieus analogous to those of Balzac’s Paris or Dickens’s London. Instead, Wolfe lamented, the American intelligentsia decried realistic fiction as “bourgeois” or “middlebrow,” unsuited to the contradictions of capitalism and the ambiguities of the human psyche.

Gone With the Wind is exactly the sort of big novel that DeForest and Wolfe had in mind. This may not be evident to people who know only the movie, which pares the plot down to the romantic intrigues of its four main characters: the bewitching and morally ruthless Scarlett O’Hara (Leigh); the darkly handsome speculator Rhett Butler (Gable), who sees right through her; the cultivated planter Ashley Wilkes (Leslie Howard), who is Scarlett’s love obsession; and sweet, saintly Melanie (Olivia de Havilland), whom Ashley marries instead of Scarlett. In the background stands the black slave Mammy (Hattie McDaniel), Scarlett’s beloved childhood nanny who continues to work for her mistress even after emancipation and who is the subject of much criticism today as an unrealistic stereotype.

But the novel Gone With the Wind has a much larger scope. Mitchell used War and Peace, Tolstoy’s epic about the Napoleonic wars, as her literary model, and her novel is meticulous in its depiction of the Civil War and Reconstruction. It follows the South’s military fortunes and misfortunes through Gettysburg and beyond, carefully tracing Gen. William Sherman’s scorched-earth march through Georgia in 1864 and the Confederacy’s ignominious, bloody defeats along the home front. She created dozens of characters representing every social stratum, each vividly sketched as an individual: the rowdy Tarleton twins, flighty Aunt Pittypat, fancy house madame Belle Watling, Scarlett’s mismatched parents and her two sisters, her three husbands (Rhett is the third), her children, and the elaborate social hierarchy of her neighbors in north Georgia. Mitchell also included slave characters with distinctive personalities and a hierarchy of their own. Like War and Peace, Gone With the Wind is a novel about families: which ones survive and which don’t.

Contrary to critics’ charges, Mitchell didn’t sentimentalize the Old South. It was the movie, not the book, that limned the plantation system with romantic gauze: “the land of Cavaliers and Cotton fields … where Gallantry took its last bow,” as the opening titles recite. Mitchell was under no such illusions. In the novel, Clayton County, Georgia, where the O’Haras and the Wilkses raise their cotton, is rough upcountry, pine forest until just yesterday. Scarlett’s Irish-born father, Gerald O’Hara, is a raw newcomer who arrived to set up his plantation only in the 1830s or so. The “old” families who form the local aristocracy got there just a generation before he did. One elderly woman remembers when Clayton County was Indian territory.

Furthermore, Mitchell makes it clear that the Confederacy was a doomed enterprise from the start. The bravado of the Tarleton twins (“you don’t suppose any of us would stay in college with a war going on”) ends with both their names on the killed list at Gettysburg. The South had almost no industrial infrastructure to manufacture supplies and armaments and no navy to protect its ports so it could continue to export cotton, nearly its only source of cash. Most Southerners didn’t seem to realize that slavery, as an economic system, was moribund by the 1860s. Mitchell titled her book Gone With the Wind because the society she wrote about was already gone with the wind in April 1861, when the novel opens, right after the firing on Fort Sumter. And while Mitchell, like most white Southerners, was no fan of Reconstruction, she had little sympathy for the Lost Cause nostalgia that infects Ashley, Melanie, and others who seem unable to move beyond the defeat that destroyed their way of life.

Nonetheless, Gone With the Wind’s treatment of slaves, and black people in general, cannot help but disconcert 21st-century readers. Gone With the Wind was not so much pro-slavery as it was indifferent to it. The O’Haras and their neighbors happen to be kindly masters, which conveniently enables their creator to bypass the uglier and crueler aspects of Southern chattel slavery. Still, the notion that masters and slaves might, and sometimes did, form personal attachments that transcended their status is far from implausible. When Scarlett, in a fit of pique after the war, orders Mammy to return from Atlanta to the O’Haras’ plantation, Mammy responds that she is free and can’t be sent anywhere she doesn’t want to go. She is the only person in the novel who can strike fear into Scarlett’s heart.

In 1936, the same year that Gone With the Wind was published, William Faulkner published his own Civil War novel, Absalom, Absalom! There were striking similarities between the two books, mainly their profound skepticism toward the mythic qualities with which sentimental Southerners imbued their antebellum past. Both excelled in beautiful, evocative writing. But Faulkner crafted a highbrow piece of “literary” fiction, as Wolfe would describe it, replete with such Joycean conventions as multiple narrators, hallucinatory sequences, and levels of interiority that cry out for deciphering in an English class term paper. Mitchell opted for an epic realist novel. Absalom, Absalom! sold 6,000 copies in its first year. Gone With the Wind sold 1.7 million.

Charlotte Allen is a Washington writer. Her articles have appeared in Quillette, the Wall Street Journal, USA Today, and the Los Angeles Times.