Really, do we have to go over this whole business with Gone with the Wind once again?
Since 1961, the United States has gone through the civil rights era and all that came afterward. Does anyone really think we’re going to rewatch or reread this classic tale of endurance and resilience, of a woman wasting years of her life pining over a man who was wrong for her when the right one was always right there beside her, and decide that the Old South, of which we see just a little before it gets blown up completely, really had something great going on in the plantation system?
Certainly, none of the four characters who speak for the author — Scarlett and Melanie, Ashley and Rhett — ever say anything other than that the war itself was a blunder of historic proportions. Rhett tells the secessionists they have nothing but “cotton and arrogance” and that, in the long run, the Union will crush them. Ashley enlists but knows it’s a huge waste of effort and bound to end badly. When the casualty lists come in from the battle of Gettysburg, Scarlett tells Rhett that the South should have freed the slaves long before the war started. Later on, she is stunned to hear the framing of the war’s supposed “Lost Cause,” as she thinks it a mistake that should never have happened.
In short, if you want a defense of war or the states that began it, Gone with the Wind is not it.
Slavery is in the book, as in slaves and then freed slaves. But they, like everyone else, are secondary to the theme of the opus, which is that the fittest survive. What Margaret Mitchell wished to explore is what happens to the privileged class of a caste-ridden culture when that culture collapses, when those bred to do nothing are stripped of protection and pushed out to fend for themselves.
Rhett understands this and explains it often to Scarlett, who, though she does not understand it, is living it out by herself. Back home at Tara, she works like a field hand, shoots an intruder who tries to molest her, and runs a lumber mill by herself until Rhett comes to her rescue. Meanwhile, Ashley, the flower of antebellum gentility, depends on her to give him a living, and some of her old friends from the plantation heyday sink back into the lower-class culture out of which they first came.
Certainly, you don’t have to be racist in order to love Gone With The Wind. Jacqueline Kennedy, who worshipped President Abraham Lincoln and strongly supported the civil rights movement, read the book three times when it was first published. She loved it forever, seeing much of her father in Rhett Butler, as played by Clark Gable, and much of Scarlett in her mother and also herself. Jackie and Scarlett both came from privileged families that suddenly lost most of their money. Jackie and Scarlett would marry two men apiece, almost entirely because they had money.
Jackie and Scarlett would each marry the beau of a sister, in each case only because he had money.
Each, too, would see her life and her country ripped apart by violence. Each would emerge as the rock of her family, or, as in Jackie’s case, of the whole country, keeping their heads and their senses when their respective worlds were falling to pieces. It is no wonder that since 1936 and 1963, we’ve been enthralled by both. That won’t blow away with the wind.
