Have you read Gone with the Wind?
I came to know the story as a young girl, by watching the movie starring Vivien Leigh as the haughty, superficial Scarlett.
But I'm really here to talk about the book itself. The story that it tells about America, women, the South, the War, and slavery.
The book revolves around the strong willed and selfish Scarlett. She is the daughter of a wealthy plantation owner who immigrated from Ireland. Her mother, a resigned woman of noble French origin, dies of typhoid after caring for the sick child of a poor sharecropper who Scarlett and her sisters call 'white trash'.
After Sherman’s march across Georgia, Scarlett does everything in her power to keep Tara (her family plantation) from being sold by carpetbaggers. She works with her hands to rake in a meager food source after all the slaves have left. She steals the fiancé betrothed to her younger sister. She comes up with a way to pay the taxes on Tara when the carpetbaggers swoop in to avenge their own wounds. And she continually manipulates and claws her way into respectable society, using marriage and men to find her way back to a state of ease and the lost idyll of antebellum Georgia. She does all this while everyone around her is falling apart and mourning a lost way of life.
Scarlett feeds her own family during and after the war. Following her mother's death, her father has become a mumbling, walking whiskey bottle of stereotyped Irish insanity. And her sisters do not have the strength of mind to help, or to establish a sense of stability.
Some characters who know her from the beginning (namely, Rhett Butler and India Wilkes), are aware of her obsession with the genteel husband of the respectable, good-hearted Melanie–a man who rejects her in the book's early scenes. Through the odd circumstances of the Civil War battles, and family connections, Melanie winds up being oddly devoted to Scarlett. She dotes on her in spite of the swirling rumors. She chooses to see the best in her, even though Scarlett's returned scorn is barely concealed, and in spite of Scarlett’s sense of entitlement to Ashley, who remains devoted to Melanie. Where Scarlett is wicked, Melanie can only see strength. Where Melanie is honest, Scarlett can only see weakness. It's a fascinating juxtaposition. However, Melanie is one of those whom Scarlett feeds after Tara has gone to seed. She has become family, and in her physical weakness, she is dependent upon the breadwinning Scarlett.
And then there's Rhett Butler. He's a dashing, reckless profiteer, who falls in love with Scarlett after witnessing her private tantrum over Melanie’s and Ashley’s engagement in the book's early stages. Rhett has questionable ties to blockading, but he nevertheless sees Scarlett more clearly than anyone else. Even more, he loves her for who she is. After he and Scarlett finally marry, he dotes on their young daughter (“Bonnie Blue”), until she dies in a tragic accident. Throughout the tale, he is an evolving question mark until his final words to Scarlett, who thanks to Melanie's dying words of persuasion, has finally seen the light:
"My Dear, I don't give a damn."
There's so much to talk about in Gone With the Wind. Margaret Mitchell was an invalid when she wrote it, and I have always questioned why her only book seems has always seemed to me to be such an urgent novel. It seems as if she was desperately trying to to tell us a story that included slavery and the war, but also wanted to tell us about how the lives affected by the War itself transcended the politics of the time. Many people now condemn the book for its depiction of black slaves. Scarlett spews racist epithets for the young Prissy, who proves useless when it comes time to deliver Melanie's baby during Sherman's March on Atlanta.
To be sure, the book is not sympathetic to black people. But that's not the story it's telling. Margaret Mitchell seems to be telling a story about women in particular, from her own perspective. And the story is organized around womanhood, strength, power, beauty, loss and goodness.
Oh, the wiles and power of a debutante's heart.
In the latter half of the book, Scarlett is attacked in the dark while driving her buggy past a shantytown. Her weak minded second husband rounds up a group of men to avenge the attack, and we see the beginning of the Ku Klux Klan. It's a dark moment. And we're reminded of Scarlett and her frequently selfish motives.
What do I really want to say about Scarlett? About Melanie? The book is really about these two. Two southern belles who had everything going their way before the war. In the opening scene Mammy, a black house slave, urges Scarlett to eat pancakes while cinching up her corset. Then we meet Melanie at the Twelve Oaks picnic who, according to Scarlett, is a homely woman with the lashless eyes of all the Wilkes girls.
Conversely, Melanie is both gentle and genteel. She is privileged, but her power resides in a grace and a self-possession Scarlett could never attain or understand. As southern women, they're two sides of the same coin. Flirtation as power. Grace as attractive force. It is the homely Melanie who wins Ashley Wilkes's heart, the man who Scarlett mistakenly adores from day one.
Even later in the book, when Scarlett pieces together a dress from the velvety green drapes of Tara to hide her new working class status, she is the picture of haughtiness, power and privilege. Even when Melanie, stumbling after a difficult pregnancy down the stairs of Tara in a pale nightgown, wielding a heavy sword to confront a Yankee intruder, is all heart.
Each time I've read Gone With the Wind, it was Melanie's death that affected me most, and I think that’s probably the case with most readers. Her body broken after another difficult pregnancy, she faces death with a grim honor. And it is only then that Scarlett realizes the shallowness and stupidity of her prior apathy towards Rhett, by then her husband of many years. So Melanie's heart seems to win out over Scarlett's heartless-ness. She becomes a Christ figure in death, and is resurrected in Scarlett's oh-so-human resolve to change. Rhett's final piece of dialogue reminds us of the despair and futility of overcoming the demons within (both his own and Scarlett's). He is both broken by Melanie's and Bonnie's deaths, and his heart is hardened against Scarlett in a way that can only be described as totally and completely final.
What does the book have to teach us? Scarlett ends the book with her typical, tough optimism: "Tomorrow is Another Day". But Bonnie, Melanie, and now Rhett have departed, whether for the afterlife or another part of the South. Scarlett stands alone, almost like a triumphant devil, and we're all still reeling from Melanie's death when Rhett finally walks out the door for good.
To me, Melanie stands in for the Beatitudes from the Gospel of Matthew. She is blessed, because she is meek. She inherits the Earth, even though she dies. The meaning is the mystery, which is the two sides of the coin the southern belles represent. What does it mean to be a woman is another question introduced by the story, but even more, is the question of what does it mean to be real, humble and truthful? How are we to face the world? What after all, is true strength?
