Gone with the Wind

"Today, far more people have watched the blockbuster 1939 film adaptation of Gone with the Wind than have read the 1,037 pages of the Pulitzer-Prize winning novel. That’s unfortunate, given that the book offers a more nuanced and sophisticated view of the Civil War and Reconstruction, particularly of women in the American South. The novel charts the evolution of Scarlett O’Hara from a spoiled, sheltered, and superficial pre-war belle to a shrewd postwar plantation and business owner operating in and around Atlanta, Georgia. Scarlett’s family and their plantation home of Tara face endless challenges brought on by the war and its aftermath – including poverty, disease, runaway slaves, labor shortages, marauding Yankee soldiers, the burning of Atlanta, postwar carpetbaggers, crime, inflation, and the death of family and loved ones. Yet Scarlett’s relentless drive to protect her home leads her to overcome each obstacle in turn, including a love triangle that threatens to tear her family apart. For many readers the novel tells the story of the South’s surviving the Civil War, with the new South emerging to replace and succeed the storied South of old. Yes, readers have interpreted Scarlett’s character in a wide number of ways. Some have lauded Scarlett for embodying the tough, shrewd resourcefulness that enabled Southern women to hold together their society both during and after the Civil War. With men away at war, or killed, or maimed and in need of care, Scarlett’s real-life equivalents played a central role in their societies. Other readers have condemned Scarlett for putting her household ahead of her community except when it suits her to do otherwise. There are plenty of other perspectives on Scarlett that fall between these two extremes, many of which take up the matter of gender. For instance, some have argued that Scarlett’s self-interest is scandalous only because it deviates from traditional expectations for a woman. My own view is that we should consider the Southern society in which Gone with the Wind was written and published. Throughout the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the figure of the Civil War veteran had become an American icon. This was the case in the North as well, but perhaps especially so in the South where veterans organizations and women’s societies were devoted to honoring the South’s surviving soldiers, caring for those in need, and decorating the graves of the fallen. The figure of the veteran had achieved such lofty heights that Margaret Mitchell set out to win recognition for the wartime sacrifices and achievements of southern women. In fact, her novel devotes serious attention to the Reconstruction era – when soldiers had returned home – in order to portray southern men and women working together to repair their war-torn communities. After well over 1,000 pages of a novel describing Scarlett and other southern women in her community toiling and sacrificing, the privileged word ‘veteran’ is at last applied to Scarlett. The narrative states, “They were veterans. She was a veteran too.” Given that the term ‘veteran’ was almost exclusively coded as male, including during the 1930s when Mitchell wrote Gone with the Wind , this late moment in the novel is a striking one. Gone with the Wind is not a fully feminist work, but it was surely progressive in demanding that Southern women be recognized for the part they played in Civil War and American history."