Five Great Novels- Season Two, Part One

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The author asserts that every word of this post is his original intellectual property, and also begs anyone using any of the content or ideas herein to simply cite appropriately. 

Margaret Mitchell’s Gone With the Wind, first published in 1936, has been on my radar for quite some time.  I grew-up exposed to the film, and at one point attempted to read through this monstrous volume.  Obviously, I failed.  With this in mind, I decided to place this novel in the first slot (American Novel) of my Summer 2014 Five Great Novels rotation. 

This novel took an unreasonable amount of time to finish—well over a month.  With that being said, my experience was enjoyable; this was one of the few novels in which I have been able to observe veritable layers of plot.  The broadest of these plots is the Gotterdammerung of Southern culture.  We see the South as it was before the war, followed by the process of its inevitable destruction, and later are presented with a reborn culture, a shadow of the past.  Regressively, there is the plot of action within Scarlett’s social circle.  Herein, those with gumption thrive, despite the death of their culture, and those without are doomed to relive a past which will never return.  This gumption should not be confused with a willingness to part from the original culture, as even those who cling to the past, yet bend in order to survive, are successful.  For example, the Fontaines and the Merriweathers, whom one cannot possibly claim have abandoned their past, are able to find success in a new, if not foreign culture.  At the most personal level is the plot surrounding Scarlett’s own life, her romantic affairs with her three husbands and other assorted beaux, including the pitiable Ashley Wilkes. 

It is precisely this layered plot which makes Gone With the Wind a novel of such great worth.  The novel documents a culture with all the bias of a people whose combined experience of bitterness and destruction has been discounted in favor of that of the victor.  Naturally, the novel is considered to be of racist leanings, as I discovered, much to my own humor, by browsing the Barnes & Noble website.  To this, my response is—‘ Of course the novel has racist leanings, it describes a culture firmly-rooted with a dichotomy of race which determined social class.’  But we should not discount Gone With the Wind for what in our politically-correct era would be considered it’s racist tendencies.  For although we may consider such language and themes to be bigotry, it is in fact a picture of a different time, and those who wish to make a fuss over a novel written before the Civil-Rights Movement, and largely set in a time before the Fourteenth Amendment, need to get over themselves.