I just finished reading ‘Gone With The Wind’. Why, I hear you ask, in this day and age, would you read such a horrible piece of racist trash? My answer is because it’s both a great work of American literature and an important historical narrative.
For all of the disturbing imagery contained in ‘Gone With The Wind’, there’s no doubt that it’s a beautifully written book. The images evoked by Margaret Mitchell’s writing are vivid and easily draw the reader back into Scarlett O’Hara’s world. The characters are rich and complex. Mitchell’s description of far off historic events from Scarlett’s perspective from the streets of Atlanta or the steps of Tara both capture the impact on Southern society as well as the confusion and anxieties her characters experience as their world is turned upside down. From that perspective, it’s a masterfully written story.
From another perspective, ‘Gone With The Wind’ is a fascinating illustration of the difference between history and memory. Margaret Mitchell wasn’t a historian. She was a storyteller and journalist who grew up in an affluent part of Atlanta in the early 1900s. She heard stories about the war from her older relatives as well as surviving veterans. She was educated, going to well-regarded Atlanta schools before one year at Smith College. ‘Gone With The Wind’ didn’t spring from the mind of some fringe author. Mitchell’s portrayal of the South during the Civil War and Reconstruction captures the popular memory held by many, including some historians, in the 1920s. Her book reflects the early 20th century popular memory of the Civil War and reflects the power and invasiveness of the Lost Cause mythology.
‘Gone With The Wind’ depicts part of how the Lost Cause was born and how it took such firm hold. For people not familiar with the Lost Cause, it was a historical ideology that held that the Confederacy’s cause was just and honorable, and that those that fought for the Confederacy were heroic. It essentially ignores the role of slavery in triggering the war, and focusses on states’ rights, unfair tariffs, Northern aggression, and other reasons for why the war began. Supporting this central thesis are other nonsensical arguments like slaves were happier as slaves, slaveholders were all kind and gentle, the Ku Klux Klan was an honorable bunch of men who were just protecting the honor of the South, and so on. Quoting from the book, “The Lost Cause was stronger, dearer now in their hearts that it had ever been at the height of its glory. Everything about it was sacred, the graves of the men who died for it, the battle fields, the torn flags, the crossed sabres in their halls, the fading letters from the front, the veterans.” It was this Lost Cause philosophy that formed the ideological basis behind the implementation of Jim Crow and justified the two-tiered segregationist society that gripped the Deep South for a century after Appomattox. ‘Gone With The Wind’, in a way, documents the birth of the Lost Cause, in some ways celebrating it, and lets us see just how this pseudo-history gripped popular memory and formed the basis for so many people accepting white supremacy and segregation as simply how it was supposed to be.
It’s this peek into mainstream memory that fascinates me so much about Mitchell’s book. ‘Gone With The Wind’ was a huge bestseller and won a Pulitzer Prize, above and beyond being turned into a hugely successful Hollywood blockbuster. This was the antebellum South that many Americans in the first half of the 20th century looked at and said, “Yep. That’s the way it was.” It reminds us of how easy it is for popular memory to be fooled into believing a beautiful myth rather than an ugly reality.
Should you read 'Gone With The Wind' too? Maybe. If you're thin-skinned and the movie horribly offended you, I wouldn't recommend it. The movie was downright pleasant compared to the book. The book was astonishingly racist and held absolutely nothing back. Every trope of the Lost Cause was front and center and shouted from the rooftops. However, if you can get past that, and want to explore the dichotomy between history and memory, 'Gone With The Wind' is a great case study.
