A few weeks ago a friend shamed me into reading Gone with the Wind by saying, “I would think that as a writer you’d have read it. It’s very well written.” I ordered the book from Amazon and almost choked when I checked the final page and saw that it would take 957 pages to read Margaret Mitchell’s tale.
I disliked Scarlett from page one. I take pride in crafting protagonists for my books who are winsome characters my readers want to cheer on through difficult circumstances. With Gone with the Wind I struggled through 957 pages and at every turn wanting to scream, “Scarlett, you little fool, stop whining over Ashley!” She was not a character I wanted to cheer on.
But what if rather than a character in a novel she was the South itself. I could cheer her then, not for a South returning to its antebellum ways, but a South, like Atlanta, rising from ashes and clawing its way into modernity. I took a deep breath and stepped back from the canvas. I stopped glaring at Scarlett and began to see the bigger picture.
Both Rhett and Ashley used the term “feudal” to describe the mid-nineteenth century Southern economy. In feudal era Russia there were serfs, in antebellum South, slaves, human beings caught with no hope of upward or outward mobility, the cruelest condition.
Perhaps Gone with the Wind is really an allegory, with a meaning residing deeper than the struggles of one woman as her world collapses before another can be built to take its place. And there it is, Gone with the Wind. the tale of every woman or every man, struggling to survive using what they have, even just a clump of red soil.
