Fiddle-dee-dee! A Gone With the Wind Review

[aggienaut]

   I might pump out several entries this morning since I have several different topics I fancy writing about and a free morning while it rains outside, which is pleasantly conducive to writing.


   So I just finally read Gone With The Wind. I had just finished reading Half A Golden Sun about the Nigerian civil war in the 60s, which is told from the perspective of people on the losing side of the war and it had gotten me thinking I ought to read that American classic about being on the losing side of the civil war. I thought Half a Golden Sun was great by the way and recommend it. Also I had recently written a piece I wish I could get published about traveling in Tigray and the lovely people I met there, the losing side in the recent Ethiopian civil war, so I had this theme of being on the losing side of civl wars much on my mind.

   Anyway so I finished Gone With the Wind and.... boy was that racist. I expected the characters to be racist because of the time it takes place, and the author to be a bit racist because it was written in the 1930s, but yikes. All the black characters just want to serve and be taken care of by their kind kind white masters and ... I don't even want to recount all of the racist stuff because it's disgusting to recount. But just like, the author (NOT a character but the author in the omniscient narrator's voice) tells us that after the civil war black people turned free didn't know how to take care of their own children and abandoned them to starve unless kindly white people took them in. Like, seriously? Or like when the auther breezily mentions second-main-character Rhett shoots a black person who was impertinent to him or something minor like that, and acts like we should agree he shouldn't be held accountable for it as those damn yankees are seeking to do.
   So this kind of made me want to hate the book, that plus the main character starts out very dislikable and remains so. For much of the book I was trying to decide if the author thought the character of Scarlett was actually likeable or knew she was an unlikeable character, but gradually towards the end I began to conclude the author must know she is largely dislikeable and I began to have some admiration for an author who could write a whole book (a very long book!) about an unlikeable character. It was weird, I read it almost entirely rooting _against_ the main character and hoping her disagreeable ways would bring her misfortune. One theme I identified though, fitting for a book about the civil war, is that even when bad things happen to characters you don't like, in their own mind they are never defeated, and ultimately it is useless to wish them misfortune because of the fact that they'll never see themselves as defeated.
   I think another redeeming quality of the book was that it did seem to have a coherent feminist message about how a very capable woman was constrained by the society of the day.
   On a very minor note it kind of annoyed me that they refer to "Captain" Rhett Butler as "Captain Butler" throughout, despite that his own maritime experience seemed to be a few months of blockade running during the war, which it doesn't go into the details of but as he had zero maritime background prior to that he presumably was involved in as the owner but not the seamanship expert aboard and as an avid sailor and consumer of books about sailing adventures, I strongly feel he does not appear to have earned the title of "captain" at all.

   Anyway, I think it was a worthwhile book for its interesting themes and bold decision to make a dislikeable character the main character, but, and I'm normally totally against censorship, but I rather feel like someone should go through and eliminate all the blatantly racist garbage the author included (not the racism inherent in the people and society of the time but the steaming shit the narrator tells us) and release an official updated version that won't poison the minds of impressionable readers who might already be inclined towards racism and gobble that shit up / it's distractingly appalling for anyone.

Comments

[lenine2.livejournal.com]

Two years ago I went to a historical society lecture here in my small but very old town. Southwest Wisconsin drew men wanting to get rich from the lead deposits here. Despite slavery being illegal, wealthy southerners, including our first governor, brought slaves to work in the mines. Gov. Dodge's slaves are documented and we know their names, and the ages they were when he brought them here.

One woman at the lecture said Gov. Dodge must have taken good care of his slaves, or they would have left.

That was in 2019. There are people alive right now who feel the same way Margaret Mitchell did in the 1930s. Is a book like this a good illustration of the inherent racism that we are still fighting against? Or is it just going to bolster racists who will use it as an example of how Whitey had to take care of the Blacks because they were incapable of it themselves? I don't have an answer, I'm sorry to say.

I enjoyed your review.

[emo-snal.livejournal.com]

oh my gosh shortly after writing this I saw somewhere online where smoeone had written laudingly of Gone With The Wind and said it was a good portrayel of the African Americans in it! I then stopped looking at further reviews of the book lest I get too disturbed

[cactus_rs]

I wonder if an alternative to either nuking the book from orbit or issuing a redacted edition (neither of which, honestly, I think are even terrible ideas, but whatever) is more stuff like The Wind Done Gone to unambiguously highlight and present what is so awful about the original.

[emo-snal.livejournal.com]

I'm definitely keen to read the Wind Done Gone if I can get my hands on it!

[chocolate-frapp.livejournal.com]

I never read the book but I've seen the movie which is just as awful for the same reasons and I find it ideologically depressing how popular it is and was.

[emo-snal.livejournal.com]

Indeed indeed. I started to read some other reviews of GwtW after I had read it just curious what other people were saying and I had to stop after reading too many that were lauditory about it's portrayel of things and it was disturbing me

[xo-kizzy-xo.livejournal.com]

The biggest reason why GWTW was the hit that it was wasn't as much the book as it was the movie. Clark Gable was the "It" male Hollywood star at the time. Scarlett was Vivien Leigh's breakout role. It racked up a ton of awards. Hattie McDaniel wasn't allowed to accept her Oscar because award ceremonies were segregated at that time.

It's also a very long movie (3+ hours) and it still omits a good chunk of the book. The cinematography is now considered "romanticizing the slave era South" but that's how movies were made back those days. EVERYTHING was romanticized so it would appeal to the broadest of audiences. GWTW also came out right after the Great Depression so the belief that media had to be "uplifting" was also very much there.

I haven't reread the book nor have rewatched the movie in years. I suspect I'd be more disgusted about the book now. The movie, I'm not so sure. I tend to look at performances more than plot in many instances, and GWTW the movie fits into that. The closing scene with Rhett "I don't give a damn" is one of the most famous in classic Hollywood history.

[emo-snal.livejournal.com]

Yeah its funny I recognized the "I don't give a damn" line at the end of the book as a movie line I remember hearing (I think in the movie case it was "frankly my dear I don't give a damn" ? ) I wasn't sure if it was from the movie version of GWTW or another movie had had it as a homage though

[xo-kizzy-xo.livejournal.com]

It is "Frankly my dear" and yes, it's the last line in both the book and the movie. Happens just at the moment when Scarlett realizes how her behavior drove him away and how much he truly loved her.

[emo-snal.livejournal.com]

I'm pretty sure the "frankly" isn't part of it in the book, because I remember noticing that difference as I read it.

Edit: yeah no yeah just double checked and in the book it is "My dear, I don't give a damn."

[furzicle.livejournal.com]

I enjoyed your honest review. It's been so long since I read the book that I don't remember noticing the racism. Generally, I am in favor of preserving books for what they tell us about the mindset of the era. But it definitely should have a commentary with it. I think one could argue that the author did a good job of portraying Scarlett O'Hara as a spoiled bitch and one who definitely brings on all her own troubles.