Gone with the Wind Novel The Story of Scarlett O’Hara

This novel has been a massively popular hit in America and all over the world ever since it was written in 1936.  It is the one and only full work by Margaret Mitchell, a young woman from a southern family, who had heard stories of the Civils war from her relatives all her life.  It is, most famously, also a film with Vivien Leigh as the anti-Heroine, Scarlett O’Hara and Clark Gable as the blockade running Southern rascal Rhett Butler.
The story is too well known to need repetition here.  It is a romance but it has an uneasy ending.   It does not end with the heroine and hero falling in love or marrying... Scarlett marries three times and has three children during the story, as well as surviving the horrors of war, taking up running a business, in an unladylike fashion, and even killing a man.

After years of pursuing Ashley Wilkes, the gentlemanly but weak young man from a neighbouring plantation, Scarlett realises that she loves Rhett, her third husband. Rhett is also a Southerner, but unlike Ashley he has lived life exactly as it pleased him, been cheerfully selfish instead of high minded.  Rhett has made money from the war and only joined the Confederate Army after the fall of Atlanta.  Rhett only starts to fit in with the prim and proper mores of the Old South when he wants to get his daughter into local society…and realises that having a mother and father who traded and socialised with Yankees and who were more concerned with money making than with reciting the history of the Lost Cause and the South’s defeat, will damage Bonnie’s chances of finding a suitable husband when she is grown.

The story’s attitude to the South is ambivalent.  Mitchell did not seem to find anything particularly reprehensible about slavery and the South’s defence of its “peculiar institution”.   Most of the characters that are against slavery are bad in some way or at best weak and overly idealistic.  It is possible that she did not want to inflict modern views on slavery and racism to her 1860s based characters but she does not seem ever to provide any other viewpoint.  
However she is critical of the South for its foolish belief that they can “Lick any number of Yankees” with few factories and industrial resources, and nothing but “cotton, slaves and arrogance”.  She is also tart in the first part of the book, about the South’s attitude towards women, that they had to pretend to be pretty little  idiots who need their menfolk to guide them, when in fact they were often the ones who ran plantations or bred horses while their menfolk idled and talked about politics or hunting.   She allows Scarlett, (albeit we are always told that Scarlett is not very clever about people and apart from a shrewd head in regard to figures and money, isn’t very intelligent or cultured) to get irritated by the men’s behaviour and their desire to keep her in the drawing room and nursery.   Rhett is one of the few men who admires her for her brains and grit and willingness to work hard, but even so, he tends towards the end of the book to revert to a more conservative point of view about the South in general and its attitude to women.
He tries to curb Scarlett’s independence at times, to stop her from using her business interests to spend time with Ashley whom he knows she still loves.  He intrigues with Melanie, to get her to sell the mill, to Ashley.  He forces her into his bed, to stop her from thinking about Ashley.  He leaves her in the end because he now has stopped loving her and does not want her to be adoring him when he is not willing to reciprocate.  And because he is no longer rebelling against the southern codes in the way he used to be.  He wants to look for the old ways, and to remember the happier times when he was more in tune with the ways of his people…   He rejects Scarlett because she has identified with the Yankees and “not looking back at the past” and rejected the code of “Southern womanhood”, and he sees this as signs of her being shallow and vulgar and that she “will always be attracted to glister more than to gold”.
He doesn’t seem to accept her defence that if she had been “soft and sweet like a southern lady”, she would have lost Tara, left her family to starve and that her selfishness and hard work have saved them.
Scarlett is not a heroine. She is selfish and ruthless. She lacks understanding and education and has little to recommend her, except for toughness and willingness to work hard and to shoulder her own burdens and those of her family, even when she doesn’t like them.

In spite of criticisms of the undoubted racism, Gone with the Wind has always been loved and read mostly by women.  I believe that this is more to do with the portrayal of Scarlett as a woman who has to grow up too fast… and who in spite of the war, is able to use her abilities in a way that she would not have done otherwise.   Scarlett uses her femininity and sexuality to lure men into doing business with her, but she has plenty of “street smarts” and is willing to work hard, even picking cotton. Women readers may disagree with many of her methods but her courage and willingness to do what’s necessary, as she sees it.