Margaret Mitchell - Gone With The Wind

This book was recommended to me by a friend’s mother, whose other favourite book is ‘Madame Bovary’.  Expectations were high and, in many ways, met by this true epic.  Scarlett O’Hara and Rhett Butler are both deliciously self-interested and complicated characters.  Mel and Ashley are excellent secondary foils.  The narrative covers a decade around the Civil War in an enjoyable and historically authentic way.  Plus, the book has an amazing ending.  So, in short, there was a lot to like!

This book was not as good as  ‘Madame Bovary’.  Obviously, almost all novels would suffer by this comparison.  ‘Gone With The Wind’ is a very good book, but it is far too long.  When I think about how quickly and effortlessly Flaubert sketches Charles Bovary’s early life and social milieu, without any loss of colour or texture, the description of Scarlett’s pre-war life at Tara feels laboured.  The prose can be verbose and the narrative repetitive.  It would be unfair to say that ‘Gone With The Wind’ doesn’t create vivid scenes or a good feel for the era, because it does that well, but at huge length.   Given the enormously ambitious scale of the book, I felt like this problem was compounded.  I also felt like some of the minor characters were a bit superfluous and caricatured.  So, it definitely could have done with some editing!  

But this can take nothing away from the glorious main characters that are so human and memorable and deserve to be spoken of as great literary achievements.  Both the narrative and the people in the book have an authentic feel, which can sometimes get lost amidst all the history in historical novels.  

‘Gone With The Wind’ is also a book of extremely prejudiced ideas.  Black people are said to have been much better off as slaves in southern America and are being duped and exploited by the Yankees offering them freedom and wages.  Irish people are degenerate alcoholics and animalistic chancers, incapable of controlling their impulses.  Women, prostitutes, the French and any other minority all receive similar treatment.  I was divided about how to feel about all these harmful stereotypes.  On the one hand, saying something along the lines of, ‘the average black person was better off under slavery in the South’ is hard for me to believe.  Nonetheless, it doesn’t feel like the author is inventing these opinions, so they probably existed around this time and so can be said to be, in some sense, historically accurate.  

Taken as a whole, the book was too long and the prose too verbose.  It’s also full of opinions and prejudices that may be offensive to modern readers.  At the same time, the characters and narrative are deeply impressive and the ending is wonderful.  I would certainly recommend the book but perhaps not without warning that some of the content is inflammatory.