Conspirator
- Brian
- I went out there in search of experience To taste and to touch and to feel as much As a man can before he repents.
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Review: Gone with the Wind
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Of course, I got distracted with other things in the spring--I read nearly the entire corpus of Flannery O'Connor's short fiction, along with her novel The Violent Bear it Away, and a significant portion of Eudora Welty's short fiction--and was unable to give Gone with the Wind much focus until this summer.
I finished the novel a few weeks ago, and I still don't know how to feel about it. It's a long novel, but an easy read. It lacks the complex plot develop of the aforementioned Absalom, Absalom! and, while it is a well-told narrative, it lacks the bite--the vicious reality of life--possessed by fellow Southern women writers Welty and O'Connor, not to mention Bobbie Ann Mason.
The criticisms of GWTW are justified, I think. This is, in many regards, an offensive novel. It is not just the use of racial slurs, which I suppose is historically accurate (for what it's worth); it depicts slaves/freed persons in a racist fashion, and at times it does seem that Mitchell herself is a racist, thinking African Americans as an inferior people. I'm not sure if this was the case, but I suspect that by today's standards she would certainly be considered a racist.
Clearly, though, Mitchell is not attempting to convict us of anything, except that perhaps Southern whites were grossly mistreated during the years of Reconstruction. I can't say that I would disagree with this assessment, however GWTW is a story told only from the white perspective and that bothers me. It bothers me that the novel concludes that African Americans were better off under slavery and that Northern notions of slave mistreatment were grossly exaggerated. HELLO! YOU WERE HOLDING PEOPLE IN BONDAGE! YOU DON'T GET TO ENSLAVE PEOPLE AND THEN CLAIM THEY ARE BETTER OFF! I can only hold so much sympathy for your loss
Despite this, I think GWTW is an important novel for our country culturally and people should read it for the questions it raises, as it presents the point of view that a segment of our country's population holds. I actually hope to read it again sometime (maybe this Christmas!) because I'm interested in the narration of the novel. It seems as though there are times when the narrator is obviously Mitchell herself, preaching to anyone who will listen.
I want to reread it to see if I can identify when it is that Mitchell is inserting herself into the narration of the novel and then articulate what significance that holds for storytelling. There is also a bit of agrarian romanticism that I think certain people will connect with and enjoy.
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