Gone with the Windby Margaret Mitchell

University of Northern Iowa

Gone with the Wind by Margaret MitchellReview by: Eleanor L. Van AlenThe North American Review, Vol. 242, No. 1 (Autumn, 1936), pp. 201-204Published by: University of Northern IowaStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/25114785 .

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BOOK REVIEWS [ 201 ] Your hosts toil uselessly: no force can take Those walls. Your legionaries break and break In vain. Ever before each bleeding line, It rises still, the Vision Invincible.

They could stand, and I think that he would sign them to

day. And the spirit that moves them, however unrealistic, is

the same force that makes Mr. Benet a fine poet. For to be a

fine poet it is even more important to have a "Vision Invinc

ible" than a correct vision. When his first book was published Mr. Benet had this vision. He has it still.

THOMAS GALDEGOT GHUBB

GONE WITH THE WIND. By Margaret Mitchell. Macmillan, $2.50.

SANTAYANA

has said in a critical essay: "Imagination needs a soil in history, tradition, or human institutions,

else its random growths are not significant enough, and like

trivial melodies go immediately out of fashion." In her first

novel, Miss Mitchell, a newspaper woman reared obviously in the Georgian tradition, roots her characters and plot in the soil of the Civil War and Reconstruction days of the South.

After the approved grand manner of her medium, she has

written a story commensurable in length and scope with

"Anthony Adverse."

Scarlett O'Hara had for mother "a coast aristocrat of French descent," and for father, a self-made country squire of Irish peasant stock. The life in the red clay hills of the north

Georgia county of Clayton was still new in 1861, and, by the standards of the older Southern towns, a little crude. Planta tion folk here "had the vigor and alertness of country people

who have spent all their lives in the open and troubled their

heads very little with dull things in books." In a man, the

raising of cotton, riding, shooting, dancing, the squiring of

ladies and the carrying of liquor were what counted; in a

woman, the management of slaves, dressing, flirtation, and

child-bearing; finally, the formula of a contented land, "that

of making men pleased with themselves." The theme de

veloped by Miss Mitchell against this background is the

double-edged one of Vera Brittain's "Testament of Youth" ?



[ 202 ] THE NORTH AMERICAN REVIEW

war and the wash of war, seen by a woman ? intertwined with the story of the struggle between the old South of the

plantation culture, and the new, of raw, booming Atlanta. It is to the author's notable credit that she has been able to keep a nice balance between the plays of historical and psychologi cal forces throughout.

From the standpoint of its principle character, the book seems primarily a spirited yarn of Scarlett's miraculous cat's

lives, her hard-headed business propensities, her few friend

ships, her two loves for men as different as chalk and cheese, and her third and greatest love for Tara, the plantation. One sees her vividly from the first, her smouldering green eyes

lusting for life through all the mutations of circumstance that life can bring. As long as she existed, she "was constitutionally

unable to endure any man being in love with any woman but herself." Her complex personality, her aristocratic wishfulness and her crass motivation, stemmed from her mixed inheri

tance, though she passionately desired to be her mother's

daughter, a great lady, she remained shanty Irish at the core.

This cynicism of the earth, "a hard self-honesty at the base of her nature," forced her at last to see through herself as she had seen through the holy Confederate cause, through sense

less pretentions of gentility in the face of starvation. Though, after the burning of Atlanta, Grandma Fontaine counseled her to save something to love, it was Scarlett's personal tragedy that she never saved something to fear. The code of

her clan she had discarded: secretly and surely, she could live under no other.

No impoverished imagination has been at work on this

crowded tapestry. Picked on it with an unusual degree of

theatrical validity is a multitude of types, including at least

six full portraits. Three in particular stand out: Melanie

Wilkes, "the only woman who ever commanded Rhett But

ler's renegade respect," who stood by Scarlett from first to

last with a firmness that was "not strength ?

only heart":

Ashley Wilkes, her husband, a dreamer and gentle aristocrat, lost with the loss of his native culture, loved and betrayed by

himself and Scarlett; Rhett Butler, black sheep of a good Charleston family. It is Butler, a romantically sinister figure, who stands most powerfully in the ranks of the subsidiary



BOOK REVIEWS [ 203 ]

characters, and who, transcending the part of foil, alone

strides out to meet Scarlett upon her own desperate terms. By turn blockade runner, profiteer, and political careerist, at war

with the plantation society that had ostracised him, and in

love with the culture that Sherman had dissipated, he under

stood Scarlett perfectly, seeing in her toughness an adaptability that matched his own. Melanie's humanity he could only

sardonically admire: in Scarlett's unprincipled gallantry, he

recognized a common invulnerability and a common wound.

Others, too, rise and are carried away ?

Gerald O'Hara,

gambler, "a tough rough, but a gentleman": Ellen, his wife, refined and full of austere placidity, concealing in retreat a

proud and broken Victorian heart: Belle Watling, Butler's

mistress and a hardy Madam: Mammy, wise and loyal, Tara's

black nurse: Will Benteen, poor Georgia cracker and honest

farmer, who, with Scarlett's money saved Tar a from returning to the wilderness: Archie, ex-convict and, in the dangerous

Reconstruction years, chaperon to Atlanta ladies. These and

others ? soldiers, carpetbaggers, bawds and slaves ? meet

and move into the structure of Miss Mitchell's plot; and if at

times it seems that the pieces in the jigsaw-puzzle dovetail too

neatly, compensation is provided in the stylized fluency with which they move to form a background for the actions of the

two protagonists, Scarlett and Butler.

Most memorable are the scenes and vignettes that must

provide the warp and woof of such an historical novel: the

county barbecue at the beautiful Twelve Oaks plantation; the

gay Confederate war bazaar; the burning and the frightful sack of Atlanta; the endless filing past ruined plantations of the

ragged Confederates, beaten by lice and dysentery as much as

by superior forces; the fearful reign of terror of the carpet

baggers, backed by the Freedmen's Bureau in their effort to

raise the Negroes; the organization of the night-riders, and their

final victory over Governor Bullock and the regime of Re

construction. It would be a pity to give away in detail such

highlights of the story as Scarlett's scene with Ashley the day of the barbecue, or her lone escape to Tara through the lines

of the two armies behind a dying horse. These scenes, and a

dozen others, are what prove Miss Mitchell a story teller, and a mistress of the classical technique of artful suspense. They



[ 204 ] THE NORTH AMERICAN REVIEW

should command for her a wide audience, caught by her

amazing readability.

Though little indication of the research that has gone into

the fashioning of "Gone With the Wind" creeps into the

telling, there is an overloading of detail and lack of restraint in the presentation. Salty and caustic in spots, the book con

tains none of the delicately pointed satire that will be found in

Miss Glasgow's work. Here, on the other hand, is little of the

sentimentality that thickened the coloring of "So Red the

Rose." Rather, the book is in the direct romantic tradition of

the sweeping, melodramatic novel that will recur throughout our phase of civilization. As escapism, it is excellent, for it

moves and excites without disconcerting by the presentation of eternal truths. For each figure in turn, the stage is lit ?

dextrously, and, to the casual reader, enjoyably. The faults

of the book lie principally in its over-embellishment, and the

somewhat mechanical quality of its irony. While ably reflecting in her first section the gracious slave

culture that Ashley remembered as having "a glamor to it ?

a perfection, a symmetry like Greek art," Miss Mitchell rises

to more imposing heights in the second half, depicting what Claude Bowers called "The Tragic Era." Having packed so

much material into this single book, she might with authority write the novel that could be made of the readjustment im

mediately after the Reconstruction ? an extension of the

story of the conflict between the old South and the new, and a

study of Atlanta rising from the terror of its ashes to be re

modelled finally by southerners themselves under a changed system of society.

ELEANOR L. VAN ALEN

WILLIAM JENNINGS BRYAN. By Wayne C. Williams. Put nam, $4.00.

AN INTELLIGENT, well-balanced biography of William *jL Jennings Bryan in which the man could be clearly seen

against the background of his time is a book which badly needs to be written in view of the prevalence of many of those ideas

for which the Nebraska publicist served as a champion during his long career in public life. It would have to be done by



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Gone with the Windby Margaret Mitchell