Frankly, My Dear

Mention Gone with the Wind and everyone thinks of Clark Gable and Vivien Leigh. It is Gable, in the role of Rhett Butler, who utters the immortal ‘Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn’ when a repentant Scarlett, rejected by Butler, asks what she is to do now – but that is not what he says in the book. Clark Gable added the ‘Frankly’ and that is how it is always quoted. In fact most of the popular images of the novel are from the movie. You could leave the cinema thinking Gone with the Wind was mainly a love story dealing with nostalgia for a golden antebellum age. In fact the book is closer to an anti-romance, and is full of ambiguity and ambivalence about the good old days.

I read Gone with the Wind for the first – and until recently the only – time during the week before and after my sixteenth birthday, when I was in high school in Indiana. That is what made me think of reading it again in late 2009, in matching bookend weeks around my sixty-sixth birthday. Fifty years on, would I still be enchanted by the thousand-page story of Scarlett O’Hara? Would I again feel a regretful pang when my bookmark reached the second half of the novel? In those fifty years I had grown older, read novels in other languages, and acquired degrees in English literature; the American Civil Rights movement and the Women’s Liberation movement had happened. How would all that affect my second reading of the novel? I had still another reason for wanting to reassess it. When I was a student a friend had asked me what I thought the ‘best novel’ was. I thoughtlessly blurted out ‘Gone with the Wind ’, and her face fell. My answer was shockingly middlebrow and unsophisticated. Gone with the Wind was everything that really great literature almost never was. I had really put my foot in it. Still, I have never again felt the same pang on passing the halfway point of a novel. Doesn’t that count for something? When Gone with the Wind first came out in June 1936, it was already a bestseller because of advance orders and the fact that it was a Book-of-the-Month Club choice. It had to be reprinted before it was even launched. By the end of 1936 it had been reprinted a further twenty-five times. It would be more appropriate to speak of hot cakes selling like Gone with the Wind than the other way round. There has never been anything like it before or since. Besotted readers phoned Margaret Mitchell at all hours, turned up on her doorstep, and sent her copies of the book asking for her signature (and assuming that she would be happy to pay the return postage). Libraries had to order replacements of worn-out copies. One of the many phenomenal things about Gone with the Wind is the way it caught on outside the South and outside the United States. Northerners loved it, rather to the surprise of the author, and it was read avidly during the Second World War in occupied Europe in pirated editions; its message of endurance and triumph was so threatening that the Nazis banned it. But was there anything that could be said for Gone with the Wind, really, in literary terms, on mature examination? I wanted to be rigorously objective, although I couldn’t help having a certain prejudice in favour of Margaret Mitchell’s sprawling novel. Reviewers in 1936 were divided on the subject. Some put it on a par with War and Peace and Vanity Fair. Others were misled by certain facts that should not have clouded their judgement. The author was a woman who had written no previous novels and her main characters were women: it was therefore a ‘woman’s novel’ by a beginner and not worth serious consideration by the literary establishment, who were mostly not women. It was also a narrative with a beginning, middle and end, of all retrograde structures in the Modernist era. The story of Gone with the Wind (or GWTW, as we aficionados call it) traces the career of Scarlett O’Hara during and after the American Civil War. As the book opens, Scarlett is 16, accomplished at flirting but not much else, and bored by all talk of the impending war. From such an inauspicious beginning, we then see how Scarlett copes with the events of the next decade. The movie naturally concentrates on her romantic adventures: she loves Ashley but marries Charles; she is widowed and then marries Frank for his money; Frank is killed in a Klan skirmish defending her honour; she then marries the disreputable scallywag Rhett for his money while still carrying a torch for Ashley; finally she realizes that she doesn’t love Ashley after all, but her husband. By this time Rhett is fed up and utters his famous ‘Frankly, my dear . . .’ The love affairs help keep the plot rolling along, but they are secondary to the main concerns of the novel: how women survive when their whole society is turned upside down and they suffer unimaginable loss and hardship; how pampered girls learn to shoulder responsibility and develop strength and resolve; how Southerners in 1870 try (or fail) to resist the strong pull of nostalgia and live in the demanding and radically different present. Far from being a wallow in nostalgia for the antebellum South, it is about the necessity to resist that nostalgia. Scarlett realizes that the old days are gone for good: the only way to survive in the present is to forget the non-returning pleasures of the past. Margaret Mitchell (1900–49) explained one of her motives for writing GWTW: as a child in her native Atlanta she had noticed that older women in the family circle who had been young at the time of the Civil War had a special quality of gentleness but also a certain intriguing toughness. Mitchell wanted to explore the sources of that toughness and find out how those older women got that way Another strand in her thinking derived from her mother, who impressed upon her the importance of education by showing her some war-ruined houses near Atlanta. All the people who had lived in them, she said, thought that their world was stable and would go on for ever, but when everything fell apart they had only their own inner resources to sustain them. So Margaret Mitchell was steeped in the history of the Civil War in a way that would be impossible now. She also possessed a journalist’s nose for a story and a scholar’s love of research in primary sources. When she came to write GWTW she had all the material at her fingertips. What makes GWTW such a page-turner? Much of the story is told through dialogue, much of it spelled phonetically. This device has not worn well, but it does give a verisimilitude to the characters that could hardly be achieved in any other way. The black characters come alive, especially Mammy, the slave lady’s maid who is the guardian of morals and propriety, but who has her work cut out for her with Scarlett. The great thing about Mitchell’s use of dialogue is the economical way in which it advances the plot and characterizes the speakers at the same time. Nothing adds to the immediacy of fiction more than hearing characters reveal themselves in what they say. Another secret of Mitchell’s virtuoso storytelling is suspense: there are cliff-hangers within cliff-hangers. There are schemes, deceptions, threatened disasters, medical emergencies, seductions and the approach of General Sherman and the Yankee army. Sometimes a situation is set up and we have to wait several pages or even chapters to see how it will turn out. Early on in the novel, for example, Scarlett hatches a scheme whereby Ashley Wilkes, who is about to announce his engagement to his demure cousin Melanie Hamilton, will drop everything and run off with her, Scarlett, when she confesses her love to him. Will she succeed? Is he such a brainless cad? The author stalls with all sorts of tangents and we wonder if we will ever find out. Eventually we do, and in the meantime we have effortlessly learned a lot about Scarlett and her milieu. (Is Melanie really the dreary bluestocking that Scarlett assumes? It takes even longer for Scarlett and the reader to discover Melanie’s true character.) Some scenes can only be described as brilliant. The Wilkes’s barbecue, which sums up the good life before war breaks out; the fundraising gala during the war, at which Scarlett scandalizes society by dancing while dressed in mourning; Scarlett’s perilous return to the family plantation as Atlanta burns; her elaborate hoax to cajole Rhett into lending her money to pay ruinous post-war taxes; her mystification as a bystander when an even more elaborate hoax is acted out by other characters to deceive the Yankee authorities. These are among the reasons I couldn’t put Gone with the Wind down at 16 and discovered a whole new appreciation of it fifty years later. The movie is outstanding, but the book is an undervalued classic of storytelling.

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 45 © Sarah Lawson 2015