It must be hard for the current generation to imagine how Gone With the Wind captured the minds and hearts of Americans fifty years ago. Other cultural currents initiated by authors or entertainers have never approached the deep-felt dynamics of GWTW—not Elvis Presley, or the Beatles, or Sylvester Stallone, or even (though it may be heresy to mention this month) the Statue of Liberty hoopla.
GWTW’s sales of 25 million books are second only to the Bible’s. While today’s visual images on television and the movies, hour for hour, have more effect on people than the printed word, the 1,000+ pages of images created by GWTW are more lasting still.
Gone With the Wind was real life to those who read it in the 1930s. Scarlett and Rhett, Melanie and Ashley, were real people. Tara was a real place we hoped to see someday. Indeed, visitors in Atlanta still ask directions to Tara more often than any other tourist attraction, not realizing that Tara exists only in the minds of GWTW readers.
Gone With the Wind came to an American people devastated by six years of the Great Depression—an economic and social crisis of immense proportions. President Roosevelt said “the only thing we have to fear is fear itself,” but that was just empty rhetoric to the unemployed. Our problem wasn’t fear; it was despair.
Gone With the Wind is the saga of those who repudiated defeat in the face of defeat all around them. GWTW tells the history (omitted from most history books) of what the Civil War did to the South, including the hunger caused by destruction of the crops, the desolation from burned-out homes, the pain of war wounds and amputations without anesthetics, and the deaths of a generation of young men.
History books record the heroism of the Civil War’s battles, but GWTW recorded the heroism in the daily lives of women and men who had to cope with the war brought to the civilians in the cities and the countryside by circumstances beyond their control.
After the French Revolution, one day a friend asked a writer, “What did you do during the Revolution?” To which the writer replied simply, “I survived.” Indeed, there are times when survival is the supreme achievement, and the Old South of Scarlett O’Hara was such a time.
Last year, one of the networks aired an expensive remake of Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman. The critics lauded it as a dramatic triumph, but it bombed in the Nielsen ratings. People are not willingly entertained by a tale of failure.
People prefer to hear about heroism in the face of great odds, about the strong-willed who survive when their world is blown away with the wind, about people’s determination to rise again from the ruins. That’s why GWTW is a saga for all seasons.
GWTW tells about those who survived and rebuilt by sheer will and hard labor—without disaster relief, disability payments, welfare, Social Security, veterans’ benefits, unemployment compensation, food stamps, or housing allowances.
Communist regimes have banned GWTW. That’s because its theme is contrary to the Marxist dogma that the individual must be submerged in the all-powerful state. As Margaret Mitchell explained in her published letters, the Communists suppress GWTW in their countries because the novel is “a glorification of individual courage and individual enterprise (both qualities being highly obnoxious to Communists)” and because it reveres what the Communists call a “bourgeois” love that free people have for their land and home.
GWTW is not a book for feminists. Their ideology teaches them that women were helpless and oppressed prior to the women’s lib movement of the 1970s. They can’t accept the role-model of a female heroine who faces life’s challenges without government help.
Women didn’t don uniforms and ride to battle in those days, but the women in GWTW exhibited the strength of the South. When the Union soldier invaded their home, not only the spunky Scarlett but even the sickly Melanie could grab a gun to protect their virtue and their home.
GWTW is absent from most high school reading lists. Maybe that’s because television-reared youngsters haven’t the intellectual stamina to tackle a 1,000-page book.
Maybe it’s because the majority of high school students are too vocabulary-poor to read books written prior to the era of the dumbed-down classics. Maybe it’s because those who select school reading lists are too eager to prescribe stories of defeatism and despair (such as Arthur Miller’s) and have no time for tales of heroism and hope.
