Gone with the Wind

A colleague gave me a copy of Gone with the Wind and so, despite its daunting bulk, I decided to give it a shot.

What did I know about the story, going into it? I knew that it was supposed to be a sweeping romantic saga set in the antebellum south. I knew the names Rhett Butler and Scarlett O'Hara, and I knew that the former said to the latter something along the lines of "Frankly, my dear, I don't give a damn." I knew there was an unauthorized parody (or putative parody) from a slave's perspective called The Wind Done Gone, which was at loggerheads with the author's estate in the copyright arena. And that's about it.

One of my high school friends was crazy about the movie and had watched it many times. (This same friend used to invent variations on the plot and characters from the original Star Wars trilogy, which had similarly captured her imagination; I have the impression she did the same with GwtW.)

So. Some reactions. To be perfectly honest, the writing is risible at times -- the opening paragraphs are filled with clumsy and unnecessarily specific detail in the style of "I'm so happy to survey my plantation, Tara, with its red clay soil and 327 slaves, Scarlett O'Hara thought, as she put her lily-white hand on her 16-inch waist. For her mind could not handle complex thoughts, a quality she inherited from her irascible father, Gerald, who had killed a man on the corner of Walk and Don't Walk back in his small Irish hometown of Incroyable, as opposed to her saintly mother Ellen who would have died rather than speak harshly to another human being." In fact, the Scarlett-Rhett interactions remind me of Bella and Edward from the Twilight series, in that the characters flip back and forth between just a few basic settings rather than a fully nuanced, compelling range of emotions. But still . . . somehow . . . I found the story compelling.

I spent most of the book thinking Scarlett is evil . . . and yet, though I didn't like Scarlett, I still wanted her to figure out that Rhett was the right match for her.* At about the half-way mark, when it looked like Scarlett was going to marry anyone and everyone but Rhett, I skipped ahead to find out the context for his famous quote. I'd always figured it was a reckless, devil-may-care, passionate statement (i.e., I want to be with you, I don't give a damn what anyone thinks) and was shocked to see it was just about the opposite.

This slowed down my reading considerably, now that I knew that all the misery Scarlett was going through was not even going to be redeemed by a union with the man who was made for her.

But still I had to come back to the novel. The tragedy here, for me, is not the loss of the amazingly gracious and civilized antebellum south. It's Ms. O'Hara-Hamilton-Kennedy-Butler's total inability to see the difference between real love and her fantasy of what love is supposed to be. Ashley never gives her any reason to believe they would be a good match. Not one. And yet her stubborn devotion to her idea of Ashley destroys her chance for real happinesswith Rhett.

How incredibly depressing.

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FN* C.S. Lewis explored the distinction between liking someone and caring about their well-being in his discussion of the mandate to Love thy neighbor as thyself:

[W]e might try to understand exactly what loving your neighbor as yourself means. I have to love him as I love myself. Well, how exactly do I love myself?

Now that I come to think of it, I have not exactly got a feeling of fondness or affection for myself, and I do not even always enjoy my own society. So apparently 'Love your neighbor' does not mean 'feel fond of him' or 'find him attractive'. ... In my most clear-sighted moments not only do I not think myself a nice man, but I know that I am a very nasty one. I can look at some of the things I have done with horror and loathing. So apparently I am allowed to loathe and hate some of the things my enemies do. ... However much I might dislike my own cowardice or conceit or greed, I went on loving myself. There had never been the slightest difficulty about it. ...

Even while we kill and punish [evil-doers] we must try to feel about [them] as we feel about ourselves -- to wish that [they] were not bad, to hope that [they] may, in this world or another, be cured: in fact, to wish [their] good. That is what is meant in the Bible by loving [one's neighbor]: wishing his good, not feeling fond of him nor saying he is nice when he is not.

(Mere Christianity, Book III, ch. 7).