Is there anyone in the United States who is unfamiliar with the Civil War classic “Gone With the Wind,” either the movie or the book?
It was a Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, published in 1936, and it was made into a blockbuster of a movie in 1939, which won numerous Academy Awards.
I read the book many years ago and for some reason decided to read it again this summer. What a great decision that was. It’s a very long book, but I just inhaled it. I loved it. Well, most of it.
The author, Margaret Mitchell, lapses into dialect (cringe) when the plantation slaves are speaking. That’s hard to read. Other aspects of the race culture of the time are hard to read, too. But I’m going to give her a pass and say she was writing faithfully about a certain time and place as she knew it.
She tells the story of Scarlett O’Hara, a spoiled Southern belle, who survives marriages, poverty, riches, love, and loss during the Civil War.
I suppose her depiction of the antebellum South is a bit romanticized, even though most of the novel deals with the brutal aftermath of the war.
Mitchell was a journalist, and I enjoyed her writing style and the inclusion of historical details. In fact, I formed a GWTW reading group when I started the book in June.
By July, I was the only member of the book club left. My mistake was to include two young mothers and a working woman (with two jobs) in the membership. I couldn’t wait for them. I galloped through the book.
“Gone With the Wind” is more than a love story. The change in society that Mitchell describes is enormous, and although her main character, Scarlett, is deeply flawed, she also survives challenges that nothing in her life prepared her for. You go, girl.
My appetite for history was whetted, so when I saw that Jeff Arnold was offering a class on the Civil War, I signed up.
When I told him I was joining the class because I’d just finished reading “Gone With the Wind,” he could barely suppress a slight grimace.
I know, it’s considered the height of the romantic, “moonlight and magnolias” history of the war, but I think it’s more than that. Mitchell writes about poverty and reconstruction and foreshadows traumatic race relations. Plus, everyone she introduces us to in the first half of the book is dead by the second half.
Still, Arnold’s class was fascinating. We only met four times (at the Estes Valley Community Center), but now I have about a dozen more books to read immediately and hundreds more to read as time goes by.
Arnold, an Estes Park educator who retired two years ago, bought a musket in Gettysburg that was probably used in the conflict. He had ancestors who fought on both sides, North and South.
“The Civil War saw improvements in both taking and saving lives,” he said. “It was the first modern war using machine guns, submarines, an air corps (balloons), and ironclad ships.”
Ambulances were used for the first time to transport the wounded. Union doctors developed a triage system of treatment. And more than 500,000 men came home from the war as morphine addicts. Most of the soldiers were between the ages of 18 and 29.
These details bring the brutal side of the war to the forefront in a way “Gone With the Wind” didn’t even try to accomplish. Still, I think there’s room for a doomed love story in descriptions of the war.
If you have time, try reading “Gone With the Wind.” You won’t be sorry.
Elisabeth Sherwin is a journalist who teaches memoir writing at the Estes Valley Community Center. She holds a master’s in journalism from the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University, worked as a copy editor at the Los Angeles Herald Examiner and the San Francisco Examiner, and was a reporter, editor, book reviewer, and copy editor at the Davis (Calif.) Enterprise. She also taught journalism at UC Davis Extension. She lives in Allenspark. Her book reviews and other writings can be found on her website, Printed Matter.