2010 Reading list #13!! Gone With the Wind by Margaret Mitchell
So, before, when I said it was embarrassing that I had only read 12 books last year... I just remembered that my record is slightly less atrocious, because I ALSO read Gone With The Wind. Why? Mostly because we saw it in the bookstore and Darrin recommended it (yes, he who owns the sewing machine and the BBC series of Pride and Prejudice).
I had seen the film version a few years back with my roommate and quite liked it, but all I knew about the book was that my mother's mother forbade her to read it as a young girl because there was too much inappropriate material in it (yeah... that's right...) so my mother read it under her covers with a flashlight. Go Mummy!
I think most people I know who don't much care for GWTW don't care for it because, essentially, Scarlett O'Hara is a royal pain in the a&&. No argument here. She's the kind of character you'd love to slap upside the head for most of the book. And yet what struck me, particularly about the opening chapters, is just how well Mitchell portrays that utterly self-centred, petty, emotionally destructive personality that represents the *worst* of female adolescence in my mind. Then, that gives a starting point for the much more interesting drama of being forced to grow up and face the consequences of her choices AND the harsh realities of the civil war all at once. The first paragraph that caught my breath was: "Within two weeks Scarlett had become a wife, and within two months more she was a widow. She was soon released from the bonds she had assumed with so much haste and so little thought, but she was never again to know the careless freedom of her unmarried days. Widowhood had crowded closely on the heels of marriage but, to her dismay, motherhood soon followed." (179)
A couple of things stand out for me in my now months-old memory of reading this book. One: I didn't expect to like it as much as I did. My preconception of it was as some kind of lightweight bodice-ripper; instead the narrative held my interest at a historical level as well as in terms of characterization. Two: Think twice about reading the chapters about the Fall of Atlanta when you're pregnant; it's kind of squirmy to think of being in Melanie's situation. Three: As I believe Mitchell said herself, this book was really about the differences between those who fall apart in a crisis and those who manage to survive. Our crises usually involve unemployment, deaths in the family, upheavals in relationships, but the earthshattering crises and upheavals endured in this book - which to some degree must reflect the reality of the civil war period for some people in the South - are beyond the pale. I don't particularly hold much ultimate faith in the economic or social stability of western society. Maybe it's a good foundation overall, but given a hard enough push, I think most of our civilities will blow away like a thin veneer of dust (and be gone with the wind, haha). If the crap REALLY hits the fan we're all in heaps of trouble... and then I wonder who the Rhetts and Scarletts will be, who will pick up and do what needs to be done to survive, and if they will turn out to be people we never expected.
I had seen the film version a few years back with my roommate and quite liked it, but all I knew about the book was that my mother's mother forbade her to read it as a young girl because there was too much inappropriate material in it (yeah... that's right...) so my mother read it under her covers with a flashlight. Go Mummy!
I think most people I know who don't much care for GWTW don't care for it because, essentially, Scarlett O'Hara is a royal pain in the a&&. No argument here. She's the kind of character you'd love to slap upside the head for most of the book. And yet what struck me, particularly about the opening chapters, is just how well Mitchell portrays that utterly self-centred, petty, emotionally destructive personality that represents the *worst* of female adolescence in my mind. Then, that gives a starting point for the much more interesting drama of being forced to grow up and face the consequences of her choices AND the harsh realities of the civil war all at once. The first paragraph that caught my breath was: "Within two weeks Scarlett had become a wife, and within two months more she was a widow. She was soon released from the bonds she had assumed with so much haste and so little thought, but she was never again to know the careless freedom of her unmarried days. Widowhood had crowded closely on the heels of marriage but, to her dismay, motherhood soon followed." (179)
A couple of things stand out for me in my now months-old memory of reading this book. One: I didn't expect to like it as much as I did. My preconception of it was as some kind of lightweight bodice-ripper; instead the narrative held my interest at a historical level as well as in terms of characterization. Two: Think twice about reading the chapters about the Fall of Atlanta when you're pregnant; it's kind of squirmy to think of being in Melanie's situation. Three: As I believe Mitchell said herself, this book was really about the differences between those who fall apart in a crisis and those who manage to survive. Our crises usually involve unemployment, deaths in the family, upheavals in relationships, but the earthshattering crises and upheavals endured in this book - which to some degree must reflect the reality of the civil war period for some people in the South - are beyond the pale. I don't particularly hold much ultimate faith in the economic or social stability of western society. Maybe it's a good foundation overall, but given a hard enough push, I think most of our civilities will blow away like a thin veneer of dust (and be gone with the wind, haha). If the crap REALLY hits the fan we're all in heaps of trouble... and then I wonder who the Rhetts and Scarletts will be, who will pick up and do what needs to be done to survive, and if they will turn out to be people we never expected.