Introduction by the Blog
Author
Below are some incisive book reviews for Gone with the Wind
submitted and used by Amazon.com.
This supposedly minor classic about a backward American
subculture is still being read in America and abroad. I think this is true because Mitchell’s book
is a triumph of the Shakespearean revolution.
It used to be that characters in a play were static, unchanging,
statue-like. Shakespeare’s main
characters changed as the play progressed – and this was particularly striking
in the tragedies he wrote late in his career.
One sees this as well in the best novelists, including American writers
like Herman Melville and Margaret Mitchell. The major characters of Gone with
the Wind charge and evolve –and grow tired!—in the course of a twelve-year
narrative.
The book has shrewd insight into matters that modern social
scientists still haven’t figured out – such as why slavery worked and why so
few slaves attempted to run away. There
was a kind of common-sense meritocracy within the black slaves of a plantation
and a stunning sense of loyalty that has no modern equivalent. Mitchell journalistically uses the dialect of
19th century north Georgian slaves as they talk to each other and to
white Southerners. She also correctly
notes how the most talented slaves were within the house itself, running the
household, insuring the white masters kept up with appearances, and allowing
their children to play with the next generation of masters while those
blue-bloods were children – Scarlett herself is described as a tomboy who threw
rocks as well as the young boys who were slaves and with whom she played as a
girl.
This accurate portrayal of the closeness of the races and
teamwork in running a plantation were a shock to northern and western readers
of the book in the 1930s. I suspect
Mitchell wanted to upset them.
It was a society that worked and remained stable. The problem was that it didn’t work as well
as capitalistic free states
with their railroads and cannon factories, something Rhett Butler noticed and
acted upon as a war profiteer.
Because Gone with the Wind ingeniously recreates an extinct
society, it deserves praise. And it
deserves respect for the awesomely thorough depth of the characters presented –
as we read the book we make analogies to people we know because we come to
recognize and understand the personae being described. The proof of this talent comes home if you
re-read the book about every twenty years of your adult life. It is late in life that we come to appreciate
the masterful understanding of human character that Mitchell possessed as she
drafted this amazing book in her twenties and early thirties.
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487
of 524 people found the following review helpful
Format:
Hardcover
I'm
a literary snob, I'll admit it. I've read all the classics, and I even know
some Literary Theory. Gone With the Wind? Pul-lease, racist, sexist, revanchist
trash, made popular by all the young woman dreaming of being Scarlett and
having both their Rhett and Ashley. Cheerleader fare. Escapist.
WRONG!
Gone
with the Wind is an American War & Peace. This is serious literature, which
won the Pulitzer prize, no less. Most people don't see past the epic plot
(which isn't as cut and dried as you may think) or the love story, but this is
no less than a successful attempt to reclaim a discarded culture. It is not
about crinoline and lace, it is about the Apocalypse and how losers of the counter-revolution must learn to live in a place where
all their politics, personal or civil, are demolished. Scarlett O'Hara is popular because she is an American,
driven, materialistic, sentimental and utterly ruthless. Rhett Butler is the
tragic character of this book; the way of life and ideals he disdained are
killing him, and he suffers like no one else in this post-apocalyptic
landscape. His departure at the end is an act of contrition as much as a
romantic failure; he had tried to recreate the materialism of the ante-bellum
world, but neglected the spirituality (such as it is) of men like Ashley
Wilkes. Both men, the dreamer and the realist end up alone in a very sterile
place. This book is proto-feminist as well. Scarlett survives, even as
everything around her dies, but in the end, she too is alone.
Don't dumb this masterpiece down. The movie fails to capture even a tenth of the depth
here. And that awful sequel! Caused by the mistake that this book is some kind
of romance novel. This is Art, and you can't stick a new ending on it, any more
than you can a great painting or musical composition.
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135
of 146 people found the following review helpful
Format:
Paperback
I
would give this 10 stars if I could. I haven't read this since I was a young
girl in the early 70's and should never have waited so long to read it again.
The characters were exceptionally well drawn, the dialogue was brilliant,
particularly between Rhett (SIGH!) and Scarlett. I swear there was sparks
flying off the pages. I am going to miss the people I will have to put behind
me now that the book has come to an end, Rhett (SIGH), Scarlett, Mammy, Prissy
and Aunt Pitty Pat (LOL).
The author's use of prose was beautiful, all the scenes and action came alive
for me. Some people seem to be offended by the racism in the book, but that's
how things were back then. Sugar coating it would have ruined the story
reducing it to a Harlequin romance.
This is an incredibly well written book about the death of a civilization and
the struggles to survive in the new era. This is a book that should not be
missed, particularly those who enjoy historical fiction.
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153
of 168 people found the following review helpful
Format:
Mass Market Paperback
It
took this reviewer half a century to get around to reading this great novel for
the first time! Appreciating it then, with 'fresh eyes' I share the view that
"Gone With The Wind" is quite simply the most readable long novel of
all time. With world-wide sales nudging 25 million, it's probably fair to say
that most first-time readers (apart from the odd reviewer here at the world's
biggest web site) have shared that opinion in the almost 70 years since
Margaret Mitchell wrote her one-and-only book. At least one other, highly
readable novelist of the past century, the late James A. Michener certainly
felt that way.
I'm recalling an interview of thirty years ago in which Michener - a master
storyteller in his own right - expressed awe at Mitchell's achievement. I
remember Michener quoted a long-forgotten critic who greeted the book's release
in 1936 with the perfect, one-sentence summing up: "It's the shortest long
novel I have ever read!" Michener predicted at that time (1975) that
"critics will forever have to grapple with the problem of why Margaret
Mitchell's novel has remained so readable, and so important to so many
people."
Michener singled out a few of the "super-dramatic confrontations" so
perfectly conjured up in Mitchell's lucid, timeless writing style: Mammy lacing
Scarlett into her corset; the wounded at the railway station; Scarlett shooting
the Union straggler; the girls making Scarlett a dress from the moss-green
velvet draperies; Rhett carrying his wife upstairs to the long-unused bedroom.
Yet for all of its amazing drama, the novel does not ultimately depend upon
major confrontations for its page-turning momentum: Michener I remember, zeroed
in on two 'central' paragraphs which provide the reader with perfect glimpses into the way
the two major characters have 'grown' before our eyes within these pages. One
of these paragraphs captivates our imagination in about the middle of the book
(chapter 29):
"Somewhere, on the long road that wound through those four years, the girl
with her sachet and dancing slippers, had slipped away, and there was left a
woman with sharp green eyes, who counted pennies and turned her hands to many
menial tasks, a woman to whom nothing was left from the wreckage, except the
indestructible red earth on which she stood."
And, in the final pages, that indelible portrait of Rhett, age forty-five:
"He was sunken in his chair, his suit wrinkling untidily against his
thickening waist, every line of him proclaiming the ruin of a fine body and the
coarsening of a strong face. Drink and dissipation had done their work on the
coin-clean profile, and now it was no longer the head of a young pagan prince
on newly minted gold, but a decadent, tired Caesar on copper debased by long
usage."
It's true to say (again as Michener noted thirty years ago) that the weakness
of "Gone With The Wind" is the almost exclusive focus on Atlanta, ignoring the rest
of the South: When in fact, it was really the ENTIRE South that changed,
"altered by war, and defeat, and social upheaval - and stark determination
to re-establish itself." Michener astutely observed that GWTW
"depicts with remarkable felicity, the spiritual history of a region."
Most everyone these days would concede that Margaret Mitchell's personal views
on the "liberation of the former slaves" (as expressed in subsequent
interviews) were less than compassionate. Nevertheless, it was NOT Mitchell who
composed those words which make some of us wince when they're scrolling up the
screen in the movie version - words quaintly poetic perhaps, but manifestly
insulting to those Americans whose ancestors never mistook the days of slavery
as part of some "pretty world" poignantly longed-for, or in some way
better than America today. (This reviewer has a pretty good memory for
well-cadenced English prose, and this is his memory of those opening words from
some anonymous male screenwriter.)
"There was a land of cavaliers and cotton fields called the 'Old South.'
Here, in this pretty world, gallantry took its last bow. Here was the last ever
to be seen of knights and their ladies fair, of master and slave. Look for it
only in books, for it is no more than a dream remembered, a civilization gone
with the wind."
So much better are the novelist's own words, distilled into so many sentences
and paragraphs that positively 'sing' in our memory. Like this one:
"He swung her off her feet into his arms and started up the stairs. Her
head was crushed against his chest and she heard the hard hammering of his
heart beneath her ears. He hurt her and she cried out, muffled, frightened. Up
the stairs, he went in the utter darkness, up, up, and she was wild with
fear."
Or this:
"Hunger gnawed at her empty stomach again, and she said aloud: "As
God is my witness, as God is my witness, the Yankees aren't going to lick me.
I'm going to live through this, and when it's over, I'm never going to be
hungry again. No, nor any of my folks. If I have to steal or kill - as God is
my witness, I'm never going to be hungry again."
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I have often thought that "age twenty-six" is the single most
important year of any long and healthy lifetime (for too many subjective
reasons to list here; but think of the athletes or musicians we've admired when
they were at the very summit of their game -- in their twenty-sixth year). So
it comes as no surprise to learn that Margaret Mitchell was at that same magic
age when she began work on this --- the book another great novelist of the last
century would term "this long and powerful recollection of her home town -
destined to become a titanic tale of human passions, loved around the
world" . . . (its astonishing impact) "a mystery then, and remains
one now."
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217
of 229 people found the following review helpful
By A
Customer on July 12, 2000
Format:
Hardcover
I've
read GWTW many times -once you get going you can't stop! I once gave a copy to
a friend to read -she said it was 'too old fashioned' oh well her loss. I'm
glad I'm in the company of true 'Windies' so I thought I'd share with you some
interesting facts about the book:
-Scarlett
was originally named Pansy
-Scarlett was partly based on Mitchell herself and her grandmother
-Rhett was based on Mitchell's first husband Red Upshaw
-the initials JRM in her dedication refer to her second husband John Reginald
Marsh
-Margaret Mitchell maintained the only character taken from real life was
Prissy the maid
-When asked who she'd like to be in the movie version, Mitchell said 'Prissy'
-Like a detective novelist, Mitchell wrote the last chapter first and the first
chapter last
-GWTW is the only book to sell more copies than the bible
-Mitchell nearly went blind just proofreading the manuscript!
-Mitchell scrupulously researched every detail for GWTW, even going to the town
register to ensure there was no Rhett Butler or Scarlett O'Hara alive during
the Civil War
-The novel took ten years to complete, most of it was written in three
-For style, she endeavoured to make her prose so that a five-year old could
read it
-If she were ever to write a sequel, it would be called 'Back With the Breeze'
On that note, please avoid the Ripley penned sequel 'Scarlett', it is atrocious.
Gone
with the Wind is my favourite book of all time, and yours too, I hope. Enjoy!
