Before there was a movie there was a novel - a Pulitzer Prize winning novel. It is a novel about difficult subjects, a novel that would probably not do well today although it reflected the world that it was written about. How much of it is a true reflection? I am not scholar enough to say. So much has changed since this was published eighty-five years ago. It was controversial then, and it may be even more controversial now.
There was a time when the rebellious south stood as a symbol of independent thinking, when Robert E. Lee sat high atop his monument, and served as the moniker of a 1969 Dodge Charger in the Dukes of Hazard. Just in the past year that image has shifted to a traitorous point of view as the capital was stormed and the union was in jeopardy once again. The movie has been removed from HBO Max.
It’s still a block buster of a novel, romantic fiction that puts all the novels with the sweaty bare chested men with a beautiful woman draped over them to shame. Scarlett O’Hara cannot be beaten as a heroine for the ages.
War is a nasty business no matter when or where. The civil war was no different. You cannot fight a war if you don’t care about the outcome. Clearly the citizens of the Confederacy were passionate about their cause and Margaret Mitchell portrayed that through the character of Scarlett and the characters surrounding her. Even today (perhaps more so) it is difficult to set all the politics aside and just read this as a well written story. Scarlett is a fully developed and beautifully described character. Mitchell granted each and every character a clear and distinctive voice as they dance alongside the death, devastation, and horror of the war. She wrote lyrical dialog, built up tension, twisted in the cliff hangers for the sixty-three chapters.
I saw the movie years ago, and I was intrigued as I continue to hone my own writing skills to see how a master wrote it. A novel is a story first and foremost, and I certainly rode along with the tale. Scarlett is a maverick. She does things her own way - right or wrong, good or bad. She certainly doesn’t make the right choices every time, but she doesn’t sit on the sidelines and watch. Scarlett is one of those people who make the world turn. I think if romance fiction writers of today were compelled to read Gone with the Wind, we would have better novels.