Chapter - 60 | Gone with the Wind

-three

Preface
THE NOVEL Gone With the Wind shaped the South I grew up in more than
any other book. For the most part, I was raised in a house without books,
but the ones displayed and laid out ﬂat for the inspection of visitors were
the Bible and Gone With the Wind, in no particular order of importance.
My mother bought countless numbers of the novel during my childhood to
hand out as gifts or to replace the ones she read so frequently that they
came apart in her hands. Few white Southerners, even today, can read this
book without conjuring up a complex, tortured dreamscape of the South
handed down by generations of relatives who grew up with the taste of
defeat, like the bluing of gunmetal, still in their mouths. What Margaret
Mitchell caught so perfectly was the sense of irredeemable loss and of a
backwater Camelot corrupted by the mannerless intrusions of insensate
invaders. The Tara invoked in the early chapters of this book is a mirror
image of a Southern Utopia, a party at Twelve Oaks that might have gone
on forever if the hot-blooded boys of the South could have stemmed the
passions of secession and held their ﬁre at Fort Sumter. It is the South as an
occupied nation that forms the heart of this not impartial novel. This is
The Iliad with a Southern accent, burning with the humiliation of
Reconstruction. It is the song of the fallen, unregenerate Troy, the one sung
in lower key by the women who had to pick up the pieces of a fractured
society when their sons and husbands returned with their cause in their
throats, when the ﬁnal battle cry was sounded. It is the story of war told by
the women who did not lose it and who refused to believe in its results,
long after the occupation had begun. According to Margaret Mitchell, the
Civil War destroyed a civilization of unsurpassable amenity, chivalry and
grace. To Southerners like my mother, Gone With the Wind was not just a
book, it was an answer, a clenched ﬁst raised to the North, an anthem of
deﬁance. If you could not defeat the Yankees on the battleﬁeld, then by

God, one of your women could rise from the ashes of humiliation to write
more powerfully than the enemy and all the historians and novelists who
sang the praises of the Union. The novel was published in 1936 and it still
stands as the last great posthumous victory of the Confederacy. It will long
be a favorite book of any country that ever lost a war. It is still the most
successful novel ever published in our republic.
Gone With the Wind is as controversial a novel as it is magniﬁcent. Even
during its publication year, when Margaret Mitchell won a Pulitzer Prize,
the book attracted a glittering array of literary critics, including Malcolm
Cowley and Bernard De Voto, who attacked the artistry and politics of the
novel with a ferocity that continues to this day. Margaret Mitchell was a
partisan of the ﬁrst rank and there never has been a defense of the
plantation South so implacable in its cold righteousness or its resolute
belief that the wrong side had surrendered at Appomattox Courthouse. In
this novel, the moral weight of the narrative is solidly and iconoclastically
in line with the gospel according to the Confederate States. It stands in
furious counterpoint to Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, a book
that Margaret Mitchell ridicules on several occasions by scofﬁng at Stowe’s
famous scene of bloodhounds pursuing runaway slaves across ice ﬂoes.
Margaret Mitchell writes of the Confederacy as Paradise, as the ruined
garden looked back upon by a stricken and exiled Eve, disconsolate with
loss. If every nation deserves its own defense and its own day in the
sunshine of literature, then Margaret Mitchell rose to the task of playing
the avenging angel for the Confederate States. There have been hundreds
of novels about the Civil War, but Gone With the Wind stands like an
obelisk in the dead center of American letters casting its uneasy shadow
over all of us. The novel hooked into the sweet-smelling attar that
romance always lends to the cause of a shamed and defeated people.
Millions of Southerners lamented the crushing defeat of the Southern
armies, but only one had the talent to place that elegiac sense of
dissolution on the white shoulders of the most irresistible, spiderous,
seditious and wonderful of American heroines, Scarlett O’Hara.
Gone With the Wind is a war novel, a historical romance, a comedy of
manners, a bitter lamentation, a cry of the heart and a long, cold-hearted
look at the character of this one lovely, Machiavellian Southern woman.
The book is sure-footed and beautifully constructed into ﬁne, swiftly

moving parts and sixty-three chapters. Margaret Mitchell possessed a
playwright’s ear for dialogue and the reader never becomes confused as the
hundreds of characters move in and out of scenes throughout the book. She
grants each character the clear imprimatur of a unique and completely
distinct voice. Once Miss Mitchell has limned the outlines of the main
characters, they live completely and eternally in the imagination of the
reader. She was born to be a novelist, but one of that rare, hybrid breed
who bloom but once on the American landscape, then withdraw into their
own interiors, having given voice to the one novel bursting along the
seams of consciousness. Margaret Mitchell sings her own song of a land-
proud, war-damaged South, and her voice is operatic, biblical, epic. Her
genius lay in her choice of locale and point of focus and heroine. She
leaves the great battleﬁelds of Gettysburg and Vicksburg, Bull Run and
Antietam to the others and places the Civil War in the middle of Scarlett
O’Hara’s living room. She has the Northern cannons sounding beyond
Peachtree Creek as Melanie Wilkes goes into labor, and has the city of
Atlanta in ﬂames as Scarlett is seized with an overpowering urge to return
home that ﬁnds her moving down Peachtree Street with the world she
grew up in turning to ash around her.
The novel begins and ends with Tara, but it is Scarlett herself who
represents the unimaginable changes that the war has wrought on all
Southerners. It was in Southern women that the deep hatred the war
engendered came to nest for real in the years of Reconstruction. The
women of the South became the only American women to know the hard
truths of war ﬁrsthand. They went hungry just as their men did on the front
lines in Virginia and Tennessee, they starved when these men failed to
come home for four straight growing seasons, and hunger was an old story
when the war ﬁnally ended. The men of Chancellorsville, Franklin and the
Wilderness seemed to have left some residue of the fury on the smoking,
blood-drenched ﬁelds in battles, whose very names became sacred in the
retelling. But Southern women, forced to live with that defeat, had to build
granaries around the heart to store the poisons that the glands of rage
produced during that war and its aftermath. The Civil War still feels
personal in the South, and what the women of the South brought to
peacetime was Scarlett O’Hara’s sharp memory of exactly what they had
lost.

With the introduction of Scarlett O’Hara and Rhett Butler, Miss
Mitchell managed to create the two most famous lovers in the English-
speaking world since Romeo and Juliet. Scarlett springs alive in the ﬁrst
sentence of the book and holds the narrative center for over a thousand
pages. She is a fabulous, pixilated, one-of-a-kind creation, and she does not
utter a dull line in the entire book. She makes her uncontrollable self-
centeredness seem like the most charming thing in the world and one feels
she would be more than a match for Anna Karenina, Lady Macbeth, or any
of the women of Tennessee Williams. Her entire nature shines with the joy
of being pretty and sought after and frivolous in the ﬁrst chapters and we
see her character darkening slowly throughout the book. She rises to meet
challenge after challenge as the war destroys the entire world she was born
into as a daughter of the South. Tara made her charming, but the war made
her Scarlett O’Hara.
The cynicism of Rhett Butler is still breathtaking to read about, and his
black-hearted, impudent humor resonates throughout the book. He serves
as the clarifying eye in the midst of so much high-toned language speaking
of the Cause and the Southern Way of Life. His is the ﬁrst sounding of the
New South, rising out of the chaos left in the passing of the old order. Yet
in the arc of his character, it is Rhett and Rhett alone who seems to change
most dramatically in this book. He, who never let an opportunity pass in
order to mock the pieties and abstractions of Southern patriotism, joined
the Confederate Army only when its defeat was certain. Rhett Butler, who
proﬁted greatly while blockade running, food speculating, and bankrolling
prostitutes, turns out the softest of fathers, the most self-sacriﬁcing of
friends, the most ﬂamboyant and ardent of lovers; yet it is his wounded
masculinity that haunts the book as the secret toll the war took on the
South. His one great ﬂaw was making the terrible and exhilarating mistake
of falling in love with Scarlett O’Hara.
Both Scarlett and Rhett are perfect representatives of the type of
Southerner who prospered amidst the ruins of a conquered nation. They
both collaborated with the occupying army, both prospered by embracing
pragmatism and eschewing honor. Rhett and Scarlett are the two
characters in the book who let you know what the South will become.
Ashley Wilkes and Melanie Hamilton let you know what the South was
and will never be again. The practicality of both Rhett and Scarlett make

them the spiritual parents of Atlanta. Born of ﬁre, Atlanta was the ﬁrst
Southern city to fall in love with the party of hustle and progress. The
burning of Atlanta increased the city’s lack of roots and made it even more
like Dayton than Charleston. Rhett and Scarlett were masterful at cutting
deals and playing the percentages and not looking back, and they
bequeathed these gifts to the reborn city itself.
* * *
I owe a personal debt to this novel that I ﬁnd almost beyond reckoning. I
became a novelist because of Gone With the Wind, or more precisely, my
mother raised me up to be a “Southern” novelist, with a strong emphasis on
the word “Southern,” because Gone With the Wind set my mother’s
imagination ablaze when she was a young girl growing up in Atlanta, and it
was the one ﬁre of her bruised, fragmented youth that never went out. I
still wonder how my relationship with the language might be different had
she spoon-fed me Faulkner or Proust or Joyce, but my mother was a country
girl new to the city, one generation removed from the harsh reality of
subsistence farming, and her passion for reading received its shaping thrust
when Gone With the Wind moved its heavy artillery into Atlanta to ﬁght its
rearguard action against the judgment of history itself.
When my mother described the reaction of the city to the publication of
this book, it was the ﬁrst time I knew that literature had the power to
change the world. It certainly changed my mother and the life she was
meant to lead forever. She read the novel aloud to me when I was ﬁve years
old, and it is from this introductory reading that I absorbed my ﬁrst lessons
in the authority of ﬁction. There is not a sentence in this book unfamiliar
to me since my mother made a fetish of rereading it each year, and the lines
of Gone With the Wind remain illustrated in gold leaf in whatever disﬁgured
Book of Kells I carry around with me from my childhood. I can close my
eyes today and still hear my mother’s recitation of it in the same reverential
voice she used when she read to me from the Story of Genesis. When she
drove me to Sacred Heart School, she could point out areas where the two
armies of the Americas clashed as we moved South along Peachtree Street.
She would take me to the spot outside the Loew’s Grand theater and show

me where she was standing in the crowd on the night that the movie
premiered in Atlanta and she saw Clark Gable and Vivien Leigh and
Margaret Mitchell enter the theater to great applause. Though she could
not afford a ticket, she thought she owed the book the courtesy of standing
among the crowd that night. Together, we visited the grave of Margaret
Mitchell at Oakland Cemetery and my mother would say a decade of the
rosary over her tombstone, then remark proudly that the novelist had been
a Roman Catholic of Irish descent. On weekends, she would drive me to
Stone Mountain to view the half-ﬁnished efﬁgies of Southern Generals on
horseback carved into the center of that massive granite outcropping, then
off to Kennesaw Mountain and Peachtree Creek where she taught me the
battle of Atlanta according to the gospel of Margaret Mitchell. My mother,
during these visitations, taught me to hate William Tecumseh Sherman
with my whole body and soul, and I did so with all the strength I could
bring to the task of malice. He was the Northern General, presented as the
embodiment of evil, who had burned the pretty city where I was born. My
mother would drive me near the spot where Margaret Mitchell was struck
down by a taxicab in 1949 and look toward the skyline at Five Points
saying, “Could you imagine how beautiful Atlanta would be if Sherman
had never been born?”
But the story of this novel and my mother goes deeper than mere
literary rapport. I think that my mother, Frances Dorothy Peck, modeled
her whole life on that of Scarlett O’Hara. I think that ﬁction itself became
such a comfortable country for me because my mother treated the book as
though it were a manual of etiquette whose dramatis personae she presented
as blood relations and kissing cousins rather than as creations of one artist’s
imagination. She could set our whole world against this ﬁctional backdrop
with alarming ease. My mother, the willful, emotional beauty with just the
right touch of treachery and ﬂirtation, was Miss Scarlett herself. My father,
the Marine Corps ﬁghter pilot, ﬂying off the deck of his aircraft carrier,
dropping napalm on the enemy North Koreans an entire world away,
played the role of the ﬂashy, contemptuous Rhett Butler. My Aunt Helen
was the spitting image of Melanie Wilkes, my mother would inform me as
she prepared our evening meal, and my Aunt Evelyn acted just like Sue
Ellen. My Uncle James could play the walk-in part for Charles Hamilton,
and my Uncle Russ could be the stand-in for Frank Kennedy. My mother

could align our small universe precisely with that of Gone With the Wind
and she could do it effortlessly while stirring the creamed corn. Once she
had read the novel, it lived inside her the rest of her life, like a bright lamp
she could always trust in the darkness.
Even my young and tenuous manhood was informed by lessons of
instruction from her interpretation of the novel and she would ﬁght about
it with my father. “No matter what girls say,” my mother would tell me, and
this was a recurrent theme broached upon often, “they’d much rather marry
a man like Ashley Wilkes than Rhett Butler.”
“I hate Ashley Wilkes,” my father would say. Literary criticism was not
an art form conducted at a high level in my family, and I still do not
believe my father ever read my mother’s sacred text. “That guy’s a pansy if
I’ve ever seen one. Of course, Rhett Butler’s a pansy compared to me.”
My mother would sniff and say, “Your father’s from Chicago. He doesn’t
even know what we’re talking about.”
Gone With the Wind presented my mother and people like her with a
new sense of themselves. She hailed the book as the greatest book ever
written or that ever would be written, a nonpareil that restored the South’s
sense of honor to itself after the unimaginable hours of war and occupation.
I have come across legions of critics that deplored my mother’s taste in
ﬁction, but this was my mother and I was heir to that taste, for better or
worse. My mother’s hurt childhood had damaged something irreparable in
her sense of self and I think she won it back by her obsessive identiﬁcation
with Scarlett O’Hara. My mother’s family suffered grievously during the
Depression, but Scarlett taught that one could be hungry and despairing,
but not broken and not without resources, spiritual in nature, that
precluded one from surrendering without a ﬁght. When Scarlett swears to
God after rooting around for that radish in the undone garden of Tara that
she will never go hungry again, she was giving voice to every American
who had suffered want and fear during the Hoover years. It was this same
Scarlett who gave Southern women like my mother new insights into the
secrecies and potentials of womanhood itself, not always apparent in that
region of the country where the progress of women moves most slowly.
Gone With the Wind tells the whole story of a lost society through the eyes
of a single woman and that woman proves match enough for a world at war,
an army of occupation, and every man who enters those sugared realms of

her attraction. Rarely has a heroine so immoral or unscrupulous as Scarlett
O’Hara held the deed to center stage during the course of such a long
novel.
Whenever the movie version was released again by MGM, my mother
would march all her children to the local theater with a sense of religious
anticipation. I remember that feeling of participating in some rite of sacred
mystery when the movie began and my mother let herself be taken once
again by this singular, canonical moment in Southern mythmaking. She
would hum along when the theme from Tara began playing and she would
weep at all the right places. I would observe my mother watching her
heroine, Scarlett O’Hara, my mother mouthing the words as Scarlett spoke
them to Ashley, to Rhett, to Melanie, to the Yankee interloper who
desecrated the sanctuary of Tara, and I would be thinking what I think now
—that my mother was as pretty as Scarlett O’Hara, that she had modeled
herself completely on this ﬁctional creation and had done so as an act of
sheer will and homage. I would wonder if anyone else in the theater could
see what was perfectly obvious to me—that this movie belonged to my
mother; that it was the site of her own invention of herself, the place
where she came to revive her own deepest dream of her lost girlhood. The
movie version of Gone With the Wind, like the book, was a house of worship
my mother retired to so she could experience again the spiritual
refreshment of art.
Yet it is as a work of art that Gone With the Wind has been most suspect.
From the beginning, the book has endured the incoming ﬁre of some of the
nation’s best critics. It is a book of Dickensian power, written after the
dawn of the age of Ulysses. Its vigorous defense of the Confederacy was
published three years before the German panzer divisions rolled across the
borders of Poland. In the structure of Margaret Mitchell’s perfect society,
slavery was an essential part of the unity and harmony of Southern life
before Fort Sumter. No black man or woman can read this book and be
sorry that this particular wind has gone. The Ku Klux Klan plays the same
romanticized role it had in Birth of a Nation and appears to be a benign
combination of the Elks Club and a men’s equestrian society. Liberal critics
took the novel apart from the beginning, then watched as it proceeded to
become the best-selling book in American history. Its ﬂaws may have

doomed a lesser book, but this one rode out into literary history with Rhett
and Scarlett in complete command of the carriage.
* * *
Literature often has a soft spot for the lost cause. Defeat lends an air of
tragedy and nostalgia that the victors ﬁnd unnecessary. But history will
forgive almost anything, except being out-written. None can explain the
devotion that Gone With the Wind has inspired from one generation to
another, but one cannot let this ardor go unremarked upon either. Because
its readers have held it in such high esteem, it has cheapened the book’s
reputation as a work of art. Democracy works because of the will of the
people, but it has the opposite effect when scholars begin to call out those
books that make up the canon of our nation’s literature. Gone With the
Wind has outlived a legion of critics and will bury another whole set of
them after this century closes.
Gone With the Wind works because it possesses the inexpressible magic
where the art of pure storytelling rises above its ancient use and succeeds in
explaining to a whole nation how it came to be this way. There has never
been a reader or a writer who could ﬁgure out why this happens only to
very few books. It involves all the eerie mysteries of enchantment itself, the
strange untouchable wizardry that occurs when a story, in all its fragile
elegance, speaks to the times in a clear, original voice and answers some
strange hungers and demands of the Zeitgeist. I know of no other thousand-
page book that reads so swiftly and grants such pleasure. The characters are
wonderful, and the story moves with swiftness and bright, inexorable
power. The novel allows you to lose yourself in the glorious pleasures of
reading itself, when all ﬁve senses ignite in the sheer happiness of
narrative. The Civil War and its aftermath may not have felt like this at
all, but it sure seems that way when one gets carried away in the irresistible
tumult and surge of Gone With the Wind. This book caught the imagination
of Americans and the world as few books ever have or ever will. It
demonstrates again and again that there is no passion more rewarding than
reading itself, that it remains the best way to dream and to feel the sheer
carnal joy of being fully and openly alive.

Gone With the Wind is a book with many ﬂaws, but it cannot, even now,
be easily put down. The book still glows and quivers with life. American
letters will always be tiptoeing nervously around that room where Scarlett
O’Hara dresses for the party at Twelve Oaks as the War Between the States
begins to inch its way toward Tara.
—PAT CONROY

PART ONE