Babies, babies, babies. Why did God make so many babies? But no, God didn’t make them. Stupid people made them.
–Margaret Mitchell, Gone with the Wind
Babies, babies, babies. Why did God make so many babies? But no, God didn’t make them. Stupid people made them.
–Margaret Mitchell, Gone with the Wind
Men and women, they were beautiful and wild, all a little violent under their pleasant ways and only a little tamed.
–Margaret Mitchell, Gone with the Wind
Suppose I don’t want to redeem myself? Why should I fight to uphold the system that cast me out? I shall take pleasure in seeing it smashed.
–Margaret Mitchell, Gone with the Wind
That is the one unforgivable sin in any society. Be different and be damned!
–Margaret Mitchell, Gone with the Wind
It’s no wonder this book is a doozy—it was always going to be. Margaret Mitchell, writing in the 1930s, aimed to cover the American Civil War and Reconstruction Era, as well as the three marriages of an insufferable woman, in a single novel. It’s a war epic and a love story and a character portrait and a historical drama, all in one. And even though it was the only novel Mitchell published during her lifetime, it won the Pulitzer Prize.
Not too shabby, as statistics go.
Among Scarlett O’Hara’s admirable qualities are:
Unfortunately, her survival skills are limited to:
Scarlett O’Hara is hard to like and hard to hate. She’s sharp and tough, and she’s not afraid to get her hands dirty—she even runs a plantation and, later, a sawmill when there’s no one else around to do it. But even as she rises to her potential as a born leader, she relapses into pettiness and narcissism. She spends most of the book ridiculing the few people who care about her and relentlessly pursues her closest friend’s husband. She finally meets her match in the opportunistic Rhett Butler, but she’s too stubborn to notice. Scarlett’s ultimate legacy is to leave us tearing our hair out over what might have been, if only she’d let it.
Also, there’s something in there about the importance of land. Apparently it’s the “only thing that matters.” This sounds very American, if you ask me—and it’s gotten us into a whole lot of trouble before and since.
Is It One of the Greatest Books of All Time?
Epic historical drama and a Southern belle gone bad? YES PLEASE.
Favorite Quotes:
You’re so brutal to those who love you, Scarlett. You take their love and hold it over their heads like a whip.
How closely women clutch the very chains that bind them!
That is the one unforgivable sin in any society. Be different and be damned!
Babies, babies, babies. Why did God make so many babies? But no, God didn’t make them. Stupid people made them.
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musings inspired by literature, poetry, nature, and occasionally everything else.
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