Gone with the Wind

Since The Book of Salt by Monique Truong brought me back into reading mode, I spent the entire past 48 hours reading Gone with the Wind, which was a gift from legolastn. And I do mean the entire past 48 hours, interrupted only by sleep and enough time to prepare about two bowls of pasta-roni (other than that, I avoided eating anything that would have required any food preparation, because I didn't want to put the book down for that long).

Lots of people had warned me that this book was racist, and a smaller number of people had warned me that it was sexist. So I was expecting it to make me very angry for both reasons, and it did. But I wasn't expecting it to be so interesting as well - so well-written and so emotionally involving, so that having to hate the book anyway actually hurts. And unlike everyone else in the United States, I've never seen the movie, so I had no idea how the book was going to end. I knew the famous line from it, of course, but I had no idea whatsoever of the context for it.

The book is blatantly racist from the very first page, although it does get worse as it goes along. I think that with some helpful un-racist footnotes added to correct unrealistic perceptions, though, it could actually be a very useful book for making people less racist. The racism in it is so unashamedly blatant that it's hard to imagine anyone being nearly as racist as this book nowadays, so making people read it would force them to recognize the existence - even just the past existence - of racism in a way that (white) people often don't. By which I mean: racism not just as an abstract thing done by abstract unfathomable people, but as a thing done by real three-dimensional people who actually think of themselves as nice people, who actually think of themselves as doing the right thing. There's really nothing quite like reading nearly a thousand pages about people's lives, getting to know them, sympathizing - even grudgingly, even just a little bit - with their problems, and then finding out that they're not only unrepentant ex-slaveowners (but they were nice slaveowners, they keep assuring you!) but Ku Klux Klan members who murder black people regularly and are proud of it.

The book did not seem sexist at all, though, for the first two thirds of it. On the contrary, it seemed quite impressively feminist. Scarlett had no education and expected to be able to get anything she wanted just by being pretty, but her beloved Ashley wasn't taken in by it and instead married a more educated woman who actually knew about most of the same things he did. Rhett Butler convincingly argued that the then-American traditions in which women were supposed to spend three years isolated and in mourning when they had been widowed, and nine months isolated when pregnant, were sexist and unfair and should be ended immediately. He also made a pretty good case for the broader revolutionary attitude that one's actions should not be dictated by other people's opinions but rather by one's own opinions (although considering what his and Scarlett's own opinions led them to do, I suppose having him as a spokesperson for this attitude may have been a disservice to it). Most impressively, Scarlett took a traditionally male job running a sawmill, and made more money at it than any of the men in town who had tried their hands at it had ever managed to do.

But then it all started falling apart. Scarlett couldn't run her (now plural) sawmills while she was pregnant. Since this had a great deal to do with society's shock about a woman being visibly pregnant in public, it didn't speak badly of her by itself. But she displayed an appalling lack of her former business skills when she hired her beloved but incompetent Ashley to run one of her mills, and a brutally violent overseer to run the other. It would have been perfectly in character for her to hire brutally violent overseers if this had been the most financially profitable thing for her to do; she never did have any moral scruples about anything. But when she realized the brutality was extreme enough that if she were caught employing such a person she could be prosecuted and financially penalized for it - well, that just makes her look too stupid to succeed in a man's career after all. There's no reason she should suddenly lose all her business sense like that. she had all the makings of a successful evil capitalist exploiter who cared about absolutely nothing but money, but then she had to go and ruin it and make the silly men she'd initially been beating at their own trade look like smarter evil capitalists than she was.

And then there's her goddessawful romance with Rhett Butler. I have no idea why he married her in the first place, when he'd previously consistently declared himself not to be a marrying man, and had shown every sign of always meaning everything he ever said, and already knew that Scarlett could easily be bought as a prostitute instead of a wife for the right price - since she'd offered herself to him once before on those grounds - and he was supposedly still furious with her for having broken her word to him by hiring Ashley to run her sawmill. The only sense I could make out of his sudden marriage proposal was to suppose he was lying, tricking her into thinking he was marrying her but not actually marrying her, just socially ruining her by having out-of-wedlock sex with her, as his way of taking revenge for her having broken her word to him, by him breaking his word to her in return, to show her what it felt like. This would have been far more in character for him than what he actually did, which was to suddenly and inexplicably actually marry her. I realize that the fact that he (almost but not quite as inexplicably) actually loved her is supposed to explain it. But I, as a citizen of the 21st century, am not really naive enough to believe that a committed "non-marrying man" would suddenly feel a need to get married just because he fell in love. It has been my observation that non-marrying men do not tend to magically transform into marrying men just because they fell in love. But then, it's also been my observation that men who are ultra-devoted fathers do not tend to fall in love with women who they can see for themselves are the most appallingly awful mothers on the face of the Earth. So I guess there just isn't very much about Rhett Butler's character that's believable at all.

Anyway, the sexism reaches its most disgusting in the descriptions of the rare moments when Scarlett is attracted to her husband. Invariably, these moments come only when he terrifies her into submission with hints of his potential for violence. ( Click for creepy excerpts showing how sexy it is when your husband threatens to murder or rape you! )

But all the disgustingness in the book wouldn't upset me so much if I could just hate the entire book consistently and without exception. Then my resolution would be simple: Throw the creepy book in the trash and hope it eventually fades into such complete obscurity that nobody reads it ever again. But my resolution isn't that simple, because this book doesn't only contain more disgusting offensiveness than almost any other book I've ever read in my life. Inconveniently, it also happens to contain, within the same 1,024 pages of badly underproofread text printed in ink that rubbed off on my fingers with every page that I turned, some really unusually worthwhile writing, with significant insights into human nature and food for thought of a kind that one probably couldn't get from any book that wasn't horribly offensive. So I'm glad that I read it, and I'd even like to encourage more people to read it - provided that they're people who are sufficiently well-informed from other sources to avoid falling for any of the book's offensive propaganda. I think every well-read person should read this book, but I can't really blame any of my teachers or professors for not having dared to teach it - if I were a teacher, I'm not sure I'd dare teach this book either, even to college students, in our current society. I'm rather disturbed by the idea that schools in the South, according to legolastn (who would know, having attended them) very commonly do teach it, because I can envision way more possibilities for that to go horribly wrong than for it to ever go right. Yet, at the same time, ideally, if only it could be done right, I would want this book to be taught. And it has so much to do with the South that it would be so bizarre for schools there not to teach it. I just . . . have all sorts of misgivings about exactly how teachers might go about teaching it.