Most Americans over age 50 have seen the film Gone With The Wind. And quite a few of us have read the Margaret Mitchell novel upon which it was based.
I’ve read the book once and seen the film several times; if I’m not mistaken I own it on DVD. To be honest, I don’t love GWTW. The story contains too many white characters I simply experience as unlikable humans.
I just read a reappraisal of the film and novel by Bruce Bawer at The New Criterion that put both into perspective for me. He strongly hints those characters I found unsympathetic were written and played as Mitchell intended.
To a great extent, indeed, her book can fairly be described as a highly sophisticated (if amateur) work of social anthropology, providing readers with remarkably nuanced social taxonomies of the pre-war and post-war South.
This is assuredly not a soggy, sentimental drama of cavaliers and chivalry, but a candid, even cynical, study of two strong-minded survivors set against the backdrop of America’s greatest social upheaval. Nor is it, as Mitchell readily and repeatedly admitted, a beautifully written book or a masterpiece of plotting. (She could never grasp why it became a bestseller or won the Pulitzer Prize.)
Bawer describes southern whites as knowing black people they liked and were fond of, if mostly paternalistically. Whereas northern whites opposed slavery but knew no blacks and mostly had no reason to do so.
From about age 7 till he left home, my father, his brother, and his widowed mother lived with her parents - a physician and his wife - whose household included an old black couple, as cook and houseman. They were addressed as “aunt” and “uncle.” Dad’s assessment agreed with Bawer’s.
