Gone with the Wind

Article written by Onyekachi Osuji

B.A. in Public Administration and certified in Creative Writing (Fiction and Non-Fiction)

Scarlett’s sheltered, indulgent life first gets hit by the news that Ashley Wilkes, the man she is in love with, is to marry another woman, Melanie Hamilton.

Swiftly in the wake of her heartbreak comes the American Civil War with its adversities that would keep her in a continuous battle with her worst fears, the cynical jeers of Rhett Butler, and an inextricable connection with the gentle Melanie Hamilton whom she resents for marrying Ashley Wilkes.

Key facts about Gone with The Wind

• Title: ‘Gone with the Wind’
• When/ where written: 1926 to 1929 / Atlanta, Georgia
• Publication year:  1936
• Genre: Historical Fiction
• Setting: The American Southern State of Georgia during The American Civil War and The Reconstruction Era
• Point Of View: Third Person/ Omniscient Point of View
• Climax: Melanie’s Fatal Miscarriage
• Protagonist: Scarlett O’Hara
• Antagonist: The genteel society of Georgia

Margaret Mitchell and Gone with the Wind

Margaret Mitchell was born in 1900, decades after the war, and the era ‘Gone with The Wind’ is set in. However, she got insights into the personal experiences of the war survivors from stories her folks told, especially her Irish-American grandmother, Annie Fitzgerald Stephens.

She began writing ‘Gone with The Wind’ in 1926 while recovering from a slow-healing leg injury that had forced her to quit her job as a reporter for the Atlanta Journal. John marsh, her husband at the time, had been bringing her books to read from the public library to keep her occupied in her convalescence but one day, had told her it was high time she wrote her own book instead of always reading books by other people. John Marsh would later play a key role in editing the manuscript of ‘Gone with the Wind’.

While ‘Gone with the Wind’ is a work of fiction, many of its characters and events were inspired by Margaret Mitchell’s true life. One of the most striking connections between ‘Gone with the Wind’ and Margaret Mitchell’s personal life was her relationship with her mother—she revered and admired her mother but her mother’s aloofness left her a lot to be desired. In ‘Gone with the Wind’, Mitchell portrayed these maternal images in two very different ways. On the one hand is Ellen O’Hara, strong, ladylike and perfect, likened to The Virgin Mary of the Catholic faith, giving all of herself in service to everyone around her. Then Scarlett O’Hara the protagonist is impatient and cold to even her children.

Margaret Mitchell faced a lot of backlash for racial controversies in ‘Gone with the Wind’ especially about her depiction of Negroes and slavery but she does not agree with her detractors, saying that the black characters are some of the most dignified characters in the book. ‘Gone with the Wind’ is the only novel by Margaret Mitchell to be published in her lifetime but scores of decades after Margaret Mitchell’s death, the controversies around Gone With The Wind are anything but gone with the wind.

Books related to Gone with the Wind

The world can never have enough books that tell of how war devastates people both individually and collectively. Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell is one such book that tells of war and its effects. Some of the books related to ‘Gone with the Wind’ include:

• Half Of A Yellow Sun by Chimamanda  Ngozi Adichie. This novel published in 2006, tells a tale of the ethnic interactions in Nigeria and The Nigerian Civil War from the perspectives of Odenigbo a university professor from the Eastern part of Nigeria, his beautiful and accomplished girlfriend Olanna, his thirteen-year-old servant boy Ugwu, and an English writer Richard. Although set in entirely different climes and written decades apart, ‘Gone with the Wind’ and ‘Half of a Yellow Sun’ are both historical fictions similar in their themes of the cruelty of war on humanity and some feminist ideals.
• Scarlett by Alexandra Ripley. This book is a sequel to ‘Gone with the Wind’ written and published by another author in the year 1991. ‘Scarlett’ picks up from where ‘Gone with the Wind’ stops and follows Scarlett’s efforts to win the renewed love of Rhett Butler. Unfortunately, it is not as popular as Gone with the wind.
• Rhett Butler’s People by Donald McCaig. This is another sequel to ‘Gone with the Wind’. Again by another author, Donald McCaig who follows the story of ‘Gone with the Wind’  by Margaret Mitchell with the character Rhett Butler as the focus.  The story is set in a timeline that ranges from before the beginning of ‘Gone with the Wind’ to the timeline captured in ‘Gone with the Wind’. It was published in the year 2007 but does not take cognizance of the earlier sequel ‘Scarlett’ published in 1991.

The Lasting Impact of Gone with the Wind