History lessons from Gone with the Wind.

Bevilacqua, Kathryne

"You know I don't read novels."

--Scarlett O'Hara to Rhett Butler (Gone with the Wind 778)

1936 WAS AN ANNUS MIRABILIS FOR THE HISTORICAL NOVEL AND FOR Southern arts and letters. As William Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom! was set to print in October, another novel purporting to "Tell about the South" (142) was published in June: Margaret Mitchell's Gone with the Wind. (1) Since the coincidence of their near-simultaneous publication, however, these two great Southern epics--one, a massively popular middlebrow historical romance, the other, an intricate specimen of American modernist aesthetics--have only moved farther apart. Nowhere is this divide more trenchant than in critical responses to history in both novels. Almost as much scholarly ink has been spilled considering the narratological intricacies of historical inaccuracy and indeterminacy in Absalom, Absalom! as has been spent cataloguing and debating the historical inaccuracies in Gone with the Wind, both novel and film. (2) Consequently, there remain more interesting historical questions to ask of Gone with the Wind than whether or not the gentleman-farmer Gerald O'Hara would ever wear a cravat on a weekday. (3)

If we accept the canonical accounts of the composition of Gone with the Wind, Margaret Mitchell actually seems quite at home next to Quentin Compson, sitting in the still, hot air of Rosa Coldfield's drawing room, receiving a potent mix of history and memory. (4) Mitchell claimed that the only source she needed for her novel was her memory, full of a rich oral history that she had received as a child. As she often told reporters, "she was 10 years old before she learned that Robert E. Lee did not win the Civil War" ("Miss Mitchell"). It was not until she sold her manuscript to Macmillan that she fact-checked her inherited memory, and even then, Mitchell maintained that she found "exactly two minor errors, neither of which would ever have been found outside of Georgia" (Harwell 30). (5) Thus story and history have always been entwined in Gone with the Wind, and this pedigree places the novel in the same storytelling tradition whose fissures and complications provide the drama of Absalom, Absalom!

Nevertheless, most engagements with Gone with the Wind have fixated on issues of historical accuracy. As scholars have re-checked Mitchell's historiography, they have implicated its various inaccuracies and flaws in various ideological projects. Critics of the novel have argued that Gone with the Wind "propagandizes history" in order to advance a Lost Cause mythology (Watkins 89). Others have attempted to apologize for the novel's inaccuracies by historicizing its flaws: Mildred Seydell argues that the novel provides not a "true picture of the South of those days," but "a true picture of the picture of those days" (Harwell xvii). Still others attempt to absolve the novel of its historiographical offenses by universalist appeals to "truths ... of a mythic, epic and indeed tragic nature"--in short, by de-historicizing the novel altogether (Taylor 209). All these readings of Gone with the Wind, however, still emphasize the historical in historical fiction at the expense of the Fictional.

Distilling history from memory in Gone with the Wind is a fruitless pursuit, and such efforts ignore the real work that fictionalizing history--making history something that can be read and interpreted--performs within the novel. The historical question to ask of Mitchell's novel is not "What historical story does Gone with the Wind tell?" but rather "How does Gone with the Wind encourage us to interpret history?" Gone with the Wind's historical project is less about teaching its readers "accurate" history and more about teaching readers how to react to the historical. Embedded in the sweeping romance of Mitchell's novel is a suite of historical reading practices, methods of accounting for and interpreting historical change, that this essay will consider through one of the central relationships of the text--that between Scarlett and the novel's narrator. While the narrator becomes a mouthpiece for the text's dominant historical pedagogy, the reader is given a chance to assess this pedagogy through the efforts of its worst student: Scarlett O'Hara. Scarlett's unrelenting boredom and indifference is more than a mere character trait: it is a formal strategy knowingly employed to present competing models of historical reading. As the narrator of the novel presents history in a deluge of metaphorically significant material details, Scarlett refuses to "read" these details properly--or even at all. Time and again she goes against the grain of the narrator's historical hermeneutics, and the reader is caught in a crossfire of memory and forgetting, metaphor and material, nostalgia and futurity. Ultimately, as Scarlett stares stridently into tomorrow, Gone with the Wind shows how history need not be measured in units of accuracy or pathos; rather, history becomes a strategy not for remembering, but for forgetting.

Re-experience and the Historical Novel

While Gone with the Wind was outselling Absalom, Absalom/in the United States, en route to a 1937 Pulitzer Prize for Margaret Mitchell, the Hungarian Marxist critic Georg Lukacs was working in the Soviet Union on his own contribution to the genre that both Mitchell and Faulkner had mobilized that year. The Historical Novel (first published in Russian in 1937; in English, 1962) is Lukacs's theoretical and literary history of the historical novel from Sir Walter Scott through the European masters of the genre in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Plenty of scholars have devoted time and energy to the exact contours of Lukacs's literary history, (6) so I will only sketch his argument here so that we might take up its resonances with Gone with the Wind as a starting point. Lukacs argues that the social and political upheaval of the late eighteenth century provided, for the first time, "the concrete possibilities for men to comprehend their own existence as something historically conditioned," and literary form reflected this new conceptualization of history as it directly inscribed itself on present-day, everyday life (24). Lukacs locates the precise moment of this shift in the literary treatment of history in the Waverly novels of Sir Walter Scott, whose "greatness lies in his capacity to give living human embodiment to historical-social types" (35). Scott wrestles "history" out of the abstract and the epic and embeds it in people, creating characters that are not totemically historical, but in fact peculiarly historical--we might even say historicist--products of their particular moments in time. Thus in Rob Roy and Robin Hood, we read more than epic heroes and more than Romantic invocations of some distant past; we see "the real representatives of these historical crises" (39), whose actions and psychologies work through past conditions in order to speak to the present.

As Lukacs identifies this new type of historical representation in Scott's novels, he also argues that this new technique has produced a new kind of reading experience (35). In the Waverly tradition, history is no longer something merely recounted, but rather something experienced through people:

   What matters therefore in the historical novel is not the
   re-telling of great historical events, but the poetic awakening of
   the people who figured in those events. What matters is that we
   should re-experience the social and human motives which led men to
   think, feel and act just as they did in historical reality. (42)

Lukacs's description of "what matters" finds an uncanny echo in a letter that Mitchell wrote to an early reviewer of her novel. Like Lukacs, Mitchell identifies an individual character's reaction to historical circumstances as the catalyzing force in her own historical novel:

She [Scarlett O'Hara] just seemed to me to be a normal person thrown into abnormal circumstances and doing the best she could, doing what seemed to her the practical thing. The normal human being in a jam thinks, primarily, of saving his own hide, and she valued her hide in a thoroughly normal way. (Letters 29)

Both Lukacs and Mitchell profess more readerly interest in the actions of characters than in the accurate chronicling of historical facts: for both, it is the condition of "being in a jam" that precipitates the "poetic awakening" that in turn provides the animating energy for historical fiction. This "poetic awakening" is, per Lukacs, Scott's great innovation in the genre, and, per many after Lukacs, a predominant reason for the historical novel's persistent popularity throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Today, studies of readers of historical romances provide further empirical evidence for the equation of "poetic awakening" and popularity. Janice Radway's now canonical study of romance readers, Reading the Romance: Women, Patriarchy, and Popular Literature (1984), shows, for example, that the "re-experience" of history is in fact a major part of the genre's appeal, while "reading for instruction" in historical events and places was but a "secondary justification," something to tell husbands or friends that questioned the value of a romance reading habit (107). Likewise, Helen Taylor's study of British readers in Scarlett's Women: Gone with the Wind and Its Female Fans (1989) shows compellingly that readers need not even be familiar with the American historical context of the novel in order to be impressed by the pathos the text generates out of the specifics of historical experience. By Taylor's survey, only a tenth of her respondents had enough "certainty about historical 'truth'" to judge Gone with the Wind's presentation of history as factually accurate. The rest may never have heard of the American Civil War or remembered its details well enough to judge (207). More than historical accuracy, then, the historical novel provides the reader with an immersive opportunity to live out the crises of history writ large on a human scale, where the costs of historical specifics are reckoned in human thoughts, feelings, and actions.

By this definition, Mitchell's novel seems to be another piece of positive evidence for the Waverly theory--with one major flaw. Before we tout Gone with the Wind's depiction of human suffering and survival, we should take another look at Scarlett O'Hara. At the center of Gone with the Wind, a thoroughly historical novel, is a heroine who doesn't give a damn, as it were, about history. Next to "not beautiful" on the novel's first page, "bored" is the most striking descriptor of Scarlett. In the flurry of world-altering events surrounding her, Scarlett is consistently described as "wild with boredom" (519), boredom that would perhaps not be so remarkable if it did not completely structure--and even work against--the novel's presentation of history and the reader's experience of that history. Others have read Scarlett's boredom in political and psychological frames, (7) but I consider it an essential formal strategy employed in the service of the novel's historical pedagogical project. Facing Scarlett's boredom forces us to ask, how can a reader "re-experience" the crises of the past when her model of reaction is the indifferent, even hostile, Scarlett O'Hara?

"Scarlett O'Hara was not beautiful ... "

Gone with the Wind unfolds from a third-person omniscient and retrospective point of view, but such narratological labels do not do justice to the ways in which the narrator structures the reader's access and reactions to characters and events. Whether we are following the romance plot of Scarlett, Rhett, and Ashley, or the historical plot of Civil War and Reconstruction, the narrator can never be mistaken for a disinterested observer. In the novel's broader moments, such as the aftermath of Gettysburg, the narrator's allegiances to "every Southern heart" and "the South" (248) surface explicitly, demanding certain sympathies from the reader that she may or may not be inclined to provide. (8) More often, however, the narrator's structuring interest is put to a more pointed use: a narratological cattiness that takes Scarlett as its main target. (9) Take the novel's first page and its famous description of Scarlett. With two initial observations--"Scarlett O'Hara was not beautiful" and "her true self was poorly concealed"--Scarlett is immediately labeled as a sub-standard romance heroine, not only because of her lack of beauty, but also because of her lack of guile (25). For the narrator, exposing how easily a reader may access Scarlett's "true self' becomes a major source of play and antagonism throughout the novel. With every reminder of Scarlett's shortcomings--"to the end of her days she would never be able to understand a complexity" (46), or "Scarlett had not a subtle bone in her body" (51), or "Quick though her brain was, it was not made for analysis" (101)--the narrator further disidentifies with Scarlett's worldview. This disidentification comes not only in declarative judgments of Scarlett's character--"the things Scarlett set her mind on were unthinkable" (595)--but also in moments of free indirect discourse that catch Scarlett's mind at its nastiest moments: "Why had God invented children," she thinks (385), then later, "But no, God didn't make them. Stupid people made them" (390). Taken as a single narratological apparatus, these antagonistic gestures do more than provide moments of humor or relief: they draw a line between Scarlett and the text that presumes to represent her.

To read the antagonism between the narrator and Scarlett as merely one-way, however, is to overlook the other half of the text's most contentious relationship. (10) As often as the narrator undercuts Scarlett's beauty, intellect, and morality, Scarlett undercuts the narrator's clear mission to tell a lush, detailed historical story, and her main weapon against the narrator's history is boredom. Two scenes from early in the novel show how Scarlett's boredom structurally interferes with the reader's access to the narrator's presentation of historically important moments, leaving the reader positioned between historical pathos and selfish indifference.

The first moment comes at the Wilkes' barbecue, on the eve of the Civil War, when Scarlett overhears the men of Twelve Oaks discussing the events of April 1861: "'Of course we'll fight--' 'Yankee thieves--' 'We could lick them in a month--' 'Why, one Southerner can lick twenty Yankees--(118). The paragraph continues in this staccato mode until Scarlett's boredom forecloses the reader's further access to this drawing room discussion. "Secession, war--these words long since had become acutely boring to Scarlett," and so the novel stops repeating them, as if to spare its heroine's sensibilities (118). Scarlett has already pouted with "bored impatience" at the Tarleton twins' talk of war (27); now she belittlingly ascribes the interruption of the Wilkes's barbecue to "Mr. Lincoln's didoes" (135). The film visually captures the interplay between the emerging historical story and Scarlett's profound disinterest (bordering on disgust) in stunning fashion. As news of Lincoln's call for troops reaches Twelve Oaks, all of the South (or so it seems) abandons its barbecue and rushes out of the Wilkes's stately home, toward its destined doom in war. Scarlett, however, is shown slowly walking, with equal parts defiance and oblivion, in the other direction, back up the stairs to nurse her wounded pride. The novel adds one final tantalizing detail at this moment: "she heard for the first time, without knowing it, the Rebel yell" (132). For the reader, the Rebel yell might stand for any piece of historical ephemera, any detail from the past that can be described, but never wholly recovered. That Scarlett hears the Rebel yell without knowing (or caring), thus denying the reader even a cursory description of this literal blast from the past, helps to transform her boredom from a mere character trait into an active impediment to the reader's experience of history.

Scarlett's profound indifference to the start of the Civil War is matched--perhaps even exceeded--in a later moment, when the narrator catches her secretly reading Ashley's letters home to Melanie. From the outset, the narrator and Scarlett are at cross-purposes vis-a-vis Ashley's letters: Scarlett is mining them for hints of romance between Ashley and Melanie, but the narrator presents them differently, as one of Gone with the Wind's longest and most poignant eulogies to "the old days, the old ways" of a soon-to-be-gone South (212). Ashley's letter seems like a prime vehicle for the historical novelistic project of generating pathos from a character's singular inability to cope with historical change, and for almost three pages, the novel indulges in Ashley's vision, creating a "timeless time" in the middle of an otherwise brisk narrative. As Ashley "sees" Twelve Oaks, his mother, "the darkies" and magnolias (212), the reader is haunted by the ghosts of the antebellum plantation life that "was lost the minute the first shot was fired" (213). The letter presents a sustained meditation on memory and loss, but lest the reader grow too entranced by Ashley's genteel fictions, Scarlett's cold indifference breaks the spell:

   "Our cotton is worthless and what he called arrogance is all that
   is left. But I call that arrogance matchless courage. If--"

   But Scarlett carefully folded up the letter without finishing it
   and thrust it back into the envelope, too bored to read further.
   (213)

After nearly three pages of Ashley's ghostly prose, Scarlett reemerges, snapping the reader out of Ashley's spell. She is so bored by Ashley's letter that she cannot even finish his sentence, and his "If--" marks the clear threshold between past potential and present fact. Scarlett's indifference to anything that sounds like history resists this potentially moving moment of historical remembrance, of the Lost Cause mythology that is so often ascribed to Mitchell's text.

The men's discussion and Ashley's letter present two different types of "history" in the novel's early moments. The talk at Twelve Oaks centers on the political and practical matters of waging a war against the North, whereas Ashley's letter is more of the moonlight and magnolias school of Southern memory and nostalgia. While their content diverges, however, these two moments are quite similar in form. To start, both the barbecue talk and the letter are coded as masculine intrusions into the novel's feminine romance plot. One of the novel's early premises is that "War was men's business, not ladies'," (11) and in keeping with this, Scarlett can only access the early moments of the war through men (27). But men enter Scarlett's life as part of her romance plot: she only overhears the barbecue discussion on her way to professing her love for Ashley, and she only reads Ashley's letters out of similar romantic devotion. This overlap, at times even competition, between Scarlett's particular romantic interests and the historical events of the wider world makes it quite clear that Scarlett's boredom with history is not simply the disinterest of an "unanalytical," intellectually incurious girl (214). Put bluntly, and from Scarlett's point of view, hostilities between the North and the South are destroying her love life, and thus boredom becomes yoked to an emotional callousness rooted in profound romantic self-interest. In a rare moment of self-reflection, Scarlett makes this connection clear when she tells Rhett, "I do get awfully bored when they talk about the Cause, morning, noon and night. But goodness, Rhett Butler, if I admitted it nobody would speak to me and none of the boys would dance with me!" (237). The narrative constantly frames Scarlett's choice as one between patriotism and romance: for example, after her first husband's death, it is "the dancing and the beaux which drew her back to Atlanta and not the service of the Confederacy" (220). And as soon as the war sours the men, Scarlett's loyalties become equally sour: "If there had ever been any novelty and romance about nursing, that had worn off a year ago. Besides, these men wounded in the retreat were not so attractive as the earlier ones had been." The reader might ask, what could make a man unattractive to Scarlett O'Hara? The narrator answers, "They didn't show the slightest interest in her" (293). Even as Scarlett serves the Confederacy, then, she cannot do so without recalculating her service in terms of self-interest.

The practical selfishness that underlies Scarlett's boredom with the historical leads to the other major formal feature of these two specific interjections of history: in both the barbecue talk and Ashley's letter, the historical is fundamentally immaterial, relegated to voices wafting in from another room, or the imprint of the unheard Rebel yell, or the ethereality of Ashley's imaginative vision. While the letter in Scarlett's hands may be material, (12) the voice that speaks from it is disembodied and dislocated, an effect that the printed text of the novel reproduces by setting all of Ashley's letter in quotation marks. This immateriality is quickly given a temporal dimension, too, as Ashley's history--like Ashley himself--is guilty of an unbecoming "timelessness": despite the vivid details of his letter's vision, they remain in "a magic circle," "inside his head instead of outside in the world," part of an unrecoverable past (214, 215). At one point the real Ashley admits to Scarlett, "I do not like the outlines of things to be too sharp. I like them gently blurred, a little hazy" (497). "Gently blurred, a little hazy" is both Ashley's preferred mode of being and, it turns out, his preferred mode of historical storytelling. This effect may heighten the haunting spectrality of the letter for the reader, but it also makes Ashley's version of the story of the South much more susceptible to Scarlett's particular brand of resistance. Scarlett, after all, cares most about the present materiality of the world around her. If Ashley "moved in an inner world that was more beautiful than Georgia and came back to reality with reluctance," then Scarlett is firmly of the Georgia soil, unable to parse the inner world that Ashley's reflections represent (46). (13) As readers of a novel that so closely follows this indifferent heroine, we have no choice but to adopt her reading practices as our own. There is no way to sneak a peek at the rest of Ashley's letter: Scarlett has put it away. This dynamic between heroine and narration leaves Gone with the Wind as a historical novel on unstable ground. How can this novel possibly stage a Waverly-esque encounter between the present and its past if history is continually foreclosed upon by a resisting reader lurking within its very pages? What other possibilities exist for a Lukacsian "re-experience" of history for as stubborn a subject as Scarlett O'Hara?

The Bored Belle as Resisting Reader

Immaterial traces of historical ephemera such as Ashley's ghostly reminiscences and the unheard Rebel yell are no match for Scarlett's boredom, so Gone with the Wind must take another tack in its presentation of history. In fact, the immateriality of the two historical interjections discussed above is quite uncharacteristic for Mitchell's novel. More often, the novel represents history not through voices and visions, but through material details composed into backgrounds, tableaux vivants that perform a particular brand of Confederate historical memory. The materiality of these moments would appear to be ideally suited for Scarlett's pragmatic, "thoroughly normal" sensibility, but something still keeps her from fully assimilating the cues in these backdrops into a "proper" (as judged by the novel's omnipresent narrator) historical sensibility. Two of the novel's most memorable set pieces--the Atlanta bazaar and the wounded soldiers at the train depot--show just how disparate Scarlett's readings are from the readings modeled by both the narrator and the characters around her. While Scarlett commits to a particular model of historical interpretation that, in keeping with her thorough practicality, reads these tableaux in a literal, material way, the other characters in the novel (and indeed, the reader herself) are more impressed by the metaphorical weight of these material details.

It is worth noting that Scarlett herself actually poses in a tableau as the "Spirit of the Confederacy"--a bit of casting that the reader must take with a healthy dose of irony (229). For, as we see time and time again in the course of the novel, Scarlett is not one for posing; nor is she one for interpreting such precisely posed scenes. The failure here is not due to a lack of opportunity. The bazaar scene, which takes place early in the war in Atlanta, begins by quite explicitly positioning Scarlett as an observer and potential interpreter of, rather than a full participant in, this moment's potent mix of decoration and commemoration: "She sank down on one of the little stools ... and looked up and down the long hall which, until this afternoon, had been a bare and ugly drill room" (172). From here we might expect an assessment of the scene through Scarlett's gaze, but the narrative voice overpowers Scarlett and instead unfolds a three-page description of candlesticks, garlands, wreaths, and bunting--all beautiful, all "especially artistic" (172). This sense of artistry applies not only to the decorations that have transformed the hall: the attendees of the bazaar are equally artistically composed, with the girls "bedecked" with "laces and silks and braid and ribbons" and the men in "resplendent uniforms, brave with shining buttons and dazzling with twined gold braid" (174). Occasional "arms in slings," "head bandages," and "crutches" provide the final decorative touches to this scene, a tableau that emphasizes how mankind and material are all woven from the same thread of Confederate sacrifice (174).

The reader cannot help but notice the glut of material detail, and the narrative makes the interpretation clear: "finery flaunted with an added pride as an extra affront to the Yankees" (174). By investing these symbolic details with an "added" significance, the narrator models a way to read world-historical significance in this particular tableau. In the bazaar scene, this metaphorical way of reading history is closely linked with the other Confederate women, whose brand of patriotism and historical sensibility relies on the ability to transmute the physical details of the war's costs to the South through metaphor. Interestingly, the choice that history presents for Melanie Wilkes and the other women of Atlanta's Old Guard is also staged (as it was earlier for Scarlett) as one between romance and patriotism: "A Cause they loved as much as they loved their men" (176). But while Scarlett sides with romance (or more accurately, romance filtered through the narrow sieve of her own self-interest), the other interpretive model sides with patriotism, or rather, folds romance into patriotism: "a Cause to which they would sacrifice these men if need be, and bear their loss as proudly as the men bore their battle flags" (176). The choice between their Cause and their men is no choice at all: metaphor enables the women to cleave the two options together, so that lost life and lost love become a "battle flag," and "love snatched in the face of danger and death was doubly sweet for the strange excitement that went with it" (177). That "strange excitement" is the result of a particular type of historical reading, one that is able to invest even the gravest detail with recuperating significance.

Reliance on metaphor and its power to re-imagine details that have been changed in war is one of the most common strategies in the text for dealing with historical detail, but it is not always valorized by the narrative. Ashley, in his "gently blurred, a little hazy" way, is one of the text's main practitioners of this reading practice, but also one of the characters through which the reader can see its flaws. When presented with Scarlett's rough, calloused, postwar hands, he resorts to metaphor in an attempt to recuperate them. In his gracious reading, "every callus is a medal ... every blister an award for bravery and unselfishness" (496). But Ashley's metaphorical investiture of Scarlett's blisters rings hollow in the text. For one thing, we are shown how Ashley's reading does not bear up under peer review: Rhett brusquely dismisses Scarlett's hands as "not the hands of a lady," reading on them the reality of her labor at Tara and the true reason for her visit to Atlanta (542). Furthermore, the text is elsewhere quite adamant that blisters remain blisters, that details of historical change marked on wartime bodies are irreversible and non-transcendent, even--or especially--when wrought in metaphor. A striking example of this logic comes as the casualty lists from Gettysburg arrive in Atlanta, and the reader witnesses the McLure girls' discovery that their younger brother has been killed. As their pony cart passes through the scene, we see "Miss Faith was driving, her face like a rock," and "Miss Hope, death in her face" (254). The twinned traumas of war and death have immediately and physically deformed the McLure girls' faces: hardened into rock, overtaken by death, "They looked like very old women" (254). Unlike Scarlett's real blisters, the transformation here is conducted through metaphor, but, yoked to the permanence of Dallas McLure's physical death, the metaphor, too, has the weight of irreversible reality. Later, Scarlett provides further confirmation, looking at the faces of women like the McLures and thinking, "The faces she was seeing in the room were not faces; they were masks, excellent masks which would never drop" (570). As mask replaces face, metaphor becomes reality, and the reader is left with changes whose effects are as irreversible as they are unbelievable.

The critique of metaphor implicit in the idea of "masking" relates to the novel's larger interest in historical interpretation: metaphor can destabilize the physical reality presented in historical details, but the destabilization is itself an unstable fiction, and so its meaning remains open to interpretation. This interpretative wiggle room allows for multiple readings of a historical scene, and more often than not Scarlett is present to provide the reader with a different interpretation. While the narrator spins an extended symbolic reading of the material details of the Atlanta bazaar, Scarlett interrupts with three explicit notes that drag the scene down from the metaphorical into the mundane: "Every candle and candlestick in Atlanta must be in this hall tonight, she thought"; "Scarlett knew that every potted and tubbed plant in town was there" (172); and, "Such handsome men, thought Scarlett" (174). These three interruptions of the narrative reverie are wholly in keeping with what we already know about how Scarlett reads. The first two comments are concerned with the material reality of the candles and flowers (quite literally, where they came from), while the last comment points to Scarlett's well-established interest in the opposite sex. Pragmatism pervades these remarks, engendering a resistance to symbolism that gains strength as the scene progresses. Against a backdrop of self-sacrifice, as the other women feel goosebumps at hearing "Bonnie Blue Flag," Scarlett, in stark contrast, stands apart, "Tired and bored and nauseated" (177). The difference between Scarlett and her Confederate sisters is the difference between nausea and goosebumps: while the latter group experiences a physical response that, itself a metaphor, heightens the affective charge of the moment, Scarlett experiences her intellectual and emotional resistance to the same symbolism as physical sickness. And to make matters worse, Scarlett knows that she is not reading this scene in the expected way. She sees in the other women "an emotion she did not feel," an emotion that she cannot even fake because "she knew the Cause meant nothing at all to her and that she was bored with hearing other people talk about it with that fanatic look in their eyes" (177). So even as she goes through the motions of Confederate feminine patriotism, wearing the proper mourning clothes and depositing her wedding band in the appropriate collection basket, Scarlett thinks "treacherous, blasphemous thoughts ... fearful that someone might find them written clearly upon her face" (177). Scarlett's mask, in this case, is not a recuperative strategy as it is for the other women; in fact, the only thing protecting Scarlett from discovery as a hollow patriot is the other women's acceptance of outward appearance as a guarantor of inward fidelity. Scarlett is saved by a generous reading that she herself cannot practice.

In a sense, Scarlett's intellectual and emotional inability to generate a symbolic reading of the Confederate tableau in the bazaar makes her a "critical reader," we might say, of the historical material around her. There is no Lost Cause mythology undergirding her interpretation that "The war didn't seem to be a holy affair, but a nuisance that killed men senselessly and cost money and made luxuries hard to get" (177). Scarlett's reading is motivated by a pragmatism that, while out of place in the drill hall, does make her seem oddly enlightened (if not also materialistic). As if anticipating our sympathy with Scarlett's point of view, the narrator continues to undermine her reading skills by poking fun at her lack of symbolic appreciation. Upon examining the portrait of Jefferson Davis, Scarlett can only remark, "It was his goatee that annoyed her the most. Men should either be clean shaven, mustached or wear full beards." The narrator quickly swoops in to assure the reader that she was "not seeing in his face the cold hard intelligence that was carrying the weight of a new nation," but this added commentary neither chastises Scarlett, nor totally forgives her (178). The larger point of this moment is that Scarlett cannot read the same historical significance of the details around her that is so legible to other characters and (the narrator hopes) to the readers of the novel. Instead, she continues to process these details through her unrelentingly selfish vision, which, while it violates the prevailing mode of memory in the text, oddly equips her for survival.

Back at home, still relatively insulated from war's forces of destruction, the women of Atlanta are able to festoon the drill hall with material details that are then communally invested with symbolic significance. Scarlett's refusal to participate in this communal sensibility certainly brands her as an outsider, but this label comes with relatively low stakes. As the war creeps closer and closer to home, however, and as the details of sacrifice and suffering become more present and more gruesome, Scarlett's indifference to them carries much more weight than does her mere dislike of Jefferson Davis's facial hair. By the time the novel reaches one of its most famous scenes, the description of the thousands of Confederate wounded gathered at the Atlanta train depot, Scarlett's inability to square her interpretive practices with the text's historical hermeneutics reveals a much darker side to her boredom.

The text once again positions Scarlett as the reader's eyes (and ears and nose, in this case) as she approaches the train depot in search of Dr. Meade. She is on a mission: Melanie is in labor, and Scarlett needs the help of someone who knows something about delivering a baby. Despite the urgency of Scarlett's situation, she is "halted appalled" before entering the chaos of the train depot, described in the text's most poetic mode:

   Lying in the pitiless sun, shoulder to shoulder, head to feet, were
   hundreds of wounded men, lining the tracks, the sidewalks,
   stretched out in endless rows under the car shed. Some lay stiff
   and still but many writhed under the hot sun, moaning. Everywhere,
   swarms of flies hovered over the men, crawling and buzzing in their
   faces, everywhere was blood, dirty bandages, groans, screamed
   curses of pain as stretcher bearers lifted men. The smell of sweat,
   of blood, of unwashed bodies, of excrement rose up in waves of
   blistering heat until the fetid stench almost nauseated her. The
   ambulance men hurrying here and there among the prostrate forms
   frequently stepped on wounded men, so thickly packed were the rows,
   and those trodden upon stared stolidly up, waiting their turn.
   (347)

In no other moment in Gone with the Wind do the minute details of sight, smell, and sound arrest both the reader's and Scarlett's senses with equal urgency. The excruciating pace of this paragraph, dragged out by the listed excesses of its imagery, demands a type of meditative attention that Scarlett is loath to practice. But here, for once, she reacts in a way that seems wholly commensurate with the scene at her feet: "but never anything like this," she thinks to herself, "Never anything like these" (347). While Scarlett's initial reaction to the wounded and dying seems in line with the text's implicit argument about the scale and significance of Southern sacrifice and suffering, her self-interested indifference returns as the scene proceeds. After her moment of observant meditation, she moves on, picking her way across the bodies in search of Dr. Meade:

   As she walked, feverish hands plucked at her skirt and voices
   croaked: "Lady--water! Please, lady, water! For Christ's sake,
   water!"

   Perspiration came down her face in streams as she pulled her skirts
   from clutching hands. If she stepped on one of these men, she'd
   scream and faint. (348)

At this moment of contact with the physical details of her historical backdrop, their suffering quickly gives way to her suffering--she is the one who would "scream and faint" should she tread on one of the wounded men. Additionally, as soon as she finds Dr. Meade and learns that he cannot leave the depot to assist with Melanie's labor, the mass of details that surround Scarlett quickly fades from her consciousness. This indifference to her historical background is rendered in a small moment of inadvertent cruelty: "For a moment she stared at him bewildered, dropping her skirts in dismay. They fell over the dirty face of a wounded man who feebly tried to turn his head to escape from their smothering folds" (348). Scarlett literally smothers the historical detail of the dying Confederate soldier with her oppressive physical presence as her indifference takes on a truly horrific dimension. There is no room for metaphorical recuperation of this diseased and dying body under Scarlett's skirts--and Scarlett does not seem to care.

The train depot scene ends with Scarlett once again unable to correctly read the historical tableau in front of her. In this instance, Dr. Meade provides the reader with the "correct" response: "Oh, God, for some morphia! Just a little morphia for the worst ones! Just a little chloroform. God damn the Yankees! God damn the Yankees!" (349). Dr. Meade's exclamations beautifully elide the immediate (and yet materially scarce) means of alleviating physical pain (morphia and chloroform) with the metonymic causes of that pain (the damn Yankees), further illustrating how permeable the boundary between material and metaphor must be in order to generate historical pathos. And it is worth noting here that Dr. Meade's response, rather than Scarlett's, provides the basis of this scene's interpretation in the most famous "reading" of the novel: the film. The train depot scene looms large in Gone with the Wind lore and in the film itself, precisely because it does not fail to capture and exploit the moment's emotional and historical resonances. The shot starts with Scarlett's appalled expression, but as the camera pans up and out, revealing the extent of the horrific scene, her pink skirt is soon lost amid the reds of the Georgia dirt and the gray-yellows of the homespun uniforms of the wounded. The effect is only amplified by both the length of the shot--it lasts for a full minute--and the somber medley of Southern folk songs that accompanies the visuals. Finally, as the camera reaches its apex, so, too, does the pathos of the shot, as the fluttering Confederate flag enters the frame to sanctify the carnage below. Scope, significance, sacrifice: this, the film suggests, is the proper way to frame and read the history of this moment. (14)

Scarlett, however, provides an alternate reading. Even as the details from this scene address her directly, she does not engage them: "The man at her feet looked up at Scarlett compassionately. She turned away, for the doctor had forgotten her" (349). Even in a forgiving reading, Scarlett's turn away from this historical detail is incommensurable with the reason offered in that sentence's second clause: "for the doctor had forgotten her" plunges the reader into the cold ice bath of Scarlett's resisting indifference. The chill of the train depot scene remains throughout Scarlett's flight from the burning of Atlanta and reaches its climax a scant hundred pages later. Amid the burned-out garden of the once majestic Twelve Oaks, Scarlett makes her formal renouncement of history:

   For a timeless time, she lay still, her face in the dirt, the sun
   beating hotly upon her, remembering things and people who were
   dead, remembering a way of living that was gone forever--and
   looking upon the harsh vista of the dark future.

       When she arose at last and saw again the black ruins of Twelve
   Oaks, her head was raised high and something that was youth and
   beauty and potential tenderness had gone out of her face forever.
   What was past was past. Those who were dead were dead. The lazy
   luxury of the old days was gone, never to return. And, as Scarlett
   settled the heavy basket across her arm, she had settled her own
   mind and her own life.

       There was no going back and she was going forward. (407)

This moment presents Scarlett at the final crossroads, where memory and forgetting forever diverge from each other. At first, Scarlett seems primed to fall back into memory, the comfort of the "timeless time" of irrevocable and unending memory. But in the end, presented with the choice between memory and futurity, Scarlett chooses to bury the former in a tautology--"What was past was past"--and to set her sights and actions resolutely on the future. Finally, Scarlett's boredom with the past, which has fueled her inability to read any sort of significance into the material details of remembrance that constantly surround her, crystallizes into a concerted program of forgetting. She quite brazenly turns away from the South, from the Confederacy--and from Gone with the Wind's other models of historical interpretation--in the name of her own future. As God is her witness, she'll never remember again.

Romancing the Past

More than telling a historical story, Gone with the Wind's real historical project is to provide the reader with models for how to react to the details of history. Scarlett and her fellow Confederates present two competing models of historical interpretation: "She wasn't like these people who had gambled everything on a Cause, because it was worth any sacrifice. They drew their courage from the past. She was drawing hers from the future" (571). When faced with history, Scarlett turns away, bored with remembering, committed to a future of forgetting. To remember in Gone with the Wind, to "draw courage" from the past, requires a mode of figurative reading that Scarlett simply does not practice. While the novel prefers to freeze history in "timeless time," Scarlett blusters forward, jolting the timeless back into time with her relentless march into the future. And yet, there is one historical detail, one relic from the past, that almost thwarts Scarlett and her project of forgetting: Ashley Wilkes. One final tableau, the ill-fated meeting between Ashley and Scarlett, presents a crucial lapse in Scarlett's commitment to the future and shows how Ashley gets Scarlett--for a brief moment--to remember.

As a type of relic, "a gentleman caught in a world he doesn't belong in," Ashley appears to present a problem for the novel's usual algorithm of physical description (951). He is not "masked" like the women of the South with whom Scarlett is in constant comparison, but instead seems to be defined by a fundamental instability. During the war years, the reader sees him (through Scarlett's eyes) become physically denatured by the effects of war. He returns to Atlanta for Christmas in 1863 as "a different man from the easy-going, drowsy-eyed boy she had loved to desperation before the war ... her same handsome Ashley, yet so very different" (259). Not even dressing him up in a new wool jacket and sash can restore him at that moment: Scarlett watches his "saber glinting ... his sash dancing jauntily," and yet his face remains "the unhappiest face she was ever to see" (270). But if the war has beaten the "aloofness" from Ashley's features, he remains oddly unchanged in other physical respects. After Ashley returns from the war, Scarlett notices that, despite all of his labor on Tara, his hands "were still slender and sensitive looking and remarkably well tended" (674). Even earlier, in the orchard, Scarlett sees "the look of race and dignity persisted in his slim erect body, even through its grotesque rags" (501).

Scarlett's vision is usually quite unforgiving in its bored, interpretive pragmatism, and yet for Ashley, she is able to read past the literal, material details of his outward appearance in order to transmute him into something figuratively different. The result is an indeterminacy in Ashley's physical presentation, something we see again in the beginning of their final encounter at the mill:

   He looked like the old Ashley she knew at Twelve Oaks when he
   smiled like this. And he smiled so seldom these days. The air was
   so soft, the sun so gentle, Ashley's face so gay, his talk so
   unconstrained that her heart leaped with happiness.... Suddenly she
   felt sixteen again and happy, a little breathless and excited.
   (853)

In the blurry, hazy light of the mill, Scarlett's metaphorical vision momentarily transforms Ashley into his old self and brings her physical rejuvenation as well. Ashley later expresses his own metaphorical vision of Scarlett: "when you are sixty, you'll look the same to me" (854). Mutually restoring each other through metaphor calls to mind Ashley's earlier attempt to rescue Scarlett's hands by pinning her blisters with metaphorical medals: in both instances, the negotiation between physical detail, metaphorical reading, and physical effect hews to the novel's prevailing logic of gentle, hazy reading. Ashley soon violates the rules of this logic, however, by blurring the line between the metaphorical and the physical in another reminiscence. Not only does Ashley remember the details of Scarlett's dress from the barbecue, but he has also made that memory physical: "I know that dress by heart because when I was in prison and things got too bad, I'd take out my memories and thumb them over like pictures, recalling every little detail" (854). The visual clarity of Ashley's memories is enhanced by the physical clarity of his act of remembering them. In "thumb[ing] them over," he invests his memories with a physicality created in metaphor, but obtaining the weight and presence of reality.

Ashley's picture-memories appear earlier, in the letter that Scarlett wearily tosses away, but his memories in the mill are not so easily dismissed because of how they elide the difference between present and past. Scarlet finds her usually trenchant sense of direction stymied by Ashley's entreaties: "Where did she want to get? That was a silly question. Money and security, of course. And yet--Her mind fumbled" (855). This moment of fumbling upsets Scarlett's usual polestars, as the future, the material, and the practical grow blurry and hazy under the influence of Ashley's spell: "The sound of his voice, the touch of his hand were softly unlocking doors that she had locked forever" (856). Scarlett's defenses are weakened, and in this state, Ashley is able to replace the present moment in the mill with one from the past. It starts with Ashley's incantatory "Do you remember," and

   under the spell of his voice the bare walls of the little office
   faded and the years rolled aside and they were riding country
   bridle paths together in a long-gone spring. As he spoke his light
   grip tightened on her hand and in his voice was the sad magic of
   old half-forgotten songs. She could hear the gay jingle of bridle
   bits as they rode under the dogwood trees to the Tarletons' picnic,
   hear her own careless laughter, see the sun glinting on his
   silver-gilt hair and note the proud easy grace with which he sat
   his horse. There was music in his voice, the music of fiddles and
   banjos to which they had danced in the white house that was no
   more. There was the far-off yelping of possum dogs in the dark
   swamp under cool autumn moons and the smell of eggnog bowls,
   wreathed with holly at Christmas time and smiles on black and white
   faces. And old friends came trooping back, laughing as though they
   had not been dead these many years: Stuart and Brent with their
   long legs and their red hair and their practical jokes, Tom and
   Boyd as wild as young horses, Joe Fontaine with his hot black eyes,
   and Cade and Raiford Calvert who moved with such languid grace.
   There was John Wilkes, too; and Gerald, red with brandy; and a
   whisper and a fragrance that was Ellen. Over it all rested a sense
   of security, a knowledge that tomorrow could only bring the same
   happiness today had brought. (857)

In this powerful moment, Ashley demonstrates how wholly and materially his memory can replace the present with the past. It is under the literal grip of Ashley's hand that Scarlett falls under the figurative grip of his memory, in which material reminders from the specific occasion of riding horseback to the Tarleton's in a "long-gone spring" flood Scarlett's senses, with the glinting hair and jingling bits standing, like Scarlett's barbecue dress, as physical impressions of this particular moment to be thumbed over. From the specificity of this memory, space and time then grow more expansive, catalyzed by the "magic" and "music" of Ashley's voice. On these strains the memory veers from the specific, sense-based recollections of the bridle path, pursuing distant spaces (a swamp, the "white house that was no more"), distant times (spring, autumn, and Christmas at once), and, in its most magical moment, distant people. The dead are resurrected into their most exemplary moments of living, then frozen in a time and space that neutralizes the threat of their ever dying again. (15) In fact, all change is neutralized in Ashley and Scarlett's shared memory, as "tomorrow" is folded into "today" in the memory's final line.

What's past does not have to stay past, "the old Ashley" seems to say, via another type of historical interpretation, one that refuses to deny the materiality of the past in favor of the present. More than simply looking beyond the broken bits of past, Ashley's memory can actually undo the breakage of historical change and insure against its supposed inevitability. He doesn't have to read history; he can recreate it. This, for Ashley, is the power of memory, but the charm does not stick for Scarlett. In a cruel moment, Scarlett emerges from Ashley's memory only to face the cold, hard fact of the present: "when she looked at Ashley he was no longer young and shining" (857). Ironically, the very memory that was to restore "the old Ashley" to her has opened her eyes to the profundity of the change that this memory elides. Ashley's spell might work if it could go on forever, and indeed, in Scarlett's diagnosis, this is exactly how he has taken to using memory: "He can't look forward any more. He can't see the present, he fears the future, and so he looks back" (857-58). Of course, simply looking back is not Ashley's problem: it is his insistence on materially transporting the past, "a load of aching memories," into the present as the only means of coping with the reality of historical change (856). As much as Ashley offers Scarlett a reason to look back, the failures of his method of memory also remind her why she is so set on looking forward. The costs of this alternative mode of engagement with the historical ultimately outweigh the benefits, and Scarlett, once again, turns toward the future.

Future Frustrations

The back of the Scribner 75th Anniversary edition of Gone with the Wind proclaims that " Gone with the Wind is a thrilling, haunting, and vivid book that readers will remember for the rest of their lives." No one will contest that the novel is memorable, and yet it strikes me as ironic that so memorable a heroine as Scarlett O'Hara in so memorable a text as Gone with the Wind can be so dead set against remembering. Any reader hoping to linger in antebellum or Confederate nostalgia--or even in straightforward historical fact--must first reckon with Scarlett. Her firm belief in the unquestionable fact that "tomorrow is another day" structures the reader's every encounter with the historical throughout the novel, making Gone with the Wind a complexly self-defeating history book (959). But perhaps this should come as no surprise. As the epigraph to this essay shows, Scarlett does not read novels--least of all the one that contains her--and she undermines the project of historical fiction to the very last page of the novel, where she finally turns her back for the last time on the reader and the text to face an impossible fictional future.

Scarlett may not be a reader, but she has certainly been read. Indeed, Scarlett's rejection of today and yesterday and her dedication to the always-unfolding "charm" of tomorrow (943) is exactly what has made her one of the most persistently popular, that is, readable, heroines in American fiction. It is as if her rejection of "timeless time" has in turn granted Scarlett a timelessness of her own, reflected not only in reader response and identification, but also in critical estimations of her character. Scarlett has been read as belle-gone-bad and model Confederate; as anti-Agrarian, post-feminist, and multi-ethnic; even as an autobiographical proxy for Margaret Mitchell. (16) Because Scarlett is so fiercely ahistorical, readers can easily blast her out of the novel's particular history. Indeed, it is this blank space at the center of Gone with the Wind that makes the text and its heroine so endlessly readable in both a popular and critical sense.

Lest Scarlett earn the last laugh, however, we should sit with the notion of "readability" for a while longer. Mary Conde begins her account of African American fictional responses to the novel with a quotation from an exasperated Margaret Mitchell, who found that no matter how carefully she composed her novel or subsequent responses to it, "people believe what they like to believe" (208). This elasticity of meaning is, from the frustrated author's point of view, the darker side of "readability." Yet, I have argued that Gone with the Wind formally encourages this type of reading of historical detail by modeling it over and over again in the figure of Scarlett O'Hara. We are left, then, with a novel that is so readable, it seems, as to be unreadable, or at the very least not worth the time it takes to read it.

My final argument, then, is that the unreadability of Gone with the Wind is exactly why we should read Mitchell's novel alongside other projects of Southern history and memory from the 1930s. Rather than subject Mitchell's novel to characterological readings or, worse, tests of historical "accuracy," we must recognize that this paradigmatic historical novel presents, in its characters, plot, and form, a legitimate historical problem--not, as many might suspect, how the losing side of history might narrate its defeat and survival, but rather how the losing side of history might completely forget its defeat. Quentin Compson has long stood for the painful, cyclical, indeterminate remembering that we associate with Southern Renaissance fiction and historiography. In Quentin's South, there is no escape from the recursive violence of the passage of time; there is only "Again. Sadder than was. Again. Saddest of all. Again" (Faulkner, Sound95). No effort to read or write history can break this cycle of "again," a futility that Jason Compson explains to Quentin in Absalom, Absalom! using the language of a chemical reaction:

   you bring them together in the proportions called for, but nothing
   happens; you re-read, tedious and intent, poring, making sure that
   you have forgotten nothing, made no miscalculation; you bring them
   together again and again nothing happens: just the words, the
   symbols, the shapes themselves, shadowy inscrutable and serene,
   against that turgid background of a horrible and bloody mischancing
   of human affairs. (80)

Quentin's undoing is arguably his failure to find a catalyst for this reaction. He mixes and remixes the various elements of his history, and yet the reaction fails. Scarlett, on the other hand, has found the secret ingredient, the catalyst that will finally trigger a reaction and make something happen: she forgets. As soon as Scarlett injects her practiced amnesia into this reaction, the words, symbols, shapes, and shadows that haunt Quentin and the rest of Faulkner's South are used up and annihilated, leaving no residue behind.

In the end, Scarlett has the privilege of choosing to forget, a privilege that makes her, in Patricia Yaeger's magnificent phrase, "so whitely forgetful" (100). While her determined decision to forget may resonate with readers weighed down with their own loads of memories, her choice also represents a dangerous fantasy of escape from historical consequence. Thus the cleanliness of Gone with the Wind's version of Jason Compson's historical experiment raises a final question: when forgetting replaces historiography, what future is possible?

I will end with one possible answer, with help from Flannery O'Connor. In her 1953 short story "A Late Encounter with the Enemy," O'Connor writes of General Tennessee Flintrock Sash, age 104, who spends his dotage in service to his community as a living monument, a "Glorious upright old man standing for the old traditions! Dignity! Honor! Courage!" (154). In fact, General Sash cannot actually remember where he fought in the Civil War--he cannot even remember if he fought in it. Nor is he actually a general: the uniform he wears to parades and processions is a Hollywood prop, a costume he wears as part of the festivities surrounding the 1939 Atlanta premiere of the film, Gone with the Wind. However, the artificiality of his historical aura does not bother General Sash; on the contrary, he cannot imagine history any other way. Just as Scarlett refuses to drag loads of memories out of the past, the General "didn't have any use for history because he never expected to meet it again" (155). History is something that "happened then," and the only way out of history and into a future of anything "not remembered" is to forget, something the General is happy to do (160). Thus history can safely reside in the pomp and ceremony of the General's ersatz dress grays, while historical facts are condemned to cheery oblivion.

In the end, however, the General does meet history again, and his late encounter with this enemy shows the cost of dressing up and parading around a concerted program of forgetting. While he lends his relic-like presence to the stage at his granddaughter's graduation, "a succession of places--Chickamauga, Shiloh, Marthasville--rushed at him as if the past were the only future now and he had to endure it." The names become bullets, and his body is "riddled in a hundred places" by the onslaught of words. Even a Scarlett-esque "turn" from history only finds the General improbably "running toward the words" again, with escape wholly impossible (166). In two terrifying pages, the General must endure the past storming back to reclaim the future, a future in which forgetting is no longer an option. Of course, for the audience at the graduation, the easy "readability" of the General's costume and saber puts his struggle to the death under erasure, and he remains genteel even as a corpse. The enemy proves to get the best of the General, showing how turning away from history only causes the future to collapse back into the past.

KATHRYNE BEVILACQUA

University of Michigan

Works Cited

Adams, Amanda. "Painfully Southern: Gone with the Wind, the Agrarians, and the Battle for the New South." Southern Literary Journal 40.1 (2007): 58-75.

Antolini, Katherine Lane. "Scarlett O'Hara as Confederate Woman." West Virginia University Philological Papers 51 (2004): 23-35.

Cardon, Lauren S. "'Good Breeding': Margaret Mitchell's Multi-Ethnic South." Southern Quarterly AAA (2007): 61-82.

Conde, Mary. "Some African-American Fictional Responses to Gone with the Wind." Yearbook of English Studies 26 (1996): 208-17.

Dekker, George. The American Historical Romance. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1987.

Entzminger, Betina. The Belle Gone Bad: White Southern Women Writers and the Dark Seductress. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 2002.

Farca, Paula Anca. "And, You, Miss, Are No Lady: Feminist and Postfeminist Scarlett O'Hara Rethinks the Southern Lady." Southern Studies 14.1 (2007): 73-90.

Faulkner, William. Absalom, Absalom! 1936. New York: Vintage International, 1990.

--. The Sound and the Fury. 1929. New York: Vintage International, 1990.

Gone with the Wind. Prod. David O. Selznick. MGM, 1939. Film.

Hanson, Elizabeth I. Margaret Mitchell. Boston: Twayne, 1990.

Harwell, Richard, ed. Gone with the Wind as Book and Film. Columbia: U of South Carolina P, 1983.

Jones, Anne Goodwyn. Tomorrow Is Another Day: The Woman Writer in the South, 1859-1936. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 1981.

Lukacs, Georg. The Historical Novel. 1937. Trans. Hannah and Stanley Mitchell. London: Merlin P, 1962.

Mathews, James W. "The Civil War of 1936: Gone with the Wind and Absalom, Absalom!" Georgia Review 21.4 (1967): 462-69.

"Miss Mitchell, 49, Dead of Injuries." New York Times 17 Aug. 1949. Web. 15 Feb. 2013.

Mitchell, Margaret. Gone with the Wind. 1936. New York: Scribner, 2011.

--. Margaret Mitchell's Gone with the Wind Letters: 1936-1949. Ed. Richard Harwell. New York: Macmillan, 1976.

O'Connor, Flannery. A Good Man is Hard to Find and Other Stories. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1955.

Radway, Janice A. Reading the Romance: Women, Patriarchy, and Popular Literature. 1984. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1991.

Seidel, Kathryn Lee. The Southern Belle in the American Novel. Gainesville: UP of Florida, 1985.

Taylor, Helen. Scarlett's Women: Gone with the Wind and Its Female Fans. New Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 1989.

Watkins, Floyd C. "Gone with the Wind as Vulgar Literature." Southern Literary Journal 2.2 (1970): 86-103.

Yaeger, Patricia. Dirt and Desire: Reconstructing Southern Women's Writing, 1930-1990. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2000.

(1) See Mathews for an early critical account of this coincidence.

(2) To speak of Gone with the Wind the novel without reference to Gone with the Wind the film seems an unnecessarily puritanical exercise: the two are so enmeshed in popular imagination that a reference to one is already a reference to the other. However, though they share a name, the two texts are different enough in content and tone that a simple one-to-one substitution of film-for-novel (or vice versa) cannot work. I have chosen to respect these differences while still drawing on the film for evidence in this paper by positioning the film as a "reading" of the novel. I hope that reading the film as a reading allows for a discussion of the interpretive choices that the film makes vis-a-vis the novel. Rather than evaluating these choices as "good," "bad," "faithful," or "fanciful," I will read them as more evidence of how the novel invites (or thwarts) particular interpretations of its historical details.

(3) See Watkins for this and more of Mitchell's historical mistakes.

(4) See Jones 314-15 for a version of the novel's origin tale.

(5) An oft-repeated line in her letters is that by the end of this research period, her "bibliography ran into thousands of volumes" (Mitchell, Letters 55), and her letters contain many specific citations that she sent to inquiring correspondents.

(6) For example, George Dekker critiques Lukacs vis-a-vis an American national frame in The American Historical Romance. Gone with the Wind receives short shrift in Dekker's treatment, however, as the author is more interested in "a far higher plane of moral and artistic intelligence than Thomas Dixon or Margaret Mitchell" (4).

(7) Amanda Adams, for example, reads Scarlett's indifference as anti-Agrarian progressivism; Kathryn Lee Seidel takes another approach, positioning Scarlett's narcissism between the psychoanalytic poles of "passion [Rhett] and repression [Ashley]," making her self-interest a function of her inability to conform to typical feminine roles (57).

(8) For another example of the narrator's explicitly pro-Confederacy views, take the narrator's half-defense/half-apology for the conditions under which Northern prisoners of war were kept at Andersonville, Georgia (278).

(9) This is not to say that other characters are not playfully scorned by the narrator. Of Gerald O'Hara, for example, the narrator quips, "Most small people who take themselves seriously are a little ridiculous" (49). However, Scarlett is clearly the focus of much of the text's free indirect discourse and free direct disdain.

(10) I would even go so far as to argue that the competition that plays out between Scarlett and the narrator contributes in no small measure to the text's readability. For proof, look no further than Goodreads.com, a social networking site built around reading and reviewing whose nearly 4,000 reviews of Gone with the Wind comprise a corpus of contemporary reader reception. A major theme throughout many of these reviews is the extent to which Scarlett's unlikeability, a function of the narrator's constant undercutting of her resilience and tenacity, provides readers grounds for either loving or hating the novel.

(11) Of course, part of the novel's immense popularity no doubt stems from how deftly it undermines this assumption by focusing almost exclusively on how much war becomes "ladies' business." See Taylor, for example, for responses from British women who first read Gone with the Wind under the siege-like conditions of the Blitz and thoroughly identified with its presentation of the feminine Southern home front (212-18).

(12) And, in fact, by manipulating the materiality of the letter, by refolding it and putting it back into its envelope, Scarlett is able to end its reverie.

(13) Scarlett's connection to and emotional reliance on the permanence of land, particularly the land of Tara, is one of the novel's repeated themes.

(14) Mitchell also endorsed the film's reading of the train depot scene. When Nell Battle Lewis documented a Raleigh, North Carolina, audience's reaction to the scene in her review of the film, she expressed surprise at the lack of applause for the fluttering Confederate flag (Harwell 170-74). To this Mitchell responded, "Have you ever felt like applauding in a Confederate cemetery on Memorial Day? No, you haven't; you feel something too deep for applause" (Letters 297).

(15) Everyone but Ellen, that is. Her failure to rematerialize, as she remains "a whisper and a fragrance," speaks to the depth of feeling that Scarlett experiences over the loss of her mother.

(16) For these variations on the theme of Scarlett O'Hara, see Entzminger, Antolini, Adams, Farca, Cardon, and Hanson.