I finished Gone With the Wind and The Wind Done Gone

So yeah, I finished the second-longest book I've ever read in my life. After a time, the length became so overwhelming that it really seemed to swallow the narrative, and I just kept pushing myself to finish the book. This was relatively easy to accomplish because the book, or rather the character of Scarlett O'Hara, is so engaging. But it was still a long, onerous bastard, and I tip my hat to a book so challenging and simultaneously so enthralling. I have two perspectives on the book which I shall relate below, in the order in which I had them:

#1 - Scarlett O'Hara might be the quintessential American female epic heroine. I can't think of any other woman who so forcefully shapes her own destiny and the world around her. I'm not saying that all the things she does are terribly moral or even helpful, but Scarlett does do things with an epic flair that is unmatched in American letters, perhaps even world letters. I spent a long day and night trying to come up with any other epic female characters in my meager knowledge of world literature, and I had a hard time. A friend suggested that several of Shakespeare's females were vastly superior to Scarlett O'Hara, and I would agree that the emotional complexity of two or three of Shakespeare's women - Lady MacBeth, Kate from the Taming of the Shrew, and possibly Hamlet's mother - rival that of Scarlett O'Hara, but I definitely would not go so far as to say that they were vastly superior. Scarlett makes her world, and more than anything I think that is the single most important factor for an epic hero or heroine. Furthermore, she is not very likable, which makes her abilities at creation all the more intriguing. By sheer force of will and and a powerful ability to ignore potential obstacles, Scarlett O'Hara figures out the means to survive events that would flatten most people, and then she takes it a step further and figures out a way to turn every situation to her advantage. I feel almost traitorous with what I'm about to write. . . . but these are the very characteristics that make Odysseus so powerful and transcendent. I think that the female persona that Virginia Woolf created throughout her works demolishes Scarlett O'Hara in terms of being epic status and the ability to make the world, but that creation came about over several different books and under the guise of several different characters, all of whom were, of course, Virginia Woolf herself, but I just thought I'd throw that idea out there.

#2 - Margaret Mitchell has crafted a completely adorable version of the South, both before and after the Civil War, which is so wonderful and pleasant that I wouldn't particularly mind having lived in that time and place. Oh wait, I forgot. It's completely fake, absurdly romantic to the point of outrageous fabrication, and quite possibly one of the single largest hoaxes perpetrated in American literature. In Mitchell's Georgia, the slaves love their situations, their is virtually no violence committed against slaves by white people, and the Civil War is presented as an affront to the very dignity of slavery. What the fuck?!? Oh and of the few male characters I remotely connected with, most turned out to be leaders of the local KKK, which was presented as an almost benign organization. Again, what the fuck!?! If people make the mistake of reading Gone With the Wind as any sort of historically accurate portrayal of the American South in the 1860's and 1870's, then it's no wonder Americans are looked on as ignorant brutes by the world. Mitchell lived in the first half of the twentieth century and undoubtedly had access to the works of folks like Mark Twain, who was himself under no illusions about the brutal legacy of American slavery on every soul in the nation. Yet, she seems to have created a South that was nothing by happiness and joy. And the Civil War came along and destroyed that happiness and joy, and damn those Yankees for messing things up. Now, obviously this seems to be the dominant perspective of Scarlett O'Hara, but I have a difficult time believing that Mitchell could so easily present such a malformed notion of one of the central episodes in U.S. history. It's really quite baffling to me. Either she did it intentionally as part of the romanticism of the world created by Scarlett O'Hara and felt readers would be under no illusion that Scarlett's paradigm was itself an illusion of such vast and comic scope that readers would never entertain the notion of it being anything other than farce. Or - there's something more substantial to Mitchell's portrayal of South, something sinister like revisionist history. And I say this because I've been to parts of the South that so directly contradict Mitchell's paradigm, even 150 years later, that I am so pissed at her for even making the implicit argument that underlies so much of the book.

#2.5 - Which leads me to the book I read immediately after Gone With the Wind: The Wind Done Gone by Alice Randall. The central premise of Randall's book is that Mitchell is a big fat liar when it comes to writing about plantation life, so she takes it upon herself to describe a more realistic version of the events in Gone With the Wind from the perspective of a mulatto slave child fathered by Scarlett's Irish father and Mammy the predominant black female slave in Gone With the Wind. The character is Scarlett's half sister, though as a slave her status in the family is nothing more than property. Randall wondered why Mitchell left out this particularly bleak part of history that was so essential to plantation life: white men raped their female slaves repeatedly in order to create more property thus making them richer. The Wind Done Gone is an incredibly rich look at Gone With the Wind and I suggest that it is required reading for anyone bold enough to take on the dual challenge of Mitchell's book: the first being its daunting length and the second being its fantasy-filled look at historical antebellum Atlanta. Randall, furthermore, is a prose genius. The language of The Wind Done Gone is haunting and beautiful and art of the highest caliber, almost more verse than prose. Cynara, Scarlett's half-sister, tells her reader early her ability to read and write were earned through struggle and she does not take them for granted. It's almost as if Randall is implying that it's easy to romanticize history in the way that Mitchell has done but the truth is hard and vicious and not for the meek, and she intends to communicate that truth in a way that will leave the reader no doubt as to the historical veracity of her work over Mitchell's. There was much controversy surrounding the publication of Randall's book because the Mitchell trust tried to get it from being published, though ultimately they failed, and I am grateful to Randall for writing an antidote to the sweet-tasting poison that Mitchell presents so sumptuously on a silver tray. The Wind Done Gone shows that true literature cannot help but guide us through the trauma and beauty of history with elegance, force, and art.