the performative aspects of a culture that demands such ritualistic self-presentation in order to function.

Scarlett's excellence at pretending to be feminine is the central paradox of the first section of Gone with the Wind. On the one hand, she is an ideal Southern young lady because she behaves exactly as the ideal is required to behave. On the other hand, it is her ability to scheme and "calculate"— both literally and metaphorically—that allows her to act this ideal. In other words, the very aspects of Scarlett's character that enable her to be "ideal" are precisely those attributes that are to be avoided. To "catch" her man she must be duplicitous; to "snare" a good marriage she must be "natural" and "unaffected." This series of irreconcilable paradoxes creates the sixteen-year-old heroine of the opening scenes, a girl who has learned to use the attributes of womanhood to further her "predatory" designs on men. Tellingly, mathematics is the only subject in which Scarlett has ever excelled—"calculating."

Scarlett's reaction to this endlessly self-generating cultural demand for calculated performance is not a positive one. It frustrates her, and over the course of the novel she becomes less and less willing to enact the required facades. Fundamentally, such facades are shown to be not only foolish, but also actively harmful. As her Mammy scolds her into remembering, in order to catch her man Scarlett must become completely "unnatural"—denying her actual hunger in the interests of seeming like a delicate young lady. In the complex exchange culture of Southern gender, Scarlett must deny her physical reality in order to create a consciously false, quasi-Platonic Ideal of reality. The effort is exhausting and, more importantly, tends to the inevitable collapse of the Ideal. "Reality" cannot be denied. As Scarlett says, "I'm tired of everlastingly being unnatural and never doing anything I want to do." In an ironic foreshadowing of later events, this scene looks forward to the devastated Tara in which food is perilously scarce. Scarlett, like her culture, will experience a shift from feigned appetite to actual famine—from performance to reality—in one horribly ironic sequence. Reconstruction will depend on subduing all efforts to the goal of meeting the needs of bodies that had always been denied, ignored, and disguised. When Scarlett vows she'll "never go hungry again," the Southern lady disappears forever.

Scarlett's tendency to break the fourth wall of femininity shifts in meaning as the novel progresses. As the war forces a slow but total collapse of the old culture, so Scarlett's breaches of ritual become more and more essential to the survival of those around her. Melanie, the novel's true "ideal" lady, is able to easily shift her private self-sacrifice to a public self-sacrifice for the sacred Confederacy. While there is no real danger—and while the possibility of defeat is still safely in the North— the cultural goals that she embodies remain intact. Scarlett, who becomes a nurse simply because, "she didn't know how to get out of it," is the subject of outrage, preoccupied with her own aims and indifferent to the demands of Atlanta culture. The disintegration of the Confederacy and the arrival of war in Atlanta overturn the meaning of both the conventions she has ignored and the characteristics she refuses to hide. As Dr. Meade announces, "This is war time. We can't think of the proprieties now."

The currency has changed, and Melanie's "value" is debased entirely. Like the Confederate bonds in which the families have invested, old and privileged behaviors have no exchange value or functional meaning anymore. Significantly, Melame is struggling in labor while Atlanta burns and Scarlett searches for help. Like her culture, she is unable to "reproduce" naturally—transmuting from a cherished ideal of weakness to a sickly liability during the course of the fire. The product of the cousin-marrying-cousin union of Ashley and Melanie, lady and gentleman par excellence, is unable to come into the world without the New South, Scarlett, who delivers the baby herself. From this point onwards, the traits that Ellen and Mammy have struggled to repress in Scarlett become the basis for her survival, and for the salvation of those who surround her. Melanie's world is too weak to survive into another generation without Scarlett, and reliance on Scarlett means accepting what Scarlett stands for, which in turn means accepting self-destruction. As Ashley says, it's the Gotterdammurung—the Twilight of the Gods—below the Mason-Dixon line.

The notion that Scarlett represents a critique of both Southern womanhood and manhood is suggested throughout Gone with the Wind. The gradual emergence of performative masculine gender behavior in Scarlett acts as a significant indicator of her character progression, from the little girl who was good at calculations, to the fully grown businesswoman who is better at calculating and dealing then the men who surround her. At the beginning of the novel, Scarlett is still engaged in the enactment of gender performance, and wishes she "was a man." While the Confederate cause was still glorious and while her culture remained ideal, Scarlett's yearning to psychically "cross-dress" is no more than appropriate cultural behavior—an extension of the ritualistic performance of femininity into which she is forced. By the end of the war she has begun to behave like a "real" man: now "her reactions were all masculine," and she "talked and acted like a man." Becoming almost a "garçon manqué," she wins a reputation for bravery among the ladies of Atlanta to the extent that Aunt Pitty and Melanie are willing to stay without a man if Scarlett is there. When Atlanta burns, Scarlett's role shifts between various masculine states, allowing her to become first a general in retreat, and then Tara's patriarch. The "real" patriarch is mad—both literally and metaphorically—and Scarlett becomes the family's provider and protector.

Scarlett's behavior throughout the Reconstruction period acts as a greater and greater critique of Southern gender assumptions than had her previous violations of convention. Having been the gallant savior of both Melanie and her surviving family, Scarlett now becomes a businesswoman. In the representation of this transformation lies a powerful reversal of entrenched masculine honor. First and foremost, Scarlett's "masculinity" shows itself to be based in acquisitiveness. She dedicates herself to amassing wealth at any human cost, orchestrating her marriages and trampling the affections of those around her to that end. Human relationships are reduced to financial transactions and calculations as Scarlett steals her sister's only beau, Frank Kennedy, for his money, offers her body to Rhett in exchange for money, and uses exploited convict labor to increase her profits. Laying bare the economic underpinnings of the old order, Scarlett justifies her actions with the comment: "You can't be a lady without money." Both the genteel femininity and protective masculinity of the antebellum South rested on assumptions of wealth and privilege. By laying these connections bare, Scarlett destroys their sum product. The New South that Scarlett represents is merely the Old South with its masque removed.

The idealized young gentlemen of the South—the Ashleys—have disappeared to battle, "gone with the wind" of "flamboyant patriotism" that made the war possible. By the novel's conclusion their glory has been debased and deflated, until they are, as Scarlett realizes, just "children." The benevolent white patriarchs are equally destroyed, reduced—like Gerald O'Hara—to madness and despair. Again, this is not a true transformation, but a breach of the facade—a revelation of reality. As the narrator says, the Old South was a "happy feminine conspiracy." Privilege rested with men, but power lay in the unspoken "conspiracy" of white Southern women. At Tara in the days before the war, "only one voice was obeyed on the plantation"—Ellen O'Hara's. The reality of gender and power remained hidden from Gerald, since "everyone from Ellen down to the stupidest field hand was in a tacit and kindly conspiracy to keep him believing his word was law." Gerald retains the performative aspects of masculine authority by tacitly accepting the condescension of his family and his slaves Scarlett's masculinity and her naked ambition, calculation, and power shatter the illusion of the old patriarchy forever. Too "masculine" to be "feminine," and too "feminine" to be "masculine," Scarlett not only pulls down the structure of gender expectations and behavior, but also destroys the culture of which it was a product. The Scarlett who emerges from the war is the avatar of de- and Re-construction.

Source: Tabitha Mclntosh-Byrd, in an essay for Novels for Students, Gale, 2000.
Mclntosh-Byrd is a doctoral candidate at the University of Pennsylvania.

Although Margaret Mitchell did not consider herself a writer for young adults, her single masterpiece, Gone with the Wind, and its blockbuster film version have been perennial favorites of American teenagers, to the point that both are often included in high school and college curriculums. The increased interest of recent years following the fiftieth anniversaries of both the novel (1986) and the film (1989), as well as the publication of an authorized sequel (1992) will surely extend the popularity of Gone with the Wind into the next century. This popular phenomenon proves most interesting as Mitchell's masterwork seems a nineteenth-century book in subject, theme, and style—a twentieth-century reincarnation of the Victorian "triple-decker" romance. Thus the book's remarkable popularity is a combination of tradition and change much like the narrative it relates. In critical terms, it is possible to read Gone with the Wind as a female development novel. At the novel's opening in 1861, Scarlett O'Hara is a sixteen-year-old coquette; when it concludes in 1873 she is a twenty-eight-year-old woman, in the twelve year span of the novel, she experiences Secession, Civil War, and Reconstruction, as well as romance, love, marriage, and motherhood. Scarlett lives through the adolescent trauma of American culture, which is matched by a traumatic personal history as much or more tumultuous. Energized by her own life, Mitchell created one of the most arresting tales of troubled adolescence in American literature and in so doing created a novel which will continue to captivate teenagers and fascinate their teachers well into the next century.

For younger readers, Scarlett O'Hara's development from teenaged girl to mature woman proves as fascinating now as it did when the book was first published in 1936 or when the movie first appeared in 1939. The particular, indeed peculiar energy of the story proceeds from Mitchell's own girlhood, adolescence, and young adult life. During these years she heard the family legends of the Civil War era into which she projected her own development toward womanhood. The novel combines Mitchell's family and personal romances with historical facts to create powerful and popular fiction.

The popular image of Mitchell was as a Southern matron who turned to writing as her contemporaries might cultivate bridge, golf, or gardening. Although descended from old Georgia families and raised in comfortable circumstances, the future author was no simple Southern belle. Her mother's feminist leanings clashed with her father's conservatism, and a young Mitchell became a somewhat willful, rebellious tomboy, given to flights of imaginative fancy and a series of serious, debilitating accidents and illnesses. After the death of her first beloved on the Western Front and of her mother in the influenza epidemic, Mitchell became "a flapper," both living the wild times of the Jazz Age and writing about them in nonfiction. Her first marriage was a disaster, climaxed by spousal rape and scandalous divorce, while her second marriage mirrored her dependent, and sometimes stressful relationships with her father and brother. The writer's social, psychological, and sexual ambiguities found expression in her greatest creation, Scarlett O'Hara, while other people in her life provided models for other characters in Gone with the Wind.

The critical history of Gone with the Wind is contradictory, as might be expected from the writer's conflicted biography. The reaction of reviewers and of general readers was quite positive in 1936, for no one would deny that the novel was a great "read." Even the initial response of the literary community seemed laudatory. Comparisons were made with the great novelists and novels of the nineteenth century, such as [William Makepeace] Thackeray and Vanity Fair, [Leo] Tolstoy and Anna Karenina, and [Gustave] Flaubert and Madame Bovary. In terms of memorable characters, sweeping action, colorful settings, and grand themes the novel was a success. At the same time, qualifying statements about style, sentiment, racism, and melodrama raised legitimate questions about the book's literary status.

Unfortunately, the novel's existence as a cultural artifact subsumed its identity as a literary text and the immense power and popularity of the film version only complicated the situation. Book and film were conflated into a phenomenon of American and later international popular culture. Thus criticism was arrested at the levels of basic appreciation, often in the opposite poles of love and/or hate, and evaluation, again often in bipolar terms of praise and/or scorn. On the popular level the novel was lauded and in the literary world it was defamed.

This critical neglect continued well into the 1960s when reconsiderations of American culture and society elicited new readings of classic texts. Mitchell and her novel were seen as important symbols of American cultural forces. A serious biography in 1965 sparked reconsideration simply by the assumption of Mitchell's importance as a writer. Other reevaluations followed which asserted the literary quality of the work, notably in feminist terms. The critical neglect of the novel thus was explained in terms of the largely male critical establishment, and Mitchell became the subject of articles and dissertations in the 1970s Finally, in the 1980s, the half-century anniversaries of both novel and film provided new perspectives for critical focus in a number of important critical works, including a definitive biography.

Source: Joseph R. Millichap, "Margaret Mitchell Overview," in Twentieth-Century Young Adult Writers, 1st ed., edited by Laura Standley Berger, St. James Press, 1994

Gone with the Wind is an encyclopedia of the plantation legend. Other novelists by the hundreds have helped to shape this legend, but each of them has presented only part of it. Miss Mitchell repeats it as a whole, with all its episodes and all its characters and all its stage settings—the big white-columned house sleeping under its trees among the cotton fields, the band of faithful retainers, including two that quaintly resemble Aunt Jemima and Old Black Joe; the white-haired massa bathing in mint juleps; the heroine with her seventeen-inch waist and the high-spirited twins who came courting her in the magnolia-colored moonlight, with the darkies singing under the hill—then the War between the States, sir, and the twins riding off on their fiery chargers, and the lovely ladies staying behind to nurse the wounded, and Sherman's march (now the damyankees are looting the mansion and one of them threatens to violate its high-bred mistress, but she clutches the rusty trigger of an old horse pistol and it goes off bang in his ugly face)—then the black days of Reconstruction, the callousness of the Carpetbaggers, the scalawaggishness of the Scalawags, the knightliness of the Ku Klux Klansmen, who frighten Negroes away from the polls, thus making Georgia safe for democracy and virtuous womanhood and Our Gene Talmadge—it is all here, every last bale of cotton and bushel of moonlight, every last full measure of Southern female devotion working its lilywhite fingers uncomplainingly to the lilywhite bone.

But even though the legend is false in part and silly in part and vicious in its general effect on Southern life today, still it retains its appeal to fundamental emotions. Miss Mitchell lends new strength to the legend by telling it as if it had never been told before, and also by mixing a good share of realism with the romance. She writes with a splendid recklessness, blundering into big scenes that a more experienced novelist would hesitate to handle for fear of being compared unfavorably with Dickens or Dostoevsky. Miss Mitchell is afraid of no comparison and no emotion—she makes us weep at a deathbed (and really weep), exult at a sudden rescue and grit our teeth at the crimes of our relatives the damyankees. I would never, never say that she has written a great novel, but in the midst of triteness and sentimentality her book has a simple-minded courage that suggests the great novelists of the past. No wonder it is going like the wind.

Source: Malcolm Cowley, "Going with the Wind," in The New Republic, Vol. LXXXVIII, No. 1137, September 16, 1936, pp. 161-62.