Gone with the Wind

I had a pleasant weekend. On Saturday I made pancakes, did yoga, cleaned up a little, and read Gone with the Wind.

This was on the cover of the copy that I read.

(Spoiler alert in case I wasn't the last person ever who didn't know anything about Gone with the Wind.)

I've never seen the movie, but I'd absorbed enough information from crossword puzzle clues and just living in America to know that it’s an epic romance about a pretty lady on a plantation during the Civil War. I knew there was a part about Atlanta burning, something about curtains, a house called Tara, and Clark Gable not giving a damn. I figured that there would be a lot of picturesque landscapes and racism and accounts of historic battles and people falling in love under difficult circumstances.

As it turned out, there were indeed long and captivatingly yonic descriptions of the countryside, and the tumult and history of the war and the deterioration of the social order all made for good reading. I was distracted but not surprised by the racism, both depicted and inherent, and kept being reminded of a part of this David Sedaris short story called Six to Eight Black Men that goes "history has proved that something usually comes between slavery and friendship, a period of time marked not by cookies and quiet hours beside the fire but by bloodshed and mutual hostility." 

The thing that caught me off guard was the ending. I just wasn't expecting “the greatest love story of our time” to finish with a fatal miscarriage and the post-mortem of a broken marriage. Tomorrow may be another day, but I still closed the book feeling slightly gut-punched. 

In any case, I found myself reading so much of the novel from the perspective of a Public Health Volunteer - I liked how often dysentery was mentioned, interested that diarrhea was given a place of prominence among the many undignified ravages of war and poverty. I liked that the notion that women invariably possess a “maternal instinct” was thoroughly dragged through the mud. I liked that reproductive health issues kept coming up – the unmet need for reliable contraception, the burden of unwanted pregnancies, the many forms of prostitution, the grim dangers of childbirth and back-alley abortions. (I feel compelled to point out that these are still very real problems for women and girls around the world.) I couldn't help but think that modern contraception and obstetric care could have saved Scarlett from resenting motherhood and Melanie from suffering horribly and dying. I feel like Scarlett would have been all about birth control. 

But I suppose that if Scarlett had been on the pill and Rhett had just talked about his feelings then maybe they would have figured things out and built a happy life together, but it wouldn't have made for such a dramatic saga. 

Also, I now really want to read/watch 12 Years as a Slave. I've been hearing wonderful things about how harrowingly good it is, and I feel like it would be a good counter-balance to Gone with the Wind's rosy portrayal of slavery and the whole master-slave relationship.