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As the dog days of summer pull us further into the world of reading, it’s time for some communal book bliss. 

It’s time for the Great Gone With the Wind Readalong! 

Discover (or reacquaint yourself with) Margaret Mitchell’s perennial classic, which turns 75 this year.  It’s a chunkster, to be sure, but it’s also a hotbed of romance, scandal, historical detail and roiling controversy…and it features one of literature’s most petulant and complex heroines. 

How It Works

To participate, just tell me you plan to read along in the comments below.  Then procure a copy of the classic and start reading.  We’ll meet here on the blog on the following schedule to discuss the book in parts.  I’ll summarize each part and include historical background and fun ways to approach the book as a conversation-starter…then we’ll discuss in the comments.  And I’ll be giving away GWTW-inspired prizes to make this summer read even juicier!

The Schedule*

• August 1: Discuss Part 1 (Chapters 1-7)
• August 15: Discuss Part 2 (Chapters 8-16)
• September 5: Discuss Part 3 (Chapters 17-30)
• September 26: Discuss Part 4 (Chapters 31-47)
• October 17: Discuss Part 5 (Chapters 48-63)

*Due to the chunkster nature of this novel, I’ve broken our group reading down into five parts.  You’ll have two weeks to read the first two parts, and three weeks to read each subsequent part.  But buyer beware…this book just might be hard not to read in one feverish, fell swoop! 

Are You In?

Please introduce yourself, tell us where you’re from and whether you’ve read the book before.  Happy reading!

I’m at loose ends these days.

Between the usual summer rush of entrepreneurship, my long to-read list, an unfinished novel taunting me from the corner of my desk, and a book to promote, life feels like a hodgepodge more often than not.

Not that I’m complaining…not at all.  This summer has brought all sorts of bookish pleasures, including but not limited to:

 

• A road trip with Eleanor Brown to Salida, Colorado, where we’ll participate in a literary shindig, mountain style
• Further reading encounters with Georgette Heyer, who has made this year all the merrier
• Plans for the Great Gone With the Wind Readalong (still pending)
• Sweet notes and reviews from readers
• The knowledge that the more time I spend on my writing, the closer I get to what I increasingly see as my calling (a capital C is probably necessary here, but it makes me nervous)

How about you? What literary delights are punctuating your protagonist’s summer?

Goosebumps…and Gone With the Wind

For a long time, I considered myself a Gone With the Wind fan, only slightly more interested than normal.

Yes, I re-read the book every year, but that’s as much of a writerly task as it is a readerly one. Yes, I have been to Oaklands Cemetery and the Margaret Mitchell House, but only because I was in Atlanta anyway. I believe still have enough fingers to count the number of times I have seen the movie (not that the number of my fingers is in question, but the number of times I have seen the movie is), and I own no Vivien Leigh collectible plates.

I don’t think I can make that slightly-more-interested-than normal claim anymore.

Not because I bought a collectible plate, but because I had the good luck recently to be at the Arkansas Literary Festival with Ellen F. Brown, author of Margaret Mitchell’s Gone With the Wind: A Bestseller’s Journey From Atlanta to Hollywood. After Ellen’s presentation at the Historic Arkansas Museum, two of the Museum’s director whisked me, Ellen, and Kyran Pittman up to a storage room where they opened three boxes that had arrived in preparation for their upcoming “Reel to Real: Gone With the Wind and the Civil War in Arkansas” exhibit.

The first contained the hat Vivien Leigh wore as Scarlett O’Hara in the Twelve Oaks barbecue scene (and later on when working the farm at Tara).

The second contained Bonnie Blue Butler’s beautiful blue velvet riding habit.

And the last contained Vivien Leigh’s Oscar for Gone With the Wind.

I have been to a lot of museums in my time, but I don’t think I have ever had the reaction to an exhibit the way I did to those items. I had goosebumps. I cried. I squealed (okay, maybe shrieked) with delight each time they opened a new box.

I don’t know if I realized until that moment, as Ellen, Kyran, and I, stood in collective wonder in that museum storeroom, how very much Gone With the Wind means to me. The book and the movie have been my companion for a good twenty years now, and each time I re-read or re-watch them, I see something new, I learn something else, I am inspired to write something wonderful.

And because the book has been with me for so very long, I can add to that list of the pleasures of re-reading it my own memories – of watching the movie when I had my wisdom teeth out in high school, of reading it curled in a chair in my college library’s “Classics” room, of the lines that ran through my head as I stood in Oaklands Cemetery, looking at the endless rows of Confederate dead.

Happy birthday, Gone With the Wind.  It’s been my pleasure to have you by my side for twenty of your seventy-five years. I hope to travel with you for many more.

 

Thanks for all of your comments and visits over the last few days!  Remember, all comments this week are entered to win a copy of Molly Haskell’s Frankly My Dear: Gone With the Wind Revisited.  Just comment on a blog post this week to win…and watch for a special bonus giveaway later this week!  And now, please welcome Melissa Maday, a self-proclaimed “writer, reader, scholar, Smithie” who teaches college English when she’s not reading, writing, or thinking about literature.

The Wind as Literature – Q&A With Melissa Maday

When did you first read GWTW/what were your initial impressions?

I had seen the movie — or parts of it — over and over on TV, but I hadn’t read the book. At Smith, during the first semester of my sophomore year, I took an American lit class with the then-senior member of the English Department. It was 1998, and he’d been at the college for close to 40 years. The students in my class wanted to know if he had known Sylvia Plath as a student or instructor at Smith  but no one wanted to ask him. Finally, they talked me into asking. I raised my hand and asked simply”Professor Murphy, did you know Sylvia Plath when she was here?”

In response, he sighed heavily, shook his head, and leaned on the podium: he said, “We were here at the same time, and I suppose our paths must have crossed,” then he sighed again and added. “I don’t know what the big deal is about Sylvia Plath. The best writer this college ever produced was Margaret Mitchell.”

I was so surprised by this — both that Mitchell had gone to Smith, and that an editor of the Norton Anthology thought she was a better writer than Plath — that i went to the library after class and checked out Gone With the Wind. I read it over the next few weeks, and I was struck by the careful characterization and sumptuous detail. And, carrying its 1037 pages around campus with me for a few weeks also served as a real conversation piece: I was amazed to find out that many women I met felt connected to the book. I heard lots of stories about people whose moms read it every summer, or who had read it for the first time at the age of 12, then read it again and again … it became clear to me that it was a book that meant something to women of different ages and from different backgrounds. There was an unexpected (for me) universality to Scarlett’s story.

You wrote about GWTW in your senior thesis at Smith College. What was your topic?

I wanted to look at the book as a piece of literature. So much had (and has) been written about the movie, but the book’s popularity tended to remove it from consideration as “serious” literature. My thesis sought to read it as literature and position it in the canon of American literature, and — more specifically — American literature by women.  Fortunately for me, the book about Margaret Mitche”s journalism career came out while i was writing my thesis, and that book really served to put GWTW into perspective for me I saw where MM got her trained eye for detail, her ability to describe and explicate characters, and her clear, precise writing style. 

It was also really rewarding for me to write my thesis about an author who was also an alumna of my college. I’m grateful that i had the chance to spend so much time reading and writing about a book that means so much to so many people. I ended up writing a lot about the differences between the movie and the book to highlight that much of the exaggeration and excess we associate with the film was not in the novel.

What do you find most compelling/upsetting/awesome about Margaret Mitchell as an author?

I love her authorial perspective — GWTW is a novel written by a journalist: someone practiced and expert at observation and description. It is not the weepy, melodramatic, sentimental artifact that the movie has come to be. I think it’s most interesting that Mitchell did not like to be compared to Scarlett (in fact, she was kind of horrified by such comparisons). It’s also important to understand that Mitchell had a keen understanding of historical scope — GWTW wasn’t meant to stand on its own, it was the first of a planned trilogy of novels about the American South. But, of course, her untimely death prevented her from going on.

And, I really enjoyed reading about her utter consternation at the making of the movie — my favorite quotation is when she wrote that they were making the Wilkes’ plantation look like Grand Central Station. She was really worried about what the residents of Jonesboro, Georgia would think when they saw how their town was portrayed.

Can you speak to GWTW as a classic/feminist work/work of “serious” or popular fiction?

Yes! GWTW has been repeatedly misnamed as sentimental fiction, when, in fact, it is an historical novel about the Civil War — but from a woman’s perspective — Mitchell was a 20th-century southern woman giving voice to the women before her. She told their stories beautifully in the novel, and she created an archetypal flawed heroine in Scarlett. It always bothers me when critics or scholars contend that “serious” and “popular’ fiction have to be placed in different categories — I think it takes a truly gifted writer to blur those lines, and Mitchell succeeded at it in this novel. To understand this, it’s important to separate the novel from the film, and I think most who only know the latter are surprised by the intensity and depth of Mitchell’s prose.

I use the novel often in my own classroom — I haven’t taught it in full (yet), but it’s a great example of strong, descriptive narrative, and it holds up well under the scrutiny of close reading.

Um, could any week have been MORE eventful than last week?  Not only did The Heroine’s Bookshelf win a Colorado Book Award, but I was invited to guest host #litchat this Friday and Felicity won a lovely copy of GWTW.

This week’s prize is one you might not have on your bookshelf…a copy of Molly Haskell’s Frankly My Dear: Gone With the Wind Revisited.  Just comment on a blog post this week to win…and watch for a special bonus giveaway later this week!  And now, please welcome Melanie Fishbane with a few realizations about GWTW’s prickly heroine.

Scarlett: The Mean Girl I Learned to Admire

I was really flattered when Erin asked me to guest blog in commemoration of the 75^th anniversary of Margaret Mitchell’s Gone With The Wind. Mostly because it is not a book that I feel that I have any expertise in. I haven’t clocked the same amount of hours as I have with some of the other classic novels I study. My focus has tended to be on Anne Shirley, Laura Ingalls or Jo March. Scarlett O’Hara always seemed outside of my world view.

However, I loved having the chance to revisit this novel, because it gave me an opportunity to clock some of those hours I just mentioned. In the process, I realized how much GWTW has been a part of my reading life.

My copy of GWTW is stolen from my mother’s bookshelf. I get confused as to whether she had it first, or, someone gave it me, but somehow it landed on my bookshelf as a teenager and its remained there ever since.  It’s been there for so long, I guess it doesn’t matter. I left it at my parent’s house when I moved out because until I was settled, I didn’t want it to get damaged.  In fact, when preparing for this blog post, I called my mother and asked her if she knew where it was.

I started describing it to her, but she knew exactly what it looked like: grey, hardcover with the dust jacket long gone. The corner edges frayed, the spine worn and the pages yellowed.  I think at one point, the top of the book had some kind of dark ink, but it is now spotted making it look like I once spilled black coffee on it.  The edition is from 1954 and inside there are two columns of writing on each page.  After I got off the phone with her, I found it behind the glass case hutch in the living room with my other special books.

I’m sure it sounds sacrilegious to admit this, but I didn’t like Scarlett at first. This made my first reading of GWTW challenging.  Being mostly teased and betrayed by catty young girls during my elementary and middle school years didn’t warm me to the idea of reading about one. I couldn’t relate to her scheming ways or why boys found her so attractive.

It probably won’t be surprising, that I identified more with Melanie.  For two reasons:  1) She got the guy that Scarlett wanted to marry her; 2) Well, we shared the same name. It seemed disloyal to not be on her side. Still, like Scarlett, I knew that I would never be as good as that fictional Melanie. (I’m not sure how many people could) and so, my connection to her was short-lived.

Over the years, I dumped a lot of the mean girl baggage and became friends with someone who counts Scarlett as one of her favourite heroines. Listening to her talk about Scarlett, I realized that maybe there was more to her than just a spoiled rich girl. So, I re-read and re-watched the movie with new eyes and I saw it.

Scarlett is a survivor.

She has tenacity and stubbornness and willingness to not take “no” for an answer.   Her perseverance and fortitude against immeasurable odds, demonstrates something that we all strive for…and that is passion.  To know what it is you want and to go after it.  Even if he says that he no longer gives a damn, or your house has burned down, or, the man you thought you loved married another, none of that matters if you know what you want. Scarlett does. Now, I might not agree with her methods or how she goes about getting what she wants, but I admire the fact that she has something to go after.

I guess that makes me a Scarlett convert.

Melanie Fishbane is starting her second semester at the Vermont College of Fine Arts where she is working on her first Young Adult novel. With over fifteen year working in YA/Kids lit at various Canadian book chains, she decided it was time to write one herself.  She writes book reviews for the Canadian Children’s Book News and is active with online communities promoting children’s literature, Laura Ingalls Wilder and L.M. Montgomery.  You can see her blogging about writing, YA and her love of classic children’s lit at http://melaniefishbane.blogspot.com/