{"id":9469,"date":"2014-07-24T18:17:45","date_gmt":"2014-07-25T00:17:45","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/?p=9469"},"modified":"2014-07-24T18:17:45","modified_gmt":"2014-07-25T00:17:45","slug":"why-i-couldnt-finish-gone-with-the-wind","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/why-i-couldnt-finish-gone-with-the-wind\/","title":{"rendered":"Why I couldn&#8217;t finish Gone with the Wind"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.goodreads.com\/book\/show\/526493.Gone_With_the_Wind\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignleft\" src=\"https:\/\/d.gr-assets.com\/books\/1336522502l\/526493.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"186\" height=\"292\" \/><\/a>For the past month or so, I&#8217;ve been on a Civil War kick. I watched the movie Gettysburg to celebrate July 4th, read <em>Gods and Generals,<\/em> wrote a short story about a time traveler at Gettysburg, and have been listening to a lot of Civil War music as I write. One of the books I decided to give a shot was <em>Gone With the Wind,<\/em> that classic American novel that&#8217;s tied so closely with the Civil War.<\/p>\n<p>It&#8217;s definitely a good book. There were parts of it that I really enjoyed, such as the perspective of the people of Atlanta as Sherman&#8217;s troops got steadily closer. The poverty of the plantation owners after Sherman&#8217;s march to the sea provided a stark contrast to the pompous gaiety of society before the war. You definitely get a sense of what it means to be Southern while reading the book&#8211;it&#8217;s surprising how similar some things are to the way they were. And just in general, the sheer sense of immersion that the novel gives you is just incredible. It&#8217;s rare that I&#8217;m sucked into a world as thoroughly as I was sucked into the quiet charm of the antebellum South and the frenzied optimism of Confederate Georgia.<\/p>\n<blockquote class=\"twitter-tweet\" lang=\"en\"><p>Halfway through GONE WITH THE WIND. Rhett Butler is an ass and Scarlett deserves him. <a href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/hashtag\/amreading?src=hash\">#amreading<\/a><\/p>\n<p>\u2014 Joe Vasicek (@onelowerlight) <a href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/onelowerlight\/statuses\/489938351806353409\">July 18, 2014<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p><script src=\"\/\/platform.twitter.com\/widgets.js\" async=\"\" charset=\"utf-8\"><\/script><\/p>\n<p>The real shock to me was that I could enjoy the book even as I hated the main characters. Scarlett is a bitchy, stuck-up brat&#8211;an entitled rich white girl who cannot comprehend that the world does not revolve around her. Rhett Butler isn&#8217;t nearly as stuck-up as she is, but he is an arrogant jerk who sneers at other people, profits from their misfortune, and hides his cowardice with his biting cynicism.<\/p>\n<p>The fact that I enjoyed reading about them even though I disliked them so much is a testament to the fact that not every character needs to be likable. Even thought Scarlett really peeved me off, I still found her fascinating because I felt like I really understood her. Margaret Mitchell does an excellent job of getting you into her characters&#8217; heads and showing where they come from. In some ways, I felt that I understood Scarlett better than she understood herself.<\/p>\n<p>But I have to be honest&#8211;from page one, I was only interested in Scarlett for the schadenfreude. I already knew how the story ends, with those classic lines &#8220;frankly my dear, I don&#8217;t give a damn,&#8221; and &#8220;tomorrow is another day.&#8221; If I&#8217;d been waiting instead for Scarlett to experience a growth arc (and she really does start in an excellent place for one), I probably would have thrown the book across the room much sooner.<\/p>\n<p>The part that made me stop reading&#8211;and yes, this will spoil the book&#8211;was the part where Scarlett steals Frank Kennedy, her sister&#8217;s fiance, in order to get the money to save Tara. She&#8217;s so singly focused on saving the plantation (Tara) that she&#8217;s willing to backstab her own family, who ought to matter a lot more to her than a house and a spot of land. Yes, I understand that it was entirely in her character to do that, but when she actually betrayed her sister like that, I just couldn&#8217;t stand it anymore. I skipped to the last chapter, had my juicy moment of schadenfreude, and returned the book to the library.<\/p>\n<p>I had a lot more sympathy for everyone who locked horns with Scarlett (except for Rhett) than I ever did for Scarlett herself. The O&#8217;Hara overseer who gets fired in the first or second chapter for making the poor Slattery girl pregnant&#8211;I didn&#8217;t think it was noble for him to try and steal Tara through his postwar connections, but I could see why he&#8217;d do it. He probably didn&#8217;t feel like he could marry the Slattery girl because the O&#8217;Hara&#8217;s weren&#8217;t paying him enough. Even if they were, the fact that he married her showed that at least he was trying to set things right. And though I didn&#8217;t admire the way he went about trying to get his revenge, a part of me wanted him to succeed.<\/p>\n<p>My favorite character was probably Melanie. As soon as she showed up on the page, I liked her, and as the story progressed, I came to actively admire her. Ashley, too, was a very interesting character to me&#8211;his thoughts on the war and on the passing of the old way of life were fascinating. But I could never really respect him, because it was always so easy for Scarlett to manipulate him.<\/p>\n<p>And even though Rhett wasn&#8217;t so prone to Scarlett&#8217;s machinations, I still couldn&#8217;t respect him because he was always such an ass to everyone. It&#8217;s not that he wasn&#8217;t a gentleman&#8211;there were plenty of gentlemen in the book who were jerks, and plenty of men who weren&#8217;t gentlemen who were still good people. The thing was, Rhett was just never a good person to anyone except Melanie, and throughout the book, that never changed.<\/p>\n<p>I guess the takeaway here is that it&#8217;s almost impossible to have any sympathy for a character who treats their friends and family like garbage. For me, at least, if a character constantly betrays the people who are closest to them, I really want nothing to do with them. But I guess that&#8217;s just me&#8211;judging from the success of <em>Gone With the Wind,<\/em> I guess I can&#8217;t generalize that at all.<\/p>\n<p>I don&#8217;t know. What do you guys think?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>For the past month or so, I&#8217;ve been on a Civil War kick. I watched the movie Gettysburg to celebrate July 4th, read Gods and Generals, wrote a short story about a time traveler at Gettysburg, and have been listening to a lot of Civil War music as I write. One of the books I&hellip; <a class=\"more-link\" href=\"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/why-i-couldnt-finish-gone-with-the-wind\/\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">Why I couldn&#8217;t finish Gone with the Wind<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"Why I couldn't finish Gone with the Wind #amreading http:\/\/wp.me\/p7iXK-2sJ","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[112,574,959,508,599,829],"class_list":["post-9469","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-character","tag-character-arcs","tag-civil-war","tag-sympathy","tag-thoughts-reflections","tag-why-we-read","entry"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p7iXK-2sJ","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9469","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9469"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9469\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9474,"href":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9469\/revisions\/9474"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9469"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9469"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9469"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}