When I was in middle school, I read Margaret Mitchell’s epic romance, “Gone With the Wind.” Not once. Not twice. But continuously. Each time I finished the novel, I began again, flipping open the broken-spined paperback so many times the book split in half, yielding two portable sections of text. I preferred a break of at least several hours between readings, but sometimes compulsion forced me to begin again only moments after finishing it.
I told myself that I could resist, that I’d read some other book, some “real” book, that I could read on the couch in front of family members without raising eyebrows. For my parents, it was the repetitive reading of a single text that seemed deranged, and for my brothers it was reading such an enormous tome in the first place, but my own sense of shame arose from my deep ambivalence about the novel itself.
Even then, I knew that reading “Gone With the Wind” was not transformative; that its portrayal of romantic love as the only prize worth having was wrong; that the book presented a distorted view of womanhood. My obsession was based purely on titillation, the excitement of following the fatally flawed Scarlett O’Hara through her breathless, war-torn, starvation-marked pursuit of love. “Gone With the Wind” was my “Twilight” series.
At the same time, the book was also a repository for all my adolescent loathing, of both self and others. The beginning section represented everything I hated about middle school. Scarlett was the perfect stand-in for my arch enemy, a girl who resembled her in each particular — green-eyed, brunette and brutal. The first line of the novel dazzled me with its concise encapsulation of a distinct feminine mystery: “Scarlett O’Hara was not beautiful, but men seldom realized it when caught by her charm as the Tarleton twins were.” How could this be? This was the central question of middle school. How could the most vital fact of female existence — were you a beautiful girl or not? — be surpassed by mere will? Scarlett O’Hara controlled male perception. She created her own reality. She was a genius. She was also a slave owner. When Scarlett returns home after the war, she is aghast that any of the family’s slaves had run off, and the reader, who wants Scarlett to survive so she can get on with the essential work of pursuing Ashley Wilkes and succumbing to Rhett Butler, is forced into the uncomfortable moral position of empathizing with her. In other words, the end of human bondage in America is a subordinate concern to whether or not Scarlett is able to use her charms to get the man she wants. (Despite the frustrating fact that you know from the moment you are introduced to the principal characters that Rhett is the right man for Scarlett and Ashley is utterly wrong! Why then read on? Why then the obsession?)
Because, in the world of “Gone With the Wind,” romantic thinking trumps everything, including war, civility, morality, starvation and childbirth. The book amazed me with the grandeur of its delusion.
It also made me guilty, perhaps above all because reading “Gone With the Wind” made me feel that a part of myself might be like Scarlett, that I, too, might be capable of caring about the wrong things in life, so long as I was loved by a man.
I finally put aside “Gone With the Wind” once I entered high school, and discovered “Goodbye, Columbus,” “Slaughterhouse Five” and the dizzying complications of actual teenage boys. Years later, when one of my brothers bought me a commemorative edition of the novel, I sulkily stashed it in a dark corner. How, I wondered, could anyone who knew me well think that I’d wish to be reminded, would treasure, an artifact of such a shameful episode in my literary explorations?
And so I forgot about “Gone With the Wind.” Until recently, when I was talking with a friend about our daughters (now in middle school themselves), and their fascination with impossibly lengthy, endlessly repetitive supernatural romances. I casually mentioned my romantic epic of choice, and it occurred to me that “Gone With the Wind” was in fact the ultimate young adult novel. The choice between two starkly different lovers (one gentlemanly, one roguish) appears, for the very young, to be a choice between two utterly distinct potential identities, two possible roads through life.
I realized then that I was, for the first time, outside that romantic paradigm. I am getting a divorce, and so I am now on my own path, rewriting my life’s narrative to include that most modern of twists: interruption. In my darker moments, it feels as though time itself has stopped. Having been married for nearly 18 years, I find it hard to imagine exactly how one day unfolds into the next outside the dynamics of coupledom.
I can’t help but be reminded of the one part in “Gone With the Wind” that I routinely used to skim: the postwar section, in which Scarlett is married to the pathetic Frank, whom she stole from her own sister. This is the one loveless section in the book, when Scarlett cares more about food, shelter and money than she does about either Rhett or Ashley. It is the one moment when real life appears as more than a set piece for the conjured world of love. It is Scarlett’s reality test; the suspension of the girl-dream of romance as the core of one’s being.
But — perhaps thankfully — this section doesn’t last. In the end, it does not matter that Scarlett’s true love scorns her, so long as the reader knows that love exists and that Scarlett will continue to pursue it.
Talking about the book with my friend over lunch, I felt no rekindled desire to read it. But I did feel a fondness for the girl who had done so those many times over — an admiration for the adolescent voraciousness that compelled me to search again and again in the same place for resolution to a story I knew had none. I realize now that this youthful tenacity might be a source of strength I need again to drawn on. Although I am a mother and a mature, single woman, newly awakened to the perils of love and the demands of reality, I can’t deny in myself a Scarlett-ish sensibility, the drive to believe that there is in the idea of tomorrow another story line worthy of pursuit, something dazzling to ponder, if never quite possess.
This almost redeems the book for me today: It is a romance grounded in absence and error. Its end is a beginning, not of an idealized life, but of pursuit and desire. It is a thousand-and-some-page proof of the human need to seek love. It is the young adult novel I am now too experienced and humbled to scorn.
Claire Needell is an English teacher at a public middle school in Manhattan and the author of the forthcoming collection of short stories for young adults “Nothing Real.” The above piece originally appeared in New York Times on November 23, 2013
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