Since it's apparently Lincoln Day here on the blog, I thought I'd dive into the Civil War fray, but from a somewhat different perspective. There's no question that racism is the primary social issue at stake in the war and Reconstruction, but the abolitionism also laid the groundwork for the campaign to give women the right to vote, and the war was, like World War II, profoundly disruptive to women's social roles. It's no accident that two of the greatest portraits of women in modern literature come from Civil War novels. Gone With The Wind's Scarlett O'Hara and Little Women's Jo March live on opposite sides of the Mason-Dixon line, come from different backgrounds, and their personalities evolve in different directions. I'm not sure they would have liked each other very much. But I love them both, and re-reading both novels in recent weeks, I've been struck by how much they have in common.
At the beginning of the Civil War, Scarlett is a privileged planter's daughter whose main talents for are manipulating men and, in a nice bit of foreshadowing, for mathematics. Jo is the second-oldest of four daughters in a once-comfortable family left poor by their father's poor financial decisions, and without a reliable income when he decides to join the Union Army as a chaplain. Gone With the Wind is much more explicitly a novel of the Civil War than Little Women is, and as such, Scarlett has direct contact with combat and an enemy army, while Jo lives her life far from the front lines in Massachusetts. But in both novels, economic survival comes into direct conflict with both Northern and Southern expectations of femininity, and Jo and Scarlett both forge solutions that make them semi-kindred spirits.
When the war threatens their families, both Scarlett and Jo sacrifice their physical beauty to protect the people they love. When the Union Army takes Atlanta, Scarlett makes a terrifying and physically exhausting flight to her family home in a wooden cart, pulled by a dying horse, that carries her son, a slave named Prissy, her sister-in-law who has almost died in childbirth, and her infant son.
"She had never in her life been out in the sunshine without a hat or veils, never handled reins without gloves to protect the white skin of her dimpled hands," Margaret Mitchell writes of Scarlett. "Yet here she was exposed to the sun in a broken-down wagon with a broken-down horse, dirty, sweaty, hungry, helpless to do anything but plod along at a snail's pace through a deserted land."
Scarlett's hands become a symbol of her shifting worldview throughout the immediate post-Civil War period of Gone With the Wind. On her arrival home, Mammy, the slave who helped raise her, expresses shock at the blood clots and callouses on her hands from driving a balky horse for almost an entire day. That concern represents, to Scarlett, Mammy's inability to see that their circumstances have changed forever: "In another moment, [Mammy] would be saying that young Misses with blistered hands and freckles most generally don't never catch husbands." For a woman who has been raised with the sole skill of catching men, Scarlett's abandonment of that ideal is a significant reversal.
In Little Women, the scene of Jo's sacrifice provides a comedic break in a sad and tense section of the novel. The girls' father is wounded, and their mother must go to Washington, D.C. to visit him in an Army hospital. She sends Jo to borrow the money she needs to make the trip from Aunt March, a wealthy relative who thinks (semi-correctly) that her brother has little sense and is responsible for his family's poverty. Jo works as Aunt March's companion. But when she's faced with the humiliating prospect of begging from the older, Jo, a confirmed tomboy, sells her hair to a wigmaker to earn the money instead. When she comes home with a shorn head and $25, one of her sisters cries "Oh, Jo, how could you? Your one beauty." It's kind of funny, but Jo's desperation is real, as is some of her humiliation: she had to convince the wigmaker to take her hair even though he didn't think it was pretty or fashionable enough to sell.
Those steps away from feminine ideals of beauty are the first that Jo and Scarlett take as they venture into male-dominated working worlds. It's a transition that is easier for Jo than for Scarlett: Lizzie Skurnick had a great post at Jezebel last week in which she argued that the value of work is at the core of both the March family's and the novel's values. In contrast, the fact that Scarlett's mother taught her nothing whatsoever about work makes her incredibly angry, and is one of the main reasons she ends up rejecting her mother's entire set of values, throwing out a lot of good things in the process. "'Nothing, no, nothing she taught me is of any help t me! What good will kindness do to me now?" Scarlett thinks as she prepares to try to save her family's plantation. "What value is gentleness? Better that I'd learned to plow or chop cotton like a darky. Oh, Mother, you were wrong!"
But she emerges from that despair an almost terrifyingly competent businesswoman, much to the consternation of her second husband, Frank, who finds after their marriage that "her voice was brisk and decisive and she made up her mind instantly and with no girlish shilly-shallying. She knew what she wanted and she went after it by the shortest route, like a man, not by the hidden and circuitous routes peculiar to women." She borrows money to buy a mill and ends up with a thriving lumber business, and after Frank's death in a Ku Klux Klan raid (Scarlett is undeniably racist throughout the book, but she's not particularly attached to slavery as a concept, thinking it's not worth the war, and she takes the consistent stance that the Klan is impractical and stupid.) she runs his store far more competently than he did.
Jo, on the other hand, has always been prepared to work. One of the earliest scenes in the book is of her heading off to Aunt March's as her older sister, Meg, heads off to her governess gig for an unhappy wealthy family. The girls all mend, cook, clean, etc., though not all with overwhelming competence. But after the war, Jo begins to take on a significant part of the financial burden for her family. She starts selling occasional short works of fiction, and after two serious personal disappointments, moves to New York City, where she takes a job as a governess (acceptable female employment) and starts writing thrilling and macabre adventure tales for the gloriously-titled Weekly Volcano (decidedly not acceptable female employment, though Louisa May Alcott wrote thrilling newspaper tales herself). Unlike Scarlett, who came close to starvation, and is driven beyond all conventional bounds of propriety by the need for security that experience gave her, Jo isn't necessarily writing to keep food on the table. But she is writing for her sister's life: Jo's fiction buys a winter coat for her dying sister, and a trip to the seaside that she hopes will save her.
Work is really the point at which Scarlett and Jo's lives begin to move in opposite directions. Scarlett's work makes her an outcast because she isn't willing to work within feminine ideals. While other Atlanta women do acceptable things to make money, whether painting ugly china or baking pies to sell to the occupying union army, Scarlett refuses to play within acceptable boundaries. Not only does she work within rough industries, but she chooses deliberately unacceptable methods, hiring convicts to work in her mills, and letting one of her supervisors kill several men in the name of profitability. It's a neat character sketch: Scarlett is considered coarsened partially because of absurd societal expectations for women and their proper roles, but her character is also really damaged by what she decides she can do for money.
Jo, on the other hand, finds a path through writing and work to be the kind of woman she found it so difficult to be in the earlier sections of the novel. Her friend and eventual husband encourages her to write a sensitive memoir instead of trashy fiction. When Aunt March leaves Jo her grand house, Jo founds a school for boys (and the occasional girl), which is the subject of Little Men, a setting that gives her the opportunity to be a mother figure, but also to encourage her female students to be strong, and her male students to be something other than macho archetypes.
Lest this get TOO dour, both books have hilarious sections about gender and expectations. In Gone With The Wind, when Rhett Butler saves the lives of the Atlanta men who are in the Klan by sneaking them through Belle Watling's whorehouse, one of the men, the highly respectable Dr. Meade, is shocked to find out his wife wants to know what the whorehouse looks like:
"Are there cut-glass chandeliers? And red plush curtains and dozens of full-length gilt mirrors? And were the girls--were they unclothed?"
"Good God!' cried the doctor, thunderstruck, for it had never occurred to him that the curiosity of a chaste woman concerning her unchaste sisters was so devouring. 'How can you ask such immodest questions? You are not yourself. I will mix you a sedative."
"I don't want a sedative. I want to know. Oh, dear, this is my only chance to know what a bad house looks like and now you are mean enough not to tell me!'"And in Little Women, Jo gets into a terrible comedic snit over the fact that her friend Laurie's tutor has stolen one of her sister Meg's gloves in what she believes is a piece of steroetypically lover-like behavior. The descriptions of the girl's attempts to play out exaggerated male and female roles in the plays they put on in their living room and attic are amusingly subversive, too.
I don't know that either novel is exactly feminist. Margaret Mitchell has a very, nasty funny crack in a section on Scarlett's drinking about women "who were insane or divorced, or believed, with Miss Susan B. Anthony, that women should have the vote." The fact that the sublime sexual experience of Scarlett's life is an instance of marital rape is horrifying. Scarlett is deeply dependent on the attention of men, and to say she's a repeat girl-on-girl crime offender is an understatement for a woman who marries her own sister's fiancee and lusts after the husband of the woman who she belatedly admits is her best friend and her moral compass. There's a required repression of emotion in Little Women that is troubling--as Lizzie points out, Jo isn't even really allowed to be angry when her younger sister burns her novel. All of the sisters who live end up married and living out fairly conventionally female lives.
But Jo and Scarlett remain vibrant, viable characters decades after they first appeared on the page because they transcended the boundaries laid for women of their times. Scarlett's fierce will to survive and prosper are compelling in any period, even when her 16-inch waist and apple-green afternoon dresses became anachronisms. Jo's struggles with her temper, her intellectual passion, and her writing are not tied to any age, even if the expectations of what she would do with them are. The Civil War created the opportunity, and the need, for both Scarlett and Jo to defy convention, and the literary world is a richer place for them.
The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood 
I have read that Margaret Mitchell had always thought of Melanie Wilkes as the heroine of Gone with the Wind. Make of that one what you will!
I love that scene where the doctor's wife quizzes him about the whorehouse so much.
I find that the greater differences between Jo and Scarlett probably stem from the fact that Alcott wrote "Little Women" in 1868-69, and was recalling direct experiences with the Civil War, while Mitchell published "Gone With the Wind" in 1937 (70 years after the War) based on tales from southern family members.
Speaking of classic women's lit, my girlfriend came back from Barnes & Noble yesterday with an updated version of a Jane Austen classic, "Pride and Prejudice and Zombies". The cover art, a pic of which I posted elsewhere yesterday, is pretty clever. This book club question included in the back of the novel was humorous as well:
I don't know that either novel is exactly feminist... There's a required repression of emotion in Little Women that is troubling--as Lizzie points out, Jo isn't even really allowed to be angry when her younger sister burns her novel.
I think this is a misinterpretation. Jo isn't supposed to refrain from showing her anger because she's female; she's supposed to let go of her anger and forgive Amy because Little Women, and Louisa May Alcott's other novels, is a strongly Christian book and the girls and Laurie learning to be good people is a central theme. Jo's continued fury at Amy, understandably as it may be, isn't bad because it's contrary to how women should act; it's bad because holding on to anger and valuing things (even very personally valuable things) over people is wrong regardless of gender.
Gone With the Wind is a loathsome book - it exploits every possible racial stereotype (from "black people were happy as slaves and freedom was bad for them" to "all black men want to rape white women"). Some people may regard Scarlett as some sort of feminist "strong woman" model; I don't. She is a thoroughly selfish character who's only motivation is self-interest and self-gratification.
The main difference between the two women is a fairly simple one. Jo is a good person. Scarlett isn't.
But that's what makes Scarlett so much fun! She drinks, she's ruthless, she's shallow, she's cruel, she's amoral. And all of those things make the realization of how much she loves Melanie Wilkes that much more emotionally stunning at the book's conclusion. Much in the same way that Melanie would be boring and hopeless if she didn't have the backbone to storm down the stairs to kill a Yankee and help Scarlett cover up the murder, or if she didn't have the nerve to start a family feud to protect the deeply imperfect sister-in-law she loves.
I agree with you that the book is racist. So, arguably, is Uncle Tom's Cabin, or any other contemporary fictional portrait of black people. But I don't think that the book's racism detracts one whit from its quality; if anything, the anachronisms of that racism, now that we can see them clearly, only contribute to the overall portrait of a wrecked, misguided society.
I can be somewhat more accepting of the racism of an Uncle Tom's Cabin, published in 1852, than novels like Gone With the Wind, written nearly a century later.
Fair enough; I wrote that somewhat quickly and late. There are certainly things that Mitchell could have done differently in the portrayal of the black characters in the book. But: 1) I think it would have been wildly unrealistic to make Scarlett or any of the novel's other characters explicitly anti-racist (Ashley does talk about freeing his family slaves eventually, and that might have been one thing to tease out) because it would have seemed like a false note, and 2) the novel does take the consistent stance that Reconstruction was done poorly, in a way that gave freed slaves no education and little means of supporting themselves. That doesn't mean that white characters don't react in racist, violent ways. But I think it's hard to argue that Emancipation was done beautifully, sensitively, with sufficient resources committed and an eye towards long-term policy.
Regarding your comment below, it's not simply the characters that are racist; so is the book's portrayal of black people. It's essentially set in a fictional version of the South where what the Confederacy believed and stood for - the superiority of the slave system and white supremacy - was actually true.
The main difference between the two women is a fairly simple one. Jo is a good person. Scarlett isn't.
Well yeah. One of the reasons why, while Gone with the Wind is not a feminist book, it's extremely fascinating to young women readers. Scarlett's not *supposed* to be good.
If you've read the book, you know Margaret Mitchell makes no bones about it. Scarlett's an amoral antihero and Mitchell makes you somewhat sympathize with her dilemmas without feeling the slightest need to redeem her. As Alyssa notes, what's fascinating about her is the way she gets her own back, in material terms,in a way that's completely unacceptable to ideas about "good" girls--either those of the Civil War, the 30s, or today. Gone with the Wind doesn't remotely pretend to be a moral book.
One of the great breakthroughs for readers of either gender is to get beyond the cloying, infantile, school and culture-driven assumption that stories are supposed to teach you to be good, and that women in particular need to only love stories about being good. Stories about whatever fascinates us, and that can be the story of a brave, unhappy, clever, selfish rascal like Scarlett, too.
I was fascinated by Gone with the Wind as a young teen, and couldn't have been more bored with Little Women. Thank you very much, I already knew exactly what I was supposed to do to be a good person, and I already knew what a struggle it was to be kind and helpful and selfless all the time. Arghh!
Scarlett was Selfish! She was Angry! She Lied-- right to people's faces! She was driven by Hungers (for food, romance, money) that could not be fulfilled without destroying herself! She was the Opposite of the Womanly Ideal!!! How could I not love her at that age?
Scarlett was Selfish! She was Angry! She Lied-- right to people's faces! She was driven by Hungers (for food, romance, money) that could not be fulfilled without destroying herself! She was the Opposite of the Womanly Ideal!!!
I have read that Margaret Mitchell had always thought of Melanie Wilkes as the heroine of Gone with the Wind.
I don't know where you read that. But as someone said once, no one would fuss much if the book were had been named "Scarlett O'Hara", but it would have confused everyone if it had been named "Melanie Wilkes". So no, Mitchell didn't think of Melanie Wilkes as the heroine of the story. She might have liked her better, but then most people do.
The movie Melanie (less so the book Melanie) is tough, kind, and smart. She was the one who figured out that her husband was injured, and that Rhett was helping him. She was the one who accepted the money from Belle, and who asked to come visit the prostitute after she'd helped her husband. One of the truly great feminist moments in movie history is not when Scarlett shoots the Yankee, but the cut to Melanie, who could barely walk, but was dragging her father's sword down the stairs to protect her family--and then has enough wits to think of checking the Yankee's pockets.
Everyone always acted as if Scarlett didn't care what people thought, but she did. Scarlette hated embarrassment or censure and always complained when she reaped the results of her actions. Melanie could care less about the opinion of others, she did what was right.
I always hated Scarlett O'Hara until I realized that Melanie would not allow a word said against her--and that every single reason Melanie gave was exactly right. Scarlett did save her sister-in-law and her infant from certain death--first by delivering the baby, second by her determination to get them out of town. Scarlett did keep the family together when they otherwise would have died. And ultimately, Melanie was correct in her belief that Scarlett wouldn't abandon her marriage for Ashley.
Scarlett has many flaws, but looking at her through Melanie's eyes, you can see that she is in fact a remarkable person.
Dismissing older literature because it portrays African Americans in a racist light is a limiting point of view, really. What a waste of moral outrage. For Mitchell's time, she really gave her black characters a wide range of both positive and negative attributes.
Really nice analysis Cal, this is a lot of what is compelling about Gone with the Wind-- the relationship between two very different women, and how that relationship develops and strengthens throughout their lives. If you recall at the end of the book, when Melanie dies, Scarlett realizes that it was only Melanie's unwavering love and support that allowed her to accomplish what she has.