Book Review: Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell

Gone With the Wind, Motion Picture Edition, Complete and Unabridged (Hardcover) 

While human culture accumulates huge energy, it also accumulates huge loads. Walking on a rough road, do we abandon it or draw strength from it? For us, is it destruction or salvation? There is never an answer to this question, we just make a choice. 

About "Gone with the Wind": The fastest and clearest way to figure out the context of a story is through its main characters. As important characters in the book, Ashley, Scarlett, Brady, and Melanie each pinned on the author’s complex feelings for the South, which has experienced glory, elegance, suffering, and rebirth. 

From them, it can be read that the author’s thoughts about the past era of Affectionate contemplation. 

Ashley: Grey sigh Ashley is a grey elegy sung by the author to the Southern civilization passing away with the wind. He carries on his body the thoughts, traditions, lifestyles of old age, and everything that once looked beautiful but was out of fashion. All this is just like him, beautiful and elegant but at a loss and worthless in the new environment. 

Ashley represents the part of southern civilization that has been abandoned by the times. Although they were once a symbol of southern civilization, they remember the beauty of the past-if southern civilization is a pastoral song, they are the most lingering among them. 

Toned, if the southern civilization is a picture, they are the most poetic lines on it, and they can play the gentlest part in the memory of the South. 

However, although all these decorate the South, it is not the vitality of the South. At the time when the South was in need of stubborn rebirth, they had clearly become a burden and burden for the South to move forward. 

As for Ashley and what he represents, the author obviously took a negative attitude and cut this piece from her feelings for southern civilization. Through Ashley's gray eyes and the cold wind passing by Tara Manor, we seemed to hear that low sigh. 

Such sighs and feelings are the main tones that constitute the sentimental emotions in the book, and it is them that are really Gone with the wind. Scarlett: The original color of survival. 

But Scarlett, who fell in love with Ashley, was a complete betrayer from that old age. This is an interesting irony. Scarlett's appearance, behavior, character, and thought are all incompatible with southern traditions. She even felt that she seemed to have no feelings for Southern civilization, which was different from Ashley, Melanie, and Bryder. 

She didn't love it, whether it was its bad or good aspects. Of course, she also missed the clothes and temples and peaceful life of the past, and she also yearned to be a woman like her mother, but when that old era passed, she did not hold back at all, and She is quickly throwing herself into the new environment and life, and the past civilization has little influence on her. 

At the last moment of the war, Bryder got up to fight for the South and bothered to lay a passage for his daughter to reach the mainstream society in the South. This all showed the return and recognition of the southern civilization, and all of these were invisible to Scarlett. 

Bryder, who kept mocking southern virtues and qualities, did not really "let go", but Scarlett was a complete betrayer of the past. In Scarlett’s body, the author tries to put aside all traditional and moral constraints. This looks like a complete denial, but this denial has gone beyond the level of moral judgment and has returned to a primary color, this primary color. 

Is survival. Under the pressure of survival, Scarlett has no extra strength to love her family, and no extra ability to show kindness and generosity. Of course, this is also related to her selfish, shrewd, bold, and enthusiastic nature. Choosing such a person To interpret the theme of survival may be exactly the kind of purity that the author wants to express. 

Scarlett is the most primitive survivor, her gaze is always forward, and anything that gets in her footsteps will unthinkingly let them go. In that era, there was no simple and direct need for survival in the scarred South. 

In the face of primitive survival needs, elegance, civilization, virtue, tradition, norms, etc. become so weak, useless, and cumbersome at a certain moment, but at this time the prominent theme of survival appears cruel and strong. It is the red earth under her feet that connects Scarlett with the blood of the South. 

Scarlett can ignore the southern norms, abandon the southern character, and be a complete betrayer, just as easy as she shrugs, but she can't give up the red land that is as hot as hers. The red land is the incarnation of the South, symbolizing the most primitive and wild vitality of the South under the appearance of civilization. 

This vitality allows the South to grow and prosper, and also allows it to take a blow when it is forced into desperation. Scarlett lying on the red soil of the Twelve Oaks The ground vowed to live, which is also the roar of the wild resurrection of survival in the south. 

Only by standing on the red earth, Scarlett can bravely tell herself "Tomorrow is another day" again and again. At this time, under the blood-red sunset of Tara, she merged with the south. This is survival. The theme of survival is undoubtedly the strongest rhythm that echoes throughout the story, and Scarlett is the brightest symbol in this rhythm. 

The author sincerely praises Scarlett's unrelenting and unscrupulous vitality, but it is by no means affirmative. Scarlett has too many shortcomings: she is selfish, superficial, not good at thinking, and ignores all morals and virtues. From her body, she reflects the blindness of survival. 

This is a wild growth, full of vitality but also full of destructive power. Unscrupulous is its advantage and its biggest flaw. Such a defect is reflected in Scarlett’s body. She doesn’t realize that she loves the South, Melanie, or Bryder. She only pursues her own desires and what she can see, so she will lose a lot of important things; The way of pursuing goals is simple and rough, and it is often easy to fall into misunderstandings. 

Similarly, for Scarlett, she is also unaware of the nobility of morality, so she can abandon it without any regrets or nostalgia. This kind of decisiveness can become extraordinary courage when struggling to survive, and change and innovation are needed. 

Time can also be extraordinarily clean and thorough-but when it takes the direction to move forward in the South and requires the support of a huge moral civilization, her shortcomings will inevitably be exposed. 

Therefore, Scarlett is incomplete with regard to the deep theme of "new life" in the South. She needs Melanie's supplement. Scarlett is loyal to the ancient and solemn proposition of "survival", and Ashley is a deserter under this proposition. 

Scarlett and Ashley, one positive and one negative contrasted sharply. Under the huge historical curtain, one figure is lonely and depressed, with heavy steps, one figure is tenacious and brave, eager to try; one figure retreats to the past, and one figure steps in the future. 

At the junction of the old and the new, they drifted away. The wheels of the times ran over this desolate background, and there was a deep reverberation with endless reverberations. Barrett: The pain of return. 

For the southern civilization, Ashley represents drifting with the flow, and Scarlett represents total negation. In Barrett, the author's attitude has turned a corner, and it seems to become contradictory and unpredictable. On the surface, this attitude is full of mockery and criticism, but in fact, like Scarlett and Melanie, Brad loves the South deeply. 

However, there is still a deep pain in this love. Gradually, I felt that it was not Scarlett that resembled Bray the most, but Melanie. The similarities between Scarlett and Brad are in rebellion, ego, enthusiasm, shrewdness, and even greed, cunning, and unscrupulousness. 

This is a betrayal of the southern mainstream civilization; the similarity between Melanie and Barred lies in the love of this civilization. Melanie's love for southern civilization is manifested in his persistence, while Bryder's love is manifested in criticism. He and Melanie are like two sides of the same coin, seemingly different, but both have the same purpose. 

Barrett’s eyes are sharp. He has already seen the backwardness and anachronism of the self-proclaimed South, so he betrayed, criticized, and even though he had drawn a line with it-but the influence of spirit and civilization moistened things silently. This subtle influence is often more surprising once it appears. 

In the flames of Atlanta, Brad clearly saw his heart and his inseparable complex with the South. This kind of complex is also hot and strong, and it makes Brad abandon the coat of betrayal at that moment and obey the call of his heart. The author uses this character to convey another attitude toward southern civilization and express her most complicated emotions towards southern civilization. 

On the surface, Brad and Scarlett are betrayers, but Brad's betrayal has a different color. He considers himself despicable, mocks virtue, and ridicules hypocritical defenders, but he truly respects and loves Melanie, the true moral adherent. He was proud of his status as an outstanding class in the South. 

For his most beloved daughter, he abandoned everything he had done in the past and devoted himself to finding a position for her in the upper class of the South. 

Therefore, unlike Scarlett, Brad's betrayal should have a color return. Unlike Scarlett and Melanie, the two male protagonists, Ashley and Barred, are not described in a separate way by the author. 

There is almost no separate description of Bryder, there is no narration-like language in his heart, and his footprints in the book also appear in connection with other characters. We cannot know from the front what role Southern civilization played in Barrett’s destiny, but his exposure to this complex background of the alternation of the old and the new represents the author’s attitude towards the South. 

So he will never be just a functional role in Scarlett's love. Southern civilization should have a destiny, cause, and effect on Barrett. Scarlett and Brad’s love can be said too much, a story about love and regret (think about it now, too many misunderstandings and misses can be said to be missed, and the true name of missed may be called unsuitable-just like It is a kind of subconscious avoidance of each other, there is nothing to regret.), this time I want to bypass it for the time being, and analyze our Barred from the perspective of civilization.

He should have experienced the double loss of cultural identity and love pursuit. The tragedy between Barrett and Southern civilization is that he can neither stick to it "blindly" like Melanie nor can he completely abandon it like Scarlett. We know from life that love alone cannot defeat a person (except for some brainless romance novels.), especially for people like Barrett. 

If a person is really crushed by love, he will be hit. It must be one of his weaknesses. This weakness of Barrett should be the "southern." In fact, Bryder has always been lonely. His critical attitude was not recognized in the southern culture that originally nurtured him. 

As a member of the southern civilization, he did not bother to associate with despicable and vain adventurers and speculators and despised them from the bottom of his heart. ——Maybe I also look down on the self who is similar to them. A person who constantly denies or questioned himself verbally and in his heart should be painful. 

The success achieved by betraying the southern civilization does not make him truly happy. The love with Scarlett is a kind of comfort in his life. He loves Scarlett. Perhaps not only do her boldness, shrewdness, and rebellion coincide with him, but also because they are all from the same class in the south. From here, he can expect to see the same as his own. 

The same feelings of love and betrayal are intertwined in the South. Perhaps, the sum of these two points is the real "similarity" between him and Scarlett. He said to Scarlett, "It's rare to see one like you among a thousand girls", which certainly expressed his appreciation for Scarlett, but from another angle, why didn't he reveal his loneliness. 

However, this love was ultimately lost, which became the last straw that crushed Barrett. The last impression Bryd left us was the figure sitting alone at one end of the long dining table. The shadow of the back of the chair casts over his face. He murmured that after the loss of love, he might go to talk to his parted family. 

The words of harmony—Bride at this time is just like the moment when he buried his head on Melanie’s knee fragilely and helplessly, which is a sigh and pity. Melanie: Scarlett the sober watcher represents the purity of survival. 

Ashley is a gorgeous and impractical burden. Brad has returned from betrayal, and Melanie is the sober one standing in this historical storm. 

People, if Scarlett is the most tenacious vitality in the southern spirit, Melanie is the core cohesion and strongest pillar of the southern spirit. Melanie's sobriety is not only because she is holding tightly the most precious part of the Southern spirit, courage, loyalty, diligence, honor, etc., 

but also because she has soberly realized that the South must accept change. You can continue to move forward stubbornly. She strictly adheres to the core of the southern spirit but is not pedantic and self-proclaimed. 

This is also what she can get the love of the most conservative southern aristocrats, and what she can spurn from the old aristocrats like Scarlett and Barry. The reason for finding a balance between a pair. Melanie loves Scarlett and respects Bryder. 

On the surface, it seems that they helped her and Ashley. The deeper reason is that she knows that only their brave, enterprising, and hardworking spirit can save the South and infuse Southern civilization. Fresh blood supports a world that is shaky by wind and rain. 

A careful review of the whole article shows that behind many of Scarlett's and Brady's rebellious and bold words and deeds, there is a figure of Melanie's silent support. 

Facing the change, Melanie did not hesitate: she needed to work, she put down her former figure and worked hard; Scarlett shot the white guy to death, dragged her weak body, and stood firmly behind her to support her; Scarlett ignored her. 

The public opinion ran the timber business by herself. She stood by her to defend her, telling the conservative wives that it was Scarlett's "thing to do." Faced with change, her bravery was no less than Scarlett's. She and Scarlett, one bright and one dark, one passionate and unrestrained, the other deep and firm. 

Throughout the chapter, Scarlett's image, no matter how passionate and dazzling, can't conceal Melanie's brilliance. She and Scarlett complement each other: Melanie knows that the South needs to change and needs a fearless spirit like Scarlett’s. 

For Scarlett, Melanie is like the eternal red earth under her feet, and she can feel her support. Practically muster the courage to move on. As a woman, the author undoubtedly preferred her two heroines. If Scarlett is the force in the south, Melanie is the force in the south. 

The mutual echo between her and Scarlett is the perfect interpretation of the new life theme in the South, which stands up amidst the ruins of reality and soul. This is a story about the South, a story about destruction and rebirth, a story about strength and hope. 

The four protagonists represent the author's four emotions and thinking directions, no matter where they extend, they will eventually converge in one direction, where the vitality and hope of the south continue.