History is gone with the wind

Pan Macmillan, which once published a book of mine, has now re-released one of rather greater renown, Margaret Mitchell’s novel Gone With the Wind.

Moreover, it hasn’t even been bowdlerised, which practice is the current equivalent of Nazi book burning. This though Mitchell’s novel treats Southern planters as human beings, rather than caricature villains.

The temptation to bring the narrative in line with today’s sensibilities must have been strong. Nor would it have been difficult to do so.

Scarlett O’Hara could have been replaced with Simon Legree, appropriately renamed and borrowed for that purpose from Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Limon Segree would spend his days torturing slaves and his nights in flagrante delicto with Rhett Butler.

That would give his character the requisite depth, by turning it into a battleground where virtue (homosexuality) clashed with vice (racism). Eventually, virtue would triumph. Limon would ‘transition’, surgery and all, and become a model modern woman. Rhett would follow suit, and the two would live in a lesbian union happily ever after, having first killed Ashley Wilkes for his membership in the Ku Klux Klan.

But I shouldn’t let my morbid imagination run away with me. We can argue till the cotton pickers come home whether anything along those lines could have happened. The important thing is that it didn’t.

The publishers clenched their teeth, held their nerve and committed the heroic act of publishing the book in the original. But such bravery, exceedingly rare these days, called for a full complement of warnings and disclaimers.

These were duly provided: “The text of this book remains true to the original in every way and is reflective of the language and period in which it was originally written.

“We want to alert readers that there may be hurtful or indeed harmful phrases and terminology that were prevalent at the time this novel was written and which are true to the context of the historical setting of this novel.”

Now, the novel was written (not originally written, for those who eschew tautology) in 1936, some 84 years after Harriet Beecher Stowe wrote her Uncle Tom. The gap isn’t especially wide chronologically, but in every other respect the two epochs were aeons apart.

When Stowe put that last full stop down, the Emancipation Proclamation was still 11 years away and slavery was in full swing. However, it had become a distant memory by the time Mitchell created her one and only masterpiece.

Hence, it’s unclear which period it was that her novel was supposed to reflect linguistically. Mitchell expertly stylised her protagonists’ speech to make it sound the way people spoke in Stowe’s time – not in 1936, when Mitchell’s novel was “originally” written. Her contemporaries spoke pretty much as we do now, minus the woke bilge.

And they felt about slavery pretty much as we do now. However, they were neither “hurt” nor “damaged” by Mitchell’s depiction of Georgia during the Civil War. They still had enough taste to know the difference between Uncle Tom’s Cabin and Gone With the Wind.

The former wasn’t really a novel. It was novelised propaganda of abolitionism, which wasn’t out of place in the 1850s, when slavery was rife. Like any tract written largely for political purposes, it was artistically weak.

That genre called for the villains of the story to be demonised in a one-dimensional, caricatured way. That diminished the novel as a work of art, while giving it the impact of a down-with-slavery leaflet. The book was useful in that capacity, rallying anti-slavery forces to their worthy cause.

Unlike Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Gone With the Wind is a real novel, and a damned good one. However, Mitchell consciously tried to counterbalance Stowe by depicting a more harmonious relationship between her slave owners and slaves.

Historically, that wasn’t out of place either. No doubt her O’Haras, Wilkeses and Butlers existed in the South – as did the Simon Legrees.

A reader of even average taste and discernment would have appreciated that back in the 1930s. Although raised on the ethos of Uncle Tom, he would have read Gone With the Wind for its literary merits, which were considerable. He would have perhaps even compared Mitchell to Stendhal or Tolstoy, what with their ability to create a panorama of an historical epoch and inhabit it with real people, not cardboard cutouts.

Perhaps as a result he would have stopped to think more deeply about the vicissitudes of human nature that could embrace good as well as evil, maybe even at the same time. Those who felt especially strongly about such matters might have felt that, rather than creating a balance, Mitchell tipped it too far towards the other end. Her planters just might have come out as too benevolent, and her slaves too content.

Those readers would have put that view to their friends, who would have either agreed or disagreed. But under no circumstances would any of them have been either “hurt” or “damaged”. And crucially, none of them would have felt obligated to feign the trauma he hadn’t experienced.

I am absolutely sure that no one reading Gone With the Wind today suffers a deep emotional wound either. But, as a crucial difference to the 1930s, today’s educated readers (the only kind who can get through a 1,000-page novel) have been ideologically conditioned to claim they feel “hurt” or “damaged” whenever their mandated woke sensibilities are slighted.

And today’s publishers feel they have to pander to such bogus sensibilities. Hence their offensive disclaimers – or worse. They often go as far as vandalising original texts, or banning them if they don’t lend themselves to vandalisation easily.

For example, Huckleberry Finn, as anti-racist a novel as one can find, has a character called Nigger Jim who appears throughout the narrative. Even today’s savages realise that renaming him Afro-American Jim or some such would be glaringly idiotic. So they ban Huckleberry Finn from school libraries, for starters.

That deprives children of the book about which Hemingway said: “All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn.”

But who cares about literature or history or artistic and intellectual integrity? It’s ideology that sits at the top of the totem pole, and everyone is supposed to genuflect. Yet we should keep in mind that getting down on one’s knees may sometimes be easier than getting back up.