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When Americans think about the Confederacy, they often think about Margaret Mitchell's 1936 classic, Gone With the Wind. Inspired by recent debates over the Confederate flag, I decided to give the book a try. I confess that I did not have high hopes. I expected to be appalled by its politics and racism, and to be bored by the melodrama. (Scarlett O'Hara, Rhett Butler, and Ashley Wilkes? Really?) About twenty pages, I thought, would be enough. I could not have been more wrong. The book is enthralling, and it casts a spell.Does it make a plausible argument for continuing to display the Confederate flag? Not even close. But it does raise a host of questions--about winners' narratives, about honor and humiliation, about memory, about innocence and guilt, about men and women, about what's taken for granted, about the particularity of human lives, and about parallel worlds. Teeming with life, it offers surprising insights into the Confederacy and the Old South. To be sure, its presentation of slavery is appalling. But at its core, it's much less about politics than it is about the human heart. On that count, it has a lot to say, not least about how to come to terms with history.
