Gone with the Wind Study Guide

Margaret Mitchell was the daughter of the wealthy attorney Eugene Mitchell and the Irish immigrant and avid suffragette Maybelle Stephens. She grew up in Jackson Hill in Atlanta nearby her crude and explosive grandmother, from whom she heard firsthand stories about the Civil War. However, she did not learn that the South lost the war until she was 10 years old. Growing up, Mitchell preferred riding her pony to playing with dolls. She was an avid reader and writer of stories that often focused on the themes of honor and love. Two things that greatly influenced Mitchell when she was a child were the Atlanta Race Riot, as well as accompanying her mother to suffragette meetings (the 19th amendment, which gave women the right to vote, passed when Mitchell was 19). Although Margaret’s brother believed that education ruined girls, her mother believed education was a girl’s tool for survival. With her mother’s encouragement, Mitchell attended Washington Seminary and then Smith College. Mitchell was engaged twice and eventually married Kinnard Upshaw, an alcoholic who later physically and emotionally abused her. Their marriage ended in divorce. Mitchell then married John Marsh when she was 29. Between her marriages, she wrote for the Atlanta Journal and continued to publish articles for four years until an ankle injury kept her home. Bored and needing something to do, she wrote Gone with the Wind, her only novel, which won the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. In 1949, she was hit by a drunk driver when she was crossing Peachtree Street. She died from her injuries a few days later.

The American Civil War and Reconstruction are the driving forces of Gone with the Wind. The Civil War was fought between April 1861 and May 1865 over the institution of slavery in the Southern United States. Just after President Abraham Lincoln was inaugurated, seven states—including Georgia, where the novel takes place—seceded from the Union. Over its four years, the war resulted in at least a million casualties of soldiers and civilians, most caused by disease. As Union troops took each Southern state, they freed enslaved people and began the process of Reconstruction. Reconstruction lasted until 1877, and its main goal was to permanently end slavery and bring the Southern states back into the Union. During this time, three “Reconstruction Amendments” were passed, including the 13th which outlawed slavery, and the 14th and 15th, which guaranteed citizenship and voting rights for formerly enslaved Black people. Reconstruction ended when Democrats gained control of the House of Representatives and withdrew federal troops from the South. It quickly gave way to Jim Crow laws which upheld segregation and took rights away from the Black people Reconstruction sought to help. During Reconstruction, the Ku Klux Klan came to power, and the idea of the “Lost Cause” (which features prominently in the novel) was developed. The Lost Cause cast the Confederate cause as heroic and just, and it refused to acknowledge that slavery was the primary reason for the Civil War—a common criticism of Gone with the Wind. In addition, Margaret Mitchell was also influenced by the passing of the 19th amendment, which gave women the right to vote and contributed to her exploration of feminism and sexual freedom in Gone with the Wind.

Gone with the Wind has at times been proposed a contender for the Great American novel. Other contenders with similar themes of racism and Reconstruction are Uncle Tom’s Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain, and Harper Lee’s novel To Kill a Mockingbird.  Uncle Tom’s Cabin can be the most closely compared with Gone with the Wind because it also depicts slavery firsthand—though unlike Gone with the Wind, Uncle Tom’s Cabin is overtly against slavery. Cold Mountain by Charles Frazier is another American novel that tells of love and loss during the Civil War, while the Australian novel The Thorn Birds by Colleen McCullough is often heralded as the Australian Gone with the Wind. Another epic tale about slavery—but one that focuses on American slavery’s horrors, rather than glorifying it—is Alex Haley’s novel Roots: The Saga of an American Family. It tells the story of seven generations of the author’s family, beginning with the author’s 18th-century ancestor who was abducted from the Gambia and sold into slavery into America.