“Gone With the Wind” by Margaret Mitchell (post 15): Author interview fails to address either why Scarlett is changeable or the Lincoln assassination.

Margaret Mitchell was interviewed on an Atlanta radio station in 1936, the year Gone With the Wind was published. The interviewer, having read the novel, feels that its main theme is how people respond differently under stress: Melanie’s personality remains the same, but Scarlett’s personality changes. It is noteworthy that Margaret Mitchell’s answer is not at all responsive to the issue that the interviewer raises. Quoting from the interview:

MRS. PERKERSON: Peggy, I have read your book Gone With the Wind with a great deal of pleasure, but I know that many of our listeners are not familiar with it. So can you tell us, briefly, just what the book is about?

MISS MITCHELL: I am glad to tell you, Medora. My novel is the story of a girl named Scarlett O’Hara, who lived in Atlanta during the Civil War and the days of Reconstruction…It’s about the effect of the Civil War on a set of characters who lived in Atlanta at that time…

MRS. PERKERSON: Your heroine, Scarlett O’Hara, is not at all like the usual Civil War heroine. She was just as shocking in her era as the flapper was in the jazz age. Was it your idea that Scarlett was the product of her time, just as the flapper was the product of the period following the World War?

MISS MITCHELL: Yes, wars have a way of changing women…The sorrow and hardships and poverty of the Civil War changed Scarlett O’Hara from a spoiled and selfish but otherwise normal Southern girl into a hardened adventuress, just as the wild period following the World War made modern girls cut loose from their mothers’ apron strings and do shocking things.

MRS. PERKERSON: …Melanie and Scarlett went through the war and Reconstruction, side by side, and it was fascinating to see how the same set of circumstances produced such contrasts in character. The experiences that hardened Scarlett O’Hara and made her unscrupulous simply made Melanie Wilkes more of a lady…that seemed to me to be the real theme of the book, how different characters reacted under the stress of circumstances.

MISS MITCHELL: If Gone With the Wind has a central theme, I suppose the theme is survival…

Margaret Mitchell goes on to speak of survival in general, totally ignoring the interviewer’s question about why different survivors react differently; why some, like Melanie, become more of what they were before, while others, like Scarlett, undergo radical change. It would appear that Mitchell’s host personality did not relate to that issue.

Lincoln Assassination

In a previous post, I raised the issue of why the novel never mentions the assassination of President Lincoln, which would have been discussed by people living in Atlanta at that time. This interview makes much of how the author steeped herself in research of historical details, but neither the interviewer nor the author mentions the assassination.

Earlier this month, I went to Ask NYPL, a service of The New York Public Library. But their research department could not find anything published in which Margaret Mitchell addresses why her novel does not mention the assassination.

It is puzzling to me that Mitchell never mentions it and nobody ever asks her about it.

1. Interview with Margaret Mitchell from 1936. http://www.pbs.org/wnet/americanmasters/margaret-mitchell-american-rebel-interview-with-margaret-mitchell-from-1936/2011/