Erin Blakemore - The Heroine's Bookshelf - Life Lessons, from Jane Austen to Laura Ingalls Wilder

This flagrant provocation hit its mark. After revelations of the extent of Red’s illegal activities, it became clear that the marriage was over. Now separated, Peggy moved to her next battle: becoming a woman journalist in a town that banned women from most newspaper offices. Somehow, she fast-talked her way into a job at the Atlanta Journal. Peggy ignored the crudity of the language that surrounded her at the offices of the Journal, brushed away the cigarette butts that surrounded her, and got to work sniffing out stories in places unfit for any lady. Blasé about her dislike for proofreading and her inability to use a typewriter, she went on to get daring interviews with generals, ax murderers, and even Rudolph Valentino.

That she held her own was no small feat. That she did so while under constant physical threat from her ex-husband, who at one point beat her so severely she was hospitalized, was even more impressive. She slept with a gun at her side through those years and put on a brave front. But inside, the constant danger was taking its toll. She started to have medical problems and accidents that were exacerbated by her nervous temperament and her propensity toward hardship and struggle. She tried to ward off her failing health and spirits by marrying Red’s former best man, Journal proofreader John Marsh, but even he couldn’t protect her from the mysterious ailments that began to encroach on her life and her comfort. Beaten for the time being, she retired from the newspaper business and took to her bed.

Never a model patient, Peggy was a wretched, cranky invalid. Her irritability inevitably got her into trouble. First she read all of the books adoring John could provide her, exhausting the riches of the local library and then the surrounding colleges and universities before reaching an impasse that could not be filled by medical tomes, pornography, or popular literature. Annoyed, she took her husband’s advice and propped herself up with a ream of paper and a typewriter to draft the last chapter of a novel about the Civil War. She’d later insist that the decision to start with the end and work back to the beginning was just an old ambulance-chasing journalist’s habit. But what Peggy had begun to envision couldn’t fit into a newspaper. She was already embroiled in a book that could only be called “epic.”

Nobody will ever know how long it took Peggy to draft and edit Gone With the Wind. She certainly never told, just as she never discussed the book with her family or friends while she was writing it. This obsessive need to control her public image was matched only by the relentless drive with which she wrote. Her manuscript piled up all over the tiny apartment called “The Dump” by one and all. Said apartment was full of friends, phone calls, and visitors, distractions that made her cagier and crazier the further she got into her dense narrative. Everyone knew about the book soon enough, but nobody could get any details out of Peggy. She laughed when they teased her about writing “the great American novel,” changing the subject as quickly as possible.

Inside, though, she was occupied with much more than the creation of a really long book. Gone With the Wind was part of Peggy’s lifelong struggle to make sense of a tradition-bound world that expected her to content herself with her family name and her deft grasp of Southern customs. A dual narrative of a defeated way of life and an undefeatable heroine, it covers massive territory, weaving together birth and death, family ties, and fatal historical forces. Appropriately, Scarlett’s story plays out against a historical backdrop as complex and contradictory as its heroine, a woman whose internal battles are as violent as any Appomattox. At its core, the book is about the one thing Peggy knew best of all: fight.

Scarlett O’Hara is more than painfully self-serving. She’s a heroine who gets under the skin like that seductive splinter you can’t quite remove. Where perfect heroines are brave, she is weak; where they act with decision, she is fickle and mercurial. She wastes a lifetime of love on a harebrained obsession with a man of inaction, brutalizes her offspring, and throws away the affection of everyone who counts. And still we read and reread Gone With the Wind, as obsessed with Scarlett’s fight for her land, her life, and her ridiculous love as she is with her own survival.

Peggy’s exhaustive depiction of Civil War battles is nothing next to Scarlett’s smaller war on her own behalf. Unsuited for anything but luxury, Scarlett is the last person we’d expect to hike up her skirts and deliver a baby or schlep her hated sister-in-law, Melanie Wilkes, over miles of gutted terrain. But Scarlett is a warrior, if not always a particularly likable one. When backed into a corner, she fights for her life, dragging anyone and everyone along with her to epic effect.

Rumor has it that Margaret Mitchell wrote the scenes in which Scarlett survives the siege of Atlanta in one marathon sitting, and I for one have never been able to put them down, preferring instead to let myself be pulled along by Scarlett’s terror-fueled flight to Tara at the peril of my own appointments, meals, and bedtimes. I’ve inhaled the book again and again, from my first stint as a sixth-grader pressed up against a musty bus seat to my days as a relatively cosmopolitan woman cramped into commercial flights and solo lunches, but time and experience haven’t dulled the impact of Peggy’s ragged, unstoppable narrative. There’s something so cruel and vital about Scarlett’s fight that I can’t help but watch it, jaw ajar with the same awe inspired by an erupting volcano or a mudslide that threatens to take down Malibu.

But train-wreck voyeurism isn’t the only thing that makes Scarlett an unforgettable heroine. It’s easy to identify with her brief battle against the teachings of childhood, values that just don’t fit into a world full of maggots and starvation and $300 mortgages. As we watch Scarlett change from a girl who idolizes her gentle mother’s every action to a hard woman who would sell her body to save the farm, there’s an icky sense of identification. Who among us hasn’t had to reexamine something she thought was important when the stakes were high enough? And who among us hasn’t hurt someone else in the pursuit of her own goals?

Rhett Butler has it right when he points out that Scarlett’s never as appealing as when she’s backed into a corner. We can’t help but cheer her on, even as she steals her sister’s fiancé, shoots a Yankee in the face, and underestimates the love that surrounds her despite all odds. And we can’t help but envy her knack for dismissing risk when it is inconvenient to her, looking instead to a fictitious tomorrow that we know will never come:

“I won’t think of that now,” she said firmly. “If I think of it now, it will upset me. There’s no reason why things won’t come out the way I want them—if he loves me. And I know he does!”

She raised her chin and her pale, black-fringed eyes sparkled in the moonlight. Ellen had never told her that desire and attainment were two different matters; life had not taught her that the race was not to the swift. She lay in the silvery shadows with courage rising and made the plans that a sixteen-year-old makes when life has been so pleasant that defeat is an impossibility and a pretty dress and a clear complexion are weapons to vanquish fate.

Scarlett is nothing if not results-oriented, and she usually gets what she wants. Lacking in self-awareness and psychotically uninterested in the emotions or motivations of others, she uses the tools that have been given her, be they her inner grit or her mother’s green curtains. And she does so whether others accept her point of view or not. Even when it tears her up to do what she must do, she shoulders the burden of her life and moves ahead, her decisions swift, self-serving, and without compromise. This blinders-on approach is one of hard offense and unwavering defense, and defeat is not an option. Scary? Yes. Effective? Very.