written artwork - gone with the wind

Eight hundred twenty four.

That is how many pages I joyously read to reach the end of this epic novel. Margaret Mitchell wrote Gone With The Wind in 1936 and it quickly became a bestseller. The book centers around Georgia during the Civil War which I am assuming resonated with the general public because World War I had ended only 18 years previous to it's publishing. World War II also started only three years after.

I personally loved this book for many reasons, but what kept me turning each page was really from two sources. The first is obviously the character story lines and the relationships you become so apart of. Love, drama, excitement....anger, jealousy, fear. You get it all in this book. With a main character such as Scarlett O'Hara, it's difficult not to stay intrigued. But my second source is the marvelous way historical events and culture were expertly woven into the story line. I am a sucker for history and especially history of war times. Mitchell chose to tell the story of those on the losing side of the Civil War. How interesting to sympathize with those fighting to keep slavery! Even though I knew the outcome of the war...I found myself cheering on the Confederacy and hating those damn Yankees.

Woven into the historical aspect of the story, lives of women in this turbulent time was an obvious focus. These women live in a manner wholly different from my own existence. I do not identify with the title "feminist," but it is amazing to see how far we've come since these times. For example, I was dumbfounded to read that pregnancy was a "medical problem" to be embarrassed of. Women were expected to hide their "condition" until they could no longer, at which point they were forced to stay in their home until the birth. In some cases it was even hidden from the husband! This is such an extreme juxtaposition from our modern day glorification of pregnancy where you find pregnant bellies with tight fitting garments showing their curves.

When having a conversation with my younger brother, he was expressing how boring he was finding his required reading of Pride and Prejudice. An obvious romance book, this was not a surprising thing to hear from an 18 year old dude. I figured he was having trouble even remotely identifying with characters such as Mr. Darcy. So I suggested that he look at the book with a new lens. Instead of struggling to find ways to relate, seek out the differences and examine how intriguingly unusual they are. I found myself constantly doing this through Gone With the Wind. This practice found me longing to be in Scarlett's world....as well as being grateful for existing in my own.

A list of what's to come, and what has already been explored.

My Written Artwork Journey Explained

1. Animal Farm - George Orwell
2. The Great Gatsby - F. Scott Fitzgerald
3. Emma - Jane Austen
4. Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
5. Cat on a Hot Tin Roof - Tennessee Williams
6. Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
7. Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde - Robert Louis Stevenson
8. Frankenstein - Mary Shelley
9. The Canterbury Tales - Geoffrey Chaucer
10. Les Miserables - Victor Hugo
11. Nineteen Eighty-four - George Orwell
    
12. Death of a Salesman - Arthur Miller
13. Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
14. The Scarlet Letter - Nathaniel Hawthorne
15. The Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
16. Treasure Island - Robert Louis Stevenson
17. Pickwick Papers - Charles Dickens
18. Catch-22 - Joseph Heller
19. The Catcher in the Rye - J.D. Salinger
20. Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
21. Invisible Man - Ralph Ellison
22. Lord of the Flies - William Golding
23. Slaughterhouse-Five - Kurt Vonnegut
24. The sun Also Rises - Ernest Hemingway
25. Their Eyes Were Watching God - Zora Neale Hurston
26. Things Fall Apart - Chinua Achebe
27. Love in the Time of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
28. War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
29. Little Woman - Louisa Ma Alcott
30. Crime and Punishment - Fedor Dostoyevsky
31. Watership Down - Richard Adams
32. Doctor Zhivago - Boris Pasternak
33. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn - Mark Twain
34. Alls Quiet on the Western Front - Erich Maria Remarque
35. Sherlock Holmes - Arthur Conan Doyle
36. Moby Dick - Herman Melville
37. The Red Badge of Courage - Stephen Crane
38. Robinson Crusoe - Daniel Defoe
39. Tales - Edgar Allan Poe
40. Diary of a Madman and Other Stories - Nikolai Gogol
41. Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
42. A Farewell To Arms - Ernest Hemingway
43. Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen