Big Girl by Meg Elison

Author:Meg Elison
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: PM Press
Published: 2020-02-15T00:00:00+00:00

Gone with Gone with the Wind

I AM A REREADER. I have been all my life. The habit was born of necessity: I grew up poor and itinerant. The books I accumulated were from thrift stores, picked up in paperback for fifty cents or in hardback for a lofty dollar. I tried to pick books that were long and would last me a while. Periods away from the library or school left me without fresh books, so I would read the good ones over again.

Gone with the Wind was one of the longest books I had ever laid eyes on that wasn’t a history or a Bible. I knew the title from conversations about the movie. The cover made it look sexy, those flames and dark-haired lovers. My mother never had the time to censor what I could read, so at nine years old, I dove into Margaret Mitchell’s epic of the Civil War.

Except it isn’t. Written in 1936, Gone with the Wind predates the concept of Young Adult literature, or really even the idea of a young adult. But as the novel begins, Scarlett O’Hara is a sixteen-year-old girl caught between two cultures and about to embark on the greatest adventure of her life. If that’s not YA, I don’t know what is. It indulges in some of the most common trope constructions of the genre: Scarlett isn’t beautiful, except that she definitely is. She is torn between two love interests who are both very attractive but appeal to different parts of her nature. She is set against insurmountable odds yet gifted with privileges of which she is never made aware. She proves astonishingly competent at skills never taught to her: mathematics, running a business, shooting a trained soldier in the face. Scarlett O’Hara is Katniss Everdeen in a hoop skirt. I fell in love with this book.

Scarlett was easy to identify with: bratty, cunning, manipulative, emotionally turbulent, artificially disguised as a victim. She flouts social convention and disagrees with the limits set for her by a restrictive society and a boring family. As a burgeoning pre-teen, this was like catnip. The short sex scenes were smoldering promises of what was to come in my own sex life. I read these scenes in that deliciously furtive way that kids do, trying to discern the mechanics from flowery euphemisms. I wept over the personal and political tragedies of Scarlett’s life like they were my own. I was hooked.

I read Gone with the Wind the first few times as all kids read books: innocently. I did not yet know how to evaluate assertions or assumptions in fiction, to discern through an author’s use of tone what she valued and what she despised. I did not yet have the tools to understand the book’s racist content or consider my dissimilarities to Scarlett O’Hara. I was her and she was me and that was it. I entered adolescence with this book as my sorting hat. In the same way people use the Harry Potter

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