I Am Beautiful: A Celebration of Women in Their Own Words

Margaret Mitchell readingcongratulatory notes in herAtlanta, QA home followingthe announcement that hernovel had won the PulitzerPrize, May 1937. Below,John P. Marsh, Mitchell'ssecond husband.failed to show up in court, he didn't call, he didn't write.Writing, like all art, can be an attempt to resolve contradictionsthat cannot be reconciled in life. And certainlyMitchell's life was fraught with contradictions: A tomboywith a lust for adventure, she had been compelled to actout the role of dutiful daughter and southern debutante.An avid journalist, she had been sidelined on the"women's page"; the daughter of a militant suffragist, shehad been shamed and abused by her mother. An enthusiasticcollector of erotic writing, she expressed a profoundaversion to male sexuality. Raised on stories about theglory days of the Confederacy, Peggy Mitchell could hardlyreconcile these with the poverty and explosive racial tensionsin the Atlanta of her girlhood.Turning to writing for the closure she needed, one of thefirst orders of business was to exorcise her guilt at the failureof the marriage. In the novel, Rhett is not blamed forthe rape. He is depicted as being driven to it by Scarlett'sprovocations, and by her not-so-secret love for AshleyWilkes, a married man. In reality, Peggy had been notoriousfor playing multiple boyfriends off against each other,and she was known to brag about her ability to tease herdates into a frenzy of sexual frustration. Also, like Scarlett,she fancied herself in love with a man she could neverhave. Clifford Henry had been a friend of Peggy's brother,a lieutenant and a recent Harvard graduate. He was a gentle,philosophical man, and it was their shared love of literaturethat formed the bond between him and Peggy. Beforegoing overseas, Clifford had given Peggy his ring. AtSmith, Peggy's romance with an "older man" at the frontwas a subject of envy. The friendship was a sincere one,and when she received news that he had been killed at thefront, Peggy had been genuinely grieved.Four years later, at the time of her marriage to Red,Peggy apparently came to the realization that CliffordHenry had been the one true love of her life. It is not knownwhy she shared this insight with her new husband, but itmay have provided Red with an excuse for hisviolence. But Peggy's "one true love" hadbeen even more inaccessible than Scarlett's.Not only was Clifford dead, but one biographersuggests that he might have been gay.In Gone With the Wind, Scarlett is scapegoatedand punished ruthlessly, both for her flirtingand for her infidelity. For MargaretMitchell to have justified compulsive flirtingas a learned response to a social milieu thatsystematically stripped women of the powerto direct their lives, she would have needed afeminist perspective which was still 50 yearsin the future. For her to know that the batteringwas not her fault, she would have neededto hear the voices of other battered women.For her to receive validation for the criminalityof rape by her husband, she would haveneeded the legislative reform spurred by activistsagainst domestic violence. And for herto understand her attraction to dispassionatemen and platonic affairs, she would haveneeded the critique of compulsory heterosexualitywhich could only emerge from a visibleand vocal lesbian culture.But Margaret Mitchell did not have these things. She hada typewriter and a desperate need for closure. Batteredwomen have powerful stories to tell; when there are no appropriateoutlets, they tell them any way they can.SOME TELL THE STORY IN THEIR BODIES, WITH CHRONIC ILLnessor injuries. Some tell their stories through chronicexhaustion or mental debilitation. Other women keeptelling the story with their lives, pitifully seeking closure inabusive relationship after abusive relationship. And somewomen tell their strongest stories with their lies, with theirdenial. These are the women who stand in the subways,one hand on the strap and the other clutching a romancenovel. These are the women who spend the whole afternoonwatching soap operas—the women who buy Regencynovels by the gross, reading one after another.It doesn't matter that the plots are indistinguishable, thatthe main characters are all the same—in fact, that's thepoint. These novels and soap operas, if read or viewed frequentlyenough, provide a pseudo-reality, a closure ofsorts—as long as they never end. What lies behind the romanceaddiction—the compulsion to hear over and overthe stories of love at first sight, of Sleeping Beauty beingawakened with a kiss? The answer is horror, the horror oflifetimes—hundreds of thousands of women's lives—wasted,destroyed, sold into slavery by lies and lies and liespassed down from grandmother to mother, from mother todaughter. Romance literature is Western mind-binding, femaleemotional castration.Romance is the legacy of our colonization as women,which we pass on to each other in the blind belief that itwill ease our bondage. Instead, it perpetuates it, becausethe woman invested in romantic fantasy will interpret herdegradation as the result of a personal failing, instead of adeliberate goal of a male dominant culture. Scarlett O'Haracould afford to put off reality; she could always think aboutit tomorrow. But for real women, today is all we have. •O N THE ISSUES • Spring 1997