“As God Is My Witness…” – A Quote for Hard Times

I have an annoying habit. I quote things. I am the sort of person that breaks into Singin’ in the Rain when it rains (sad, true, now available on the internet). I love the smell of a lot of things in the morning. I tell people I like from the first glance that this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship. And among these quotations that I use more or less compulsively, I have one that’s reserved for when things are bad. Really, really bad. Or as bad as First World Problems go, anyway. Deadlines, excruciating social situations, deadlines, disgusting but inevitable house chores, deadlines, hangovers, hours stranded in the airport, deadlines (did I mention I am bad with deadlines?).

Any one of these things has, at one point in my life, featured above the blanks in a Scarlett O’Hara-style statement. “As God is my witness,” I said, time and again, “____ isn’t going to lick me. I’m going to live through this, and when it’s over I’m never going to write another paper/attend another class reunion/drink Cuba Libre/fall victim to an Icelandic volcano again.” Of course, not one of these things would actually stay a one-off occurrence (not even the Icelandic volcano part, and what were the chances of that happening again?). But in the end it didn’t matter that much, because parodying this line actually helped me get through things when they happened.

So I started thinking. What was to this line that made it so comforting? I am going to go on a limb here and say that large part of it was simply comedic value. It is just one of those lines that everyone uses and abuses, so parodied that there is almost no substance left to it.

See what I mean? The phrase hardly has any substance left!

But if besides the indisputable value of humor in bad situations (and, let’s face it, there is some comfort in knowing that no matter how bad things are, you can still crack a worse joke), this line offers a different type of comfort too, I think this can only come from the novel’s “appeal to fundamental emotions,” as one begrudging critic once put it. What this line sells is the promise – or, if you want, the illusion – of self reliance and self sufficiency in the face of adversities of all sorts. It basically sells you the hope that you can eventually have control over things that now seem overwhelming.

Of course, it is a cliché, but all clichés are lessons our culture already learned. And I think that perhaps, at the time Gone with the Wind was published, the world desperately needed exactly this sort of lesson. There had rarely been more disempowering times for the individual faced with the forces of history as the beginning of the 20th century. People had seen their lives torn apart in a war like no other they had encountered or heard of before, a war that seemed to have nothing to do with individual soldiers and their courage and skill, and everything to do with bombs and gas, killing impersonally and from afar. Pitched against something like this, men and women were powerless, as they would later be against another unseen enemy, the economy, when the Great Depression hit.

And whereas most of the time’s literature reflected this landscape of confusion and despair, this world where “things fall apart” and nothing much makes sense, Gone with the Wind, a popular novel in all connotations of the word, brought an escape and the promise of optimism. It brought back the old message that had motivated the Western World (and America in particular) ever since Robinson Crusoe set foot on his famous fictional island: the enterprising individual can make it by force of his own willpower against anything Providence throws at him. Gone with the Wind infused new life into the old story of self-reliance.

To the Ashley Wilkes-like characters of modernism, that admit defeat in front of a world that stopped making sense and seek the lost order and symmetry in books and countless references (because that’s all they have left), Mitchell opposed the strength of Scarlett, who refuses to fall victim to the world, but models and bends it to her will. And I imagine people naturally liked this, because it offered them the illusion that it was possible to stand up to history, to stand up to the economy, to stand up to all the things they couldn’t control in their lives. It was possible to at least live through it all, and once it was over, make sure it never happened again.

And it’s this aspect of the book, besides the romance, that gave it its timeless appeal to audiences worldwide. People, especially people who experienced hardships first-hand, could connect to Scarlett’s story and aspire to her strength. And, to me at least, this is the major element that makes Gone with the Wind an important milestone in our culture even now, at its 75th anniversary. And, coming back to me, I suppose it’s the echoes of this message that comfort me when First World Problems strike and that put things into their proper context again.

Or, well, maybe it is just the comfort of a bad joke.

She was sitting there waiting for something or somebody and, since sitting and waiting was the only thing to do just then, she sat and waited with all her might and main.

Anne of Green Gables, Lucy Maud Montgomery

The countdown continues…and today you can not only sign up to win a galley of The Heroine’s Bookshelf, but you can now turn to Jo March, Lizzie Bennet, and Scarlett O’Hara for advice to life’s pressing problems on The Roaring 20s.

“What are you doing up so late, Prima Donna?” he asked. “It’s not Saturday night, you know.”

“I was sitting at the window,” she whispered, “waiting for my arm to drop off.”

- Betty Smith, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn

Is the release of one’s first book as anguishing as Francie’s midnight vigil?  No way, but it’s fun to look back at passages about waiting from my favorite heroine tomes.

While you wait (just eight days to go) for The Heroine’s Bookshelf to hit your shelf, why not participate in a contest? 

Tell me who you can’t wait to tell about THB and why, and I’ll enter you in a drawing for one of five now-rare galleys of the book! *

Stay tuned for more prizes, guest posts, and anticipatory delights as we inch forward to October 19…and don’t forget to tell a friend about upcoming events in Colorado, New York, and Massachusetts  (details on the right-hand side of the blog)!

*Drawing will end Friday, October 15.  United States residents only, please!

P.S.:  GoodReads and LibraryThing members can win a finished copy of the book here: http://www.librarything.com/er/giveaway/list or http://www.goodreads.com/giveaway/enter_choose_address/5865-the-heroine-s-bookshelf-life-lessons-from-jane-austen-to-laura-ingalls

Maybe it’s some kind of lunar phase or solar phenomenon (since everyone I know seems to be in upheaval), maybe it’s my age or something in the water.  I’m certainly at sea, and it turns out that all I really know for sure is what I have known how to do since the beginning…read myself into comfort and some semblance of sanity.

These days that usually looks like a book by or about Louisa May Alcott, irascible and overworked, overwrought and feisty and cranky as can be.  You wouldn’t know it to read Eight Cousins or Rose in Bloom, which are replete with moral lessons even when they show life’s trials (which usually involve things like struggling to be as good as you should be, or contracting a fever which is healed by a cousin’s devoted care).  But I recently had reason to turn back to Little Women…well, more truthfully, I took advantage of my participation in GalleyCat’s World’s Longest Literary Remix Contest (results coming soon!) to revisit it.  And when I took a close look at Chapter 1, I was startled by the sheer restless, anxious energy that spews forth from the book’s first beloved pages.

Just look at the verbs and descriptions:  over the course of a few passages, Jo

• grumbles
• lies on the rug
• states her work makes her “ready to fly out the window or cry”
• laughs
• stretches
• puts her hands in her pockets and whistles
• pulls off her hairnet and shakes down her hair
• warms Marmee’s slippers
• chokes on her tea and drops her bread, butter side down, on the carpet…
• and sings with her sisters.

Could there be a better portrait of the restless energy of a 15-year-old girl too big for her body and outgrowing everything about her life?  Could there be anything more appealing to a modern girl (or struggling, tired, manic, stressed-out woman)?  The beauty, of course, is that some of that anxious spirit comes from Louisa herself.  And just one chapter in, I’m plunged back into one of my primary reasons for persevering:  my admiration of an unconventional “little woman” and of her creator, who had this to say about strife:

I’m not afraid of storms, for I’m learning to sail my ship.

There were so many ways of seeing things and so many ways of saying them.

- Laura Ingalls Wilder, On the Shores of Silver Lake

Left to right:  Caroline Celestia “Carrie” Ingalls, Mary Ingalls, Laura Ingalls, late 1870s

- Betty Smith, author of A Tree Grows in Brooklyn

Both.

This freckle-faced girl is Lucy Maud Montgomery:  Canadian, teacher, tortured optimist, dutiful preacher’s wife, “passionate friend,” and author of the beloved Anne of Green Gables series.

We’re hanging out for the next week as I plunge into the writing process, on which Maud had this to say:

For five months I got up at six o’clock and got dressed by the lamplight. The fire would not yet be on. The house was very cold but I would put on a heavy coat, sit with my feet up to keep them from freezing and with fingers so cramped that I could scarcely hold a pen. I would write my “stunt” for the day. Sometimes it would be a poem in which I would carol blithely of blue skies and rippling brooks and flowery meads! Then I would thaw out my hands, eat breakfast and go to school.

When people say to me, as they occasionally do, ‘Oh how I envy your gift, how I wish I could write as you do’, I am inclined to wonder, with some inward amusement, how much they would have envied me on those dark, cold, winter mornings of my apprenticeship.