I'm reading Gone with the Wind, and in the afterword, Margaret Mitchell says that the book is about people with "gumption." Hmmm....let's see what Webster's has to say about gumption:
Boldness of enterprise; initiative or aggressiveness.
Guts; spunk.
Common sense.
I am not, of course, Margaret Mitchell, but in my humble opinion (and I'm only halfway through the book right now, so I give you that caveat), this book is not about gumption but about endurance. Now, Scarlett O'Hara, one can argue, is full of gumption, as is Rhett Butler, but right now (and perhaps the characters will flesh out a bit later), they are caricatures of what Margaret Mitchell thinks a spunky southern Belle should be or what a scoundrel of a gentleman would be in the form of Rhett Butler. All book club pontificating aside, what this book has brought to my attention is the mores, customs, and delicacies of the South in that time period, especially for the women. But, I believe, sadly, that time has not changed things all that much. The overt customs are of course, much different, but the game playing remains much the same.
I am going to make a bold statement here, and please, feel free to disagree, but over the course of several books I have read recently (A Game of Thrones, Random Family, GWTW, and The Lonely Polygamist) what I have gleaned is this: Women are still looking to men as forms of currency. As meal tickets. As the answer to "happily ever after." Random Family pointed this out most beautifully as young women (let's tell the truth here, girls) in the Bronx scramble about madly and make themselves sexually available to pretty much anybody in order to give them a son (because if you can give him a son, you might move up the scale from "baby momma" to "wife" -- which is still not an actual wife -- but you get my drift). In GWTW's time, the women were courted by and married men they barely knew, and then, should the match not work, quietly suffered through a lifetime (and I bet the men were suffering, too) with someone they were not interested in even looking at, much less sleeping with. A Game of Thrones takes place in, I don't know, some medieval time when young girls were thrust into relationships with other families in order to build alliances, so I'll let that pass (but still, currency). The Lonely Polygamist shows that even four women cannot satisfy poor Golden Richards, who simply longs to pick who he wants to love instead of being forced by his church to pick women they think will "build the kingdom."
People will sometimes try to trick you into love. And my question is this: if you have to trick, cajole, demand, forget that you've been lied to, cuckolded, ignored, or abused, is this love? And is it gumption, or endurance, if you stay?
I look forward to the end of the book. Maybe it will be about gumption after all.
