Free Hit Lit: Cracking the Code of the Twentieth Century's Biggest Bestsellers by James W. Hall Page A

that sense, she’s almost a comic character, unaware of the gravity of her situationand therefore innocently undaunted by the overwhelming obstacles facing her. It simply never occurs to Scarlett that she’s acting heroically.
    For most of the novel, Scarlett’s tribulations center around mundane matters of survival in the social realm, and most readers would surely understand how treacherous this realm can be. Scarlett has to master the complex minuet of manners and proper behavior of polite society at the very moment those things are in a state of radical transformation.
    As she is coping with wartime realities and the new condition of being a widow and living in Atlanta’s hothouse of decorum, Scarlett’s personal story unfolds against the backdrop of the most tumultuous period in our history. Scarlett thrives, turning herself into a smashing business success, chiefly by marrying anyone who can help her achieve her ends. In this sense, the novel is as much a story about female empowerment and the redefining opportunities of the industrial age as it is a flirty romance. Big themes, sweeping issues, a very large stage for one of American fiction’s biggest stars.
    Later, in scenes with panoramic sweep, Scarlett O’Hara takes charge of her family and leads them home to Tara amid smoldering scenes of battle and death and destruction. She must tear up her petticoat to use as a halter for a cow. Later she must pick cotton to survive. She kills a Yankee soldier who invades her house. She loses a child and two husbands (a third, if you count Rhett), and she rises to every occasion, fueled by romantic longings as vast as the larger-than-life landscape she passes through.
    Scarlett’s focus is outward. She keeps her sights on the exterior realities of social politics, the finer points of corsets and ball gowns—the nitty-gritty sociology of her era. Without the giant wheels of history clattering behind her, her story mighthave collapsed into a froth of silliness. But with the enormity of change occurring before our eyes, the violent death of the Old South and the reinvention of American life, the cataclysmic changes in racial arrangements and class and gender values, Scarlett’s struggles take on greater scale and more heft as well.
    As is the case with most bestsellers, two stories are at work, one small, one large. And two Scarletts are required to merge these stories into one. The foreground narrative is about the emotional cravings of a petty, narcissistic ingenue—Scarlett’s ceaseless pining for Ashley and her schemes to win his love—while the other story is a broad-canvased epic that features a tough-as-nails young woman who confronts Yankee soldiers, triumphs in a ruthless business world, and successfully adapts to the most wrenching social changes our country has ever known.
RACIAL POLITICS
    An entirely different type of scope is found in
To Kill a Mockingbird
. On first blush, this portrait of secluded small-town life rendered through the eyes of a preadolescent girl would seem an improbable candidate for a novel of scale.
    Many of us have a tendency to associate the large political and social convulsions of any particular era with urban centers, believing those upheavals to be muted to inconsequence by the time they filter out into the hinterlands of rural America. Al Zuckerman, in his guide to writing a “blockbuster,” puts it bluntly: “Less than 1 percent of the population can afford to buy hardcover fiction with regularity, and that affluent group tends to be more interested in rich people than inpoor ones, in city dwellers rather than in rural folk, in movers and shakers rather than in the downtrodden.”
    Well, that’s not exactly accurate.
To Kill a Mockingbird
is one of the most commercially successful novels of all time, and its setting is as far removed from urban America as one can get. But because the novel sends its taproot deep into the loamy soil of vital American concerns, its appeal