The Novel Cure: From Abandonment to Zestlessness: 751 Books to Cure What Ails You (77 page)

Gone with the Wind

MARGARET MITCHELL

•   •   •

The Picture of Dorian Gray

OSCAR WILDE

O
ne problem with being vain, although it’s not the only one, is that it makes you selfish and stupid.

Scarlett O’Hara, the southern belle at the heart of Margaret Mitchell’s
Gone with the Wind
, is so aware of her green-eyed beauty that all she can think of is pretty gowns and winning the heart of not just the man she wants to marry, Ashley Wilkes, but of every young man in the vicinity. When she hears that Ashley has become engaged to his cousin Melanie—an undeniably plain girl—she can’t believe it. Obsessed as she is with outward beauty, she can’t begin to see Melanie’s other qualities—or the need to nurture them in herself. And so she remains stuck as a spoiled, petulant teenager, continuing to use her looks to get what she wants. As oblivious to the importance of kindness as to plight of the slaves all around her (as, indeed, the author herself at times appears to be), Scarlett runs roughshod over everyone, including her husband, Rhett. Finally, the truth dawns on her. The flawless Melanie has belatedly won her admiration, respect, and love for the same reasons she won Ashley’s all those years ago. And it has nothing to do with looks.

Vanity also makes you ugly in the end. In Oscar Wilde’s classic tale, when the incandescently beautiful Dorian Gray starts to realize that
everybody loves him for his looks, he becomes so worried about losing them that he pledges his soul for eternal youth, arranging that the handsome portrait of him painted by Basil Hallward deteriorates instead. He then embarks on a life of heedless hedonism under the tutelage of Lord Henry Wotton, and when a young actress whose heart he breaks commits suicide, an ugly sneer appears on the portrait. For our face bears testimony not just to the passing of the years, but to the evolving character of the person behind it. And as Dorian’s disregard for others leaves more and more wreckage in its wake, his portrait becomes correspondingly hideous.

Do we really even have to say it? Beauty is what’s on the inside.

See also:
Arrogance
•
Well-read, desire to seem

Cold Mountain

CHARLES FRAZIER

E
very now and again you bean lovers need to get down off your high horses and admit that death is an inevitable part of life. Eating only living things that grow from the soil is all very worthy, but the body cries out for blood every now and then. And although we admit that these days much meat is farmed in reprehensible ways, there are times—not least when you find yourself out in the wild without a picnic—when it might just be imperative to snack on a beast.

This is something that Inman, the protagonist of Charles Frazier’s
Cold Mountain
, knows better than most. Injured in Petersburg during the Civil War, Inman decides to journey back to his North Carolina home in the hopes of being reunited with the woman who holds his heart. He walks all the way, avoiding roads for fear of re-conscription into the Confederate army. He needs to eat, and his adventures largely spring from his attempts to procure himself a meal: stealing a basket of bread and cheese from women washing at a river, saving a widow’s hog from the feds and eating its brains, shooting a bear cub whose mother has died (which does leave him with some remorse).

Halfway through his travels, he meets a goat-herding woman who has lived in a rust-colored caravan surrounded by her herd for twenty-five years. Her relationship with her animals is one of total symbiosis. When she
strokes the goat she cradles in her arms, then gently slices its throat, its death is portrayed as a completely natural part of the cycle of life—loving and respectful, rather than cruel or wasteful. As Inman leaves her caravan with a bellyful of goat and forges on toward his beloved Ada, he clutches a drawing of a carrion flower plant that the goat woman has given him. The carrion flower emits a stink of rotten flesh in order to attract its carnivorous pollinators, which serves as a reminder of the tricks nature plays on itself to survive. With this, Frazier puts the carnivores among us firmly into the natural order of things.

Wuthering Heights

EMILY BRONTË

T
aking revenge is always a bad idea. It sets in motion a chain reaction of revenge and counterrevenge that inevitably escalates and becomes hard to stop.

Such a domino effect is played out in full, terrible glory on the tormented, windswept moors of Emily Brontë’s
Wuthering Heights
. When Mr. Earnshaw, lord of Wuthering Heights, brings the orphan Heathcliff into his home, his own children, Hindley and Catherine, resent it (see: Sibling rivalry). And when Mr. Earnshaw starts favoring Heathcliff over Hindley—while Catherine and Heathcliff fall in childish love—Hindley is even more put out and takes revenge on Heathcliff. Seeing this, Mr. Earnshaw takes revenge on Hindley by sending his son away to college, and shortly afterward he takes revenge on all of them by dying. Hindley inherits Wuthering Heights, and immediately sets about taking revenge on Heathcliff by reinstalling himself and his new wife, Frances, there and sending Heathcliff out to work in the fields.

Frances dies giving birth to a boy named Hareton,
*
and Hindley becomes a gambler and hits the bottle, and in his drunkenness takes revenge on Heathcliff even more. At about this time, Cathy, despite loving Heathcliff, marries Edgar Linton, who lives with his sister Isabella on the other side of the moor at Thrushcross Grange, and Heathcliff takes revenge on Cathy by
running away. Then he comes back and takes revenge on Hindley by arranging for Hareton’s education to be discontinued, so that the boy grows up illiterate. He also lends money to Hindley so that Hindley gambles and drinks even more and eventually dies. Heathcliff inherits Wuthering Heights and then gets his revenge on Cathy for marrying Edgar by marrying Edgar’s sister Isabella, which means he’s in line to inherit Thrushcross Grange should Edgar die. He is vile to Isabella as a way of getting revenge on Edgar for marrying Cathy.

Then Cathy, who lives at Thrushcross Grange, gives birth to a daughter named Catherine and dies
*
and Heathcliff runs over the moor wishing he had not taken revenge on Cathy, or she on him, and shortly afterward Isabella takes revenge on Heathcliff by running away to London and giving birth to a boy named Linton.
*
We then fast-forward thirteen years to when Cathy’s daughter Catherine crosses the moor from Thrushcross Grange to Wuthering Heights and meets Hareton, Hindley and Frances’s illiterate son. Then Isabella dies
*
and Linton goes to live with Heathcliff at Wuthering Heights. Heathcliff is horrible to him, presumably in revenge against everybody. Then Catherine meets Linton at Wuthering Heights and they fall in love, although it turns out that Heathcliff has talked Linton into seducing Catherine because if Linton and Catherine marry, Linton will inherit Thrushcross Grange as well as Wuthering Heights and Heathcliff’s revenge on Edgar Linton will be complete.