The
excitement and acclaim that greeted both the Peachtree and the Broadway
premieres of producer David O. Selznick's adaptation of Gone With the Wind just before Christmas seventy-five years ago
seems genuinely cringe-worthy today, after multiple indictments over recent
years of Margaret Mitchell's novel as racist and historically distorted. Mitchell
is clearly culpable on the first count, although by no means uniquely so, but
latter-day critics who charge her with distorting history would be well advised
to consider the history she had to work with and, in some aspects, even
undertook to revise.
Released in mid-summer 1936, Mitchell's
book had already sold more than a million copies in the U.S. alone by January,
1937. Rather than disappoint a multitude of adoring readers poring obsessively
over their favorite lines, the screen writers ultimately opted for scrupulous
fidelity to Mitchell's text. Yet, the film's opening credits, introducing it as
"Margaret Mitchell's Story of the Old South," were more applicable to its
dialogue than to some of the actual meanings Mitchell meant to convey. This
much was clear to Mitchell and her more thoughtful readers--even before the
first scene--in the scrolled lines setting the story in "a land of Cavaliers and
cotton " where "the Age of Chivalry took its last bow." Mitchell took great
exception to this spin on her story that, she consistently maintained, was
actually intended to insert some historical realism in an Old South narrative
long shrouded in fluttery romanticism. "I certainly had no intention of writing
about Cavaliers," she insisted, pointing out that "practically all my
characters, except the Virginia Wilkeses, were of sturdy yeoman stock."
Mitchell's words certainly rang
true in her depiction of prominent planter Gerald O'Hara as a semi-literate "bogtrotter"
who fled his native Ireland under suspicion for the murder of an English rent
collector. "Loud-mouthed and blustering," Mitchell's Gerald proceeds to parlay
his facility at poker and his "steady head for whiskey" into ownership of a
run-down plantation, and after marrying well above his own social station, he
ultimately satisfies his "ruthless longing" for a respected place in planter
society.
In the film, by contrast, the means
of Gerald's socioeconomic ascent is never addressed, much less the more questionable
aspects of his Irish background. Mitchell had also presented Tara as a "clumsy,
sprawling" structure with a simple whitewashed brick exterior. The filmmakers,
however, remained deaf to her several pleas for an "ugly, sprawling and
columnless" O'Hara residence in keeping with typical plantation houses in a
Georgia upcountry still not long removed from the frontier. Despite Mitchell's
attempts to revise key aspects of both popular and scholarly myth, producer
Selznick made it clear that he had no intention of poking holes in what
remained a delightfully marketable plantation legend. Thus, Mitchell was left
to conclude that she and a tiny cadre of southern historical realists might "write
the truth about the antebellum South . . . until Gabriel blows his trump, and
everyone would go on believing the Hollywood version."
In truth, the film did a little
better in capturing Mitchell's disdain for the legend of the white South's
heroic "Redemption" from Reconstruction by a resurgent planter aristocracy.
After the war, her high-minded, genteel families like the Wilkeses flounder and
fail, especially Ashley, who seemed wonderfully grand in the Old South but
proves woefully inept in the New. Scarlett, meanwhile, summons the grit and
gall that is her patrimony from the low-born Gerald, rising above her despair
in the garden at Twelve Oaks and heading off to a rebuilding Atlanta, where
there was "still plenty of money to be made by anyone who isn't afraid to
work--or to grab."
Scarlett quickly proves that she is hesitant to do neither. Her
"harsh contact with the red earth of Tara" has transformed her into a
thoroughgoing economic realist who grimly concedes that the Yankees were right
about at least one thing: "It took money to be a lady." Ironically, her only means of feeling like a
lady again was to "make money for herself, as men made money."
Suffice it to say, Mitchell's black characters reveal no such complexity or depth but remain steadfastly and stereotypically one-dimensional. Hence, the widespread perception today of her novel as nothing more than what one critic called "a racist, revisionist Southern apologetic" written by a wealthy white Atlanta debutante still embittered about the outcome of the Civil War. This facile exercise in regional stereotyping is unfortunate, to say the least, especially given the current anger and division nationwide over what appears to be a pattern of undifferentiated racial profiling by law enforcement, the courts, and let's face it, a lot of white citizens as well. Accordingly, Americans would do well to reconsider such conveniently narrow sectional pigeonholing of a book that was actually quite compatible with white racial attitudes, both popular and scholarly, prevailing nationally at the end of the 1930s and well beyond. Such a reconsideration might even mean that the next time an Eric Garner is killed by police outside the South, we could at least be spared the long since predictable, almost willfully naive reaction registered by a recent "Justice for All" protester who exclaimed, "This isn't the Deep South. This isn't Mississippi in the 1960s. This is New York City in 2014."
Novelist Pat Conroy has suggested
that, for still-angry and defiant white southerners, Gone With the Wind amounted to "a clenched fist raised to the North." This is doubtless correct, but there is little evidence
that many white northerners interpreted it this way at the time. Nor was there
much indication that Mitchell's racist language and depictions were
particularly offensive to whites outside the South in an early 1939 Gallup
survey suggesting that some 14 million Americans had read her book in its first
30 months in print and positing a likely national audience of some 56.5 million
viewers for the eagerly anticipated film based on it.
If neither Mitchell nor the great balance of
her national readership appeared to give much thought to the disturbing racial
realities behind the seductive southern legend, the same could just as easily
be said of a great many white academic historians, North and South. Mitchell
was thoroughly conversant with the relevant (white) scholarship at her
disposal, and her airbrushed portrait of slavery and casual indulgence in
racial stereotypes are hardly at
odds perceptions offered by two distinguished Ivy League historians in the most
widely used collegiate U.S. history textbook of the day. "Sambo," they assured
students, did not fare badly in bondage because, despite the horror stories
served up by the uptight abolitionists, "the majority of the slaves were
adequately fed, well cared for, and apparently happy."
Likewise, Scarlett's charge that
emancipation "just ruined the darkies" fairly echoed the sentiments of Columbia
University's profoundly influential historian of Reconstruction, William A.
Dunning, who insisted that "the freedmen . . . could not for generations be on
the same social, moral and intellectual plane with the whites." The sole aim of
Dunning and his many students and disciples, charged W. E. B. Dubois, was "to
prove that the South was right in Reconstruction, the North vengeful or
deceived and the Negro stupid."
Such biased and offensive treatments had
already passed for scholarship far too long when they finally came under
concentrated assault by black activists and educators during World War II. The
blatant hypocrisy of a Jim Crow army fighting in defense of freedom and
democracy abroad, as well as the greater economic and political empowerment
that the war engendered, had borne fruit in a more insistent, unremitting
resolve. African Americans must at last be granted the full measure of both
their rights as citizens and the dignity and respect those rights conferred. Still,
although white and black scholars alike would soon be undertaking dramatic
revisions of historical interpretations of slavery as well as Reconstruction, not
until 1960s would either the now-notorious "Sambo" passage be excised from the
still-popular textbook or the racist and inaccurate Dunningite portrayal of
Reconstruction meet with full-blown refutation.
Although Gone With The Wind consistently ranks second only to The Holy Bible as Americans' favorite
book, a new Economist poll shows that
only 20 percent of Americans have actually read it, while less than 30 percent
of those under thirty have even seen the movie. These figures might strike some
as positive rather than negative indicators, but there is a real sense in which
all Americans, regardless of age, race, or region, would benefit from reading
Mitchell's book for what it is, not simply as a white southerner's distorted
defense of her region's uniquely horrific racial past, but as a strikingly
clear window into a national past whose burdens confront them even today.
Although it may fall short of being a great one, Gone With The Wind is--and always was--a thoroughly American novel.
P.S. This bloviation is a streamlined version of a piece posted
over at likethedew.com.
P. P.S. The ol' Bloviator knows "Cobbloviate Heads" near and
far will not feel as though Christmas is really here until they receive the
traditional greetings of the season, courtesy of his faithful ol' pickup, which
is still flashing away after 20 years and 100k+ miles. Merry Christmas to you
all, and, as always, to the Techsters, who may still be celebrating
their-once-in-a-blue moon victory with a "Blue Moon" (ugh!) or several about
now, "Felice Bobby Dodd!"
