[June 30th
marks the 80th anniversary of the initial publication of one of the
20th century’s bestselling novels, Margaret
Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind
(1936). So this week I’ll offer a handful of thoughts on the book and its
legacies, as well as some of the broader issues to which it connects.]
On one important—if
ironic—way that Mitchell’s novel revised historical narratives.
I’ve been pretty
hard on Gone with the Wind in this
week’s first two posts, and am going to continue to be pretty hard on it in the
last two; to paraphrase one of my very favorite film lines, the contexts for
which would comprise a huge spoiler for the film in question so I’m not gonna
give them, “Gone is a goddamn legend;
it can handle it.” But I would be remiss if I didn’t dedicate at least one post
to highlighting and analyzing an aspect of Mitchell’s novel that deserves a great
deal of praise: the skeptical, and at times even downright subversive,
perspectives on the antebellum South and the Civil War that she allows her main
characters Rhett Butler and Scarlett O’Hara (respectively) to voice in some key
passages in the novel’s first half. To cite only a couple examples: Rhett tells
Scarlett that he’s happy to make his wartime fortune out of “the wreckage” of
the antebellum South (193-194), having consistently poked fun at that society and
its stylized and outmoded customs and social mores during the novel’s pre-war
period; and when it comes to the war Scarlett goes even further, arguing in
response to some proudly Confederate neighbors that the South’s cause is “not
sacred” but rather “silly” (171).
You don’t have
to be particularly familiar with the literary and historical contexts for
Mitchell’s novel to recognize such lines for the unexpected and surprising
moments they are. But there’s one especially salient literary context that
makes the point even clearer: the plantation tradition.
As scholar Donna Campbell details at length on that site (part of her wonderful webpage),
the plantation tradition comprised a dominant form of American local color
writing in the late 19th and early 20th century, one
through which idealized images of the slave South and the
Lost Cause and many related historical myths were created, amplified, and
communicated to mass national audiences. Mitchell would famously write to
Thomas W. Dixon, one of the tradition’s most prominent and influential
purveyors, that she was “practically raised” on his novels; she sent him the
letter in response to one
from Dixon to her in which he had called Gone “the greatest story of the South ever put down on paper.” Yet
despite the similarities in her second-half portrayal of Reconstruction to
those in Dixon’s Clansman and Birth of a Nation (the troubling issues about
which I wrote in Monday’s post), there’s simply no way to read Gone with the Wind and miss the
distinctions in her first-half depictions of the antebellum South and the Civil
War from those of the plantation tradition’s defining works.
Or so you’d
think. Yet one of the most enduring legacies of Mitchell’s novel (and,
certainly, its film adaptation) has been the formation of communities
of Windies, groups of uber-fans who have undoubtedly read the novel as
frequently and thoroughly as any audiences could and yet who seem to focus much
of their attention on recreating precisely a “moonlight
and magnolias” version of the antebellum South. How do we explain this
central Gone with the Wind irony?
Certainly Mitchell’s troubling second half, and especially Rhett Butler’s culminating
conversion to a nostalgic Lost Cause devotee (on which more tomorrow), has played
a role. So too has an overarching fascination with the Old
South and its belles, beaus, and balls, a cultural narrative that has
adopted Gone as an iconic text
despite the novel’s aforementioned critiques of many elements of the Old South.
Whether we place the blame more on Mitchell or on her (and
our) culture and society, we can in any case certainly learn a lot about how
historical myths are created and perpepuated. Yet we shouldn’t allow that
process to overshadow the interesting moments and ways in which Mitchell’s
characters and novel resist and challenge such mythmaking.
Next Gone post
tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you
think? Memories or perspectives on Gone with the Wind you’d share?
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