The night time earlier than Gone with the Wind’s Atlanta premiere in 1939, there was a ball at a plantation. Dressed as slaves, the youngsters of the black Ebenezer Baptist Church choir carried out for an all-white viewers. They sang ‘There’s Loads of Good Room in Heaven’; the actress enjoying Belle Watling, Rhett Butler’s tart with a coronary heart, wept. The scene is already putting: a painfully literal instance of the mythologising of the South for white consumption, redefining slavery as innocent and the slaves themselves as grateful. But Sarah Churchwell finds a jaw-dropping element: ‘One of many little Black kids dressed as a slave and bringing a sentimental tear to white America’s eye was a ten-year-old boy named Martin Luther King, Jr, who can be useless in thirty years for daring to dream of racial equality in America.’
Churchwell has written about American mythology earlier than, notably in Behold America: A Historical past of America First and the American Dream, in addition to in works on Marilyn Monroe and The Nice Gatsby. This time it seems like she has hit the motherlode: ‘The guts of the [American] delusion, in addition to its thoughts and its nervous system, most of its arguments and beliefs, its loves and hates, its lies and confusions and defence mechanisms and want fulfilments, are all captured (for essentially the most half inadvertently) in America’s most well-known epic romance.’ For Churchwell, ‘Gone with the Wind gives a form of skeleton key, unlocking America’s illusions about itself.’
It is a daring declare – however Gone with the Wind was, and stays, a phenomenon like no different. Printed in June 1936, Margaret Mitchell’s novel bought one million copies earlier than the top of that yr, received the 1937 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, and have become the bestselling American novel of all time. Even now, it shifts 300,000 copies yearly. In 1939, a movie model was launched, starring Vivien Leigh as Scarlett O’Hara and Clark Gable as Rhett Butler. Adjusted for inflation, it’s the highest-grossing movie of all time, forward of Avatar and Titanic. In 2020, when the South Korean movie Parasite – a biting satire on capitalism – received the Academy Award for Greatest Image, President Donald Trump expressed his displeasure: ‘What the hell was that each one about?’ he requested a rally in Colorado. ‘Can we get like Gone with the Wind again please?’ As regular, his viewers understood precisely what he meant.
If the concept one e book and movie may be the skeleton key to an entire tradition appears simplistic, Churchwell swiftly begins to pile up startling proof briefly, pithy chapters. Race, gender, the Misplaced Trigger, the American Dream, blood-and-soil fascism, the prison-industrial advanced, a Trumpist mob storming the Capitol in 2021: it’s all right here, and it’s all certain up with the themes of Gone with the Wind. Mythmaking is not only the constructing of fantasies but additionally the erasure of reality. The genocide of native peoples, as an illustration, isn’t within the e book or movie, however it was happening at simply the time that Gerald O’Hara would have been buying land in Georgia: ‘Scarlett’s beloved Tara is constructed upon land that was stolen from indigenous Individuals a mere decade earlier than her beginning.’ Churchwell cuts by way of these thorny topics with a propulsive assurance. Her writing is a unprecedented mix of wit, mental agility and forcefulness: it’s like being swept alongside by an especially good bulldozer.
Churchwell doesn’t flinch from the horrors that Gone with the Wind belies. The e book and movie propagate the Misplaced Trigger delusion, portraying the South as a spot of chivalry, slavery as benevolent and the members of the Ku Klux Klan as honourable males stepping up because the world round them collapses. Churchwell exhibits us how these myths had been constructed from the top of the Civil Conflict onwards, and congealed seventy years later into Gone with the Wind. The fact of the reassertion of white supremacy throughout and after Reconstruction was, as Churchwell exhibits, horrific: there may be some deeply upsetting materials right here on the terrorisation of each black folks and people whites who didn’t adjust to supremacist social codes. Lynchings had been marketed upfront in native newspapers, ‘simply as a enjoyable truthful or circus might need been’. A typical headline from 1905: ‘Will Burn Negro: Officers Will In all probability Not Intervene in Texas’. Eight folks had been lynched within the yr of Gone with the Wind’s publication.
‘Most defences of Gone with the Wind maintain that whereas the novel’s racism is objectionable, it’s of its time and within the background, of secondary significance to Scarlett’s interesting psychological power,’ Churchwell writes. ‘However that defence replicates the novel’s politics, through which white ladies’s energy is preserved at the price of Black folks’s equality.’ When Scarlett and Rhett have intercourse within the novel, after a lot emphasis of her whiteness, that is how Mitchell describes it: ‘She was darkness and he was darkness and there had by no means been something earlier than this time, solely darkness and his lips upon her.’ Churchwell zooms straight in: ‘Darkness, with all its racial connotations, is the place ethical, social, and erotic dysfunction collide: the phobia and thrill of uncooked energy unleashed.’
Mitchell herself, after all, was a white Southern lady. Churchwell refers to Mitchell’s ‘internalization of white victimhood’: she believed that the oppressed folks in her story had been white Southerners pressured to just accept racial equality. Mitchell initially titled her e book ‘Tote the Weary Load’, appropriating the title of a slave non secular, ‘reworking Black struggling into white martyrdom: the folks toting weary masses in her novel are all the time the white plantation class, by no means the Black enslaved’. Mitchell used a few of her wealth to fund scholarships at Morehouse Faculty, a traditionally black college, but when she herself had encountered a black scholar in her historical past classroom at Smith Faculty, she had thrown a tantrum and demanded to be moved to a different class, ‘the place she was protected from having to think about both the historic, or precise, existence of Black folks’.
The display model of Gone with the Wind couldn’t solely ignore the existence of black folks, so it toned down the e book’s racist language in addition to a few of its racial violence. There’s a diploma of irony in Scarlett, whose ‘magnolia pores and skin’ is closely fetishised, being performed by Vivien Leigh, who most likely had Indian ancestry. The producer, David Selznick, and Leslie Howard, who performed Scarlett’s past love, Ashley Wilkes, had been each of Jewish origin. Howard, says Churchwell, ‘categorically refused to learn Gone with the Wind’. Most notably, although, the movie’s black solid needed to be persuaded to work on a white supremacist venture. Hattie McDaniel, who received an Oscar for her efficiency as Scarlett’s maid, Mammy, was born to folks who had each as soon as been enslaved. Her father was a veteran of the Union Military who had fought within the Civil Conflict. McDaniel insisted she had taken the function for the cash: ‘she had chosen between $700 per week to play a maid, or $7 per week to be a maid.’ But she and Butterfly McQueen, who performed Prissy, should have cared a bit about what they had been doing. Each lobbied to have one of many novel’s most-used phrases – rendered by Churchwell as ‘nxxxxr’ – excised fully from the screenplay. Ultimately it was, although solely after Selznick struck a cope with the censors to remove it in return for being allowed to maintain Rhett Butler’s remaining ‘rattling’.
The movie could have softened the e book’s language and violence; it could have introduced the Ku Klux Klan as a ‘social membership’ with out utilizing its identify. But it couldn’t change the that means and the message of the e book, as a result of, as Churchwell exhibits, they’re embedded in each character, each motion, each twist and switch of the story. Some argued that the movie made the Misplaced Trigger delusion extra palatable to a wider viewers: the black-run New York Age described it as a ‘$4,000,000 sugar-coating of Southern mythology’. Churchwell means that the elimination of that one objectionable phrase ‘had the unlucky impact of persuading many white audiences that nothing objectionable had occurred within the first place’.
How would possibly trendy Individuals start to unpick this fastidiously woven delusion? Within the first place, they must need to – and it’s clear from the previous few years that many would relatively hold it intact. Churchwell’s excoriating evaluation is energising, however she doesn’t present a revelation. I ended the e book pondering of Scarlett’s final line within the film, which is banal however hints at the opportunity of change: ‘In any case, tomorrow is one other day.’ Maybe, someday, the change will go towards her.
