The Racial Politics of Gone With the Wind

Helen Taylor

Gone With the Wind around town...

• Pittypat’s Porch
• Margaret Mitchell House
• Gone With the Wind Museum
• Inspiration for Twelve Oaks
• Gone With the Wind Itinerary
• Twelve Oaks Bed and Breakfast
• And many, many others...

Intro

• Spoofs, parodies, camp masquerades and performances of racial crossover seem to brush aside weighty political issues that cannot be avoided
• William Faulkner: “the past is never dead. It’s not even past”
• “This was especially true for Faulkner’s Deep South, where the past has a tendency to feature and resonate more than in other forward-thinking parts of the United States” (70)
• The Civil War (“The War Between the States”), slavery, and its legacy
• GWTW’s historical interpretation of these matters remains a problem
• Blatantly white southern perspective
• The nation’s most divisive and damaging war
• “...black modernist poet Melvyn B. Tolson attacked the film’s racism and its apparent claim to be ‘the story’ rather than ‘a story of the American South’” (71)

Pro-South and GWTW

• Should the film no longer be screened?
• Mythification of the Confederate South - connection to The Birth of a Nation (Griffith, 1915)
• Pro-South films were much more prevalent than Pro-North films in the early 20th century
• “...‘Public memory of the Civil War’ was controlled by a southern bias that argued the War was about states’ sovereignty rather than slavery
• The South violently shattered by a brutal, vindictive North
• Women, melodrama, and GWTW
• No battle sequences
• Focus on the homefront
• Ignored or sidelined issues or race

Selznick

• Selznick’s office assured the Hays Office that there’d be nothing unAmerican or prejudicial to any race or creed
• “Walter White, secretary of the NAACP, wrote to Selznick on 28 June 1938 warning him the ‘conferdatized’ story of the Reconstruction period erased from history the role and significance of the Negro, urging the producer to engage an African American historical advisor” (73)
• Selznick claimed the film was in no way “pro-slavery” or “anti-Negro”
• “Mammy and Uncle Peter were ‘treated very loveably and with great dignity’ while Prissy was ‘an amusing comedy character’ and Pork ‘an angel’” (73)
• Those patronizing words, despite best intentions, speak volumes about how slavery and the enslaved and free characters were treated in the film

KKK

• The term “Darkie” was used instead of the “N word”, despite Selznick’s original intent
• “Selznick emphasized that they must be ‘awfully careful that the Negroes come out decidedly on the right side of the ledger’” (75)
• Omitted references to the KKK
• The problem with that is that it “obfuscates the murky racial politics of the white characters, Frank Kennedy and Ashley Wilkes, aided and abetted by Rhett Butler”
• Secretive revenge plot understood by everyone except Scarlett
• Selznick substituted a white man for Margaret Mitchell’s African American rapist so the racist nature of the raid is rendered invisible

Film vs. Novel

• “...the film certainly aggrandized and ennobled Mitchell’s South” (75)
• “A pure violation of Margaret Mitchell’s vision”
• “...Selznick simplified the racial and class complexity of the novel...in order to produce nostalgia for ‘the innocent, lost world of the plantation South’” (75)
• “This distorts Mitchell’s more realistic vision of an Old South of ‘conflict and inner disorder...a place waiting for a disaster to happen’” (75-77)

Context of the Film’s Release

• POC were not permitted at the premier in Atlanta, not even the actors…
• Communist press condemned the film’s pro-capitalist, anti-black propaganda
• C.L.R. James: Selznick’s film is “dangerous”, arguing that it distorted American history and therefore “must be exposed and boycotted”
• We should point out “Gross historical falsifications” to counteract the popular perception that this was authentic history
• Pickets at the cinemas
• Hattie McDaniel wins an Oscar…
• The majority of the press coverage was overwhelmingly positive
• “Supreme triumph of Film History”
• Prissy was funny, Mammy was a “faithful slave”, etc.

Hattie McDaniel winning the Oscar for Best Supporting Actress

“While recognizing her fine performance, Leonard Pitts, Jr. suggested we imagine ‘a love story set against the last days of Auschwitz between, say, a Nazi guard and a secretary, depicting none of the horrors of the camp’, and asked rhetorically, ‘Might not you begin to feel that using the Holocaust as a backdrop for somebody else’s boy-meets-girl tale is just faintly obscene?’” (77)

Black Characters

• No historical basis for the unconditionally loving old Mammy figure
• Black characters allowed no subjectivity beyond their devotion to the white O’Haras
• Historical reality that for the second half of the film they are free men and women…
• Beautiful mise-en-scene soft-sells an image of “the Grand Old South”
• Hattie McDaniel was daughter of slaves and toured with their minstrel show
• First AA woman to sing on American radio
• “I’d rather play a maid and make $700 a week, than be a maid for $7”
• Mammy role didn’t lead to any other big roles
• Two stars on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, posthumously inducted into the Black Filmmakers Hall of Fame, first black Oscar winner to be on a US postage stamp

Mammy and Prissy

• Mammy’s role is to “produce the white southern belle and later matriarch that the antebellum South demanded of its women”
• Unnamed Mammy’s labor is naturalized throughout the film
• The actual manual labor takes place offscreen
• Two scenes have Mammy escaping the “comic fusspot stereotype”
• Drinking with Rhett after Bonnie’s birth
• Long, slow walk up the stairs with Melanie after Bonnie’s death
• Butterfly McQueen (Prissy) treated badly onset and was outspoken about this mistreatment
• Prissy portrayed as simple and comedic, getting bullied and laughed at
• Stayed away from the film’s marketing and reunions until decades later

Films Responding to GWTW

• Lots of films and texts are responding directly or indirectly to GWTW...
• Alice Randall’s parody of GWTW - The Wind Done Gone
• Roots (Chomsky, Erman, Greene, & Moses, 1977)
• The Color Purple (Spielberg, 1985)
• GWTW was “greatest movie ever made” according to Spielberg
• Alice Walker said of GWTW: “a film in which one spoiled white woman’s summer of picking cotton is deemed more important than the work, under the lash, of twenty generations of my ancestors”

Scarlett and Mammy

• Close relationship
• Praised by conservative critics, castigated as patronizing racism by others
• Mammy has power over Scarlett as enforcer of norms of southern behavior and etiquette (?)
• Mammy must shape Scarlett into a white lady of the planter class to “maintain Tara as the space of the family and of white rule”
• “Talking of the final scene in the book, when Scarlett yearns to return to home and Mammy, the mother who has nurtured her, Tara McPherson suggests that for the white woman (author and character), ‘blackness becomes a shadowy source of comfort and security, a desirable space of safety’”
• This is totally silenced in the film’s final scene.
• She instead hears voices of her father, Ashley, and Rhett (three white men)