New blog look, dissertation

I am working towards a new look and feel for this blog. Now, especially after the Earlham School of Religion experience,  I am more integrated, whatever that means, and hope the blog will reflect that consciousness. I'm already blogging here as much about my other passions as about Quakerism. Quakerism has become less a goal I am sailing towards than a ground supporting me or, especially since I joined Stillwater Meeting, the air I breathe. I keep thinking of the Buddhist idea (also very Quaker) that religion is a boat carrying you to the shore of enlightenment. Once you reach the shore, you no longer need the boat. I still need the boat but perhaps have reached a marshy ground ...

More appropriate might be the metaphor of the labyrinth. When you walking the path and seem closest to the center, you are often, paradoxically farthest from the center, and when physically seemingly farthest from the center, sometimes closest to it.

After some delays, I am at the very beginning of starting the process of writing my dissertation through the Woodbrooke program connected with the University of Birmingham. Years ago, I earned an MA in English literature, completed coursework towards the PhD and passed my PhD oral exams in English. Last December, I finished my MDiv. Finishing the PhD  continues the process of integration as the dissertation will be merging literature, theology and Quakerism. I hope to blog about this from time to time.

Gone With the Wind: Interrogating Racism

This post will fall into the category of BSP--but also promotion for what I believe is a worthy book (I haven't received my copy yet), Civil Strife, published by the Indiana College English Association. I do want to give a special shout out to the efforts of editor Nancy Riecken. My article on Gone With the Wind appears in the Civil Strife anthology.

I argue in my essay that Gone with the Wind is an ironic novel that sharply critiques both slavery and patriarchy While I do not mention Jane Austen in the paper and while Austen is not in any way a direct source for GWTW, Mitchell, I believe, followed in Austen's ironic tradition of the "polite lady" talking out of both sides of her mouth.  Mitchell disavowed liking Jane Austen, but she read her novels as a child and wrote juvenilia that was ironic in the same vein as Austen's juvenilia. (I don't imagine Mitchell read the juvenilia but I place importance on the early "voice" of both authors). For a time in the 1920s, Mitchell wrote an advice column, albeit one that she inherited, called "Ask Elizabeth Bennet," named for the lead character in Pride and Prejudice. Mitchell also stated explicitly that she wrote GWTW to critique the romantic ideology of "The Old South" still current in the 1920s when she began the book.

We often read the novel through the lens of the movie, which misses much of the book's wit and irony. Also, as my friend Ellen Moody points out, because Mitchell was a woman writing in a woman's genre it has been easy to dismiss her.

I am more "circumspect" in this polite, scholarly article than I would like to be. I would like to scream: Scarlett is an idiot! Whites in the novel are idiots! Blacks in this novel (witht he possible exception of Prissy and I wouldn't even be entirely sure of that) are smarter than whites!

What does this have to do with Quakerism? Not much, except that Quakers too critiqued slavery and patriarchy.

The article is below:

Civil War and “civil” war: Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind: Interrogating

Racism

The dramatic intensity of Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind has captured

the imagination of millions. Readers and critics alike have understood this book

about war’s devastating destruction as serious, dramatic fiction. Critic Amanda

Adams writes that the novel displays “gritty realism:” Mitchell, the “journalist” was

“ever straightforward” (66). John Crowe Ransom attacks Mitchell’s seeming

earnestness and lack of Southern wit, attributing this to Mitchell having, in his

words, “deeply committed herself to the mentality of her Scarlett” (Adams 73). Not

surprisingly, the black community, fearing violence, immediately condemned the

novel and was even more scathing in its reception of the movie (Burks eg. 62). More

recently, Carolyn See writes of Gone With the Wind’s “creepy racism” (Ryan 267).

While its dominant chord is blatantly racist, and while the novel does

promulgate—however inadvertently‐‐ the myth of the happy plantation, a strong

minor chord also runs through the narrative that interrogates this reading. Mitchell

employs irony in this novel, an irony that functions to distance the reader from her

highly flawed white protagonists and their worldviews. Along with irony, Mitchell

uses her slave’s histories to undercut the false ideology her white characters spout,

be it white male supremacy, romantic nostalgia for the Old South or dog‐eat‐dog

postwar Social Darwinism. As her biographer, Darden Asbury. Pyron wrote, in her

personal life, Mitchell, despite the reception of her novel, “mocked, ridiculed and

scorned the myths and pretensions of the Old South” (243).

Mitchell’s opening is littered with back stories of characters which problematize

from the outset a romantic view of the Old South. Mitchell wrote the first chapter of

the novel last, months after the manuscript had been accepted for publication. As

Pyron describes it, Mitchell “fought the first chapter battle as fiercely as any

skirmish she ever launched. … She wrote version after version after version. …"

(291). Because this beginning chapter clearly mattered to her, we can assume

nothing entered into it without her careful consideration, as it set the tone for a

novel that she hoped, wrote Pyron, would critique antebellum ideology (577).

In this opening, 16‐year‐old belle Scarlett O’Hara entertains her neighbors and

beaux, the Tarleton twins, on the front porch of her family plantation, Tara. It’s a

beautiful evening, the dogwood and peach blossom in bloom, and wealth, beauty,

ease and plenty abound. The twins, like Scarlett, “waited on hand and foot since

infancy, ” “lounge” idly. War, however, is in the air, which bores Scarlett. Trying to

please her, the Tarletons share the “secret” (ironically known to everybody but

Scarlett) that Ashley Wilkes’s engagement to Melanie Hamilton will be announced at

the Wilkes’s barbeque the next day. For reasons inexplicable to the doltish twins,

though shared with reader through Scarlett’s thoughts, the mood sours, and after

lingering in hopes of a dinner invitation, the disappointed males finally move to

leave.

At this point, readers experience two surprises or revelations [1]—first, the

twins have brought with them their slave, Jeems, who has been eavesdropping on

their conversation with Scarlett. Then a second surprise emerges, one that

undermines immediately the assumption of white superiority on which the

Southern slave economy is built— we learn that Jeems [2] is more intelligent than

his owners.

Though they insult him with the ease of those who have the uncontested right

to bully, it is Jeems who supplies the explanation for Scarlett’s mood:

Look ter me lak she sho glad ter see you an' sho had missed you, an' she cheep

along happy as a bird, tell 'bout de time y'all got ter talkin' 'bout Mist' Ashley

an' Miss Melly Hamilton gittin' mah'ied. Den she quiet down lak a bird w'en de

hawk fly ober.

The twins looked at each other and nodded, but without comprehension.

Jeems’s story begins a series of scattered slave vignettes that call into

question the myth of the happy plantation. We learn that Jeems, although

clearly always enslaved, had first been the twins “playmate,” a term connoting

equality. Then, he “had been given to the twins for their own on their tenth

birthday,” the “for their own” emphasizing the twins’ now overt control over

him. One could skim over that change in status—or one could stop long

enough to feel a chill for what it might have been like for a boy to be handed

over as property to two lively 10‐year‐olds, who could do with him what they

pleased, including casual brutality. Not long after leaving Tara’s porch, for

example, Stuart threatens to “beat” Jeems’s “hide off” for insulting a poor white

man—a threat Jeems treats with unconcern but which focalizes the violence

that maintains the slave culture. Likewise, Mammy’s back story could give a

thoughtful reader pause:

She had been raised in the bedroom of Solange Robillard, Ellen O'Hara's mother,

a dainty, cold, high‐nosed French‐woman, who spared neither her children nor

her servants their just [!] punishment for any infringement of decorum.

Beginning as a child slave to a cold, exacting, punitive woman more than suggests

an unhappy childhood. And while Mammy harangues Scarlett, mostly by invoking

the power of Ellen, Mitchell from the start makes clear who is slave and who is

mistress: though weary, elderly Mammy must lumber up the steps to fetch teenaged

Scarlett’s shawl, while, having set her to the task, Scarlett runs off, shawl‐less, to find

her father.

A final vignette woven in early on, while demonstrating Gerald O’Hara’s

benevolence, also illustrates the slave’s plight. Pork, Gerald’s valet, “had deviled his

master night and day” to buy his wife Dilcey, and finally, “his resistance worn thin,”

(ch.2) Gerald complies, buying not only Dilcey, but her daughter Prissy. That this is

an act of extraordinary kindness is underscored both by Scarlett’s dismayed

exclamation that Gerald didn’t need to buy Prissy and by Dilcey’s words:

Mist' Gerald … I wanted to come here and thank you agin fo' buyin' me and my

chile. Lots of gentlemens might a' bought me but they wouldn't a' bought my

Prissy, too, jes' to keep me frum grievin' ….

Mitchell’s vignettes depict a system based on the almost unlimited power of

whites over blacks. The narrative illustrates the variety of cruelties (beatings, family

break‐ups, disregard of grieving) that easily could‐‐and did‐‐ befall slaves not

encased in the magical world of Tara and its environs, troubling white dreams of

happy plantations.

Morever, the plantation system , as described by Elizabeth Fox Genovese in

Within the Plantation Household, “at all levels … reflected and reinforced a view of

the world in which women were subordinate to men” (195). It was supposed to be

an ordered world, in which contentment would reign as people adopted their

“natural” places—the white men, physically and intellectually superior, at the apex,

white women subordinate to them, and black slaves gladly accepting eternal

servitude to whites. Gone with the Wind exposes that social organization not only as

implicitly cruel, but also as a sham, revealing a comically upside down world, upheld

and enabled not by the “superior” white men, but by the intelligent and able house

slaves and by women who night and day deceive their so‐called masters.

For Jeems is not the only slave smarter than his owners. Mitchell continuously

reveals whites as less intelligent and capable than their supposed inferiors. Dilcey

doesn’t waste the opportunity afforded by her audience with the O’Hara family, in

which she thanks them for buying her and Prissy. Instead, she immediately and

assertively thrusts Prissy at Scarlett to save her child from becoming a field hand:

“Miss Scarlett, Poke done tole me how you ast Mist Gerald to buy me. [There’s no

other evidence in the text to confirm this and Scarlett’s own words deny it.] And so

I’m gwine give you my Prissy fo’ yo’ own maid.” When Scarlett demurs, stating that

Mammy is her maid, Dilcey persists—and as we find out later (ch. 8), gets her way.

Intelligent slaves also include Mammy, whose “eyes were sharper than Ellen's …

Scarlett could never recall in all her life having fooled Mammy for long.” Uncle

Peter, Miss Pittypat’s slave, is, however, the most intelligent of them all, for he runs

the Hamilton household, raising the orphaned Melanie and Charles, and managing

the “grown‐up child,” Aunt Pitty. Peter makes the kinds of decisions usually the

province of white males, deciding to increase Charles’s allowance when he turns 15

and insisting he go to Harvard. (ch. 8)

Charles’ description of Peter, especially when he calls him “devoted,” may smack

of See’s “creepy racism,” but Peter’s overwhelming competency undermines any

notion of innate white supremacy. Further, while the narrator often refers to blacks

as childlike or animals, the same fate befalls the white characters, who are also

repeatedly referred to as children or likened to animals.[3]

Women too are depicted in the novel as more competent than white men. For all

Gerald’s bluster, all of Tara knows Ellen runs the show: “everyone from Ellen down

to the stupidest field hand was in a tacit and kindly conspiracy to keep him [Gerald]

believing that his word was law.” Gerald, ostensibly the person at the top of the

plantation pyramid, is handled rather handler—and everybody knows it. Ellen was

“obeyed instantly at Tara;” Gerald “quietly disregarded.”

In her own realm, Scarlett fumes at having to play a fool:

"Why is it a girl has to be so silly to catch a husband?"” she asks Mammy.

"Ah specs it's kase gempmums doan know whut dey wants. Dey jes' knows

whut dey thinks dey wants. An' givin' dem whut dey thinks dey wants saves a

pile of mizry ..”

With perhaps unintentional irony Mammy goes on to explain that it’s good

that Scarlett isn’t a fool because men expect to marry fools and wake up with

competent wives. Everyone but the white men knows the feigned idiocy and

helplessness is a game—and everyone colludes in the deception.

While women and slaves manage the Old South’s world, we, the readers, see

that Southern women, as well as slaves, pay a heavy price. Although Scarlett adores

Ellen, who she doesn’t perceive as unhappy, and although Ellen epitomizes the

Southern “great lady,” the narrator describes her as an automaton or a ghost—

something uncanny—“She would have been a strikingly beautiful woman had there

been any glow in her eyes, any responsive warmth in her smile or any spontaneity

in her voice …” Having been forbidden to marry her true love before Gerald came

along, she is “a gentle shell.” (ch 3) Gerald, more interested in the shell—a lady from

one of Savannah’s first families‐‐ than its interior, is thrilled with the ghost‐girl he

has gained, guided the entire way to matrimony by Pork. (ch 3) The narrator, in

backhanded fashion, implies that Ellen believed her marriage a mistake: “If Ellen

had ever regretted her sudden decision to marry him, no one ever knew it, certainly

not Gerald.”

Eventually, the narrator cuts to the chase and explains that Ellen’s fate is the

southern woman’s fate:

Ellen's life was not easy, nor was it happy, but she did not expect life to be easy,

and, if it was not happy, that was woman's lot. It was a man's world, and she

accepted it as such. The man owned the property, and the woman managed it.

The man took the credit for the management, and the woman praised his

cleverness.

We do not get such insights into the private sorrows or thoughts of the slaves,

for Mitchell wrote this book as a story of the Civil War seen through the eyes of

white women (262) but as Charles Rowan Beve notes in his essay “Gone with the

Wind and Good Riddance,” a “central truth” of the novel is that ’life for women and

slaves alike was a vast prison in which these unfortunates were enslaved to free

white males.” While Beve may be questioned for equating white women—“ladies”—

and slaves, as slaves fared far worse, his insight aligns with what the novel tells us

—that Southern ladies led severely limited lives.

Beve, one of the few critics who notes the intelligence and agency of women and

blacks in the novel, resists, however, the idea that Mitchell is writing ironically. Yet

the persistent pattern in the text of the lower orders being smarter than the higher,

Mitchell’s own history of writing comedic juvenilia (Pyron, 58‐60, 322) and

Mitchell’s frustration with the reception of the novel as plantation mythology all

point to her deliberately using irony as a rhetorical device to reveal the hollow core

of ante‐bellum ideology.

While Beve dismisses the idea of the novel as ironic because it is told from a

woman’s perspective (!), itself an astonishing claim, on some occasions, particularly

when men are courting Scarlett, we are allowed to overhear their interior

monologues—or are told their thoughts. The Tarleton twins mistake Scarlett’s

manipulative use of flattery and feigned fascination as genuine admiration. Charles

Hamilton, the first man Scarlett cynically marries, comically misinterprets Scarlett’s

self‐serving and calculated ploys, as well as her self‐centered distraction, through

the lens of “Southern lady” mythology. While she is regarding him

contemptuously—eg, “Here was this fool expecting her to be excited about Mr.

Lincoln” he gushes inwardly: “How fragile and tender women are, he thought, the

mere mention of war and harshness makes them faint.” The clashing interior

monologues are the stuff of high comedy—and of social critique. Scarlett will

likewise later coldly manipulate Frank Kennedy, deceiving him with astonishing—

and comic—ease into perceiving her as a delicate, empty‐headed flower in need of

his protection.

From this male unawareness in the face what is obvious to women characters,

we can extrapolate that the interior monologues white characters—male and

female—have about blacks may be just as misinformed. Are the “darkies” as loyal,

devoted to their masters, simple, content with slavery and childlike as the white

characters think—or is this simply the product of another set of manipulations, with

the blacks playing subservient roles as blatantly as do women? Certainly, we are

given enough information about black intelligence, perceptiveness, competency and

networking—eg, “their negroes, who had been told nothing, knew everything too, by

that black grapevine telegraph system which defies white understanding” —that the

alert reader might call into question the self‐serving racist ideology of the ruling

class. We just may suspect that rather than loyal and devoted to white interests, the

black characters we meet, caught like the women in power‐less positions, are

primarily meeting their own interests.

Thus, in Gone with the Wind, the plantation ideology of male and white

superiority is exposed. Yet living this collective lie, as the novel shows, hastens the

collapse of the untenable system it means to preserve —and this may be the book’s

central irony. As anyone with the scantiest knowledge of the Civil War would know,

the bragging of the plantation class men at the beginning of the novel—"We could

lick them in a month‐‐" "Why, one Southerner can lick twenty Yankees‐‐" —

overflows with irony, for in a few years, the South will be shattered by the North’s

industrial war machine. The novel reveals to us that a system of oppression based

on lies will so inflate the sense of dominant class invincibility that tragedy becomes

inevitable.

Further, Adams’s contention that “if the novel is indeed propaganda, it is … for

the … marketplace, laissez‐faire ethic” (60) is also questionable. Mitchell skewers

this post‐war ethic as readily as the plantation ideology. In fact, what the novel

communicates, despite Mitchell’s overt straining against it, could be summed up as

The Who’s “hello to the new boss, same as the old boss.” Laissez‐faire capitalism is

little different from the slave economy in Mitchell’s view—both economies, as

Mitchell describes them, are openly built on the exploitation of the weak and

helpless. Scarlett uses convicts to man her lumber mills. Scarlett’s new cohort, after

she is rejected by the old guard, include people whose veneer Rhett loves to

skewer—"Ralph, if I'd had any sense I'd have made my money selling gold‐mine

stocks to widows and orphans, like you, instead of blockading. It's so much safer."

Whether the widows and orphans are white or black, exploitation remains the

foundation of both systems.

We can understand this novel as a celebration of capitalism only if we see

Scarlett as an admirable character—but Mitchell comically deflates Scarlett at

almost every turn (except for Scarlett’s true heroism when she returns to the

devastated Tara.) Scarlett is depicted from the start as dangerously unreflective, a

Bertie Wooster figure, a pampered personality ignorant about anything beyond her

narrow world—an ignorance she re‐embraces in more hardened form after Rhett

marries her after the war. Mitchell uses this ignorance to humorous effect. Early in

the novel, Scarlett astonishes even the besotted Charles by not knowing who the

Borgias were.

Scarlett thought quickly but could remember no family in the County or Atlanta

or Savannah by that name [Borgia]. "I don't know them. Is he kin to them?

Who are they?" An odd look came over Charles' face, incredulity and shame

struggling with love. Love triumphed as he realized that it was enough for a girl

to be sweet and gentle and beautiful, without having an education to hamper

her charms, and he made swift answer: "The Borgias were Italians." "Oh," said

Scarlett, losing interest, "foreigners." She turned her prettiest smile on Ashley,

but for some reason he was not looking at her. He was looking at Charles, and

there was understanding in his face and a little pity. (ch 6)

She later on misses every allusion Rhett makes to Shakespeare. When she tries to

conjure the Gotterdammerung for Rhett, she can’t remember the word—“Some

funny foreign name that sounded like profanity”‐‐but he understands the allusion

immediately when she explains:

"Why, Ashley said‐‐" "Yes?" "Once at Tara he said something about the‐‐a‐‐dusk of

the gods and about the end of the world and some such foolishness." "Ah, the

Gotterdammerung!" Rhett's eyes were sharp with interest. (ch 49)

This is not a celebration of anti‐intellectualism, as Adams contends, but an

indictment of it. We are invited to laugh not with, but at, Scarlett. If Ashley is caught

in a dream world, Scarlett is just as destructively trapped in her self‐centered

ignorance, leading her to drive away everything that matters—the virtues of

kindness and honesty, the ability to see clearly, community, even Rhett. Capitalism is

not her salvation.

By examining more closely at the irony and back story of the novel, we can see

how Mitchell subverts and exposes racist and sexist ideologies. The novel is neither

endorsing the Old South nor the new Social Darwinism, but critiquing both. The

subtext creates a comic and inverted world—a carnival world—in which hierarchies

are skewered. Beneath the surface of a racist text bubbles a mirror world in which

blacks and women run the show. This world is largely erased from the movie

version, which has unfortunately conflated in the popular imagination with the

more subversive written text. The novel engages us in a battle where the chief strife

is not North against South but rhetoric against reality. Given Gone with the Wind’s

continuing place as a cultural artifact, it behooves us to read it in ways that

acknowledge its subtext and give credit to Mitchell’s intelligence, complexity and

artistry.

12

Copyright Diane Reynolds

Notes

[1] Although she analyzes them in terms of psychology, not in terms of class, race

and sex, Blanche Gelfant, in “Gone With the Wind and the impossibilities of fiction,”

The Southern Literary Journal, vol 13, no 1, fall 1980, 3‐31, understands that “secrets

are Gone with the Wind’s explicit concern” (5).

[2] The name Jeems sounds like Jeeves, the all‐knowing butler who serves the

wealthy and clueless Bertie Wooster in P.G. Wodehouse’s comic novels. The popular

novels were appearing in the 1920s, and while we don’t know that Mitchell read

them, chances are she did, as she was a voracious reader who enjoyed popular

literature (Pyron 220). We do know that she chose character names carefully (Pyron

262), so if she had read Wodehouse, it’s plausible that she intended a connection

between Jeems and Jeeves.

[3] The references are almost overwhelming. A few—the Tarleton twins are

likened to horses and hounds, the Southern men to wild animals. At the end of the

book, Ashley is described as a “cold animal” and “a child.” Rhett has a voice “as silky

as a cat’s fur” and is—at least once‐‐apelike. Scarlett calls herself a “child” at the end

of the book, and Rhett likens her to a “kitten.” Melanie’s childlike figure and qualities

are referenced throughout the book.

Works Cited

Adams, Amanda. “’Painfully Southern: Gone with the Wind, the Agrarians and the

Battle for the New South.” ’Southern Literary Journal, volume xl, number 1, fall

2007.

Beye, Charles Rowan. “Gone with the Wind” and Good Riddance.” Southwest Review,

vol.1 , June 1993.

Burks, Ruth Elizabeth. “Gone with the Wind: black and white in Technicolor,”

Quarterly Review of Film and Video, 21:53–73, 2004.

14

Conde, Mary. “Some African American Fictional Responses to Gone with the Wind,”

The Yearbook of English Studies, vol 26, 1996. 208‐17.

Cronin, Jan. “’The Book Belongs to All of Us:’ GWTW as post‐cultural product.”

Literature Film Quarterly, 2007; 35 (1): 396‐403.

Fox Genovese, Elizabeth. Within the Plantation Household: Black and White women of

the Old South. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988.

Gelfant, Blanche. “Gone With the Wind and the impossibilities of fiction.” The

Southern Literary Journal, vol 13, no 1, fall 1980, 3‐31.

Pyron, Darden Asbury. Southern Daughter: The Life of Margaret Mitchell. New York,

Oxford University Press, 1991.

Ryan, Tim A. “Designs Against Tara: Frances Gaither's The Red Cock Crows and

Other Countemarratives to Gone with the Wind,” Mississippi Quarterly: The

Journal of Southern Cultures, Dec. 1 2005.

Vials, Chris. “Whose Dixie? Erskine Caldwell’s Challenge to Gone with the Wind and

Dialectical Realism.” Criticism: A Quarterly for Criticism and the Arts, Dec. 1,

2006, 61‐94.