Take Home Exam for Gone With The
Wind:
Read, reflect upon, and write about the following:
Popular novels and their translation into the media of their day can have
a profound effect on attitudes towards race and gender, perhaps even be catalysts
for action and change despite or because of their historical accuracy.
In your final essay (due the night of May 7) reflect on the following three
quotations, citing specific examples of what you mean from your reading.
:
Margaret Mitchell to a German admirer in Nazi Germany (1938) where her
book was not banned until 1941:
Of course, I was very interested in your story of your argument years
ago about "Uncle Tom's Cabin" and I enjoyed the details. It makes me
very happy to know that "Gone With the Wind" is helping refute the impression
of the South which people abroad gained from Mrs. Stowe's book. Here
in America "Uncle Tom's Cabin has been long forgotten and there are very few
people today who have read it. They only know it as the name of a book
which had a good deal to do with the bitterness of the Abolition movement.
Wyn Craig Wade in The Fiery Cross, The Ku Klux Klan in America
(1987):
There are a lot of things Griffith didn't know that night [of the
opening in 1915 of the Clansman, retitled The Birth of A Nation]. He
didn't know that he had created the first motion-picture blockbuster-- one
that would gross well over $60 million, establish movies as a major American
industry, and enshrine Hollywood, the dull parched countryside where the movie
had been shot, as The Motion Picture Capital of the World. He didn't
know that what had been shown that evening would soon envelop the nation
in a bitter controversy, trigger race riots, and embarrass the President of
the United States. And the last thing he could have possibly imagined
was that The Birth of A Nation would revive the Ku-Klux Klan of Reconstruction,
giving it a new lease on life in the twentieth century.
Claudia Roth Pierpont (1992):
Such qualities of gaiety or sweetness as "Gone with the Wind" possesses
are confined largely to the book's earlier sections, before the onset of
Reconstruction or the felt consquences of Emancipation. ("It's just
ruined the darkies," says Scarlett, innocent of irony, if of little else.)
but even from the start these patches of light are heavily overshadowed,
and are finally blotted out entirely, by the inescapable grimness of Mitchell's
racial politics. ... Knowledge and common knowledge are two different
things, and no historian ever had any thing like the audiences of Dixon,
Griffith, or Mitchell.
[To which I would add, Harriet Beecher Stowe.]
What Gone with the Wind is ultimately about is romance and sex -- these
subjects, rather than a female point of view, are what made it a "woman's
book"-- and there is no surer demonstration of the fact than the false alarm
of the scene outside Shantytown. ...
There is, after all, some spark of justice in the fate of Margaret Mitchell's
blundering colossus, condemned by posterity to live on triumphantly yet
always separate and never, never equal.