Introduction
Many authors vied to write a sequel to GWTW, but, just as Mitchell guarded her novel during her lifetime, her estate closely guarded the rights to any sequels or spin-offs after her death (Taylor 1989). When the Margaret Mitchell Estate realized GWTW’s copyright would run out in 2011, they diligently selected an author to write the long-awaited update, ultimately picking Alexandra Ripley (Taylor 1989). The Times called her the “custodian of a great American Myth” (Taylor 1989, 155). Ripley was considered “a conservative choice, someone who can be trusted to adhere faithfully to the spirit and tone of the original without radically transforming story or character and without overstepping the sexual, racial and linguistic
bounds” (Taylor 1989, 155). She acknowledged her own similarities with Mitchell, her status as
“a woman writer…(who has)…the right amount of Southern-ness,” and Taylor names her potential Confederate sympathies as she “went on to the women’s college Vassar on a scholarship from the ultra-conservative United Daughters of the Confederacy” (1989, 156).
Since the Mitchell Estate’s careful selection of an author with white, Southern sensibilities, they have since approved other authors to write various spin-offs of GWTW including but not limited to Donald McCaig’s Rhett Butler’s People; however, not all authors were granted express approval. Alice Randall’s The Wind Done Gone, which serves as its author’s “critique of and reaction to the world described in Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind,” faced significant pushback from the Mitchell Trust including a copyright infringement case ("‘Wind Done Gone’
Copyright Case Settled." 2002). Ultimately, the Mitchell Estate’s copyright case against
Randall’s publisher was settled, allowing the novel to be published as an “unauthorized parody”
in 2001 ("‘Wind Done Gone’ Copyright Case Settled." 2002).
In her critique of GWTW, Alice Randall’s The Wind Done Gone responds to Mitchell’s novel. Randall confirms this in the final line of The Wind Done Gone’s acknowledgments, closing out her book with “Margaret Mitchell’s novel Gone With the Wind inspired me to think”
(2001, 210). The vague nature of the phrase “inspired me to think” invites the reader to
interrogate its meaning. GWTW inspired a response to the whitewashed perspective provided in its pages, a response that thought about how Mitchell’s novel differed from the reality of the American South. Randall not only corrects historical inaccuracies but provides her readers the opportunity to think alongside her protagonist about the emotional toll of chattel slavery and Reconstruction era discrimination against newly emancipated Black people. Randall illustrates the emotional labor of her formerly enslaved protagonist struggling to make a place for herself in the South during the Reconstruction—labor that is left out of Mitchells’ understanding of that historical period.
Randall published her response novel 65 years after GWTW’s publication and is not only responding to a historical artifact. In 2001 and even now, GWTW, as text, film, and idea, still maintains a deep embeddedness in popular consciousness. In 1973, James Boatwright for The New Republic in a reconsideration of the novel, one that is comparatively less scathing than the radical publication’s contemporary rebuke, refers to GWTW’s “aggressive presence” 37 years later (1983, 212). Leslie Fielder writing on GWTW as an Anti-Tom novel and product of the Great Depression describes GWTW’s consumption as an idea: “(t)he millions who first read, then saw GWTW responded to it not as literature but as myth” (1983, 247). Randall and other sequel writers like her inescapably respond jointly to Mitchell’s novel, Selznick’s film, and popular
culture’s idea of GWTW. Unlike her fellow responders, Randall also does something to the novel, reinterpreting rather than building on the accepted interpretation of it, writing herself into a tradition of modernist, revisionary works in response to classic novels.
GWTW’s Myth Status
Many retrospective commentators critique GWTW on grounds that it has been wrongly deemed historical fiction when it is more accurately a myth of the Antebellum and
Reconstruction South, as well as those who reside there. It is GWTW’s myth status that Randall makes visible in her presentation of a potential reality for her Black protagonist Cynara that drastically diverges from Mitchell’s presentation of Scarlett’s reality. Emory Professor Floyd C.
Watkins, an acclaimed authority on Southern literature who completed his graduate studies at Vanderbilt, shares his position on GWTW succinctly in the title of his 1970 article, “Gone With the Wind as Vulgar Literature” (1983). In the body of the article, he argues that GWTW, in its lack of meditative depth, factual errors, and “openly patriotic” attitude, is propaganda (1983, 206). He writes that GWTW “creates a myth which seems to ease the hunger of all extravagantly Southern and little romantic souls, but it propagandizes history, fails to grasp the depths and complexities of human evil and the significances of those who prevail” (Watkins 1983, 200). By arguing that the myth Mitchell has created ‘eases’ an existing ‘hunger,’ Watkins captures the contemporary, and arguably continued, appeal of romanticized Southern literature for unresistant readers. Denouncing “Southern—and foolish romantic readers anywhere” for falling for
Mitchell’s propaganda, he insinuates their own responsibility for being deceived by the myth;
Watkins accuses them of “ignor(ing) an authentic culture while praising a false culture that never existed” (1983, 205).
However, Watkins’ accusation overlooks GWTW’s, and every novel’s, capacity to construct its desired reader. While a certain type of reader—a white, Southern, or Southern- romanticizing reader, is more likely to pick up GWTW than a resistant reader, Mitchell’s authorial power and what Watkins deems the novel’s “pernicious influence” run with the
unresistant readers’ openness to the myth they convey (1983, 205). He details the ways in which Mitchell’s novel is propagandistic: her Southland and her Southerners being made too perfect and too righteous, Mitchell’s “discursive essays on history and politics” like the passage about Atlanta analyzed in Chapter 1, and GWTW’s overall shallowness, which he repeatedly indicts the novel for (210). For Watkins, the height of GWTW’s shallowness is Mitchell’s decision to
“leave(s) evil out of the garden of Tara” (202).
In Randall’s reorienting of the Southern narrative in her novel, she answers the myth GWTW creates and recalls the evil in Watkins’ “garden of Tara” (Watkins 1983, 202). The Wind Done Gone complicates Mitchell’s charming narrative and responds to the character of Scarlett, the Southern Belle (2001). Directing her narrative through the perspective of Cynara who was formerly enslaved by the O’Hara family and later Rhett Butler, as well as being a half-sister to Scarlett, Randall makes precarious the structure of white plantocracy that upheld Scarlett’s beloved Tara by turning the story of the family’s plantation to one controlled, not by Gerald the white planter, but by Pork the enslaved valet, whom she renames Garlic (2001). Randall speaks to the divergence of the myth of the South held by the white characters in GWTW from the truth lived by her Black protagonist. After Rhett tries to silence her for calling out the South’s dirty laundry in the wake of The Civil War, Cynara writes that “I didn’t like the fact he wouldn’t acknowledge my truth,” both naming the existence of her own truth and the reality of white suppression of the history of Black oppression (Randall 2001, 18).
Randall speaks of the physical and mental suffering the enslaved characters of GWTW undoubtedly would have experienced during their time in bondage in the Antebellum South:
beatings, branding, separation of family members, the humiliation and dehumanization of being sold. As one example, she intimately describes the horrors of Cynara’s experience of being sold at the slave auction in Charleston: “…I was in the market and my breasts were turning red from the sun” (174). She then makes visible one of many repercussions of this experience: “the skin from my chest” coming “off in sheets” (174). Such raw, dehumanizing realities of enslavement are omitted in GWTW, as they continue to be omitted in white supremacist histories of the American South for white supremacists’ preferred narrative of the happy slave, Mitchell’s “shrill laughter of the pickaninnies in the quarters” (Mitchell 1936, 429). Randall calls out the
underlying claim Mitchell makes that enslavement for Black people is superior to freedom in her authorship of Mammy, Prissy, Dilcey, and Pork/Garlic amongst others that are retained in de facto enslavement by the O’Hara family after Emancipation. In Randall’s novel, Cynara records Gerald’s comments to her conveying the belief she is better off enslaved than free, “(i)t is better to be a slave to a rich man than a slave to poverty. Poverty is a cruel master, a cruel master every day. And there are kind masters in the world” (Randall 1983, 173). Through her novel as a whole, Randall clearly refutes Gerald’s assertion by illustrating the scars enslavement leaves behind and the way his claim functions to shore up white plantocracy, not to ensure the well- being of the enslaved, as he argues. As a rebuttal to GWTW, The Wind Done Gone provides an antidote for the unresistant reader under the “pernicious influence” of GWTW—if they are willing to take it (Watkins 1983, 205).
GWTW’s Unreliable Narrative Identity and Randall’s Consistent First-Person Narrator James Boatwright of The New Republic situates his critique of the novel in its narrative style. As GWTW weaves between third-person omniscient and free indirect discourse in the form of what Watkins deems ‘discursive essays,’ Boatwright’s concern surfaces in the passages of free indirect discourse in which he is unclear whether Scarlett or Mitchell are speaking. Randall avoids this lack of clarity by writing her novel in the first-person singular. Mitchell’s lack of narrative clarity is “disconcerting” to Boatwright, as he is “not to be able to winnow out Margaret Mitchell’s opinions from Scarlett’s” (1983, 215). Mitchell’s ambiguous “control of point of view” blends historical representation with her characters’ opinions, as well as her own, parading political views as novelistic fact. This blending would be particularly deceptive for an unresistant audience without lived experiences of the historical period in which GWTW takes place (Boatwright 1983, 215). While the lack of separation between narrator and protagonist is a common feature of modernist and post-modernist novels, what Boatwright identifies is a
markedly propagandistic difference, as he struggles to discern between authorial self-insertion and the voice of the narrator or protagonist. If the role of GWTW as historical fiction and a Civil War Novel is as Harwell asserts, to introduce readers to unfamiliar historical material, Mitchell’s insertion of her own views into the plot and historical background of her novel becomes
attempted indoctrination.
Randall’s novel’s form as a diary with a clear and consistent narrator is critical to its status as a counternarrative to GWTW. Mitchell intended GWTW’s third-person narration to read as a presentation of facts with little room for interpretation, yet Randall’s use of the ‘I’ voice sits in stark contrast, bringing in the understood individuality and genuineness of personal
experience. Randall presents a first-person narrative, free from manipulatory power in its
singular narrator-ship that enables the reader to learn the positionality of the protagonist and speaker rather than speculating at which point of view is being presented in each chapter or even paragraph, like in the reading experience of GWTW’s unstable narration. By centering Black writing, specifically writing for and on interiority, Randall employs her first-person narrative to decenter the third-person, pseudo-omniscient narrator that Mitchell presents as speaking for all of the South. Randall’s first-person narration is emotionally intimate, additionally countering Mitchell’s cold and distant narrative presentation of Scarlett through third-person narration.
Where GWTW, attempting objectivity, tells the reader what happens, The Wind Done Gone expresses the emotionality of its protagonist, allowing the reader to construct her story from the collection of emotions Randall makes them privy to.
Through her protagonist’s journey of self-revelation, Randall refutes Mitchell and GWTW as the voice of the South, as Randall, in having Cynara write her own narrative,
illustrates that Mitchell does not speak for her. Randall’s protagonist employs active writing to negate Mitchell’s white South. On building her home in a new Black neighborhood in Atlanta, Cynara pens, “(i)t unsettles R. that I chose to build my house in the middle of the colored—he would say ‘section,’ I will write ‘community’ (26).” It is significant that the linguistically antagonistic voice that Cynara pushes back on is the voice of the person who taught her to write, Rhett, conveying the power of the written word, once reclaimed, to enact freedom by telling one’s own story. In her purposeful narrative style, Randall pushes against Mitchell’s white, blanket narrative of the South and makes the argument that it is, instead, many individual narratives like Cynara’s that come together to represent the South. Randall depicts her
protagonist grappling with Mitchell’s white version of the South: “(h)ow is it that the South, the world of chivalry and slavery and great white houses and red land and white cotton, is gone,
forever gone, in the dust, blown off and away, and it is only in me and my memories and in my soul-carving fear that the Southland lives on?” (2001, 130). Yet, piece by piece and day by day, Randall records Cynara constructing a counternarrative of the South for herself, “sew(ing) together in my (her) mind to make me (herself) a crazy quilt,” of her own (2001, 90).
Cynara as a Response to the Character of Scarlett
GWTW’s “unscrupulous rascal” of a heroine, Scarlett, is fodder for much commentary on the novel and given a foil in Randall’s protagonist Cynara (Adams 1936). Outwardly displaying the manners and Southern charm taught to her by her aristocratic mother and expected of her in Southern planter society, Scarlett manages to fool onlookers as to her conniving, materialist nature at the beginning of the novel; yet, after The War breaks out and as she fights for survival during the Reconstruction period to follow, the true Scarlett, who the reader is already privy to, becomes exposed to the other characters in the novel. Like Atlanta society depicted in Mitchell’s novel, Isabel Paterson of the Herald-Tribune disdains the character of Scarlett, writing that “…it is something of an achievement (for Mitchell) to have made her so broadly representative of the worst aspects of her time and yet not abnormal or even unlikeable” (1983, 17). She declares the novel via the character of Scarlett a “demoralization of character,” an assertion the Reverend Howard Tillman Kuist would have affirmed (1983, 17). Only one of many religious figures to write or preach on GWTW, Kuist in a 1939 article for The Union Seminary Review critiques Scarlett’s immoral nature and her willfulness (1983). He identifies Scarlett’s theology as a belief in a “bargaining, vengeful, absentee Deity” and her world outlook as one that “value(s)
everything, even God, in terms of their own self-centered needs or desires” (1983, 104). What Mitchell considers a healthy, normally regulated desire to live, Kuist considers selfishness. In his
article, Kuist also reproduces a passage from GWTW in which Scarlett tells Rhett she dumped her “good manners and—well, things like that” overboard from her metaphorical boat on her quest for survival (1983, 105). Expressing a view Kuist appears to endorse, Rhett responds that not only her manners but her “(p)ride and honor and truth and virtue and kindliness,”—or, in summation, her morals—are also bobbing in the water, sacrificed for the sake of living another day (1983, 105). Apparently, morals, in addition, to manners are both performative for Scarlett and, according to Mitchell, are a performance essential to survival.
In a 2021 article, Tressie McMillan Cottom provides a new lens to think about manners and charm in the character of a Southern woman like Scarlett. Cottom describes the performance of Southern charm as a weapon by which “a proper Southern woman…reproduces Southern culture and…makes non-southerners feel good about the violence necessary to do so” (2021). As both white Southern women, Mitchell, in her novel and in her own life as evidenced by her surviving letters, and Scarlett, in the batting of her eyelashes and demure behavior, employ charm to get what they want. Southern charm makes a character like Scarlett palatable and makes a novel like GWTW appealing to unresistant readers of all geographic locations, Northern and Southern alike. While charm can be a manipulative tool as seen in the examples of Mitchell and her protagonist, it is not always so heavily charged. Randall provides a means to democratize charm, rather than deeming it a solely malicious, manipulative behavior to be thrown out
altogether. Cynara, describing a Black congressman from Alabama who Randall presents as a love interest, names part of his appeal that he “has the habit of charm” (Randall 143). Cottom would likely not agree with the capacity for charm to be a positive or neutral mannerism, but I argue that the manipulative end, intentional in the character of Scarlett or a subconscious product of her Confederate-adjacent upbringing in the case of Mitchell, is the condemning factor, not the
behavior of charm itself, which in its unadulterated state encompasses an attitude of cheerful hospitality and generosity of spirit.
While the problematization of Southern charm in GWTW was not articulated by contemporary reviewers, in 1976, Dr. Charles E. Wells, M.D. of Vanderbilt University
investigated the character of Scarlett as a case study of the hysterical personality. A response to the character of Scarlett as portrayed both in the film and the novel, his case study rests upon psychological theorist Hollender’s statement that “(t)he ideal climate for the production of hysterical personalities existed in the plantation society of the antebellum South, epitomized in Margaret Mitchell’s GWTW” (1983, 117). A product of his time, Wells goes on to state that
“hysterical personality is a ‘caricature of femininity’” and questions whether the hysterical can be untangled from the feminine (117). Wells illustrates that Scarlett displays some characteristics of the hysterical personality like a bad mother-daughter relationship and using sex to barter yet does not employ a key tenant: repression. Rather, she employs suppression, as made iconic in her mantra, “I won’t think of it now. I’ll think of it later” or tomorrow in the iconic, mainstream reproduction of the same idea (119). Her employment of suppression and her resistance to being influenced by the emotionality of other characters demonstrate Scarlett’s emotional maturity and contribute to Wells’ argument against her as a pure example of the hysterical personality. In an interesting turn, Wells concludes that Scarlett does not display the hysterical personality in her interior nature but rather puts on the “appearance and outward behavior” of the hysterical personality as a product of social forces of the “plantation society of the antebellum South,”
which Wells advances as what “might have been the most fertile climate for growth of such personalities” (122).
Understanding Scarlett’s hysterical behavior as a product of her upbringing as a daughter of a white planter in the Antebellum South aligns it with the mannerism of Southern charm, while considering it performative, thus active, opens it up to Cottom’s critique of Southern charm as weaponized. Mitchell categorizes Scarlett’s performance of her charm to achieve her desired ends as resourceful, even allowing for a reading in which it is subversively feminist, yet Cottom’s conception of Southern charm indicts Scarlett’s performance of charm to manipulate as white violence in the service of white plantocracy. It follows that Mitchell’s text is enacting a performance of the same Southern ideologies through its charmingly Southern narrative, aided by its self-purported plainness discussed in the previous chapter.
Randall undoes Mitchell’s performance by unveiling the dark reality of the Southern ideologies GWTW showcases. Randall’s protagonist, Cynara, de-elevates Scarlett from her position as Rhett’s wife by detailing her ongoing affair with him, her half-sister’s husband. The presentation of Cynara and Scarlett as siblings problematizes whiteness in the characters of Ellen and Scarlett, whom Randall reveals have a “Negresse” for a great—for Scarlett, great, great—
grandmother (124). Before this lineage is divulged, it is prefigured in Cynara telling Rhett that Scarlett, who Randall renames ‘Other,’ “...has the vitality, the vigor, and the pragmatism of a slave…” (47). The vitality, vigor, and pragmatism that Cynara names ring strongly of Mitchell’s
‘gumption,’ buttressing a potential argument Randall is making for Scarlett’s strength coming from her Blackness. However, the claim Randall appears to be furthering is not one of eugenics- era biological determinism that would not have surprised Mitchell’s contemporary readers;
rather, Randall pushes an interrogation of the perceived ‘purity’ of the white Plantocracy and of ingrained anti-Blackness and self-hatred that both the formerly enslaved and formerly enslavers grappled with through a microcosm of Reconstruction society that she borrows from GWTW.