Introduction
As demonstrated in the previous chapter, the text of GWTW acts on the unresistant reader by bringing them into Ahmed’s affective economy, opening up the possibility for the unresistant reader’s indoctrination with white supremacist beliefs and Antebellum sympathies. By analyzing contemporary reviews, critical and casual essays on GWTW, and modern texts written in
response to GWTW, this chapter and the following chapter present a history of GWTW’s influence, as well as a history of resistance to it. GWTW’s history, like that of any text, is ongoing, ever-widening in scope and depth. In this chapter, evidence for GWTW acting on the unresistant reader via contemporary reviews will be presented and discussed to illustrate the impact of the emotional circulation the text can enact. Margaret Mitchell’s GWTW cannot be confined to the pages of the text or her strict vision for its interpretation, as visible in the responses to it in this chapter and the next. Reviewers and marketers alike allude to GWTW not merely as words compiled in the pages of Mitchell’s book or scenes that make up the
monumental David Selznick film adaptation. Posed first as a novel of historical fiction making The Civil War accessible to a broad readership, GWTW was made into an epic romance by Hollywood and, then, was remolded by a more discerning reading public and an increasingly critical body of writers on Southern literature as a symbol of all that was wrong with the American South. Here, I track GWTW’s transition from a best-selling sensation to an idea held up as a worthy scapegoat for flawed Southern sentimentality and blatant racism of the Old and Jim Crow South.
Mitchell’s Authorial Intent
Known as a frequenter of jazz clubs and a socialite in Atlanta society, Margaret Mitchell is recorded to have become quite a shut-in following the publication of GWTW (Mitchell, Edee, and Bonner 1985). She carefully guarded her privacy, avoiding the public eye both in life and after death, requesting that almost all of her personal letters and the original manuscript of GWTW be burned in the wake of her passing (Mitchell, Edee, and Bonner 1985). Her reasoning, she explained, is that “I have always believed that an artist of any type should be judged by their work alone” rather than on their private life or personality (Mitchell, Edee, and Bonner 1985, 6).
Her fear of being misconstrued necessitated a burning of her letters to guard her interiority against an information-hungry public after her death. After her passing, her brother assisted by the family’s lawyer diligently guarded any remaining materials and only permitted one
biographer, Finis Farr, access to the materials for his 1963 biography of Margaret Mitchell (Mitchell, Edee, and Bonner 1985).
While she shielded her personal life from the public eye, during her life, Mitchell was not bashful about speaking out either in praise or in rage at commentary made about her novel. She is recorded to have responded readily to reviews of GWTW and to fan mail, even hiring a secretary to assist with the sheer quantity she received (Harwell 1983). Some of these
correspondences, as well as a collection of letters she exchanged between a possible beau she met during her sole year at Smith College in Massachusetts, were preserved by their recipients and provide alternate remnants of art to ‘judge’ her by (Mitchell, Edee, and Bonner 1985). Her correspondence with fans was always polite and littered with bashful acceptances of
compliments in typical Southern, feminine fashion: “(n)othing could have pleased me more…”
she begins her response to one fan (Wells 1983). Her letters to her friend, Alan Edee, from her
time at Smith bear a similar tone, yet are a bit snappier in moments (Mitchell, Edee, and Bonner 1985). She gives Alan, or ‘Al’ as she affectionately referred to him, her highest compliment—
that he had “something southern about” him (Mitchell, Edee, and Bonner 1985, 30). In one letter written while she is recovering from an operation, she sounds much like her feisty protagonist Scarlett when she writes, “I’m just waiting to get well and get into trouble” and laments her antsy disposition: “(w)hy in Heaven wasn’t I born of a tranquil and docile nature instead of being a firebrand?” (Mitchell, Edee, and Bonner 1985, 32 & 33). She seems to wield Southern charm as powerful as Scarlett’s when she describes herself as a bit of a flirt to Al and appears to ruffle his feathers with depictions of all the men who come calling on her (Mitchell, Edee, and Bonner 1985).
After GWTW became a sensation, Mitchell retracted her feisty tone but retained all her charm in her letters. With reviewers she approved of, like Herschel Brickell and Clifford Dowdey, she even maintained correspondence, with niceties and Southern charm dispersed within, well after GWTW made its initial rounds in the papers (Harwell 1983). For an interview conducted by Herschel Brickell, Mitchell’s favorite reviewer and her biggest advocate for the Pulitzer, she thanked him, writing: “I keep telling you it’s the best thing that’s been written about me—not only the kindest, Heaven knows, but the most accurate” (Brickell 1983, 24). Of the less favorable like Heywood Broun, Evelyn Scott, and Malcolm Cowley, she wrote to a friend, “…
they have reviewed ideas in their own heads—not ideas I wrote” (Tupper 1983, 16). With this remark, Mitchell subscribes to a formalist interpretation of her novel endorsing the claim that readers should adhere to her intended meaning of the words on the pages of her novel rather than creating their own interpretation of them.
Mitchell did not leave her novel to speak for itself. As to how she holds the novel should be interpreted, she expounds:
“If the novel has a theme, the theme is that of survival. What makes some people able to come through catastrophes and others, apparently just as able, strong, and brave, go under? It happens in every upheaval. Some people survive; others don’t. What qualities are in those who fight their way through triumphantly that are lacking in those who go under? … I only know that the survivors used to call that quality ‘gumption.’ So I wrote about the people who had gumption and the people who didn’t.” (Schefski 1983, 236) Scarlett O’Hara has gumption. Mitchell describes her protagonist as “a normal person thrown into abnormal circumstances and doing the best she could, doing…the practical thing”
(Schefski 1983, 236). Mitchell shares that her theme of survival was inspired by growing up as a child surrounded by tales of The Civil War and Reconstruction period, of a time when “the world’s been turned upside down” (Commager 1983, 196). Yet, the world Mitchell writes about is but a small portion of the world—the American South, specifically the white, American South. By hinging survival on an abstract, individual trait—gumption, Mitchell ignores other things that contribute to survival or lack of it, including but not limited to financial means, legal personhood, and social connections. Hers is a survival that weans off the weak to sustain the strong, a Social Darwinism of sorts. Yet, in the context of her novel, Mitchell appears not to be concerned with the survival or lack of it for her enslaved characters who are deprived (by her white, planter lead characters) of financial means and legal personhood, despite a large portion of the novel taking place after Emancipation. Mitchell deems her novel an argument for a survival of the fittest with her white, planter-class characters in mind. She speaks to Scarlett’s, Rhett’s, and Belle’s survival as well as to her parents’ early and Melanie’s ultimate perishing, also acknowledging Ashley’s death of self and pride in the wake of The Civil War. Notably, the Black characters enslaved by the O’Hara family in the novel, Mammy, Prissy, Pork, and Dilcey,
in the landscape of Tara, “part and parcel” of the novel (Mitchell 1964, 405). To Mitchell and those who subscribed to her intended meaning, GWTW is about which white characters survive.
Mitchell’s childhood also influenced her writing style. Floyd C. Watkins reports that as a school-aged child, Mitchell wrote, “(t)he story is all that matters. Any good plot can stand retelling and style doesn’t matter” (1983, 201). One of the most frequently named weaknesses of Mitchell’s novel is the writing’s simplicity, or GWTW’s ‘style-less-ness,’ which critics meant to sting her but at which Mitchell reveled. To her, complicated writing would obscure the story. As an adult writing her own novel, Mitchell denies aspiring for literary acclaim: “I’m not a stylist, God knows, and couldn’t be if I tried” (Fiedler 1983, 246). She, instead, positions herself as a people’s writer, not an academic whom she makes a critique of in the character of Ashley who is so consumed by his lofty books that he lacks any gumption and loses all self-respect by the end of the novel. Her unfavorable treatment of Charleston and other coastal cities compared to her love letter to Atlanta, as exemplified by her patriotic monologue included prior, reveals her disdain for ‘highbrow’ culture that differentiated the scrappy landlocked city from its coastal Southern peers. Mitchell sells copies through the sheer readability of her novel due to its plain language, as well as through its ‘Southern Charm’ and her own that she layers on readers and reviewers in her correspondence with them.
Another product of Mitchell’s self-ascribed writing style is the plain racism that is clearly visible in the novel, particularly her writing of her Black characters’ speech and lack of
interiority4. It does not take a perceptive reader to pick up on the obviousness of Mitchell’s anti- Blackness, as well as her diction loaded with white supremacist ideology. For one example, after Tony Fontaine, a member of Scarlett’s childhood white planter society, briefly seeks shelter in
4 Attempting to write in a dialect using phonetic spelling and dropping verbs, Mitchell writes speech for her Black characters as garbled, differentiating what she considers their uneducated speech from that of her white planter class
Scarlett’s home after shooting a newly emancipated Black man, Mitchell provides a glimpse into her protagonist’s thoughts via free indirect discourse: “No, it wasn’t to be borne! The South was too beautiful a place…too dear a homeland to be turned over to ignorant negroes drunk with whiskey and freedom” (Mitchell 1964, 649). Through her refusal of alternative interpretations, Mitchell exerts control as an author and attempts to spoon-feed her readers her desired message, one of white, Southern superiority. Through the text’s plainness, Mitchell makes that message easily digestible for unresistant readers, no interpretation—or chewing—required.
Contemporary Reviewers on GWTW’s Plainness
What seemed to hold contemporary critics back from calling GWTW out of the realm of population fiction to the ranks of ‘high literature’ is Mitchell’s self-acclaimed plain style. In an early review, Isabel Paterson of the New York Herald-Tribune knocks the novel for its
“commonplace” style and lack of “literary distinction” (1983, 19). Jonathan Schnell attacks the author of the “plain novel,” writing to readers of Forum and Century that “we shouldn’t be surprised to hear that the last novel the author read was Vanity Fair or Barchester Towers”
(1936). J. Donald Adams of The NY Times adds his own assertion that Mitchell’s “style is not distinguished,” yet praises the novel for its “sheer readability” that can, at least to some degree, be attributed to the writing’s style-less-ness (1936). The lack of complicated prose and absence of “any of the new-fangled tricks of the trade in it” makes the monstrous 1,037 pages a quicker read than expected (Schnell 1936). Mitchell’s plainness makes the novel deceptive. What she presents as a ‘just a story’ contains ample commentary on The Civil War, Reconstruction era government, and the South in antiquity, as well as in her (and our) modern day. Mitchell’s plain prose, amplified in power by being labeled so by reviewers, effects a glazing over of the
contentious, often complex claims she is making, like presentations of white supremacist values in Dr. Meade’s speech to those gathered in Melanie’s home. The text, which Mitchell avows has
“no fine writing…no philosophizing…a minimum of description…no grandiose thoughts, no hidden meanings, no symbolism, nothing sensational…,” as quoted by her biographer Finis Farr, constructs a parallel between Scarlett and the city of Atlanta to champion Mitchell’s through current of survival at the expense of virtuous tradition (Boatwright 1983). GWTW’s reception can be traced through reviews and other mediums that convey public reception as transitioning from a historical fiction of The Civil War to a romance, notably brought to the forefront with the advent of David Selznick’s 1939 film. From there, particularly in modern perception, it begins to be distilled down to an idea of GWTW itself as a bulwark of distinctly white, Southern racism.
GWTW as Historical Fiction and its Designation as a Civil War Novel
Supposedly plainly, Mitchell presents her story of Scarlett and the South within the time- period during and immediately surrounding The Civil War. Due to its historical boundedness, reviewers and other commentators situate GWTW in the genre of Civil War novel. Richard Harwell speaks to GWTW’s status as a Civil War novel, a genre thought to be one degree away from a history lesson for those less familiar with the particulars of The War (1983). The Civil War novel is what it sounds like: historical fiction written about The Civil War; however, Harwell notes the proliferation of Civil War novels long after The Civil War was over and shares his belief that the best were written not by The War’s participants but by later generations like Mitchell’s. He explains a particular upsurgence of the genre both in the quantity of books published and the popularity of them during the Great Depression as a product of timeliness.
While Mitchell is recorded saying that she finished the writing of her novel prior to the height of
the Great Depression, the novel’s popularity can be partially attributed to its publication date, as Harwell deems it “a novel of comeback from war published when America was searching for a boost out of a depression” (8). Not only might its popularity have stemmed from the common sentiment of resilience between Great Depression era readers and Mitchell’s characters but from the Antebellum nostalgia that pervades the novel coming at just the right interval that
contemporary readers were inclined to believe there was more reality in the novel’s rosy retrospection than their predecessors who would have lived through the events themselves.
Clifford Dowdey, a contemporary of Mitchell and author of the infamous Civil War novel Bugles Blow No More, likewise acknowledges the popularity of the Civil War Novel genre during the Great Depression and argues compellingly for the genre’s appeal to a white, Southern audience (1983). He holds that the South suffered uniquely from the rest of the United States during the Great Depression and was exploited in this time of heightened vulnerability (Dowdey 1983). Dowdey attributes the Depression partially to the sustained impacts of The Civil War, declaring that the South is “now living in the midst of the effects of the Confederate War for Independence on the American government and economic system” and that, in the wake of The War and through the Great Depression, the South was “excluded from financial expression”
(1983, 86-87). Reflecting what was a common Southern sentiment at the time, Mitchell adds to Dowdey’s pitch for the residual impacts of The War, attesting that “(c)ommon sense should show that many of the problems that sent us to war have never been settled…” (86). In this vein of things being left unsettled, Dowdey brings his argument around to affirmatively answer his essay’s titular question, “(a)re We Still Fighting the Civil War?” He holds that, yes, “we are fighting, again, for our (the South’s) economic security and our way of life” (88). This verbiage and Dowdey’s call to “remember… (his Confederate predecessors’)…courage and fortitude and
stouthearted convictions as sources of strength for us to draw upon” ring strongly of Dr. Meade’s speech to those gathered at Melanie’s home that Mitchell places in the aftermath of The War (1983, 89). The popularity of a novel like GWTW with its white, Southern contemporary audience is due to more than historical intrigue but a resonance of shared experiences, the
“uproot(ing) (of)… lives and unsettle(ing) (of)…habits,” and shared responses, that “we will build back, because we have hearts like yours to build upon” (Mitchell 1964, 738). Mitchell even writes on living through the Great Depression that “I have heard so many yells of ‘states’ rights’
and ‘Northern oppression’ and ‘sinister centralization of power’ and so many bands playing
‘Dixie’ that I have wondered whether this was 1938 or 1861” (Dowdey 1983, 85).
As to why Civil War novels were popular across the decades after the Great Depression well into the time Harwell was writing in the 60s, Harwell insists that the “Civil War is the common heritage of all Americans—the defeated Rebel and, sometimes, still defiant Southerner, the Yankee yeoman of New England, the Midwesterner…, and Americans of later
immigration…” (4). His placement of The Civil War as the crucial, unifying event in the American past loses its staying power in comparison to more modern events, such as 9/11, as well as upon recognition of the divisiveness of the opinions and politics that fueled The Civil War itself. Quite the opposite of common heritage, The Civil War created disparate historical experiences for each region of the country, particularly the South—whose Confederate past still rears its ugly head today in the preservation of Confederate statues, holidays, and retellings of The Civil War. Perhaps, instead, the fascination with the genre arises from the rest of the
country’s fascination with (or infatuation with) the Antebellum South and the white South’s deep entrenchment in and nostalgia for their own fabricated narrative.
Nevertheless, Harwell corroborates the influence of the Civil War novel when he testifies that “(t)heir authors’ feeling for their work is strong and so well grounded in their country’s past that they convey the spirit of the war with no exhibition of learned knowledge but with a
competent ease which allows the reader to participate with them and with their characters in an exciting and meaningful experience” (1983, 8). Such participation in Mitchell’s GWTW takes the form, for unresistant readers, of circulating sticky emotions ranging from invested interest to zealous sympathy toward the Antebellum South. The best authors of the genre, as can be said of the best authors of any subset of historical fiction, display the ability to bring history, often dull and weighed down by tactical details in history books, to life for their readers. Harwell presents the Civil War novel as a ‘gateway drug’ of sorts for becoming what he calls a “Civil War buff”
(10). He writes that “(n)ovels are strong meat with which to introduce new readers to a historical era,” as they are more accessible reading than history books (5). He continues: “(t)hose (Civil War) novels, and others of the same type, provided the impetus which has produced a whole new generation of readers about the Civil War” (10). What does it mean for unresistant readers to read Civil War novels prior to, or instead of, history books as Harwell proposes?
Harwell’s presentation of the genre of the Civil War Novel as a more accessible version of history ignores the fact that the sub-genre, nestled in the larger heading of historical fiction, is made up of novels that are inherently fictional. While Mitchell and other authors strove for historically accurate representations of setting and details, they were not writing nonfiction.
Mitchell’s GWTW, embedded in a historical setting, centers fictional storytelling about subject matter presented as historical over actual facts about The Civil War. Critics laud GWTW for its accurate historical details and background, but any history in GWTW is exactly that—