History Lessons from Gone with the Wind

KATHRYNE BEVILACQUA University of Michigan History Lessons from Gone with the Wind “You know I don’t read novels.” —Scarlett O’Hara to Rhett Butler (Gone with the Wind. 778) 1936 WAS AN ANNUS MIRABILIS FOR THE HISTORICAL NOVEL AND FOR Southern arts and letters. As William Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom! was set to print in October, another novel purporting to “Tell about the South” (142) was published in June: Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind.1 Since the coincidence of their near-simultaneous publication, however, these two great Southern epics—one, a massively popular middlebrow historical romance, the other, an intricate specimen of American modernist aesthetics—have only moved farther apart. Nowhere is this divide more trenchant than in critical responses to history in both novels. Almost as much scholarly ink has been spilled considering the narratological intricacies of historical inaccuracy and indeterminacy in Absalom, Absalom! as has been spent cataloguing and debating the historical inaccuracies in Gone with the Wind, both novel and film.2 Consequently, there remain more interesting historical questions to ask of Gone with the Wind than whether or not the gentleman-farmer Gerald O’Hara would ever wear a cravat on a weekday.3 1 See Mathews for an early critical account of this coincidence. 2 To speak of Gone with the Wind the novel without reference to Gone with the Wind the film seems an unnecessarily puritanical exercise: the two are so enmeshed in popular imagination that a reference to one is already a reference to the other. However, though they share a name, the two texts are different enough in content and tone that a simple one-to-one substitution of film-for-novel (or vice versa) cannot work. I have chosen to respect these differences while still drawing on the film for evidence in this paper by positioning the film as a “reading” of the novel. I hope that reading the film as a reading allows for a discussion of the interpretive choices that the film makes vis-à-vis the novel. Rather than evaluating these choices as “good,” “bad,” “faithful,” or “fanciful,” I will read them as more evidence of how the novel invites (or thwarts) particular interpretations of its historical details. 3 See Watkins for this and more of Mitchell’s historical mistakes. 100 Kathryne Bevilacqua If we accept the canonical accounts of the composition of Gone with the Wind, Margaret Mitchell actually seems quite at home next to Quentin Compson, sitting in the still, hot air of Rosa Coldfield’s drawing room, receiving a potent mix of history and memory.4 Mitchell claimed that the only source she needed for her novel was her memory, full of a rich oral history that she had received as a child. As she often told reporters, “she was 10 years old before she learned that Robert E. Lee did not win the Civil War” (“Miss Mitchell”). It was not until she sold her manuscript to Macmillan that she fact-checked her inherited memory, and even then, Mitchell maintained that she found “exactly two minor errors, neither of which would ever have been found outside of Georgia” (Harwell 30).5 Thus story and history have always been entwined in Gone with the Wind, and this pedigree places the novel in the same storytelling tradition whose fissures and complications provide the drama of Absalom, Absalom! Nevertheless, most engagements with Gone with the Wind have fixated on issues of historical accuracy. As scholars have re-checked Mitchell’s historiography, they have implicated its various inaccuracies and flaws in various ideological projects. Critics of the novel have argued that Gone with the Wind. “propagandizes history” in order to advance a Lost Cause mythology (Watkins 89). Others have attempted to apologize for the novel’s inaccuracies by historicizing its flaws: Mildred Seydell argues that the novel provides not a “true picture of the South of those days,” but “a true picture of the picture of those days” (Harwell xvii). Still others attempt to absolve the novel of its historiographical offenses by universalist appeals to “truths . . . of a mythic, epic and indeed tragic nature”—in short, by de-historicizing the novel altogether (Taylor 209). All these readings...