Search Results

This chapter examines the historical films produced in Hollywood during the period from 1930 to 1939 which focused on the American Civil War and the Reconstruction. The most notable of these types of films are William Wyler's Jezebel and Victor Fleming's Gone with the Wind which was based on Margaret Mitchell's award-winning novel of the same title. This chapter discusses the treatment of American history in these films.

Kathleen Clark’s essay examines another of the South’s important literary figures, Margaret Mitchell. Gone with the Wind, Mitchell’s epic novel on the Civil War South, was an international phenomenon and, as a result, has long attracted tourists to Atlanta to see where Mitchell wrote her novel—the apartment she jokingly referred to as “the dump.” Preserving the Victorian house in which the apartment existed proved difficult on many levels, as Clark demonstrates. Racial controversy, developers who wanted to tear down the house, and two fires all nearly destroyed the dream of local preservationists to “save the dump.” As Clark argues, visitors to the Margaret Mitchell House today encounter a complicated history of Mitchell that is not always appreciated by lovers of her book.

This chapter examines Jonathan Daniels's negative reaction to visiting Atlanta and meeting Gone with the Wind author Margaret Mitchell in June 1937. Daniels perceived Atlanta as the capital of the New South but was disappointed to see so much social distance between rich and poor, white and black, which seemed reminiscent of Old South social hierarchies. Mitchell, too, struck him as person full of contradictions. The vulgarity of her speech reminded him of the flappers or New Women of the 1920s, yet she had written a romantic epic of the Old South and seemed disappointingly conventional, rigid, and small-minded. Daniels had little insight into the gender struggles of white southern women of his and Mitchell's generation, but their ideological differences in relation to the New Deal were evident. Mitchell was very angry that Daniels included excerpts of their conversation in A Southerner Discovers the South without her permission, but the fact that he did not name her in the book resulted in very few readers recognizing her.

The pro-Confederate Lost Cause memory of the Civil War continued to have considerable staying power during the 1930s, seen most notably in the popularity of the book and film versions of Gone With the Wind. At the same time, the Lost Cause was adapted to fit the sensibilities of this era. Many white Americans, for example, were drawn to the suffering of Civil War era white southerners in light of the economic trials of the 30s. Conservatives also doubled-down on the Lost Cause narrative as they pushed back against aspects of the New Deal agenda, as well as a reawakened civil rights movement and anti-lynching campaign. Finally, conservatives adapted the Lost Cause story to target Northern radicals and communists as the same kind of agitators who punished white southerners during Reconstruction. Black activists and communists tried to expose the racist and unpatriotic underpinnings of the Lost Cause but often fell short.

This chapter discusses the rebirth of the plantation romance from the 1900s through to the 1940s, discussing two key popular fictions: Thomas Dixon’s The Leopard’s Spots and Margaret Mitchell’s Gone With The Wind. It contextualizes the plantation romance as a genre that speculates on the past and on historiography itself. Such popular fictions re-tell the story of Reconstruction, not just to do a historical critique of it as misguided or as a failure, but to produce perceptual strategies that renew racisms along different lines. It shows how Gone With The Wind transforms racial perception from one based on status and character to one based on creating racial contexts.

In chapter 1, Roh explores how copyright law regulates dialogic activity to weaken disruptive textuality and analyze the relationship between intellectual property rights and American literature in two recent copyright disputes: Alice Randall’s The Wind Done Gone (a parody of Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind) and Pia Pera’s Lo’s Diary (a novelistic response to Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita). Feeling that they held the right to cultural commentary, Randall and Pera attempted to exercise that right against the wishes of the author estates. The Nabokov and Mitchell estates both sued for copyright infringement, with the books eventually reaching publication after contentious public and legal debate. This chapter shows how the extralegal forum grants refuge to subcultural voices and examines how the participants’ literary reading of the cases affected their legal outcomes. I suggest that the tension between extralegal and canonical texts—the original or copyrighted texts—spurs literary development.

This chapter interprets Frank Yerby, one of the most successful African American historical romance writers in U.S. publication history, in relation to the conjunction of plantation romance and historiography. It shows how Yerby, writing in the aftermath of Gone With The Wind, develops narrative strategies that both critique the way in which Mitchell refigures racial perception and construct different modes of perception. The chapter compares Yerby’s and Mitchell’s plantation romances in order to detail an early narrative practice of anti-racist racial worldmaking.

Chapter 4 deals with the cinematic legacies of the Civil War, from very early documentary films featuring Confederate Memorial Days and battlefield reenactments to the two most significant feature films in the history of American motion pictures: The Birth of a Nation and Gone with the Wind. D. W. Griffith’s singular career, and his enduring influence of the institutional structure of the medium and industry, is a central presence here, while the extraordinary popularity of Gone with the Wind as novel and film provided a sense of continuity with earlier Civil War films sympathetic to the Confederacy and its partisans.

This chapter reconstructs the scoring of Selznick’s most famous film. The story interweaves several familiar anecdotes, such as Steiner’s furious discovery that another composer had been primed to replace him, into a more comprehensive, critical review of the full collaboration. Included are Steiner’s adaptation of musical ideas from Margaret Mitchell’s source novel, his divvying of the film’s music among multiple composers (Hugo Freidhofer, Adolph Deutsch, and Heinz Roemheld), Lou Forbes’s delicate negotiations with Selznick, the rejection and rewriting of critical passages of the score, the efforts of orchestrators, and the recording of the music with studio musicians. With archival materials ranging from Steiner’s doodled marginalia to Forbes’s legal files, a new impression of the score’s construction emerges: one in which a new level of involvement from Selznick prompts an unprecedented and vigorous style of musical collaboration—dubbed “Max Steiner and Co.”—that affected both process and product.

Published in 1946, Frank Yerby’s The Foxes of Harrow sold over 500,000 copies within its first two months; the novel’s sales numbers led to a film adaptation by Twentieth Century Fox the following year. Directed by John M. Stahl with a screenplay by Wanda Tuchock, the film eliminates most of the subversive elements found within Yerby’s text that seek to counter the glorification of a mythologized Old South that never truly existed. The removal of these aspects only serves to maintain the image of a glorified, idyll, and nostalgic South that the adaptation of Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind (1939) epitomizes on screen. Ultimately, the movie falls short of serving as a major touchstone in cinematic history on the representation of African Americans on screen. Instead, it perpetuates, while also challenging in some ways, the continued view of African Americans in subservient roles to white masters.