514 Making It New: 1900–1945“pop-eyed with fear” over some scary matter, and the “laughter of negro voices” as
the hands return from the fields, set the initial tone. African-American characters
are, at best, comic, choric commentators, at worst ignorant and mischievous, or they
are turned into anonymous, helpless, and occasionally shiftless shadows. All this, the
traditional stuff of antebellum romance, is bad enough. What is worse is what
happens when the narrative turns to the Civil War and, even more, Reconstruction.
There are scattered references now to “drunken blacks,” “illiterate negroes in high
office” who “conducted themselves as creatures of small intelligence might naturally
be expected to do” when faced with political responsibility. “Like monkeys or small
children turned loose,” the freed slaves, and especially the men, are seen as a threat
to white society in general, and to white women in particular. The “peril to white
women,” the reader is told, created “the tragic necessity” of the Ku Klux Klan. And
Rhett Butler himself is jailed for killing an African-American who “insulted” a white
woman. “He was uppity to a lady,” Rhett explains, “and what could a gentleman do?”
Scarlett O’Hara herself is attacked by a “ragged” white man and black man, whose
“rank odor” she can smell as he tears off her basque. She is rescued, however, by “Big
Sam,” an Uncle Tom figure who declares, after rescuing her, “Ah hope Ah done kill de
black babboon.” “Ah done had nuff freedom,” Sam adds, “Tara mah home”: a
sentiment later echoed by Scarlett’s “Mammy” when she declares “Ah’s gwine home”
to Tara. The deep racial flaw of Gone With the Wind is a matter of omission as much
as anything else. The humanity of black men is a conspicuous, constitutive absence
in the novel. So, too, are the humanity and sexuality of black women, since the only
black women who receive any attention are asexual. Miscegenation here, apart from
occasional references to “the enormous increase in mulatto babies since the Yankee
soldiers settled in town,” is a matter of forced relations between black male rapists
and pure white women. Mitchell shows absolutely no sense of what writers like
Charles Chesnutt, William Faulkner, and Toni Morrison have understood: that the
use of black women by white men – with its equation of sex and power, its
interrogation of the color line, and its revelation of a secret history – is the repressed
myth of the South and, maybe, America. Her book is an inescapable fact of American
literary history; it represents a confluence of narrative traditions; and it has at its
center one of the most memorable heroines in American fiction. But that fact is an
ugly one, in some ways. And the book shows how romance may have its dark side,
may even depend on that dark side to survive. To that extent, Gone With the Wind is
far more frightening than its author intended, because it is a symptom rather than a
diagnosis of historical failure. Recalling an American dream, Mitchell inadvertently
exposes an American nightmare. In the process her novel illustrates the famous
remark of Walter Benjamin that there is no document of civilization that is not at
the same time a document of barbarism.
Despite the enormous success of the film of her book, Mitchell had very little
interest in Hollywood or visiting there. In fact, she rarely strayed outside Atlanta.
Unlike her, though, one thing many of the humorists and hardboiled writers did
have in common was precisely their experience of the film capital of the world.
Together with novelists like Faulkner and Fitzgerald, and playwrights like Hecht andGGray_c04.indd 514ray_c 04 .indd 514 8 8/1/2011 7:54:07 AM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 54 : 07 AM