The case for Gone With The Wind

FEMINISM. RACISM. CINEMA. Maligned and rejected, it has huge relevance – if you look

Image: Scarlett O’Hara, played by Vivien Leigh, and Prissy, her maidservant, played by Butterfly McQueen, in a scene from the film Gone With The Wind.

A very dear friend of mine and a buddy of his were whiling away time one evening many years back, wondering what to do with themselves, when one of them remarked, “Why don’t we go and see that new film that’s just come out, Back To The Future?” The suggestion was taken up and off the two trotted to the picture house to watch the new cinematographic sensation. It was Monday.

On Tuesday, however, their wan having been satiated by the film, and their inquisitiveness awakened, time had nevertheless remained to lie heavy in their hands. “You know, that film really was very good,” said the one, to which the other agreed. “Why don’t we go and see it again?” Indeed, why not? So, on the Tuesday off they trotted again to watch Back To The Future for a second time. Wan was once again satiated, but inquiry simply grew.

They returned on the Wednesday and, in total, over that week, went to see Back To The Future five times. It had barely come out and it was already cult.

I can beat five times of watching, probably Back To The Future, which raised my scientific enquiry, and certainly of watching another film, which I saw for the first time in 1974, when I was 12 or 13. My mother took me, because it was a favourite of hers and it came, for the umpteenth time, back to the Odeon in Leeds, on general release, despite having been made in 1939. Thirty-five years on general release is an astounding statistic. The film was called Gone With The Wind, and took its name from the novel of the same name, on which it was based, by Margaret Mitchell.

Several years ago, the film was removed from the Home Box Office selection, on the grounds that it dealt in desultory fashion with one of its prime themes: slavery. In fact the topic, whilst being one of the film’s raisons d’être, is alluded to in only two lines of the entire script. It is that paucity of mention that induced HBO to remove it from its public offering.

The film starts on the eve of the American Civil War, and takes a viewpoint that is decidedly southern. It was the southern states — the Confederacy — that lost the war and thereby lost its way of life, which had included, for a large part, the aspect of slavery. It was a way of life that would be gone with the wind.

Mitchell wrote her novel in closed secrecy. No one knew about her writing, and Gone With The Wind is the only work of hers that was ever published (bar one discovered posthumously). Whether she wrote other works is questionable; if she did, she almost certainly destroyed them in her lifetime. She was no novelist (she worked as a newspaper columnist), and yet she had a gift, which she kept very much to herself. In fact, she was on the point of destroying her manuscript for Gone With The Wind when a friend happened upon it by chance in her home, read it and pleaded with her to not throw it on the fire. In the end, she relented and allowed him to contact publishers to see if it could be printed. It was and, two years later, the world was agog at this epic story of love, bravery, determination, compassion, hard-nosed rat-racing and terrible, terrible warfare.

The war it depicts was a war against slavery, and Mitchell initially wanted to burn the manuscript. We can only speculate why she would have wanted to do that. Perhaps because she casts slavery in a soft focus light. Or perhaps because, in so doing, she in fact homes in on the callousness with which slavery was taken for granted in the south, and she feared raising hackles in her own home territory. Perhaps because she put the spunk and spit of womanhood into the focus, and feared recriminations for her doing so, outwith the homely setting in which women were traditionally placed in the south. Perhaps because she had the audacity to depict the staunch loyalty, bravery and uprightness of Blacks against their scheming, murdering white peers. Or maybe she just thought it was a pile of garbage. Well, Miss Mitchell, I don’t think it is garbage, not one word of it.

The two mentions of slavery occur at different points. First, after the war, the homestead Tara is a rambling hulk with all its furnishings and accoutrements taken by looting Union soldiers. The butler, whose name is Pork (pronounced Poke), complains at having to feed the chickens or work the fields. He says, “I am a house servant, and house servants are not supposed to work the fields.” Pork is a simple man, who knows one thing if nothing else: the routine and rules that made of his life a reliable background for existence and which he was taught to observe — for his own well-being. When Tara needed to call all hands on deck to ensure its survival, Pork was a little lost and couldn’t quite make sense of his new world. Revolutions have that effect on people.

The second mention of slavery is when Ashley Wilkes (whom Scarlett O’Hara adores, but who is married to another) has an intimate conversation — it would get yet more intimate later on — with Scarlett and offers the line, “We would have freed them anyway,” as if to show his unbreakable moral backbone.

Even in 1974, I remember hearing the line and having an innate feeling that he was plying Scarlett with soft sawder, and yet, like Shakespeare characters, Ashley Wilkes was a role in that film that always told the truth. So, consequently, if he said he would have freed his slaves, then that is what he would have done. It was no buttering-up, of either Scarlett or, for that matter, the audience, though one has to recede within the authoress’s mind to know exactly what was intended, and she is long since gone.

One might, however, consider whether Mitchell offered this line as a panacea to an audience that had been raised, in part at least, on the idea of slavery being an evil; Wilkes is no evil man and therefore must be shown to revile slavery, if only as an afterthought: hence, one might also inquire as to why, if Wilkes found slavery so abhorrent, he had in fact ever been a slave-owner. That, I feel, is unworthy of the audience, however, for such a stance would effectively deny the validity of rehabilitation within a criminal justice system at all. In the end, no matter how evil one is smeared, a coat can be turned, and light can be seen.

Perhaps critics see Ashley Wilkes as an impossible character: a pure figment of Mitchell’s imagination, who could never truly have existed. I cannot say: I have only her novel as a product of her imagination to go by; like Thomas More, I have no window to look into another man’s, or, for that matter, woman’s conscience. A Man For All Seasons, if you care.

There is a third interaction in which slavery plays a role, and yet the word itself is absent from the script. Just as General Sherman’s army is advancing on the city of Atlanta, Wilkes’s cousin, Melanie, who is pregnant with her first baby, breaks her water and goes into labour. Scarlett is frantic at the arrival of a child in the middle of what will be a dreadful battlefield. Her servant, Prissy, avows that “she knows about birthing babies” and Scarlett tells her to help with the delivery, but sends her all the same to fetch the doctor. Doctor Meade is, unfortunately, more than occupied in tending the wounds of Confederate soldiers down at the railroad goods yard. Prissy returns without the doctor, so that Scarlett tells her she must deliver the baby alone, and only at that point does Prissy back out, saying she can’t. In the end the two have to buckle down, roll up their sleeves and deliver Melanie’s baby themselves.

It is a deeply moving scene, showing three women joining forces to preserve a new life as an army of soldiers enters the town bent on destroying just that: life. The women against the men. The creators against the destroyers.

Confronted with the real possibility of actually having to deliver a baby, Prissy shirks from the task, confessing that she doesn’t in fact know how to birth babies at all. “I don’t know why I told such a lie.” Scarlett sets to and beats the girl around the head for having induced her to believe that the future would be all right, if only the slave girl knew her duty. Why did Prissy lie?

It’s easy to interpret Prissy’s actions as ideas above her station — proclaiming assets that she didn’t actually possess. The girl would be around 16 or 17 years of age. It is an age when youngsters acquire pride in learned knowledge and are avid to put it to work. And yet, the blood and the intricacy of bringing a baby to the world was now a step too far for this girl. What’s more, despite the script and the novel, I don’t think that Prissy lied realising she’d need to ever prove her asserted ability. In that she was no different to any other teenager.

What she said was that she knew about birthing babies: in the novel, she says she had seen one such birth, effected by her mother, who’d scolded her for having watched. It was the surreptitious nature of her observing that act that had possibly made it “prized knowledge” to the girl. Even until recent times, girls have often married early in the south of the USA. The singer Jerry Lee Lewis infamously married his first wife when she was 14 years of age, and was told to stay out of the UK for his audacity. But I can recall schooldays, when the voyage of discovery about sex was at its inception, and boys would brag to one another about their experiences and their knowledge, if only of the terminology. In a rural location such as a cotton plantation, with animals around, knowledge of sex comes at an early age, even if it’s not human reproduction that is involved. In his tale Un Coeur Simple, Gustave Flaubert’s principal character is a simple country peasant woman, who nonetheless possesses more knowledge of sex from having seen animals than, probably, many city dwellers have from their own human experience. Prissy did know about birthing babies, but not human babies.

This inspiring scene, which delivers the supreme message of womankind battling to bring about new life, whilst menfolk seek to destroy, not just life but the entire fabric of the city, nonetheless delivers the outrageous shock of the physical attack on Prissy by Scarlett. It was in blatant contravention of the advice her father had issued to her back at Tara, in the days before the wind with which they would be gone swept across the south. It is a point, one of many, at which the audience is confronted with the fallibilities of Scarlett (being, as with us all, sex, money and, here, violence). She is a heroine who is not consistently heroic in her actions, but the viewer must search within themselves to know whether they approve the act, or revile it. The lack of the authoress’s judgment does not mean the viewer may not judge, and, it seems for HBO, a medium that leaves judgment to its observer is one that lacks moral instruction, and therefore requires to be rejected.

Yet, where is the moral indictment of cowboys killing First Nation tribes defending their lands in films like John Wayne’s Stagecoach, the indictment of the something for nothing attitudes in the land-grab of Tom Cruise’s Far And Away, of the arrogance of Texas ranchers in The Big Country, of the rapacious oil industry in Wayne’s Hellfighters, of the forced displacements that would follow in the wake of the settlers, in another film that looks also at the Civil War and, yet, makes no mention at all of slavery, focusing instead on a chance attempt by a Confederate soldier to kill two Union generals: How The West Was Won, whose poster features not a single Black or First Nation face:

The Guns of Navarone, The Battle of Britain, Appointment in London, Mrs Miniver, Objective Burma, Pearl Harbor, A Bridge Too Far, The Dambusters, The Great Dictator, Saving Private Ryan, The Longest Day, 633 Squadron, Schindler’s List. A baker’s dozen of films about the Second World War or the Nazis. Only one of which even mentions the Holocaust: Schindler’s List, which was all about it, and the role played in it by Oskar Schindler. Spielberg dedicated his film to the man, graphically, in the stone-laying scene that concludes the picture. It was about him and his role in the Holocaust, because it was his role in that that even made his name known to us. Perhaps Scarlett’s involvement in slavery should have brought that aspect more into focus, but what, then, was her involvement? She was a young girl; if the film had been about her father or the overseer, Wilkerson, slavery would have stood central; but for the girl, it was about her love life and how the war affected her — she wasn’t a player in the war; nor was Gerald O’Hara, but he owned the plantation, not Scarlett; when cotton became a prime commodity after the war, she didn’t put anyone to work the fields more than herself.

Aside from Schindler’s List, search as you will, you’ll find no Holocaust reference in any of the other 12 films. Second World War films tend to focus on the heroics of the men who fought. Saving Private Ryan, in fact, has little or nothing to do with Private James Ryan; instead it’s all about Captain John Miller, who saved him. It dwells on the devotion to duty, and the susceptibility of compassion to abuse by the forgiven. But it doesn’t deal with the campaign by the Nazis against the Jews, which was a policy that led ultimately to Ryan and Miller even being where they were.

All Quiet On The Western Front, King And Country, Gallipoli, Lawrence of Arabia, The Dawn Patrol, Sergeant York, The Blue Max, Oh! What A Lovely War, War Horse, Legends Of The Fall, Johnny Got His Gun, Paths of Glory, The African Queen. Thirteen more films, set during the First World War. But Germany’s expansionist policies, her invasion of Belgium, and the struggles of the Balkan states for self-determination are not touched on one bit. First World War films tend to deal with the folly and intransigence of allied commanders. Haig’s blind use of tanks where they were least suited: in mud. Duty and honour above the lives of mere cannon-fodder. If Tom Courtney is pulled apart by his duty to fight and his desertion in King And Country, Dirk Bogarde is the more so by his own duty to defend his client and his oath of allegiance to the King. Germany’s hardly even mentioned.

I don’t think a film set in the Civil War needs to deal with what the belligerents hoped to achieve, on whatever side. It needs to deal properly with what it is about: in this case a woman, who is seen in the opening shot after the credits, and is in the closing shot at the end. It’s about her, her world being swept away, her need to abandon grace and adopt wily business acumen, in the circumstances in which she found herself, which just happened to be a civil war. Slavery is the background to her story, but, for many, it’s felt it should be at the core of her story. It simply wasn’t, no more so than the shooting of an Archduke in Sarajevo is mentioned in King And Country, even though it was slavery that precipitated the war that caused such a tidal wave of change in her. This is not to be an apologist for slavery or the Confederacy, far from it, and Amistad did a far better job of castigating slavery, because that was its core theme: abhorrence of slavery. Rather, it is simply to see the film for what its story is about: Scarlett. A woman and her struggles in a male-dominated society, one whose males had taken society to the brink of Armageddon. And she got caught up in the fray. Her mother taught her that the southern way — the way founded in slavery — would guarantee tranquillity all her life long; it didn’t, and I’m glad. For, slavery was the reason it didn’t.

If nothing else, Scarlett striking Prissy is, for me, Mitchell’s indictment of the whole sorry, southern system, southerner and all as Mitchell was. And, it is a clear sign that Scarlett, an indomitable woman, who manages to win every prize that she aims at, cannot in the end do anything to change circumstances as they simply are and needs to learn that only she herself can be depended on to forge her own progress: whereupon she chooses violence to achieve, what? A solution? The baby was still in Melanie’s womb, even with the attack. Prissy is not a disappointment, but the product of a system that sought to control every aspect of men’s and women’s lives, and yet turned to them for succour when the impasse presented itself and, when then they failed, the only solution was: violence? If that is not outright criticism of the slavery system (which is, when all’s said and done, what I have understood of Mitchell), then I have not understood Mitchell one iota.

Oscar Wilde lampooned London society by getting that society to laugh at itself. And Margaret Mitchell lampooned southern society by getting it to have pangs of conscience at the manifestations of injustice in its supposedly just and perfect society. To have done so more opulently, would have been to deliver soft sawder by the bucketload. Bathos and tears; these would later come, and in rightful measure, in Spielberg’s Amistad, which, incidentally, depicts a very different Supreme Court from that which sits today in Washington, D.C. (when it’s not in the Adirondacks). Of all the tears in Gone With The Wind, they’re all, with one exception, shed for the fate of another: Mrs Meade cries for her two fallen sons (mayn’t she?); their brother, the piper, cries for them and for his nation (mayn’t he?); Mammy cries for Baby Blue and Captain Butler (mayn’t she?); Prissy cries out of sheer fright, imagines bayonets being thrust in her by rabid soldiers (imagery that invokes shades of Shakespeare’s Henry V, who threatens rape as a weapon of war — mayn’t she?); but, when struck by Scarlett, Prissy weeps for her folly, her loss of honour and the fate that could befall the new baby — in effect, for Melanie — and mayn’t she, for that too? By contrast, Scarlett’s sisters cry — for themselves — at their rough hands and at losing their beaux to her, but it is Scarlett who weeps the most, and always for herself: to Ashley (“Oh my poor, dear Scarlett, how you have suffered for us all” — and to what end?); to Rhett Butler (so often, he even gets the line: “I’ve never known you to have a handkerchief when you cry” — why? Because she turns on the waterworks for ulterior purposes?); but she doesn’t cry at the deaths of either her mother or her father, or of her husbands, and certainly not at the death of Melanie (she is admonished by Dr Meade not to do so, either). No, only one character-set cry for their own fate: the indomitable Scarlett O’Hara, and her jealous sisters.

Perhaps one last fallibility of Scarlett’s. I say elsewhere that she learns from her experiences, but the experience of striking Prissy, she does not learn from. Toward the final stanza of the film, with her pregnant and her marriage at a low ebb, Butler quips that maybe she would have a miscarriage, to avoid her needing to bear another child of his. She is outraged and strikes out physically to hit Rhett, misses him and, instead, herself tumbles down a gargantuan staircase: hoist by her own petar, as Hamlet would have said. If that’s not food for thought.

You can understand whatever it is that you want to understand from the film. It is that honest in its portrayals. There are kind and upright middle-class citizens; and there are snooty and self-centred ones too. There’s a kind and upright body of slaves: Big Sam, Pork, Mammy, Prissy; and there are the black carpetbaggers. There’s a kind and upright white woman, Belle Watling, who is a prostitute; and there are white robbers in shanty town; there are scoundrels: the white overseer, Wilkerson, who returns to gloat with his carpetbaggers and extort lucre from the plantation owners — sinister profiteering, such as that showcased much later in Margin Call, Indecent Proposal and even Pretty Woman; there are the white men who tempt freed slaves with three acres and a mule, which are offered anent the duty to vote for your friends, as if to re-enslave the, oh, so recently liberated, in a new web of exploitation; the votes counted, the ex-slaves would, as King would later put it, be left to pull themselves up by their own bootstraps. And it is the honest view of HBO of all of this that led to the film’s withdrawal by them.

Does HBO think I am so naive as to see three hours of man’s inhumanity to his fellow man, at a military level, at a social level and at the level of treating humans as capital goods, and to conclude, “Bravo, white scoundrels; down with the slaves”? HBO doesn’t know me. I find it sad, that HBO reaches a conclusion that the film must go, and won’t allow its viewers to form their own opinion on it, contorted though that may, needs must, be — in a free world. I’m lucky, I have it on two DVDs — German and English.

It’s the same with commentators who feel the urge to add their own indictment of Donald Trump to his grand jury’s, and cannot simply leave judgment of the man to the court of law before which he will soon appear. HBO is anxious that its viewers should not be given the freedom; freedom such as that which is now the subject of another war on the other side of the globe; freedom to judge Gone With The Wind according to their own precepts and opinions, for fear that that might fan flames of bias and prejudice. And, tell me: conviction of an ex-president by public, mouse-click lynch-mobs, even before a court has heard evidence, isn’t bias and prejudice?

Both this ban by HBO and the public character-lynching of a politician are okay; really, they are: if what you seek is to push a philosophy by any means; but, spare me your prejudgment lest I might advance my own prejudgement, for banners and lynchers will always have right on their side, and free thinkers never will. Because we heed not clarion calls to abandon principle, and seek refuge on a bandwagon. If I speak out for the rule of law in the law’s treatment of Donald Trump, I do not speak out in his favour; I speak out in favour of the rule of law, lest it become so distorted by a mantra of justice at any price, lest that itself come to militate against the rights of every common man or woman. Me, I have but this blog in which to militate; and its judgment I leave to you.

You can understand the film as an advocation of slavery and a dewy-eyed retrospective at a wonderful way of life, long since blown away by progress — a sort of precursor to Walt Disney’s Song Of The South, from three years afterwards. But you can see this film also in the cold light of human interaction that, within the subtle comment by the film-maker and his source, tells the audience a slightly different story. Mitchell’s novel is based on recollections from family and acquaintances who’d lived the experience. It’s a story of how it was; a story of how it changed; and of what it became.

The Union may have been right to take this stand against an abhorrent practice, but the Union was wrong in how it wrought its revenge. For revenge is never going to settle matters. Not ever. And it is the revenge that the Union took on the Confederacy that has led us, peu à peu, to what we see in a lot of today’s south: the desultory situation of the southern economies, the lingering legacies of Jim Crow, disproportionate prosecution of Blacks, and the hopelessness of the working classes down south. When the Union took revenge on the Confederacy, the Confederacy took revenge on its slaves, as a knee-jerk displacement of guilt. It’s what happened in Germany post-1919. And it is, mark my words, precisely what will happen in Russia, if Ukraine wins and then takes revenge.

For all its nearly three hours’ length, it is only on repeated viewing that you start to understand Fleming and Selznick and, indeed, Margaret Mitchell herself. Like my pal Fred with Back To The Future, I recommend about five viewings. I wonder how many re-runs of the Russo-Ukrainian War will be needed to finally understand what it was even all about, let alone the detail?

It is extremely difficult for two people to sit on a see-saw and remain, the two of them, in precise mid-air balance. It is nigh-on impossible; but that, in fact, should be the challenge of a see-saw. Not to constantly bounce up and down, and up and down, and back again, but to achieve equilibrium that will ensure peace, harmony, tranquillity and equality for all the players in the game. What goes up will always come down on a see-saw. And it helps none if one see-sawyer seeks always to grasp his advantage: to leave the other flailing in the air.