Though I will willingly concede that it has a few memorable lines, I am nevertheless not the biggest fan of Gone With the Wind. Aside from what I feel to be the overbaked melodrama of the piece, the viewer must contend with the film's many dreadful racial stereotypes.The following is an old piece of mine. It's rather long, and filled with a bit of jargon/academic speak. If that's your kind of thing, then groovy (yes, that's right, groovy). If not, consider yourself warned.
***
Film is a powerful medium with the ability to influence public perception and shape society’s understanding of the historical narrative. The popularity of film and the primacy of the filmic image have ensured the power and perpetuity of such knowledge, so that such narratives become accepted as historical truth. Yet these readings of the past are rarely innocent. They are often influenced by contemporary values, and many films are designed with specific ideological aims and meanings in mind. Accepting the filmic reconstruction of the past as the truth is therefore dangerous.
Few American historical narratives outside of the Western have been as popular as that of the Civil War, and fewer have been as easily influenced by contemporary ideology in their reconstruction and readings of the past. Civil War films encompass a diversity of issues, and the ideological viewpoints and arguments of each film are often unique. Gone With the Wind, perhaps the most famous Civil War film, is a brilliant example of the ways in which contemporary events and values of gender and race can shape visions of the past in film. When one examines these representations and contrasts them with the historical record, the danger in relying upon fictional representations of history as truth becomes evident.
The Thirties, the decade that produced Gone With the Wind in both its book
and filmforms, were difficult for many people in the United States. The economic depression produced by the crash of the stock market generated high levels of anxiety. As the nation’s economy spiraled downward, so spiraled the social and financial positions of thousands of people. Desperation and confusion engulfed many of those who lost jobs, money and stature. Traditional beliefs[1] and ways of life suddenly became uncertain. The prosperity of the Twenties gave way to hardship and social upheaval. Traditionally held concepts of gender and race identities became less certain as thousands of men lost jobs and women were forced to work. As a result, many Americans attempted to counter what they saw as a betrayal of basic American values. Efforts were made on a political and cultural level to counteract the Depression’s lugubrious effects on society and to thwart gradual but significant changes within the realm of gender. Hollywood produced films became a powerful component in this struggle over culture. While Hollywood had long relied upon cultural images and stereotypes to create meaning, the use of such symbols during the Thirties was exceptionally skilled in the effort to reassert white male dominance, the purity of white womanhood and the virtue of female subservience. Few films were as successful at presenting an image of these ‘lost’ values as Gone With the Wind (1939). It skillfully manipulates history to argue in favor of traditionally segregated spheres of race and gender.
Gone With the Wind was hardly the first film to utilize broad race and gender stereotypes, but the enduring popularity and historical context of the film allots the title a position of particular significance. Understanding its context is crucial to appreciating the title’s ideology. Margaret Mitchell’s book was published in 1936, and while its author denied any direct connection between the Depression and her story, it is difficult not to presume some influence. The novel and film both center on a society in economic and social disarray that serves as a mirror to the disorder incurred by the Depression.
Americans had not been prepared – financially, structurally, and especially psychologically – for the hardships that would have to be endured during the next decade. Americans consequently sought psychological and economic solace in the reaffirmation of traditionally held customs of gender and race.
Mitchell acknowledged that her novel centered on an era of hard times,[2] and that a portion of it was written during the Depression years. The film, like the novel, embraces a nostalgic view of antebellum Southern society that, as historian Richard McElvaine notes,[3] reflected a broader Depression era trend within the country itself – the embrace of an idealized, lost golden era of white male dominance, and an effort to reassert this dominance, negating the rising number of women and minorities within the workforce and increased female independence, thus reestablishing a weakened sense of white male confidence and, it was theorized, securing financial and social stability amidst economic chaos. Even First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt, a chief proponent of women’s rights, suggested that the home was again where women were needed – that their moral support was required. As historian Gerald Nash notes, “the Depression clearly dampened the mood of most women, in contrast to the ebullient self-confidence of the 1920’s… The majority of women centered their lives on their homes and families and devoted more than sixty hours weekly to them… most Americans accepted the notion that a woman’s place was in the home.”[4] Once again, it was believed, white males would assume leading roles in life and work.
For years, American masculinity and the traditionally accepted notions of the male role were closely associated with work. Despite gains made by women and minorities during the Twenties, the workplace largely remained a male world in which white men attempted to test and prove their masculinity to themselves and those around them. The actual act of labor allowed men to cultivate the sense that they had forged their own identities as males – instilling in them the belief that a man could be self-made, rather than made by accident of birth. According to this view, “a man’s work role… formed the essence of his identity.”[5] A majority of men considered the workplace to be a valued community. Membership in the community of work implied skill and conveyed social status and masculinity. A disruption such as the Depression and the consequent loss of jobs caused enormous distress among white males who based their identities on their positions within this community and upon their ability to perform their jobs and support families.[6] Many men viewed unemployment and the loss of this community of work as a loss of status and masculinity.
In order to bolster themselves during the Depression, white males reached back to and romanticized a time before industrialization and mass labor, when white male patriarchy remained relatively unchallenged by other genders and races, and when economic and social security were assured by the efforts of white men. By re-imagining white patriarchy and the subjugation of women and other races within popular culture and national consciousness, white men attempted to establish this romanticized notion of the past. The fact that the historical record contradicts such a simplistic reading of the past is evidence of the ideological aims.
Ideologically, both the novel and film versions of Gone With the Wind go beyond a simple attempt to transfer the troubles of the Depression to another era or any effort to accurately portray the process of Reconstruction in the South. Instead, Gone With the Wind establishes a dialect between the Civil War, Reconstruction, the economic hardships of the Depression, and the ideology of a distinctly romanticized version of society and its idealized schema of gender and race. While the film does slightly mollify some of the explicitly racist passages of the novel, it nevertheless contains a variety of images referencing white and black femininity and masculinity, and uses these images to support a system of white patriarchy. Race is used as a social control.[7]
One of several large female roles in the film, the character of Mammy, forcefully played by Hattie McDaniel,[8] embodies many of the values that Southern whites believed slave women should posses. Mammy is not so much a character in the film but a continuation of a long held stereotype of female slaves. McDaniel’s character is never given an actual name within the film – she is simply referred to as ‘Mammy.’ Nor is any insight given into her personality outside of her position and life as slave. Her real name and character traits are not important within the context of the film, as she remains, essentially, an appendage of the O’Hara family – there to validate their lives and whiteness. She is denied her own identity, and in the process is made into a symbol. Facile readings of the film may skim over the ideological implications of Mammy, instead perhaps admiring her strength and clear sightedness. These qualities are indeed there in the McDaniel performance, and it is a testament to the actress’s ability that she is able to render some human qualities and strength within the type. Yet the Mammy figure is still a type.
As Deborah Gray White convincingly illustrates in Ar'n't I a Woman,the image of the Mammy stemmed in large part from the South’s need to adopt a new defense of slavery in the nineteenth century. Feeling that the institution of slavery was threatened, the South attempted to justify it through more civilized means, and thus the South developed the image of the Mammy. The image was that of an asexual woman who loved and was loved by the white family that she served. As White notes, she was a self possessed general who guided and directed all of the servants and housework. White carefully illustrates that this was in reality frequently not the case. The image denied the complexities of the house slave’s compliance and the leverage used by whites to physically control blacks, including physical and mental abuse and threats against the slaves’ families. The ideology of the Mammy also obscured the fact that white women did a great deal of work about the house themselves, while all women, whether black or white, were subservient to white men. Mammy, White argues, was in fact an image created specifically to bolster white men’s sense of patriarchal superiority. While the cult of domesticity gained popularity in the south, a class of enslaved, subservient, asexual, nurturing and thus non-threatening women representing white men’s feminine ideal allowed males to feel secure and, in their eyes, allowed white women to pursue the ideal of white leisure and thus subjugating women of both races. By incorporating the image of Mammy while ignoring the actual social and emotional intricacies of not just that position but all of slave life, the film is able to place the viewer in a position to feel a degree of mastery over the black characters. In her essay “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” Laura Mulvey notes that the female characters within films are often used as the receptacles for the voyeuristic desires and cruel inclinations of men. Though the sexual implications of this equation in relation to blacks is deliberately ignored in Gone With the Wind (for racial miscegenation is ideologically forbidden for fear of tainting white patriarchy), the equation may be extended to encompass the desire for security and mastery among white males during the Depression. By placing black women in a subservient position on screen, white males were able to vicariously experience a sensation of control over their gender and racial identities. The threat of the Other to their security was contained.
The film version of Gone With the Wind perpetuates the dialect between black and white women and white males. Mammy, ostensibly sensible, remains with her former masters once the Civil War has finished. Despite her freedom, she and several other former slaves choose to remain infantilized. Despite the fact that she possesses a great deal more common sense than Scarlett O’Hara, it is Scarlett’s methods that prove successful at reinvigorating her home, Tara, after the war. While the film does paint Mammy as a strong figure, it never breaks with the original motives of the stereotype. Indeed, her presence after the war, when the antebellum gender and economic structure is collapsing, is essential in helping to reestablish some sense of tradition and order. The film powerfully represents the argument for the economic disaster of Reconstruction in the south; the decline of traditional gender roles and the subsequent emasculation of white men are also forcefully represented – most notably in the form of Ashley Wilkes.
Wilkes, his wife Melanie and Scarlett form a triptych of gender possibilities within the film. Scarlett and Melanie are continually contrasted, and though Scarlett is the central character of the film, this contrast is continually to Melanie’s advantage. Melanie comes to represent the idealized white woman – forgiving, generous and used to a life of leisure as opposed to work. Scarlett – selfish, determined and disdaining but unafraid of manual labor and business minded – is represented as far too independent for her own good. Indeed, in emphasizing these elements of her personality, as well as her dominating nature, the film explicitly paints Scarlett as a woman in possession of distinctly masculine traits. Her relationship with Rhett Butler reinforces her masculine qualities. The personalities of Scarlett and Rhett are deliberately paralleled – but while the roguish independence and mind for money are tolerable within Rhett, within a woman these masculine qualities are unforgivable. According to the film’s ideology, she is everything that a white woman should not be. By the end of the film, Scarlett has paid for her masculine independence with the lives of her daughter, her parents, her friends, her way of life and her one true love. Scarlett’s punishment fits with Mulvey’s thesis regarding the male, voyeuristic designs of films. By presenting Scarlett’s mind for business and her rapacious use of men for reasons of convenience and ambition in a negative light, and by forcing upon her harsh punishments for her gender transgressions, the film satisfies the white male desire for patriarchy during the Depression. In expressing this desire so vividly on screen, the film’s portrayal of the past is quite clearly influenced by the desires and ideologies of its day. Instead of accuracy, the film attempts to visually reassert white patriarchy as a means of social control. It fails to accurately consider the scope, reasons and complexity of female positions in the antebellum and Reconstruction eras.
The film argues for the image of docile, domesticated white womanhood represented by Melanie Wilkes and against the business minded, sexually assertive femininity of Scarlett O’Hara. In manufacturing these ideological poles of appropriate and inappropriate female behavior, the film fails to realize that during the years surrounding the Civil War and Reconstruction, gender roles were not so clearly defined. Many white women from the middle and lower classes labored in a variety of jobs simply to survive. Some worked as nurses and teachers, while others assumed positions within the prostitution industry. Other women of the lower classes helped their husbands labor in the fields, and a majority of wives and mothers in the lower classes performed a majority of the housework. As Susanna Delfino and Michelle Gillespie note in the their introduction to the collection of essays Neither Lady Nor Slave, many of the industries in which white women of the lower and middle classes labored, like prostitution, nursing and field work, entailed working and interacting with slaves or free blacks. Consequently the barriers between white and black society were not as clear as the ideology insisted. In reality it was more difficult for many women to base their identities on the concepts of white domesticity and racial hierarchy than the ideology of patriarchy shown in Gone With the Wind suggests, for many women labored, and not infrequently with blacks.
As the Civil War was waged, a number of women of all classes across the South, including the elite, were forced to take on additional responsibilities. As Drew Gilpin Faust observes in Mothers of Invention, the male population of the South was depleted due to the need for soldiers and the increasing death toll. As men left their residences and plantations for the army, women were left behind to run plantations, businesses and households. They assumed levels of authority and autonomy that was new to their gender. Many women were forced to perform manual labor; even in more prosperous families women were forced to economize, frequently moving in with relatives to save money.[9] Concerned for the safety of white women in the absence of white men, and dubious of their abilities to control the sizeable slave population and assume decision-making responsibilities, Confederate officials initially attempted to alter conscription laws to allow a higher percentage of men to remain behind. As the war continued and the South grew desperate for men, however, these modifications were often abandoned. The Confederate government itself tacitly acknowledged the need for women to assume such responsibilities. Though many women and their husbands were uncomfortable about the changes that war brought to the accepted notions of gender, most accepted the need. This acceptance was undoubtedly aided by the fact that female labor had been established well before the Civil War. As both Faust and White observe, the notion of white female leisure was a misrepresentation of the truth, even within the wealthier classes. As noted above, White makes the crucial observation that many white women of the elite, plantation class worked, as “there was too much work in Southern households for any one woman, black or white… [They] were anything but idle.”[10] Though few elites worked in the fields and all retained power over the slaves, the lives of many women did not fit the image of the docile life of leisure emphasized by white males. Yet in maintaining ownership of black slave labor and black bodies, white society was able juxtapose the theory of white femininity with the enslaved status of blacks and thus maintain white patriarchy.
Though Gone With the Wind portrays some increasing white female involvement with business and labor, by associating the normally masculine concept of business acumen so closely with the one-dimensionally ambitious, immature yet abnormally capable Scarlett, the film minimizes any risk that female spectators might identify with an increasingly powerful female character. Particularly when the film powerfully contrasts her with the self-sacrificing, pure qualities of Melanie as she nobly but ineptly tries manual labor, unable because of her ideal femininity to adjust to its rigors. In endorsing the rigid gender dichotomy between the impure Scarlett and the pure Melanie, the film denies the fact that women often had to become more like the former – and that this was appropriate and necessary for the time. It substitutes the ideological desires of the Depression for the actual gender strata of the antebellum South. As Jane Turner Censer notes, the gender ideals of the Civil War era were more complex than in the film. Though the image of the demure plantation wife existed, by the time of the war it had “lost much of its appeal for young women… The ideal of womanhood… had come to include a more active, outspoken, and courageous aspect.”[11] While the film condemns Scarlett’s assertiveness and concern with property and business in order to emphasize the Depression era predilection for white female domesticity, Censer notes that female property rights did exist prior to the Civil War and that while the percentage of women owning property was proportionately small in comparison with men, it was not unheard of or always looked down upon. Though both Censer and Gilpin are careful to observe that many women themselves had reservations about transgressing traditional boundaries, they make convincingly clear that many did despite these reservations – and that this fact set a precedent that was not wholly abandoned after the war. Once committed to these responsibilities, women often performed them competently and without Scarlett’s greed, and were permitted to do so by antebellum society.
Both women are shown in relation to Ashley Wilkes, a man whom the film makes a symbol of the lost, virtuous qualities of the ‘noble’ Old South – and white masculinity itself. On several occasions, Wilkes pines for the loss of this life, as well as his ‘freedom.’ He and his noble qualities, the film argues, inherently deserve Melanie Wilkes – the perfect white woman. In the antebellum days, Melanie – sickly and unused to work – validates his existence as a white male, as does the presence of so many slaves on their plantation. Yet Ashley is a model of the male figure whose time is clearly done, and both book and film provide an adequate, and distinctly modernized, substitute in Rhett Butler – a virile, independent and intelligent man with the capacity for hard work. It is important to understand the significance of these two male personality types to the decade in which Gone With the Wind appeared. Both represented certain qualities and ways of life desired and glorified by white men during the economic hardship of the Depression years – a decade in which gender identities and the role of minorities were evolving, and a decade in which white males attempted to reassert the idealized, romantic notions of gender that Ashley, Rhett, and Melanie represented. In representing the varying types of white femininity and white masculinity, contrasting them with an ideological representation of blacks and placing both genders and races within a deliberately, and ideologically, constructed vision of Civil War Southern society, Gone With the Wind alters the historical record to make a powerful, if distorted, argument for white patriarchy. By combining ideology, history and racism with the effective use of subject position and a variety of film techniques, Gone With the Wind represents the ability and power of film to shape the historical record.
Notes
[1] I use the word traditional to refer to contemporary American cultural mores and notions of gender and masculinity. The word tradition is a very flexible term that is often interpreted differently by different segments of the population at different moments in time. Within this context the meaning of the word is tied to the conservative gender backlash of the Depression, in which many within the surrounding culture represented women’s role as subservient and explicitly tied it to the home in order to bolster masculinity.
[2] Richard Harwell, ed. Margaret Mitchell’s Gone With the Wind Letters: 1936-1949. New York: Macmillan Publishing Co., Inc., 1976. Pg. 13.
[3] Richard McElvaine. The Great Depression: America, 1929-1941. New York: Three Rivers Press, 1983. Pg. 220.
[4] Nash, pg. 75.
[5] E. Anthony Rotundo, American Manhood: Transformations in Masculinity From the Revolution to the Modern Era (New York: Basic Books, 1993). Pg. 3.
[6] Robert S. Weiss, Staying the Course: The Emotional and Social Lives of Men Who Do Well At Work (New York: The Free Press, 1990). Pgs. xv-xvi.
[7] Gwendolyn Audrey Foster. Performing Whiteness: Postmodern Re/Constructions in the Cinema. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2003. Pg. 26.
[8] A measure of the racism still prevalent during the Depression era is evidenced by the fact that McDaniel was not allowed to attend the film’s premier in Atlanta due to continued segregation.
[9] Drew Gilpin Faust. Mothers of Invention: Women of the Slaveholding South in the American Civil War. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1996. Pgs. 31-33.
[10] Deborah Gray White. Ar’n’t I a Woman: Female Slaves in the Plantation South. New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1985. Pg. 52.
[11] Jane Turner Censer. The Reconstruction of Southern White Womanhood: 1865-1895. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2003. Pg. 12.
***
Film is a powerful medium with the ability to influence public perception and shape society’s understanding of the historical narrative. The popularity of film and the primacy of the filmic image have ensured the power and perpetuity of such knowledge, so that such narratives become accepted as historical truth. Yet these readings of the past are rarely innocent. They are often influenced by contemporary values, and many films are designed with specific ideological aims and meanings in mind. Accepting the filmic reconstruction of the past as the truth is therefore dangerous.
Few American historical narratives outside of the Western have been as popular as that of the Civil War, and fewer have been as easily influenced by contemporary ideology in their reconstruction and readings of the past. Civil War films encompass a diversity of issues, and the ideological viewpoints and arguments of each film are often unique. Gone With the Wind, perhaps the most famous Civil War film, is a brilliant example of the ways in which contemporary events and values of gender and race can shape visions of the past in film. When one examines these representations and contrasts them with the historical record, the danger in relying upon fictional representations of history as truth becomes evident.
The Thirties, the decade that produced Gone With the Wind in both its book
and filmforms, were difficult for many people in the United States. The economic depression produced by the crash of the stock market generated high levels of anxiety. As the nation’s economy spiraled downward, so spiraled the social and financial positions of thousands of people. Desperation and confusion engulfed many of those who lost jobs, money and stature. Traditional beliefs[1] and ways of life suddenly became uncertain. The prosperity of the Twenties gave way to hardship and social upheaval. Traditionally held concepts of gender and race identities became less certain as thousands of men lost jobs and women were forced to work. As a result, many Americans attempted to counter what they saw as a betrayal of basic American values. Efforts were made on a political and cultural level to counteract the Depression’s lugubrious effects on society and to thwart gradual but significant changes within the realm of gender. Hollywood produced films became a powerful component in this struggle over culture. While Hollywood had long relied upon cultural images and stereotypes to create meaning, the use of such symbols during the Thirties was exceptionally skilled in the effort to reassert white male dominance, the purity of white womanhood and the virtue of female subservience. Few films were as successful at presenting an image of these ‘lost’ values as Gone With the Wind (1939). It skillfully manipulates history to argue in favor of traditionally segregated spheres of race and gender.Gone With the Wind was hardly the first film to utilize broad race and gender stereotypes, but the enduring popularity and historical context of the film allots the title a position of particular significance. Understanding its context is crucial to appreciating the title’s ideology. Margaret Mitchell’s book was published in 1936, and while its author denied any direct connection between the Depression and her story, it is difficult not to presume some influence. The novel and film both center on a society in economic and social disarray that serves as a mirror to the disorder incurred by the Depression.
Americans had not been prepared – financially, structurally, and especially psychologically – for the hardships that would have to be endured during the next decade. Americans consequently sought psychological and economic solace in the reaffirmation of traditionally held customs of gender and race.
Mitchell acknowledged that her novel centered on an era of hard times,[2] and that a portion of it was written during the Depression years. The film, like the novel, embraces a nostalgic view of antebellum Southern society that, as historian Richard McElvaine notes,[3] reflected a broader Depression era trend within the country itself – the embrace of an idealized, lost golden era of white male dominance, and an effort to reassert this dominance, negating the rising number of women and minorities within the workforce and increased female independence, thus reestablishing a weakened sense of white male confidence and, it was theorized, securing financial and social stability amidst economic chaos. Even First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt, a chief proponent of women’s rights, suggested that the home was again where women were needed – that their moral support was required. As historian Gerald Nash notes, “the Depression clearly dampened the mood of most women, in contrast to the ebullient self-confidence of the 1920’s… The majority of women centered their lives on their homes and families and devoted more than sixty hours weekly to them… most Americans accepted the notion that a woman’s place was in the home.”[4] Once again, it was believed, white males would assume leading roles in life and work.
For years, American masculinity and the traditionally accepted notions of the male role were closely associated with work. Despite gains made by women and minorities during the Twenties, the workplace largely remained a male world in which white men attempted to test and prove their masculinity to themselves and those around them. The actual act of labor allowed men to cultivate the sense that they had forged their own identities as males – instilling in them the belief that a man could be self-made, rather than made by accident of birth. According to this view, “a man’s work role… formed the essence of his identity.”[5] A majority of men considered the workplace to be a valued community. Membership in the community of work implied skill and conveyed social status and masculinity. A disruption such as the Depression and the consequent loss of jobs caused enormous distress among white males who based their identities on their positions within this community and upon their ability to perform their jobs and support families.[6] Many men viewed unemployment and the loss of this community of work as a loss of status and masculinity.
In order to bolster themselves during the Depression, white males reached back to and romanticized a time before industrialization and mass labor, when white male patriarchy remained relatively unchallenged by other genders and races, and when economic and social security were assured by the efforts of white men. By re-imagining white patriarchy and the subjugation of women and other races within popular culture and national consciousness, white men attempted to establish this romanticized notion of the past. The fact that the historical record contradicts such a simplistic reading of the past is evidence of the ideological aims.
Ideologically, both the novel and film versions of Gone With the Wind go beyond a simple attempt to transfer the troubles of the Depression to another era or any effort to accurately portray the process of Reconstruction in the South. Instead, Gone With the Wind establishes a dialect between the Civil War, Reconstruction, the economic hardships of the Depression, and the ideology of a distinctly romanticized version of society and its idealized schema of gender and race. While the film does slightly mollify some of the explicitly racist passages of the novel, it nevertheless contains a variety of images referencing white and black femininity and masculinity, and uses these images to support a system of white patriarchy. Race is used as a social control.[7]
One of several large female roles in the film, the character of Mammy, forcefully played by Hattie McDaniel,[8] embodies many of the values that Southern whites believed slave women should posses. Mammy is not so much a character in the film but a continuation of a long held stereotype of female slaves. McDaniel’s character is never given an actual name within the film – she is simply referred to as ‘Mammy.’ Nor is any insight given into her personality outside of her position and life as slave. Her real name and character traits are not important within the context of the film, as she remains, essentially, an appendage of the O’Hara family – there to validate their lives and whiteness. She is denied her own identity, and in the process is made into a symbol. Facile readings of the film may skim over the ideological implications of Mammy, instead perhaps admiring her strength and clear sightedness. These qualities are indeed there in the McDaniel performance, and it is a testament to the actress’s ability that she is able to render some human qualities and strength within the type. Yet the Mammy figure is still a type.
As Deborah Gray White convincingly illustrates in Ar'n't I a Woman,
the image of the Mammy stemmed in large part from the South’s need to adopt a new defense of slavery in the nineteenth century. Feeling that the institution of slavery was threatened, the South attempted to justify it through more civilized means, and thus the South developed the image of the Mammy. The image was that of an asexual woman who loved and was loved by the white family that she served. As White notes, she was a self possessed general who guided and directed all of the servants and housework. White carefully illustrates that this was in reality frequently not the case. The image denied the complexities of the house slave’s compliance and the leverage used by whites to physically control blacks, including physical and mental abuse and threats against the slaves’ families. The ideology of the Mammy also obscured the fact that white women did a great deal of work about the house themselves, while all women, whether black or white, were subservient to white men. Mammy, White argues, was in fact an image created specifically to bolster white men’s sense of patriarchal superiority. While the cult of domesticity gained popularity in the south, a class of enslaved, subservient, asexual, nurturing and thus non-threatening women representing white men’s feminine ideal allowed males to feel secure and, in their eyes, allowed white women to pursue the ideal of white leisure and thus subjugating women of both races. By incorporating the image of Mammy while ignoring the actual social and emotional intricacies of not just that position but all of slave life, the film is able to place the viewer in a position to feel a degree of mastery over the black characters. In her essay “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” Laura Mulvey notes that the female characters within films are often used as the receptacles for the voyeuristic desires and cruel inclinations of men. Though the sexual implications of this equation in relation to blacks is deliberately ignored in Gone With the Wind (for racial miscegenation is ideologically forbidden for fear of tainting white patriarchy), the equation may be extended to encompass the desire for security and mastery among white males during the Depression. By placing black women in a subservient position on screen, white males were able to vicariously experience a sensation of control over their gender and racial identities. The threat of the Other to their security was contained.The film version of Gone With the Wind perpetuates the dialect between black and white women and white males. Mammy, ostensibly sensible, remains with her former masters once the Civil War has finished. Despite her freedom, she and several other former slaves choose to remain infantilized. Despite the fact that she possesses a great deal more common sense than Scarlett O’Hara, it is Scarlett’s methods that prove successful at reinvigorating her home, Tara, after the war. While the film does paint Mammy as a strong figure, it never breaks with the original motives of the stereotype. Indeed, her presence after the war, when the antebellum gender and economic structure is collapsing, is essential in helping to reestablish some sense of tradition and order. The film powerfully represents the argument for the economic disaster of Reconstruction in the south; the decline of traditional gender roles and the subsequent emasculation of white men are also forcefully represented – most notably in the form of Ashley Wilkes.
Wilkes, his wife Melanie and Scarlett form a triptych of gender possibilities within the film. Scarlett and Melanie are continually contrasted, and though Scarlett is the central character of the film, this contrast is continually to Melanie’s advantage. Melanie comes to represent the idealized white woman – forgiving, generous and used to a life of leisure as opposed to work. Scarlett – selfish, determined and disdaining but unafraid of manual labor and business minded – is represented as far too independent for her own good. Indeed, in emphasizing these elements of her personality, as well as her dominating nature, the film explicitly paints Scarlett as a woman in possession of distinctly masculine traits. Her relationship with Rhett Butler reinforces her masculine qualities. The personalities of Scarlett and Rhett are deliberately paralleled – but while the roguish independence and mind for money are tolerable within Rhett, within a woman these masculine qualities are unforgivable. According to the film’s ideology, she is everything that a white woman should not be. By the end of the film, Scarlett has paid for her masculine independence with the lives of her daughter, her parents, her friends, her way of life and her one true love. Scarlett’s punishment fits with Mulvey’s thesis regarding the male, voyeuristic designs of films. By presenting Scarlett’s mind for business and her rapacious use of men for reasons of convenience and ambition in a negative light, and by forcing upon her harsh punishments for her gender transgressions, the film satisfies the white male desire for patriarchy during the Depression. In expressing this desire so vividly on screen, the film’s portrayal of the past is quite clearly influenced by the desires and ideologies of its day. Instead of accuracy, the film attempts to visually reassert white patriarchy as a means of social control. It fails to accurately consider the scope, reasons and complexity of female positions in the antebellum and Reconstruction eras.
The film argues for the image of docile, domesticated white womanhood represented by Melanie Wilkes and against the business minded, sexually assertive femininity of Scarlett O’Hara. In manufacturing these ideological poles of appropriate and inappropriate female behavior, the film fails to realize that during the years surrounding the Civil War and Reconstruction, gender roles were not so clearly defined. Many white women from the middle and lower classes labored in a variety of jobs simply to survive. Some worked as nurses and teachers, while others assumed positions within the prostitution industry. Other women of the lower classes helped their husbands labor in the fields, and a majority of wives and mothers in the lower classes performed a majority of the housework. As Susanna Delfino and Michelle Gillespie note in the their introduction to the collection of essays Neither Lady Nor Slave, many of the industries in which white women of the lower and middle classes labored, like prostitution, nursing and field work, entailed working and interacting with slaves or free blacks. Consequently the barriers between white and black society were not as clear as the ideology insisted. In reality it was more difficult for many women to base their identities on the concepts of white domesticity and racial hierarchy than the ideology of patriarchy shown in Gone With the Wind suggests, for many women labored, and not infrequently with blacks.
As the Civil War was waged, a number of women of all classes across the South, including the elite, were forced to take on additional responsibilities. As Drew Gilpin Faust observes in Mothers of Invention, the male population of the South was depleted due to the need for soldiers and the increasing death toll. As men left their residences and plantations for the army, women were left behind to run plantations, businesses and households. They assumed levels of authority and autonomy that was new to their gender. Many women were forced to perform manual labor; even in more prosperous families women were forced to economize, frequently moving in with relatives to save money.[9] Concerned for the safety of white women in the absence of white men, and dubious of their abilities to control the sizeable slave population and assume decision-making responsibilities, Confederate officials initially attempted to alter conscription laws to allow a higher percentage of men to remain behind. As the war continued and the South grew desperate for men, however, these modifications were often abandoned. The Confederate government itself tacitly acknowledged the need for women to assume such responsibilities. Though many women and their husbands were uncomfortable about the changes that war brought to the accepted notions of gender, most accepted the need. This acceptance was undoubtedly aided by the fact that female labor had been established well before the Civil War. As both Faust and White observe, the notion of white female leisure was a misrepresentation of the truth, even within the wealthier classes. As noted above, White makes the crucial observation that many white women of the elite, plantation class worked, as “there was too much work in Southern households for any one woman, black or white… [They] were anything but idle.”[10] Though few elites worked in the fields and all retained power over the slaves, the lives of many women did not fit the image of the docile life of leisure emphasized by white males. Yet in maintaining ownership of black slave labor and black bodies, white society was able juxtapose the theory of white femininity with the enslaved status of blacks and thus maintain white patriarchy.
Though Gone With the Wind portrays some increasing white female involvement with business and labor, by associating the normally masculine concept of business acumen so closely with the one-dimensionally ambitious, immature yet abnormally capable Scarlett, the film minimizes any risk that female spectators might identify with an increasingly powerful female character. Particularly when the film powerfully contrasts her with the self-sacrificing, pure qualities of Melanie as she nobly but ineptly tries manual labor, unable because of her ideal femininity to adjust to its rigors. In endorsing the rigid gender dichotomy between the impure Scarlett and the pure Melanie, the film denies the fact that women often had to become more like the former – and that this was appropriate and necessary for the time. It substitutes the ideological desires of the Depression for the actual gender strata of the antebellum South. As Jane Turner Censer notes, the gender ideals of the Civil War era were more complex than in the film. Though the image of the demure plantation wife existed, by the time of the war it had “lost much of its appeal for young women… The ideal of womanhood… had come to include a more active, outspoken, and courageous aspect.”[11] While the film condemns Scarlett’s assertiveness and concern with property and business in order to emphasize the Depression era predilection for white female domesticity, Censer notes that female property rights did exist prior to the Civil War and that while the percentage of women owning property was proportionately small in comparison with men, it was not unheard of or always looked down upon. Though both Censer and Gilpin are careful to observe that many women themselves had reservations about transgressing traditional boundaries, they make convincingly clear that many did despite these reservations – and that this fact set a precedent that was not wholly abandoned after the war. Once committed to these responsibilities, women often performed them competently and without Scarlett’s greed, and were permitted to do so by antebellum society.
Both women are shown in relation to Ashley Wilkes, a man whom the film makes a symbol of the lost, virtuous qualities of the ‘noble’ Old South – and white masculinity itself. On several occasions, Wilkes pines for the loss of this life, as well as his ‘freedom.’ He and his noble qualities, the film argues, inherently deserve Melanie Wilkes – the perfect white woman. In the antebellum days, Melanie – sickly and unused to work – validates his existence as a white male, as does the presence of so many slaves on their plantation. Yet Ashley is a model of the male figure whose time is clearly done, and both book and film provide an adequate, and distinctly modernized, substitute in Rhett Butler – a virile, independent and intelligent man with the capacity for hard work. It is important to understand the significance of these two male personality types to the decade in which Gone With the Wind appeared. Both represented certain qualities and ways of life desired and glorified by white men during the economic hardship of the Depression years – a decade in which gender identities and the role of minorities were evolving, and a decade in which white males attempted to reassert the idealized, romantic notions of gender that Ashley, Rhett, and Melanie represented. In representing the varying types of white femininity and white masculinity, contrasting them with an ideological representation of blacks and placing both genders and races within a deliberately, and ideologically, constructed vision of Civil War Southern society, Gone With the Wind alters the historical record to make a powerful, if distorted, argument for white patriarchy. By combining ideology, history and racism with the effective use of subject position and a variety of film techniques, Gone With the Wind represents the ability and power of film to shape the historical record.
Notes
[1] I use the word traditional to refer to contemporary American cultural mores and notions of gender and masculinity. The word tradition is a very flexible term that is often interpreted differently by different segments of the population at different moments in time. Within this context the meaning of the word is tied to the conservative gender backlash of the Depression, in which many within the surrounding culture represented women’s role as subservient and explicitly tied it to the home in order to bolster masculinity.
[2] Richard Harwell, ed. Margaret Mitchell’s Gone With the Wind Letters: 1936-1949. New York: Macmillan Publishing Co., Inc., 1976. Pg. 13.
[3] Richard McElvaine. The Great Depression: America, 1929-1941. New York: Three Rivers Press, 1983. Pg. 220.
[4] Nash, pg. 75.
[5] E. Anthony Rotundo, American Manhood: Transformations in Masculinity From the Revolution to the Modern Era (New York: Basic Books, 1993). Pg. 3.
[6] Robert S. Weiss, Staying the Course: The Emotional and Social Lives of Men Who Do Well At Work (New York: The Free Press, 1990). Pgs. xv-xvi.
[7] Gwendolyn Audrey Foster. Performing Whiteness: Postmodern Re/Constructions in the Cinema. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2003. Pg. 26.
[8] A measure of the racism still prevalent during the Depression era is evidenced by the fact that McDaniel was not allowed to attend the film’s premier in Atlanta due to continued segregation.
[9] Drew Gilpin Faust. Mothers of Invention: Women of the Slaveholding South in the American Civil War. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1996. Pgs. 31-33.
[10] Deborah Gray White. Ar’n’t I a Woman: Female Slaves in the Plantation South. New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1985. Pg. 52.
[11] Jane Turner Censer. The Reconstruction of Southern White Womanhood: 1865-1895. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2003. Pg. 12.
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