Gone With the Wind criticism: Scarlett O’Hara and Rhett Butler recast as ‘homicidal white supremacists’
The 20th century’s most famous fictional lovers had ‘profoundly fascistic worldviews’, according to an author who has mounted an excoriating critique of the novel-turned-film for its denialism of the horrors of slavery.
American author Margaret Mitchell expected her first and only novel, Gone With The Wind, to sell about 5000 copies. Yet from the day it was published on June 30 1936, Mitchell’s 1037-page fable about the American Civil War and the pampered, manipulative daughter of a Georgia plantation owner, was not merely a bestseller: it evolved into an enduring – and polarising – cultural phenomenon.
Within six months of its release, Mitchell’s tale of tangled love set against the northern invasion and fall of the Old South, sold one million copies, making it the biggest-selling American novel to that date. It won a Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award, and has sold more than 30 million copies internationally.
The 1939 film adaptation starring Vivien Leigh as wilful anti-heroine Scarlett O’Hara and Clark Gable as her rakish third husband Rhett Butler, won eight Academy Awards, including best picture, best actress for Leigh and best supporting actress for African-American actress Hattie McDaniel. McDaniel portrayed Scarlett’s outspoken chief house slave, Mammy, and made film history as the first black woman to take home an Oscar.
The film’s melodramatic love story — Scarlett spends years pining for a man she cannot have — along with its elegant balls, burnt orange skies, hooped gowns and epic scenes of dead and injured Confederate troops, proved a hit with moviegoers around the world. When adjusted for inflation, Gone with the Wind, which tracks Scarlett’s journey through civil war, near-starvation, three marriages and the loss of her only child, remains the highest-grossing film of all time, ahead of Avatar and Titanic.
American author Sarah Churchwell recounts these milestones in her provocative book, The Wrath to Come: Gone with the Wind and the Lies America Tells — and goes on to mount an excoriating critique of the novel-turned-film for its denialism of the horrors of slavery and “shameless” historical distortions about the civil war and its aftermath. Such denialism, she contends, continues to divide America today.
In fact, Churchwell — one of the headline speakers at next month’s Melbourne Writers Festival — argues that society belle-turned-wily survivor, Scarlett O’Hara, and gambler turned doting father, Rhett Butler, are “homicidal white supremacists with profoundly fascistic worldviews’’. Not the kind of academic who pulls her punches, she adds that Mitchell’s novel is “about enslavers busily pretending that slavery doesn’t matter — which is pretty much the story of American history’’.
The novel and film’s depiction of loyal, happy enslaved people — neither Scarlett’s family nor their wealthy plantation neighbours mistreat their slaves — has long been criticised. “Gone with the Wind does such violence to American history that it practically lynches it,’’ black journalist Ben Davis Jr wrote in 1940.
Churchwell’s book adds a contemporary, political twist to such criticism: she argues America’s “most famous epic romance … provides a kind of skeleton key, unlocking America’s illusions about itself” and she links its sanitised treatment of slavery and promotion of white nationalism to Trumpism and the January 6, 2021 attack on Washington’s Capitol. Significantly, just months before this attack, Donald Trump invoked Gone with the Wind at a rally while complaining about the South Korean film, Parasite, winning the Best Picture Oscar. Trump said he wished America would “bring back” films like the 1939 classic: “Can we get, like, Gone with the Wind back please?’’
As an American who lives in London and writes about US culture and history, Churchwell is often asked, “What has happened to America?”, since the 2016 election of Trump as US president “dumbfounded most of the watching world’’. She writes: “When we understand the dark truths of American experience that have been veiled by one of the nation’s favourite fantasies (Gone With The Wind), we can see how the country travelled from the start of the Civil War in 1861 to parading the flag of the side that lost that war (the Confederate flag) through the US Capitol in 2021.’’
In a Zoom interview, Review asks Churchwell whether she has faced pushback over her claims Scarlett and Rhett are homicidal white supremacists. A professor of American Literature at the University of London, she grins and says: “People have noticed it.’’
She says the book hasn’t come out in the US yet – it will be published there in June – “so we’ll see what they think’’ of her revisionist history of this popular American classic.
With her curtain of long blonde hair, Churchwell cuts a glamorous figure as she delivers her rapid-fire answers, which, like her writing, are mercifully free of academic jargon. She says of her denunciation of Scarlett and Rhett: “It is a statement of fact because they both espouse white supremacism over and over and over again. So it’s not an interpretation. It is a simple description of the things that they do and the things that they say.’’
The Wrath to Come – which British critics have described as “extraordinary” and as prising opening “often jaw-dropping history’’ – documents how, when under pressure, Scarlett uses the n-word in the novel. This racial slur appears in Mitchell’s book more than 100 times but was removed from the film’s script after black cast members and activists lobbied the blockbuster’s powerful producer, David O. Selznick.
In Mitchell’s novel, during one wartime crisis, Scarlett threatens to sell a young, flighty slave, Prissy, “down the river’’ and also threatens her with: “You’ll never see your mother again or anybody you know’’. Later, when Scarlett and her Tara household are facing starvation following the siege of Atlanta, she again loses her temper with Prissy, uses the n-word against her for the first time and threatens to “wear this whip out on you’’.
During Reconstruction, Scarlett refers in disparaging terms to “damned n----r lovers” and when she starts a timber mill business, she is troubled by “free nxxxxrs’” who won’t work for her (because ex-slaves now have the right to resign). All of these racial insults are omitted or softened in the film.
As for those homicidal claims, Scarlett shoots a white Yankee deserter who invades her family’s plantation house, in self-defence, takes his money and hides the body. In the novel, she is initially shocked at her violence, but Churchwell notes how she later mused she “could have … taken sweet pleasure in the feel of his warm blood on her bare feet’’. Rhett Butler, a self-interested gambler who eventually joins the Confederacy, admits in the book he killed a Yankee soldier in a bar-room argument, and murdered a black man because “he was uppity to a lady, and what else could a Southern gentleman do?’’
Then there is the racist language of Mitchell’s novel, which is “far more extreme”, says Churchwell, “than those who haven’t read it probably imagine’’. She argues: “Gone with the Wind never once refers to Black people as people or human beings – not a single time. They are only dehumanised and generic racial categories. Black people are either (various) animals, especially all sorts of apes; or they are savages, just out of the jungle; or they are ‘slaves’, ‘blacks’, ‘darkies’, ‘pickaninnies’, ‘negroes’, ‘mulattos’, or ‘nxxxxrs’.
“ … Tara’s field hands have ‘huge black paws’ and ‘caper with delight’ at encountering Scarlett, while freed slaves run wild ‘like monkeys or small children’ after emancipation, ‘as creatures of small intelligence might naturally be expected to do’.’’
The film uses the now-objectionable term “darkies” and as mentioned above, dropped the n-word. This toning down of the book’s racism “had the perverse outcome of reinforcing the Lost Cause myth that white Southerners treated Black people courteously,’’ Churchwell argues.
For the academic and author, the novel’s racial prejudice goes beyond its extensive use of offensive words: “It’s unreflective in its racism. It thinks there’s such a thing as a willing slave without stopping to think about the fact that those two words literally mean the opposite.’’ Although slavery ended because of the Civil War, she also contends that Gone with the Wind presents America’s post-war reconstruction and new era of rights for freed slaves as a tragedy – for Scarlett, and her slave-owning plantation class.
Churchwell, who has also written cultural histories of other American icons Marilyn Monroe and The Great Gatsby, says Gone with the Wind advances a misleading version of American history known as the Lost Cause. This is the notion that “the Confederacy fought the Civil War (1861–65) as a principled defence of a noble civilisation (the Old South) and its democratic rights, rather than as an unprincipled defence of the white supremacist system of chattel slavery … The specific rights in question were individual states’ rights to keep and trade enslaved people, but the Lost Cause skipped that part.’’
Extending this mythology, the film’s opening title cards briefly mention slavery but also refer to the Old South – which was home to four million slaves – as “a land of Cavaliers and Cotton fields,” and a “pretty world where Gallantry took its last bow.”
Churchwell, who has a PhD in English and American literature from Princeton University, is not the only cultural expert to question Gone with the Wind’s use of racist terms and extreme euphemism. This month, British journalists revealed that Pan Macmillan, publisher of Mitchell’s epic, had added a detailed trigger warning to the 2022 edition, pointing out the novel “includes problematic elements including the romanticisation of a shocking era in our history and the horrors of slavery’’.
In 2020, HBO Max temporarily pulled the film in the wake of George Floyd’s murder. It has since been restored to the streaming service with accompanying videos that denounce its racial representations and examine the film’s historical context.
The African-American rapper Queen Latifah has said the film should have been permanently banned by HBO Max. “Let Gone with the Wind be gone with the wind,’’ she said. Actress and TV host Whoopi Goldberg – the second black woman to win an acting Oscar after McDaniel – disagreed. She favoured educating viewers on the film’s context, adding: “If you start pulling every film, you’re going to have to pull … a very long list of films.’’
Churchwell’s inspiration for her book, which took her five years to write, were the American and UK statue wars. “I initially envisioned it as a much shorter, faster book,’’ she says. “ … At the same time, history kept galloping forward and Gone With the Wind kept coming into the news and Donald Trump kept pushing things forward. And so it was like it had more and more to say to our moment.’’
She does not advocate cancelling Gone with the Wind or destroying statues. She argues it is better to place key statues of controversial historical figures in museums, with accurate contextual information. Similarly, she writes that Gone with the Wind “marks a cultural breakdown, the point where mythology triumphed over history’’. Therefore, “urging the erasure of Gone with the Wind would simply reinforce that failure’’.
Mitchell disliked nostalgic characterisations of the Old South as a land of “magnolias and moonlight’’. She describes Rhett - the embodiment of masculine virility - as “dark of face, swarthy as a pirate”, and conceived of Scarlett as a not especially beautiful anti-heroine: she was perplexed when her self-centred protagonist became a national heroine. An ex-journalist from Atlanta, Mitchell saw the adoration of Scarlett as “bad for the mental and moral attitude of a nation” and once complained: “The mythical Old South has too strong a hold on their (the public’s) imaginations to be altered by the mere reading of a 1037-page book.’’
The Wrath to Come acknowledges all this but notes that while Mitchell condemns Scarlett’s failings such as her greed and lack of self-awareness, she doesn’t challenge her racism. “Her white supremacism isn’t part of what makes her not admirable for Mitchell,’’ Churchwell tells Review.
Mitchell maintained that her black characters, including Tara’s slaves Mammy, Pork and Big Sam – the latter saves Scarlett’s life when she is attacked – behaved in a more noble manner than their white mistress. “It’s true most of the black characters in the novel are admirable in the sense they’re not evil,’’ responds Churchwell. However, she says that after the Civil War, as slaves were freed, Mitchell’s text often falsely characterised them as “a danger to civilised society’’.
Published in 27 languages, the novel has often been praised as a powerful account of the effects of war on innocent civilians, especially women, and Scarlett has been seen as a proto-feminist — a selfish but determined young woman who endures the chaos of war and flouts the stifling gender conventions of her time by going into business for herself. Former Democrat first lady Eleanor Roosevelt was a fan of the book, writing that it made the lingering enmity of the south “easy to understand … even to those who haven’t understood it before”. As a result, she sympathised, she said, with southern women whose “bitterness persisted so long” against the “northern invaders”.
Churchwell writes scornfully of this: “Even a white liberal like Eleanor Roosevelt sympathised after reading the novel not with enslaved people but with the women fighting to keep them in chains. This is what it means to naturalise a value system.’’ In our interview, Churchwell says Roosevelt’s sympathetic take “was obviously very representative of the ways that Americans read the book at that time’’.
The university professor concedes Scarlett has some winning qualities: “Vivien Leigh’s portrayal of Scarlett is one of the things that makes the film quite indelible. I think it’s an incredible performance. And she takes this character who is unlikable in all kinds of ways — is kind of stupid — and makes her a lot more interesting, charming and sympathetic.’’
McDaniel’s parents had been enslaved and she famously retorted to critics of her devoted house-slave role that she had chosen between $7 a week to be a maid, or $700 a week to play a maid. Even so, on the night she made Oscars history, McDaniel was forced to sit apart from white cast members during the awards ceremony in Los Angeles. Says Churchwell: “A lot of people now have the idea of a Jim Crow segregation in the US as being something that only happened in the south, but …. a kind of an apartheid line ran all the way across the US.’’
What about the notion Mitchell was a product of the early 20th century era, and that adult readers of her saga would understand this? “It’s true up to a point,” replies Churchwell. She says Mitchell’s contemporaries, Hemingway and Fitzgerald, also reflected the casual racism of their era, but “considerably less viciously” than she did. Unlike Mitchell, who defended her right to use the n-word, “they both evolved”.
Although Leigh’s Scarlett and Gable’s Rhett were arguably 20th century film’s most recognisable lovers, Churchwell maintains that Gone with the Wind’s historical distortions are still “vastly underestimated.’’.
“The book has always been recognised as racist,’’ she says. “I certainly didn’t write the book to be like, ‘Hey, I’ve got a revelation, ‘Gone With the Wind is racist – we never knew’.
“But the more that you go into it, the more you realise that there are ways in which we still haven’t reckoned with some of the truths about their (Scarlett and Rhett’s) positions. And (this is) despite the fact that they are both homicidal white supremacists — they just are.’’
Sarah Churchwell will give an address titled The Great American Lie at the Melbourne Writers Festival on May 6.
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