Introduction
When Americans think of the Confederacy, they often consider Margaret Mitchell’s novel Gone with the Wind or its film adaptation. For a long time, film critics could not figure out what genre it should belong to. It is a historical movie in which the action unfolds against a large-scale panorama of life in the South just before and during the Civil War.
At the same time, it is a romantic melodrama centered on Scarlett’s fate, love, and struggle for happiness. However, Gone with the Wind is a unique example of mixed-genre art, while the historical aspect is the most criticized. Despite the common stereotype that it is a lost cause movie, it is, in fact, a critique of it.
Gone with the Wind as a Critique of the Lost Cause
The material in a literary work can be used as a brilliant illustration of the knowledge already obtained by historians and as an additional source on the historical problem under study. This statement applies to the film and Mitchell’s novel, Gone with the Wind, because it is a true encyclopedia of plantation life. The movie is accurate, and the film critics, looking for errors against the historical truth, found only the most minor departures from reality (Wesselbaum 98). It is no coincidence that, in describing the events of the war years, the film depicts mostly real scenes from the author’s life.
Despite that, Gone with the Wind is often seen as a confirmation of the lost Ccuse myth. In particular, the subject of racism and how it is dealt with in the film has been criticized. Some of the most criticized scenes are when previously enslaved people are asked to serve their lords or when one of Toni Fontaine’s characters is horrified at the possibility of mixed marriages (Fleming). However, the movie is much more profound and is not limited to these scenes alone. Moreover, other scenes prove that they depict the realities of the Civil War.
Wartime events, initially relegated to the background, begin to intrude more inevitably into the peaceful lives of the characters as the novel progresses, ruthlessly undermining them. It is not enough to say that the author and director strive to be objective. They subordinate the composition and the entire structure of the plot to this task (Fleming).
At the same time, the borderline between the characters’ thoughts and reality is invariably marked. The Lost Cause is, first and foremost, a justification and legitimization of the Confederates who tried to hide their intentions to preserve their habitual way of life (Wesselbaum 98). At the same time, a close look at the film reveals that it is based on a critical rejection of the concept and a demonstration of events as they occurred.
The film shows the two dominant U.S. perspectives on the Civil War, which can be conventionally called pro-Southern and pro-Northern. Most memorable is the scene when Scarlett arrives in town with her faithful maid, the elderly Negro woman Mamushka (Fleming). Numerous Negroes were flocking to Atlanta at the time from plantations abandoned by their masters. This scene demonstrates the real treatment of enslaved people, especially when a “nigger” obstructs the passage (Fleming). This scene confirms facts that happened during the war and shows the true face of slavery without romanticizing it.
Conclusion
There are hardly any statistics, but one could argue that Gone with the Wind helped many to see the past, present, and future in a new light. The voluminous, multi-dimensional scenes seem to transcend time and space, and the truths of the novel become timeless and international. Portraying opinions from different sides of history allows us to realize the scale of the Civil War. The film demonstrates everything: the tragedy, the doom of the situation, and the slavery, thus proving that the film is not a lost cause movie.
Works Cited
Gone with the Wind. Directed by Fleming Victor, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, 1939.
Wesselbaum, Dennis, and Amelia Aburn. “Gone with the Wind: International Migration.” Global and Planetary Change, vol. 178, 2019, pp. 96-109. Web.