Enjoying the book but the racism is hard to take at times

Mayesgwtw makes good points.

What was perceived as laziness or indolence in enslaved people was often a form of resistance, civil disobedience if you will. Masters interpreted it as the inherent laziness of a "jungle people" when in fact slaves were passively subverting the system of power.

The book is not narrated by Scarlett, but we mostly see things read through her point of view, and whatever else you may say about Margaret Mitchell...she is pretty consistent in presenting the world as Scarlett would have seen it.

And as for the benign slavery GWTW is oft accused of touting...I always think, "how benign is it?" As Mayesgwtw pointed out, how many slaves stick around at Tara when they have a chance to run. Again, the whites perceive this as slaves running out of fear of Yankee atrocities, when in fact these are most likely freedom runs. This is also consistent with historical accounts. Edward Ball's 'Slaves in the Family' for example, traces two accounts of the same incident of Yankees liberating a plantation during the Civil War; one the written account left by the white master, the other the oral history passed down by the descendants of the slaves. The white master describes the yankees rounding up the slaves, who huddled in terror as the yankees declared them free, a word they feared and did not understand. The African-American descendants describe a strikingly analogous tale, but through a completely different lens, based on the eyewitness accounts of black people living on the plantation at that time. In their version, when the Yankees "rounded them up" and told them the "terrifying" news, they burst into tears of joy and cried hellelujah.

Of course, as is usually the case, two things can be true. Black and white burn and starve the same, and in point of fact, slaves did flee plantations not only seeking freedom, but also to refugee from the horrors of war. Namely, rape in the Civil War was overwhelmingly perpetrated by Union soldiers against women of color. This is not apologist, neo-Confederate propaganda. War is hell, as general Sherman said, and terrible things happen on both sides. Obviously, the rape of slaves by white masters in the antebellum south is legendary...but when it comes to wartime rapes in particular, the Union is left with canary feathers on its chops.

We also see scenes of enslaved people being abused, in particular the notorious Prissy slapping scene...no whitewashing there. I have always maintained that Scarlett (in the movie that is) doesn't slap Prissy because she is black, but because she is Prissy. Nonetheless, it is shockingly explicit in its violence, perhaps the most explicit scene of slave abuse in a mainstream film of that time. It is certainly much more graphic and forthright than what you would see in, say, Jezebel and similarly themed contemporary movies. Incidentally, I can't remember the exact number, but Scarlett slaps quite a few other people in the course of the film, all but Prissy being white. But the very fact that she feels entitled to beat Prissy in that scene without fear of consequence speaks to the power dynamics of slavery. In the book, I seem to recall she actually does feel some remorse, as Ellen had taught her never to raise her hand to a slave.

Slaves may not have wished their masters dead, may have sometimes stayed on to work for masters (out of necessity, convenience, and yes, coercion), and may even have occasionally developed sincere emotional bonds with their masters...just because when you watch several generations of a family grow up and aren't a sociopath, that tends to happen. But slaves were never "grateful" for enslavement, one of the more insidious myths passed down in lost-cause mythology.

We are given Mammy as a fiercely loyal figure devoid of any self-interest, or sense of value or worth outside her servile role. It's purely speculation, but maybe she stays on with the O'Hara/Butlers because she may not have other options, and does sincerely love them because she's a good person.

And yes, what was perceived as childlike simplicity was probably just a combination of old fashioned racism, coupled with a real lack of formal education. Robert E. Lee, for example, believed in eventual suffrage for freed slaves, but opposed it in the short term because he felt slaves hadn't received adequate education in bondage.

And that joyful naivete which the white southerners of GWTW find so endearing in the slaves is probably just a desperate clinging to optimism which is necessary to survive a traumatic situation. As Frederick Douglas remarked, slaves don't sing because they're happy, but to cope with trauma.

But I do agree with the original poster that the racism in the book can be hard to take for the modern reader. I grew up watching old movies, and reading classic books. I flatter myself I have a pretty broad scope of different cultural contexts, and a tough skin for political incorrectness. But when I got to the point where Scarlett vomits from the *beep* smell behind the slave cabins, I cringed. As the African-American artist Kara Walker (with a love/hate relationship to GWTW) put it, the disturbing thing is not the use of the word as an adjective in and of itself, but the assumption that a reader would know what that meant. And as I said on another post recently, when Tony Fontaine goes on his "black apes out of the jungle" diatribe, well, as Malcolm X said, "I wanted to crawl under the rug."

But, as Mayestgwtw pointed out, Scarlett has naught but disdain for the KKK. She even openly dismisses the black rapist mythology of the Klan: "Probably the girl hadn't been raped after all. Probably she'd just been frightened silly and, because of her, a lot of men might lose they're lives." Referring to the lynching of a black man after a rape allegation. She is also aware of the hypocrisy and moral complications of slave-holding, when she says to Ashley Wilkes, who laments the use of white convict labor, "You weren't so particular about owning slaves." Definitely one of her most redeeming moments.

I the bigger thing you're both missing that links to the offensive nature of the story is the fact that the Slaves are portrayed as well treated and happy, and the book and film both try to present this as if it's historical fact when, in reality, it couldn't be farther from the truth.

A good example is Ashley's line "That's different, we didn't treat them that way," which I loathe more than any line in cinema history.

There's also the Nazi revisionism type thing where they try to say the northerners were murdering, cruel natured people trying to rule the South with an iron foot and that they massacred most of the southern forces when in reality, as a history major I can vouch, It was much more along the lines of mostly northerners were massacred and killed but the south's big powerhouses were obliterated which led to their defeat.


~NW~

Oh, please!

I couldn't disagree more. You don't censor books to protect people's delicate little feelings. Do this and you risk people forgetting how things used to be.


The Fabio Principle: Puffy shirts look best on men who look even better without them.

I agree with Venus. I definitely don't think the word should be removed from this or any book, including Mark Twain or African American literature which uses it. That doesn't mean I personally find it any less grating, at least when it is used in an explicitly malicious context, as it often comes up in the reconstruction and KKK segment of the book. When characters in the book use it, at least you can chock it up to historical accuracy, but when the narrator uses it as though it were a matter of fact (the *beep* smell around the slave cabins) it can be jarring. But don't censor it, my feelings can take it...art is not answerable to my or anyone else's feelings anyway.

Fair points.

Yes, I've never cottoned to the fairy tale summation, but I do think the term "Idyll" fits. The fictional realms of Tara and Twelve Oaks are the definition of the classic, pastoral idyll. The South is thought to be both a geographical location and a "place in the imagination" and while I do maintain that GWTW is essentially a realist novel, the prewar passages certainly seem in line with that theory. I think you once said, "not as it was, but as we wish it had been."

I believe Mitchell specifies that it is unacceptable according to the code of Clayton County to whip or beat a slave...implying by association that such things might occur elsewhere. On the low country plantations, which tended to be larger and have more slaves, conditions could be much harsher. Hence the expression "sold down the river."

Not that GWTW is a historical source on a period Mitchell never experienced (and certainly couldn't have experienced as a black person). I'm sure slaves in Northern Georgia were whipped and beaten in real life.

I do think that Mitchell intends the "Old South" especially the feudal kingdom of Twelve Oaks, and the rugged, down-home idyll of Tara to be partially symbolic spaces. They represent a childlike state of the imagination, and feeling of safety and security in contrast to the unstable, adult place of the war years and Reconstruction. This helps to underline Mitchell's predominant theme of survival, and how one copes with losing one's sense of security. Mitchell makes it seem like a rather false sense of security, in fact...a world that (however much one might want it to) won't and can't go on. A paradise, perhaps, but a fool's paradise.

This is not to say that Mitchell didn't have a nostalgic yearning for that era which colored her interpretation of the antebellum South in GWTW. Knowing what I know about her, I believe she definitely felt it was a more perfect world, transient though it was. In my opinion, Pat Conroy gets her motivations spot on in his introduction to a recent edition.

In any case, it is human nature to remember things better than they were. And since so much of the story is filtered to us through Scarlett's internal dialogue, who's to say her vision of the pastoral Idyll of the country of her youth is reliable?

As for the Old South in historical point of fact, aside from some pretty clothes and greek-revival mansions (these are much more prevalent in Hollywood than they were in real life...most planters lived comparatively modestly which GWTW the book does get right), I don't think it was particularly pleasant for anyone, including the rich white masters. The entire antebellum period was pervaded by an underlying terror of rebellion, so that white-folks were even required to carry arms to church on Sunday, when it was generally supposed an uprising was most likely. The harsher punitive measures, and laws forbidding slave education were born out of the anxiety of slave rebellion, specifically following the Nat Turner Rebellion of 1831. The Saint-Domingue uprising (Haitian Revolution) also shook the entire Western World, and following the Eighteenth Century, it was no longer a question of "if" a slave rebellion could successfully overthrow the power structure, but "when." This revolution spread both factual and exaggerated narratives of white women and girls gang-raped and forced into marriages with ex-slaves, and the Uncle/Anti-Tom pop culture of the day promoted the "Uncle" figure of the enslaved black male, perhaps in an unconscious attempt to neutralize the perceived threat of black men to white women. This anxiety came back full force during the Reconstruction, and as we have discussed here, colors that segment of GWTW in an uncomfortable way.

Furthermore, most educated slaveholders were aware of the moral problems of the slave system, and struggled constantly to mitigate these in various ways...ranging from ignorance, to attempts at justification, to somewhat specious "humanitarian" efforts. White women lived under the burden of the open secret of their husbands' infidelities with enslaved women. As Thomas Jefferson (who after all knew something about the subject of slave concubinage) said of slavery, it was like holding a wolf by the ears, "you didn't like it, but you didn't dare let it go." The Lees and other high profile Southern figures also felt perennially uneasy with the system, and favored eventual emancipation.

12 Years a Slave, a sometimes controversial film on this board, was at least an interesting character study of how slaveholding was a pervasive "disease" if you will, that turned even the best intentioned people into monsters uncomfortable in their own white skin.

The very fact that slavery apologists and Neo-Confederates try so vigilantly to promote the myth of the Old South as a benign, idyllic place is suspect. One does not have to make so concerted an effort to justify something if it is inherently just. Rose perfume to cover the stinky elephant in the room.

The movie industry was so prudish back then the N word could not be used even in cases of legitimate historical context. Lots of people don't realize that anymore.

I completely agree with your assessment that people have become too sensitive these days, to the point of wanting to deny the truth and rewrite history. That's ridiculous.


The Fabio Principle: Puffy shirts look best on men who look even better without them.

I agree that people are too sensitive, and my personal opinion is that art is more important than people's personal feelings, and that includes rap.

However, I don't think it is irrational to be offended by things from the past which are, in fact, offensive. If you look at a photograph of a tortured slave, do you not grimace, even though it "just shows how things were back then"? Doesn't mean you throw the photos out and pretend they never happened. The "N" word for many carries the pain of centuries of slavery and racial abuse, so I agree that it shouldn't be used flippantly as it is in some rap songs and vernacular speech...but that's not my choice to make.

As for art, like Mark Twain, GWTW, not to mention African American literature of the Harlem Renaissance, of course it should not be censored or forgotten.

But, as I wrote before, that doesn't mean I have to like it when Mitchell describes the "Ni@@ery smell" around the slaves' cabins, or when Tony Fontaine goes off about "black apes out of the jungle" having the right to vote and serve public office.

I understand it, I accept it, I appreciate its historical significance, and I will defend it to the death against those who would censor it...but I don't like it. Racism offends me now, and it offends me in the past. Racism is offensive. But you don't dismiss a work of art because it has problematic elements...most art worth appreciating does.

Early in this thread there was discussion of atrocities by union soldiers. One that comes to mind is attributed to GEN. William Tecumseh Sherman. During his march south and east from Atlanta the union army was being followed by a large contingent of slaves that grew as they progressed. This began to slow the army down and cause problems. When they reached a river crossing Sherman ordered that the slaves be prevented from crossing behind the army, leaving them to be recaptured by the pursuing Confederates. Sh