gone with the wind margaret mitchell 1936

Notice that his vision of the South is indivisible from slavery: Here's noble and boring Ashley, the limpest point of the oncoming love triangle, describing what the war is about. Luckily Scarlett stays away from the slave quarters, where 'the faint niggery smell which crept from the cabin increased her nausea.'īut then war comes. We meet some of them, Scarlett's 'small white hand disappearing into their huge black paws and the four capered with delight at the meeting and with pride at displaying before their comrades what a pretty Young Miss they had.'įaithful slave Mammy is introduced, with her 'kind face, sad with the uncomprehending sadness of a monkey's face' - 'the mottled wise old eyes saw deeply, saw clearly, with the directness of the savage and the child, undeterred by conscience when danger threatened her pet.' Mammy is one of the few morally pure characters in the book, but it's always that noble savage quality. They were proud of the good names of their owners and, for the most part, proud to belong to people who were quality.' 'The house negroes of the County considered themselves superior to white trash.they were well-fed, well-clothed and looked after in sickness and old age. We start off in the glory days of the Old South, as a young, callow, beautiful Scarlett O'Hara flirts with everyone's boyfriends. This book intends to be racist Margaret Mitchell believes what she says she was a racist person who wrote a hateful book. There's no evidence whatsoever of that, and the omniscient passages that defend the South and slavery are written with passion and supported by racist scenes in the story. Is it possible Mitchell means for us to disagree with her omniscient narrator? No. They feel like the nonfiction interludes in War & Peace and they're racist. It has an omniscient narrator, and many long, racist passages that are clearly not from any character's perspective. Is the book itself necessarily racist? Yes. If that sounds unpleasant, you won't like Gone With the Wind.Ī non-racist book can have racist characters, and all the characters in this book are racist. If you'd like to hear why slavery was terrific and black people are inferior to whites and they liked being slaves, here is your epic.

Margaret Mitchell was a racist and in 1936, 70 years after the Civil War, she wrote a thousand-page love letter to racism.

Gone with the wind margaret mitchell 1936