One of my favorite movies of all times is Gone with the Wind. Like many southern women, I identify with Scarlett O’Hara in her ability to survive and in her unflappable devotion to her beloved home, Tara.
Scarlett not only showed uncommon strength in the face of adversity, she was the poster child of southern femininity. When I was a little girl, I loved Scarlett’s gowns and the way she floated down the stairs. I loved the lawn parties at 12 Oaks and how handsome Ashley Wilkes was in his uniform (the flower of southern manhood). I loved bell skirts and duels to the death. It made me feel proud to be part of the heritage that grew out of that aristocratic time.
But when I became a teenager, I began to see the movie in a whole different way. I loved Scarlett’s feisty spirit- the way she took that buggy whip to those scallywags that accosted her on the road to Atlanta. I loved how she could stop a man in his tracks by fluttering her eyes at him from behind her fan. And I loved the way that Scarlett and Mammy fiercely negotiated about the amount of food that Scarlett would eat before the Twin Oaks BBQ. Mammy said, “I won’t have you eating like a field hand” and Scarlett finally succumbed to the older woman’s iron will.
As I got older, my love for the movie shifted again. I became aware of the complexity of the characters. I became fonder of Rhett Butler as I watched him outsmarting the hardheaded Scarlett O’Hara. Sadly, Ashley Wilkes paled for me. As a child I had loved his handsome gray uniform and his flaxen locks. He was like a statue come to life. But later, I saw him as a human, vexed by his own weakness and tortured by Scarlett’s advances. So Ashley tumbled off his pedestal.
It was many years of faithful watching of this iconic movie before I started to really see the dark side of it. War is hell, as General William T. Sherman was known to have said (and he ought to know- it was on his order that the torch was put to Atlanta). In the movie I noticed how eager the young men were going to war, like hounds baying on a scent, with their friends and family shouting “hurrah” from the side. And then I saw those same proud families break down after receiving word from the front that their young men had been killed. This film offered a startling depiction of the human cost of war, showing the confederate casualties at the rail yard – more than an acre and a half of wounded men stacked neatly into rows, waiting in the blistering sun for a hospital bed that they might not live to see.
And after the war, during the Reconstruction part of the story, I saw a world turned upside down where greed prevailed and the strong preyed on the weak. Gone with the Wind really showed me, for the first time, an unvarnished view of war.
But there was still a side of that film that I really didn’t start to see until a couple of years ago. Why? Because I saw the story from a white woman’s perspective. I thought that the slaves – funny Prissy and stern Mammy and faithful Sam – had been well treated – after all, they were beloved members of the O’Hara family. But when I stopped looking at it through the fairy tale filter of Margaret Mitchell’s blockbuster book, I saw a people that were subjected to any whim of their masters and that’s when the soft-focus historical filter began to wear thin.
There’s a selfish side of me that wishes I hadn’t seen that truth in this movie (the same childish self that still wants to believe in Santa Claus). I wish I could still put myself in Scarlett’s place, posed on that veranda with her bevy of beaus vying for her hand. I wish I could still swoon at the nobility of Ashley Wilkes in his fine gray uniform. But I can’t. The truth is, the world that Tara and Twin Oaks represent was built with the forced labor of good people and not even Margaret Mitchell can erase the stench of human bondage.
Don’t get me wrong. I am proud of parts of our southern history – proud to bursting. Like Scarlett O’Hara, we survived the harsh rule of Reconstruction. After a hard thrashing, we pulled ourselves up by our bootstraps and built this region back into one of the most vibrant economies in the world. But I can’t be proud of all our history. I can’t be proud that a race of people was subjected to the whim of another. I can’t be proud that we fought a war to keep it that way. Now when I look at Robert E Lee’s portrait (he too was a flower of southern manhood), I no longer see a handsome officer dressed in finest gray. I only see his eyes, haunted from the horrors of war and the crippling shame that was visited on him at the courthouse in Appomattox.
Mimi Gentry can be read every Thursday in the Times-Georgian. Photo of the soldier in the storm: Jane Walker.