The Wrath to Come: Gone with the Wind and the Lies America Tells

Churchwell (Behold, America), a professor of American literature at the University of London, delivers an impassioned critique of Margaret Mitchell’s 1936 novel Gone with the Wind and its influence on today’s political polarization. Writing at the height of the “Lost Cause” movement, Mitchell highlighted the modernity of her protagonist, Scarlett O’Hara, but refused to allow Scarlett—or any other character—to feel empathy for the book’s enslaved Black characters. In so doing, Churchwell argues, Mitchell reinforced the idea that emancipation was a direct assault on the “political and economic agency” of Southern white women at a time when the rules of Victorian coverture prevented married women from owning property. Churchwell smoothly integrates her analysis of key scenes in the novel and its film adaptation with accounts of lynch mob violence, the rise of the Ku Klux Klan, and the installation of Confederate monuments across the South, and draws persuasive links between Gone with the Wind’s romanticization of a racially and socially stratified society and the grievances that motivated protesters during the January 6 Capitol riot. Valuable light is also shed on Mitchell’s anti-war beliefs and her firm conviction that she was not a racist, but simply telling the truth about the antebellum South and the cruelties of Reconstruction. The result is a nuanced and convincing takedown of an American classic. Photos. (June)