Gone With The Wind

While some argue that the controversy that surrounds Gone with the Wind is a product of reinterpretation of the text through a modern lens, the novel has been a controversial book since the time of its publication in 1936: Margaret Mitchell’s narrative presents a glowing depiction of life in the antebellum South that has drawn criticism as an endorsement of racist ideology, specifically the Lost Cause narrative.

The Lost Cause took shape after the Civil War as a concerted effort to rewrite and reframe the history of the antebellum South, the war itself, and the defeat of the Confederacy. After the war, the South was forced to reckon with undisputable loss: of soldiers’ lives, of property, and of a way of life dependent on the labor of the enslaved. The Lost Cause narrative was an unofficial movement that served as a psychological buffer on the part of white Southerners who were attempting to justify not only having fought the war but also their antebellum way of life. Clinging to these myths made life bearable for the war’s survivors and helped to bring the defeated out of a cycle of fury and despair.

Fundamentally, the Lost Cause narrative depicts the antebellum South as an idyllic setting in which a chivalric code of conduct prevailed among the ruling elite, the planter class to which families like the O’Haras belonged. Building upon this setting, the myths that define the Lost Cause narrative manipulate historical facts surrounding the Civil War to favor the South, including the South’s relationship with enslavement.

Defending the white supremacy that served as the foundation for Black enslavement in America is a key tenet of the narrative. It espouses that white supremacy is ordained by God through biblical precedent, reflecting a natural hierarchical order among the races. Proponents of the narrative claim that elite plantation owners treated those below them in the social hierarchy—including the enslaved—honorably and kindly. The Lost Cause suggests that enslaved people were part of the family, and that narratives such as Uncle Tom’s Cabin—an 1852 novel based upon multiple firsthand accounts of enslaved people—depicted enslavement inaccurately. Despite numerous written and oral accounts from enslaved Black people that contradict these claims, the Lost Cause positions enslaved Black people as being content, with no wishes to be free.

Despite its defenses of white supremacy, the Lost Cause purports that protecting the system of enslavement was not a motive for the war. Instead, the Civil War is framed as an attempt to assert states’ rights: the right of states to voluntarily secede from the union, but also their right to self-govern, including the right to retain the system of enslavement. The North’s motive for its “war of aggression” is framed as a desire of the North—perceived as more secular and materialistic than the South—to destroy Southerners’ agrarian way of life. 

The Lost Cause also wrestles with the outcome of the war. One common theme is that the South lost due to being overpowered by the massive resources of the North, not due to the South’s shortcomings in battle. Foreshadowing the role the Lost Cause narrative would play in upholding white supremacy throughout Reconstruction and into the Jim Crow era, the narrative reinforces racial hierarchy, espousing that emancipated, illiterate Black men would cause social and political chaos if allowed to vote. Further, Northerners typically did not directly contradict the South’s version of events, particularly during Reconstruction, because maintaining the illusion facilitated reunification between the regions; for many in positions of power, the Lost Cause narrative was seen as a necessary evil to bring about a peaceful reunification.

By the end of the 19th century, the Lost Cause myth was embellished and amplified in speeches and works of fiction. While its staunchest proponents and most active disseminators were women of the planter class, the tenets of the narrative achieved national prominence in the works of Thomas Dixon Jr. His controversial novel, The Clansman (1905), glorified the Ku Klux Klan and was later adapted in film by D. W. Griffith as the equally controversial The Birth of a Nation (1915).

Both works adhere closely to the Lost Cause narrative, depicting a utopian antebellum Southern lifestyle in which Black and white people alike were happy until the North conducted an unprovoked war of aggression. During Reconstruction, they claim, formerly enslaved men became sexual predators who attacked white women, and the Ku Klux Klan arose to defend female virtue and counteract the corruption of Yankees, scalawags, and carpetbaggers. Gone with the Wind contains all of these same elements, as the author herself had imbibed such notions from her earliest years.

Margaret Mitchell was born in 1900 as a descendant of the planter class and gleaned firsthand accounts about the war from her maternal grandmother and from the war veterans who came to visit her home. While Mitchell listened to these survivor tales of past glories, she didn’t realize until she was 10 years old that the South had lost the war. The author’s mother contributed her own frightened perspective as a child in the wake of the Civil War:

She talked about the world those people had lived in, such a secure world, and how it had exploded beneath them. And she told me that my world was going to explode under me, someday, and God help me if I didn’t have some weapon to meet the new world (Mitchell, Margaret. Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind Letters, 1936-1949, edited by Richard Harwell, Macmillan, 1976).

For many Southerners, clinging to the Lost Cause of the Confederacy became that weapon. As with all works of art, Gone with the Wind originates in its author’s worldview, and any modern study of the novel should consider it as both a literary work of art and as a historical artifact.