Some African-American Fictional Responses to 'Gone with the Wind'

Abstract

Both Rudyard Kipling and Toni Morrison, at first glance rather dissimilar authors, have spoken of writing 'literature for the tribe'.1 I should like to suggest that Gone With the Wind has elicited a 'tribal' response from AfricanAmerican women writers in that they have replied to Mitchell's tribal mythology with a tribal mythology of their own. Gone With the Wind (1936) has, of course, been criticized for presenting too rosy a view of the South: 'a piece of documented partisanship';2 a work in which 'the Old South and its Lost Cause were glamorized, sanitized, and merchandised'.3 In a famous attack on the novel, Floyd C. Watkins damned it as 'vulgar literature', taking his phrase from an essay written in I900 by William Dean Howells, in which Howells declares that 'what is despicable, what is lamentable is to have hit the popular fancy and not have done anything to change it, but everything to fix it; to flatter it with false dreams of splendor in the past'.4 Margaret Mitchell herself strenuously denied that her novel had encouraged 'false dreams of splendor in the past'. She said: A number of years ago some of us organized a club, The Association of Southerners Whose Grandpappies Did Not Live in Houses with White Columns [... ]. Since my novel was published, I have been embarrassed on many occasions by finding myself included among writers who pictured the South as a land of white-columned mansions whose wealthy owners had thousands of slaves and drank thousands of juleps. I have been surprised, for North Georgia certainly was no such country if it ever existed anywhere and I took great pains to describe North Georgia as it was. But people believe what they like to believe and the mythical Old South has too