“What’s my lamb gonna wear?
That. No, you ain’t! You can’t show your bosom before three o’clock. I’m
gonna speak to your Ma about you!” declares the appallingly named Mammy
in Gone With the Wind, a beloved if horrifying spectacle
enjoying its 75th anniversary this year. Surrounding Scarlett and Mammy
are mounds of muslin, lashings of lawn, the elaborate 1930s re-creations
of antebellum fashions that even now, three quarters of a century
later, cause the hearts of legions of little—and some not so
little—girls to flutter and soar.
Burned in the memory, as searing as Sherman’s March to the Sea, are
the images of the indomitable Scarlett being laced into her corsets, or
making a dress out of Miss Ellen’s portières. The quasi-feminist clarion
call behind that emerald-green curtain frock—the can-do spirit that
seduced Rhett, along with millions of readers struggling through the
Great Depression (the book was published in 1936; the movie released in
1939)—was alas wholly dependent on slave labor. (Hattie McDaniel, who
played Mammy, was the first African-American to receive an Academy
Award. She was criticized in the 1940s by the NAACP for so often playing
servants in films, but reportedly said: “I’d rather play a maid than be
one.”)
And yet, and yet. As we wallow in this symphony of squalid social
relations, this gorgeous apologia for the unspeakable, we can still find
ourselves swept up in the power of epic movie-making. We can cheer as
Scarlett dances the Virginia reel and builds her lumber business from a
foundation of pure grit, vowing that, like her, we will never be hungry
for anything again—all the while glorying in the most magnificent fact
of all, far more thrilling than Tara (with or without its curtains): Her
side lost.
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