Pulitzer Book Club Inclusion Guide
"Gone with the Wind"
by Margaret Mitchell
INCLUSION MILESTONES
1937
• Intro of automatic washer
• "Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs" first feature-length animated cartoon with sound
• Senate vote avoids Supreme Court packing
AUTHOR INSPIRATIONS
On a carriage ride to see plantations burned by Sherman, Mitchell’s mother described the explosion of a secure world. Atlanta-born Margaret went to finishing school and rallies with her suffragist mother. Mitchell ended her marriage to an abusive alcoholic bootlegger by charming their best man into buying her way out of the marriage and ultimately married that best man.
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– Share your key take-away about inclusion in this book in a sentence or two.
– Write a paragraph or two (up to 250 words) to describe your thoughts on exclusion/inclusion in the book, why you related or did not connect with the book, and why you think reading, inclusion and dialog about inclusion matter.
– Identify the name and website address of a cause you support with an inclusive mission.
Love triangle in bigoted Old South minus brutal slavery realities.
Vow to never to go hungry again after Sherman’s troops burn Tara’s crops.
Bigoted best-selling novel and blockbuster Oscar-winning film created a lasting whitewashed image of slavery and the claim that the Civil War was about state’s rights.
Epically long racist page-turner: 1037 pages, 49 hours
Historical fiction is fiction – with the potential to misinform/distort beliefs about what actually happened.
Blatant racism; presentation of enslaved people as loving, respecting, protecting their owners/“family’s” lifestyle.
Horrific labeling, insults, and abuse including violence. Hierarchical plantation society; arranged marriages;some more focused on horses for troops than reason for war.
Women expected to run plantation and rule over slaves. Men drink, ride, and gamble. Irish father managed by capable younger French wife. Southern heroine won't conform to society's expectations; becomes successful businesswoman. Values money, land over children.
At a formal dIning table: rolls, corn muffins, biscuits, waffles dripping with butter, ham, fried chicken, collards, snap beans, fried squash, stewed okra, carrots in cream sauce, chocolate layer cake, vanilla blanc mange and pound cake.
At a separate, lesser table: chitterlings, yams, and watermelon.
“How long will it be like this?”
Separate rooms, one very much more attractive, adorned, and comfortable than the other.
How does Gone with the Wind defend and whitewash the institution of slavery and racism? How/why does Gone with the Wind continue to shape current attitudes? Describe parallels between use of the state’s rights as a political rationale today and during the Antebellum and Reconstruction eras.
Talk about an author’s responsibilities to history and freedom to create a fictional reality. Has that changed over time?
Can a racist novel have literary value? Can Gone With the Wind inspire rejection of racism?
How do the Freedman Bureau, the KKK and voting rights affect history and figure into the novel?
Were there differences between how the narrator and characters describe people who are Black?
Did you admire anything about or sympathize with any racist character?
What about views toward people who are viewed as stupid, ugly, worthless, boring, physically challenged? The caste system among the enslaved and freed?
What demeaning labels, in addition to the racist and misogynistic ones, stood out?
Discuss female stereotyping, conformity, and feminism in the novel.
Can you think of another novel that did more to damage DEI?
Think about the history and consequences of slavery at the Atlanta History Center and Smith Farm. Contrast an experience at The Owens-Thomas House & Slave Quarters with stately homes on Savannah’s squares. In Charleston, see the International African American Museum, the Old Slave Mart Museum, take a Civil War and Slavery tour. Drayton Hall, a plantation house, is outside Charleston. Pursue statewide Civil War Historic Driving Trails of Georgia, such as the Atlanta Campaign Heritage Trail. Gone With the Wind museum is in Marietta. Twelve Oaks is a B&B in Covington (suburban Atlanta). Margaret Mitchell House, where novel was written, is in Atlanta.
Oscar winning adaptation of Gone With the Wind, released 1939, runs nearly four hours. NAACP provided input responsible for film’s deviations from novel: white people do not use n-word, white man rips open Scarlett’s gown, Scarlett less violent to Prissy.
Lost Laysen, a novella written 1916, published 1996.
Margaret Mitchell did not write a novel after Gone with the Wind. The Wind Done Gone (Alice Randall 2001) tells the story of the life of slaves during the same events.