Novel Gone With The Wind by Margaret Mitchell Essay

Gone with the Wind as a literature of witness to forced labor
Gone with the Wind, a story of white Southern resilience by Margaret Mitchell, which greatly appealed to readers of the Depression-era, depicted slavery as a world of faithful slaves and lenient masters. The tale also criticized freed individuals who tried to practice their citizenship rights. Since Gone with the Wind embraced most of the same rhetoric as purportedly non-fiction works that idealized slavery, howled freedom, and depicted black political rights as some type of tyranny over the white South, a few readers viewed the resemblances as a proof of the novel’s historical truth. Gone with the Wind’s influence has been multi-generational, and hardly has its fame been matched in longevity or scope (Adkins 11 & 23).
Margaret Mitchell’s tale is most concerned with the affliction of Southern white slaveholders as she pictures this era of social mayhem. Her narrative figures the war, freedom, and reconstruction as vessels of their grief. Following his return home from a Union prison camp, Ashley Wilkes, Scarlett O’Hara’s object of unreciprocated love, ponders about the fate of the conquered South. Ashley predicts that what will happen in the end will be exactly what happens when a civilization crumbles. 
According to him, those who are wise and courageous survive and those are not are eliminated. He continues to explain that it has been exciting and comfortable to witness a Götterdämmerung- a dusk of the gods. In German mythology, this means a destruction of the gods in an apocalyptic war against evil (Mitchell 527).
The tale, Gone with the Wind, rejects any idea of slaveholder cruelty as a lie spread by deluded Yankees. With Mitchell’s small cast of black characters, she tries to affirm Scarlett’s belittling depiction that blacks were at times irritating, lazy and foolish, but they had loyalty in them that couldn’t be bought by money (Mitchell 472). 
Even as Mitchell recognizes that some former bonds people harbored dislike for their ex-masters, that emotion is not conveyed by any of her characters. She blames this occurrence on Freedmen Bureau agents who inspire thoughts of equality among the just freed. She the anger of former slaves as a part of the alleged discrimination white Georgians go through at the hands of Northern former bonds-people and conquerors who have the nerve to assert their freedom (Adkins 40).
Gerald moved to Georgia after killing a British absentee landlord’s rent agent with the hopes of becoming a landed man and slave owner (Mitchell 45).  Trying to rise up a class hierarchy different from the one he left back in Ireland, his very first step up towards the desire of his heart was purchasing Pork, his first slave (Mitchell 45). 
The domestic trade of slaves, which especially displaced bonds-people and ruined their social networks, is depicted in the novel with Gerald’s purchase of Dilcey and Prissy, Pork’s wife and daughter respectively, apparently so that the family can be together in one household. Mitchell does not state the fact that the slave marriage bared no legal status. She does not provide any hint of the control exercised by slaveholders or the extent to which the lives of bonds-people were controlled by their master’s whims. Without any inkling of authorial rebuke, Gerald assumes that it is a nice practical joke to his valet that he sold Pork to John Wilkes instead of purchasing Dilcey (Mitchell 38).
Insinuating that a significant number of O’Hara slaves also escaped from the Union army, Grandma Fontaine claims that they passed her home looking very frightened (Mitchell 447). Her narration presumes that the slave population dislike the Union soldiers. The idea that the slaves escaped in fear maligns the Union army and shadows the historical truth that a lot of slave s regarded the army as safe haven from their ex-masters. 
Pork narrates a somewhat different story of the departure of his fellow bondsperson from Tara. He states that a few of Tara’s slaves escaped with the Union army and not away from them. However, the betrayal he implies in their departure shadows their motives. As Pork narrates to Scarlett “dem trashy niggers done runned away an’ some of dem went off wid de Yankees” (Mitchell 407).
The clear provocation for Pork’s use of racial labels is the betrayal that differentiates the “trashy” slaves form the three loyal house servants; Pork, Mammy and Dilcey, that stay back.  Mammy uses the same racist attack but substitutes the word trashy with free issue to convey her condemnation of freedmen that dissociate from their former masters. Mammy and Pork together affirm Mitchell’s tale of reconstruction that praises former slaves who ridiculed freedom and suffered as brutally as their masters (Mitchell 654). 
Remembering the caste system that described house slaves to be of a higher class compared to field hands, Mitchell elaborates that the better class of former slaves, meaning former house slaves, normally stayed with their former masters. Mammy resembles a cultural myth of the slave that acts as a surrogate parent to the children of their master. Southern’s slaveholding legend Mammy is not only an idealized slave but also an idealized woman. She is asexual, self-sacrificing and honorable. This particular mythical representation identifies more with her masters than her fellow slaves. She signifies a cultural emblem of romanticized fondness between slaves and masters (Adkins 44). 
Additionally, Mitchell also proposes predation by the Federal cavalry man that Scarlett puts to death. Hearing the uninvited guest enter the Tara kitchen, Scarlett immediately thinks of the dinner over the fire. The thought of losing that meal painfully acquired from the neighboring hardens drives her to a deadly anger. Her empty belly wriggled within her. By God that was one Yankee who would steal no more (Mitchell 439). 
The treachery of the soldier she kills is based on the alleged intention of depriving Scarlett of her scanty food supply. Mitchell, the author, redirects a natural slavery feature- the master’s human parasitism- as more condemnation of the presence of the Federal military in the South. Yet, in a funny irony, the vegetables defended by Scarlett, most likely scavenged from the slave garden at Twelve Oaks, are probably the stolen products of slave labor (Adkins 48).
In this tale, Gone with the Wind, the author appears unwilling to tolerate the likelihood that Gerald O’Hara or John Wilkes would ever sell their slaves any further than the neighboring plantation. In her elicitation of My Old Kentucky Home Good-Night, she most frequently refers to the line, “A few more days for to tote the weary load, No matter, ’twill never be light” (Mitchell 316). 
Mitchell uses the song to shadow the tribulation of the slave as an expression of Scarlett’s suffering. The heavy load that Scarlett carries is the oppression of ex-planters by white parvenus, free blacks and Yankees. Particularly despicable are the Freedmen’s Bureau agents Hilton and Wilkerson, both of whom were initially Yankee overseers (Adkins 49).
In the meantime, the only input to the Civil War that Mitchells ascribes to blacks is their forced labor of a government that is in place to guarantee their long-lasting enslavement. Even though Scarlett overlooks black military service to the Union, she comes across a group of slaves assigned to the Confederate army as ditch diggers. Among the workers is Sam, Tara’s erstwhile foreman, leading the slaves in a singing (Mitchel 323). 
The author does not stress on the political importance of the spiritual that evokes the Biblical Exodus as a fable for the enslavement of African Americans. Sam’s reappearance later in the tale, however, negates the thirst for freedom he puts across when singing the hymn. Amidst the freed individuals in the narrative, Sam is the only character to live removed from his former enslavers. 
But having acquired the freedom he praised in the song, he encounter’s some kind of buyer’s remorse. By his own narration, freedom, travel and employment just happen to him without much volition on his part. He, however, deliberately decided to exchange his freedom for the paternalism he alleges to have suffered in slavery. As anywhere in the narrative, Mitchell ventriloquizes her support of slavery via ex-slaves that act as the tale’s strongest advocates of human slavery (Adkins 49). 
Pseudo-histories that recycled principles of pro-slavery and novels such as Gone with the Wind romanticized a mutual, nearly familial fondness between the slave and master. Related from the viewpoint of conquered former masters, Gone with the Wind and other novels of its type treat freedom as though the emancipation of black bonds-people instituted serious injury to white Southerners. 
Just like most other renowned academic books, Gone with the Wind recounted history mainly for the viewpoint of white Southerners. The text whitewashed two hundred years of human abuse and fraudulently transformed slave owners into the martyred victims of the Civil War and liberation (Adkins 59). 
Works Cited
Mitchell, Margaret. Gone with the Wind. New York: Warner Books, 1999.
Adkins, Christina Katherine. Slavery and the Civil War in cultural memory. Diss. 2014.