"You liked Scarlett, you will love Janie"

Grandstand. The new translation by Gallmeister editions of the famous novel by Margaret Mitchell, Gone with the Wind (Gone with the wind) (1936), coincided with a worldwide protest movement against the death of George Floyd, in Minneapolis, considered as the very example of the violence suffered by blacks in the United States, the fruit of a systemic racism inherited from l slavery and segregation.

Margaret Mitchell (1900-1949) was born into a family in Georgia, deeply rooted in tradition and in the memory of the South. His book portrays the pre-Civil War slavery South in a particularly favorable light: good masters to whom docile and loving slaves are attached, in counterpoint to the rebel "bad blacks" and the corrupt Yankees who came to subdue the secessionist states. He maintains nostalgia for a mythical South with an idealized way of life, he ignores slavery as exploitation, violence and dehumanization.

Asked about France Culture on the interest of retranslating and republishing this work nowadays, its editor presents it as a saga describing "A world at the end of life" and "An America in the making in the way that northerners will take control of southerners". Such a justification, alas, espouses the purpose of the book instead of distancing itself from it: the novel by Margaret Mitchell, among others, helped to represent the short period known as Reconstruction (1865-1877), which immediately follows the end of the war, like a chaos organized by the carpetbaggers came from the North and scalawags from the South, allied with the freed and incapable former slaves.

Historical issues and its ideological presuppositions

The first are, in southern propaganda, opportunistic Yankees who have come to take advantage of the defeated States; the second of the traitors of the South ready to cooperate with the North. As for the Blacks, they are presented as gullible, ready to believe in the false promises of the Office of the freed (the famous "Forty acres and a mule"). However, historians now regard this period of Reconstruction as particularly rich in political, democratic and social innovations, offering the possibility of real political participation by former slaves.

Article reserved for our subscribers Read also “Gone with the Wind”: the time comes for retranslation

It ends from the end of 1877, when the conservative Republicans agree with the racist democrats of the South to leave their hands free: the Jim Crow laws then attempt to reverse the gains of abolition by preventing blacks to vote and by imposing racial segregation, enshrined in the “Plessy vs Ferguson "of 1896 and his famous "Separate but equal".

You have 64.14% of this article to read. The suite is reserved for subscribers.

LEAVE A REPLY

Please enter your comment!
Please enter your name here