ATLANTA, GA.- The handsome Tudor Revival mansion set on a shaded lot in the bustling heart of Atlanta has long been known as the Margaret Mitchell House. Yet, in truth, Mitchell’s time there — a span of seven years, during which she wrote “Gone With the Wind” — was confined to a 650-square-foot first-floor apartment she so lovingly named “The Dump.”
Over time, Mitchell and the property she never owned would become inextricable. Visitors wanted to step into the cramped quarters where Mitchell, an unemployed former newspaper reporter, created a sprawling saga that came to define the antebellum South in the popular imagination.
But Mitchell’s idyllic portrayal of the South — with romance, war, perseverance and a setting swathed in gentility and glamour — was, at best, woefully incomplete. Black characters were reduced to stereotypes, and a benevolent gloss coated the brutality of slavery and the institution’s role in bringing about the Civil War.
What was left untold in the 1,037 pages of her book and its 3-hour, 58-minute film adaptation is the focus of a reimagined exhibit at the house turned museum, which reopened to the public Wednesday after being closed since 2020.
The house where Mitchell lived from 1925 to 1932 offered an ideal venue to untangle the legacy of “Gone With the Wind,” organizers said, by exploring its vast cultural footprint and the reasons it has been a source of both pride and pain.
The exhibit, titled “Telling Stories: Gone With the Wind and American Memory,” was not meant to be a searing indictment of Mitchell or a rebuttal of the criticism leveled against the book and the film, organizers said. Instead, the intention was to lay out a complicated history and show how Mitchell and her book, the only one she published, were the product of a certain time and place.
“We’re not trying to label her,” said Sheffield Hale, president and chief executive of Atlanta History Center, the museum and research center that has overseen operations of the house since 2004. “We’re not trying to praise or denigrate her. There’s a whole lot of non-Confederate gray in this exhibit.”
These days, the house can look like a bit of an anachronism, a landmark of the Old South in a capital now regarded as a hub of Black progress and prosperity. In the decades after Mitchell abandoned the Dump, the house itself — once known as the Crescent Apartments — fell into disrepair. It was nearly razed for development and survived multiple fires. It opened as a museum in the 1990s.
The closure in 2020 came just before anger stoked by the murder of George Floyd unfurled into protests and a broader reckoning over racism and inequality in America. “Gone With the Wind” became swept up in that, as the country wrestled with how to handle a cultural artifact that was influential and beloved but also deeply problematic.
At the height of those demonstrations, director John Ridley, the screenwriter behind the 2013 Oscar-winning film “12 Years a Slave,” wrote an essay in The Los Angeles Times in which he urged the streamer HBO Max to remove the film from its platform before reintroducing it with more context for viewers.
“The movie had the very best talents in Hollywood at that time working together to sentimentalize a history that never was,” he wrote.
HBO acquiesced, pulling the film and then restoring it with a four-minute introduction that outlined its value and its flaws, and an explanation of why suppressing the film was not the right solution.
The exhibit follows a similar tack.
It starts in the part of the house that Margaret Mitchell called home: the two-room apartment where she lived with her second husband, John Marsh.
Visitors can see the tiny desk, suited to Mitchell’s 4-foot-11 frame, where she typed page after page. The exhibit describes “Gone With the Wind” as a version of the reality for someone born in 1900 in Atlanta and raised by people who had lived through the Civil War on the Confederate side.
“She grew up with that perspective in her ears,” said Claire Haley, vice president of special projects for Atlanta History Center.
The book, published in 1936, was a critical and commercial success, winning a Pulitzer Prize and selling nearly 1 million copies within six months. Readers were enthralled with the travails of the protagonist, Scarlett O’Hara, from the start of the Civil War through the turmoil of Reconstruction.
“People had been dealing with really hard times,” Haley said, referring to the Great Depression. She added, “The story is about redemption, and it’s about a character going through a war and coming out on the other side and ‘Never be hungry again.’”
The unease over the book’s treatment of Black characters and its depiction of slavery was not merely the result of hindsight. Activists and journalists working for the Black press were expressing their concerns even before the film was released in 1939.
In a 1936 letter on display in the museum, Walter White, the longtime leader of the NAACP, warned producer David O. Selznick that the book was “so essentially superficial and false in its emphases that it will require almost incredible effort to make a film from the novel which would not be both hurtful and inaccurate.”
The film ultimately diverged from the book in significant ways. The filmmakers buffed out some of the most pointed depictions of racism, including use of a racial slur and explicit references that the men around Scarlett were part of the Ku Klux Klan. They also ratcheted up the wealth and opulence of Scarlett’s family.
Some scholars and critics considered the result a Confederate monument in motion picture form.
Still, the criticism did nothing to dampen its success. “Gone With the Wind” has remained, if adjusted for inflation, the highest-grossing film in history. It received eight Academy Awards, including a supporting actress prize for Hattie McDaniel’s performance as Mammy, making her the first African American to win an Oscar. (McDaniel’s high-profile perch did not spare her from Jim Crow segregation laws or the racist sensibilities of Southern white moviegoers. According to the exhibit, she did not attend the Atlanta premiere, and her picture was excluded from the program.)
The exhibit tries to capture the lasting impression “Gone With the Wind” made on popular culture: It inspired homages in “The Simpsons,” and Miss Piggy and Kermit the Frog famously dressed as Scarlett and Rhett Butler. A spoof by Carol Burnett had her, quite literally, bedraped in a Bob Mackie creation that is now part of the Smithsonian Institution’s collection.
There are suburban streets named Scarlett O’Hara Court in Clarksville, Tennessee, and Douglasville, Georgia. Dolly Parton named her 100-acre enclave outside Nashville after Tara, the fictional plantation.
Later works that organizers felt had served as a kind of historical corrective are also highlighted, like “12 Years a Slave”; “Roots,” the epic television miniseries that aired in 1977; and the 2001 book “The Wind Done Gone,” which used the original setting to tell a story from the perspective of an enslaved woman.
Yet for all of the reappraising, visitors may come away with the sense that both the pride and the pain the story inspired were justified, said Stephane Dunn, a professor of cinema, television and emerging media studies at Morehouse College in Atlanta, who advised the exhibit’s curators.
“You can love it,” Dunn said.
She still does.
“I mean, I am a Black American woman, right?” she said. “I did not think slavery was romantic, but I found Scarlett fascinating. I found the costumes fascinating. I found in Mammy her strength, and she was not invisible in any scene she was in.”
“Gone With the Wind” has waned in popularity as an understanding of American history has evolved. But by the time visitors reach the end of the exhibit, organizers said, the hope is that they will understand how the story came to be and why it resonated.
“Because that helps us look at the stories we’re telling today,” Haley said, “to see if there are areas where we could stand to expand our perspectives.”
This article originally appeared in
The New York Times.
