Gone with the Wind: Perfect Child from the South

Gone with the Wind: Perfect Child from the South

The south seems to be there “perfect child” while the north which is mostly depicted as marauding brutes, looting and pillaging in a manner quite unknown to the gentlemanly. They make slavery seem OK. The slaves going off to war to dig trenches seem HAPPY. The role of mammy was accurate. The role of the dumb nigger slave who didn’t know anything about childbirth was pretty inaccurate. MM was very historically accurate with all of her research she did but did also romanticize the south as the “Good guys”. The film shows slaves as well-treated, blindly cheerful “darkies” loyal to their benevolent masters. Slaves are portrayed as normal employees, are rewarded with presents like the master’s pocket watch if they’ve been appropriately loyal, and are allowed to scold the young mistress of the house as if they were a part of the family. Big Sam leaves Tara only when ordered and with extreme reluctance and later saves Scarlett at serious risk to his own life. More damaging than Gone With the Wind’s simplistic view of slavery, however, is the film’s depiction of all African Americans as stupid and childlike. Mammy manages to escape the film with her dignity largely intact, but Pork, the only named male house slave, is forced to appear in scene after scene with a wide-eyed, slightly glazed expression on his face. When faced with work duties beyond those he has always performed, he immediately becomes overwhelmed and panics. Big Sam’s grammar is chopped down to an extremely simplistic level, far below even that of the equally uneducated Mammy. The worst example of this negative portrayal is the young house slave Prissy. Perhaps intended as comic relief, Prissy is stupid, squeamish, a liar, and becomes hysterical over the smallest things. She is a caricature of a woman, a living holdover from the slaveholder’s old claim that African Americans needed to be slaves because they weren’t able to function on their own.

Similar Essays