(p. C5) 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.
. . .
“We’re not trying to label her,” said Sheffield Hale, the 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.”
. . .
. . ., the 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 book, published in 1936, was a critical and commercial success, winning a Pulitzer Prize and selling nearly a 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.’”
. . .
. . . 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.”
For the full story see:
Rick Rojas. “Pride and Pain Under One Roof.” The New York Times (Saturday, July 13, 2024): C5.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the story has the date July 12, 2024, and has the title “At Margaret Mitchell’s House, ‘Gone With the Wind’ Gets a Rewrite.”)
The book is:
Mitchell, Margaret. Gone with the Wind. New York: Vintage Classics, 2020 (1st ed. 1936).