Redeeming the old south in David O. Selznick’s Gone with the Wind

Silva, Edgardo Medeiros, 1961-

http://hdl.handle.net/10451/11835

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Authors

Silva, Edgardo Medeiros, 1961-

Abstract(s)

David O. Selznick’s filmic adaptation of Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind (1936) is informed by the same kind of Romantic nostalgia we find in the pages of this timeless award-winning novel, offering its viewers a conflicting vision over the nature and significance of the period of time which followed the end of the American Civil War. Northerners understood that period as one of “Reconstruction”, whereas Southerners envisaged it more as a time of “Restoration”. I wish to examine in this paper how producer David O. Selznick attempts to redeem the South in his filmic adaptation of this text, in line with the essential premise(s) of Mitchell’s novel, through his representation of a pre-Civil War idyllic, romanticized South, devoid of the pernicious effects of the “peculiar institution”, subjected in a first instance to the aggression of a great Northern invader and upon its defeat by a civilian army of Carpetbaggers.