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Keywords

Gone with the Wind, Confederacy, Southern Nationalism, Film, Propaganda

Abstract

This paper analyzes the film Gone with the Wind as a piece of Southern nationalist propaganda. This includes an exploration of the earlier Southern nationalist film Birth of a Nation, as well as a comparison to Margaret Mitchell’s 1936 novel Gone with the Wind. In my analysis of Gone with the Wind’s production process, including memos between producer David O. Selznick and other members of the production team, I find that Selznick maintained tight control over the film’s production and was extremely concerned with maintaining positive publicity for his film. This led him to allow a few seemingly progressive deviations from the novel, including the elimination of the Ku Klux Klan and the removal of the novel’s most racist language. Selznick, in an attempt to avoid controversy, created a benign and engaging vehicle for promulgating Lost Cause mythology. I argue that, instead of undermining its effectiveness, efforts to temper the film allowed it to become a more durable fixture of American cinema. Stripped of the novel’s ugliest expressions of racism, Gone with the Wind became free to enter the mainstream of American culture, becoming the highest-grossing film ever made.

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