‘The Wrath to Come’ by Sarah Churchwell

Sometimes, a good essay is more forceful than a book, I reckon. This is what I kept thinking when reading this book, and although the pace picked up and the book ranged more widely once Part I was out of the way, I just felt as if I had been hit over the head with a mallet as the same argument was repeated again and again. I wish it had been a good long-form essay New Yorker-style rather than a 389 page book.

Churchwell’s argument, which she spells out succinctly in her prologue, is that there is a connection between Gone With the Wind, the instant bestseller of 1936 and the later movie adaptation which became the most successful of its time, and the events of January 6 2021 as the crowd, fortified by defeated-President Trump’s support (“So we’re going to, we’re going to walk down Pennsylvania Avenue. I love Pennsylvania Avenue. And we’re going to the Capitol…”) crashed its way into the US Capitol. It is not so much about the history, but about the book and the film as paired phenomena:

‘Gone with the Wind’ provides a kind of skeleton key, unlocking America’s illusions about itself. When we understand the dark truths of American experience that have been veiled by one of the nation’s favourite fantasies, we can see how the country travelled from the start of the Civil War in 1861 to parading the flag of the side that lost that war through the US Capitol in 2021. That journey was erratic and unpremeditated, but America ended up there all the same. (p. 8)

The book Gone With the Wind appeared in 1936, and sold a million copies in less than six months, won the Pulitzer Prize in 1937, was translated into at least 27 languages and became within a few years the best selling American novel of all time. The film Gone With the Wind was released in 1939 and smashed all records, and adjusted for inflation, is still the highest-grossing film of all time.

The book, which Churchwell has obviously read closely (and which I have not read at all), is more overtly racist than the film. David Selznick’s film consciously eliminated the novel’s many casually racist slurs, as a result of the lobbying from the film’s Black stars. However, the racism continued in the manifestation of the film as a phenomenon: the Black actors were not invited to the film’s premiere, and when Hattie McDaniel became the first Afro-American to win an Oscar for her portrayal of Mammy, she was sitting at a separate table to the rest of the cast, after Selznick had managed to overturn the Cocoanut Grove nightclub ban on black patrons.

Churchwell’s book follows the narrative of the book and film, starting off with ante-bellum Georgia and the rumblings of war. As Churchwell tells us over and over, Mitchell’s portrayal of plantation life (especially in the book) was gratuitously racist and infantalizing. I was relieved to move onto the post-war section of Churchwell’s book, even though I think I remember feeling (it was a very long time ago) that the film had lost impetus once Scarlett returned to Tara. But in Churchwell’s analysis, it is in the return to Tara that the book takes up its major purpose to reify the Lost Cause into American identity. Scarlett O’Hara is not the heroine of Gone With the Wind, instead the real heroine is Melanie, and it is not a love story, but a story of revenge. It is profoundly anti-democratic and consistent with fascism. And this, Churchwell argues, is what fuelled January 6.

I am not at all well-read in Reconstruction and Jim Crow legislation, many hours of listening to Heather Cox Richardson notwithstanding. I saw Gone With the Wind decades ago and have no particular wish to re-watch it, and I have never read the book and am not likely to do so. This book was too detailed for me, although admittedly I’m sure that it was not written for an Australian audience. I was deeply affected, though, by the sheer and graphic violence meted out by the Klan and other vigilante groups: I had not read this before.

Overwhelmingly, this is an angry book, which is ironic given that anger was the predominant driver of January 6 too. I felt that it was too repetitive in its critique, and would have been much punchier as a long-form essay. It felt a very long , and I was pleased to have reached the end of it so that I could move onto something else.

My rating: 7/10

Read because: I heard about it on a podcast, I think.