The Wrath to Come
Gone with the Wind and the Lies America Tells
-
- $19.99
Publisher Description
The history America never wanted you to read.
'The narrative took my breath away' Philippe Sands
'An extraordinarily and shockingly powerful read' Peter Frankopan
'One of the must-reads of the year' Suzannah Lipscomb
'Brilliant and provocative' Gavin Esler
Sarah Churchwell examines one of the most enduringly popular stories of all time, Gone with the Wind, to help explain the divisions ripping the United States apart today. Separating fact from fiction, she shows how histories of mythmaking have informed America's racial and gender politics, the controversies over Confederate statues, the resurgence of white nationalism, the Black Lives Matter movement, the enduring power of the American Dream, and the violence of Trumpism.
Gone with the Wind was an instant bestseller when it was published in 1936; its film version became the most successful Hollywood film of all time. Today the story's racism is again a subject of controversy, but it was just as controversial in the 1930s, foreshadowing today's debates over race and American fascism. In The Wrath to Come, Sarah Churchwell charts an extraordinary journey through 160 years of American denialism. From the Lost Cause to the romances behind the Ku Klux Klan, from the invention of the 'ideal' slave plantation to the erasure of interwar fascism, Churchwell shows what happens when we do violence to history, as collective denial turns fictions into lies, and lies into a vicious reality.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Churchwell (Behold, America), a professor of American literature at the University of London, delivers an impassioned critique of Margaret Mitchell's 1936 novel Gone with the Wind and its influence on today's political polarization. Writing at the height of the "Lost Cause" movement, Mitchell highlighted the modernity of her protagonist, Scarlett O'Hara, but refused to allow Scarlett—or any other character—to feel empathy for the book's enslaved Black characters. In so doing, Churchwell argues, Mitchell reinforced the idea that emancipation was a direct assault on the "political and economic agency" of Southern white women at a time when the rules of Victorian coverture prevented married women from owning property. Churchwell smoothly integrates her analysis of key scenes in the novel and its film adaptation with accounts of lynch mob violence, the rise of the Ku Klux Klan, and the installation of Confederate monuments across the South, and draws persuasive links between Gone with the Wind's romanticization of a racially and socially stratified society and the grievances that motivated protesters during the January 6 Capitol riot. Valuable light is also shed on Mitchell's anti-war beliefs and her firm conviction that she was not a racist, but simply telling the truth about the antebellum South and the cruelties of Reconstruction. The result is a nuanced and convincing takedown of an American classic. Photos.
