Representing the Race by Gene Andrew Jarrett

Author:Gene Andrew Jarrett
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: NYU Press
Published: 2011-03-20T16:00:00+00:00

“Tara Was Her Fate”: Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind

Left understated in the 2001 case is the original interplay of biology and culture in Gone with the Wind. As we all know, the historical romance begins in 1861, when the regional, ideological, and political conflict over slavery is at a climax and when America is plummeting into a divisive civil war. Recording this turmoil while following the complex life of Scarlett, a sensational Southern heroine, before, during, and after the Civil War, the novel contrasts the ancestries and behavioral styles of her parents, Gerald and Ellen (Robillard) O’Hara. The heroine’s courage and ambition to restore Tara to its pre–Civil War glory evolve over the course of her traumatic wartime experiences, but these traits are also predestined.

Scarlett’s fearless and assertive disposition comes from her father’s Irish background. Gerald’s identity crystallizes when he immigrates to America in his early twenties, after having left the brewing conflict between his family of O’Haras, then living in Ireland, and the British government, which suspects that the family, along with other culpable Irish citizens, has been planning a social revolution. Since Gerald’s undersized build disqualifies him from joining the rebellion, he embraces the ethos that “little people must be hardy to survive among the large ones” and embarks on a voyage to the American South, where his notoriously “brisk and restless vitality” in securing land and commanding slaves overshadows the cultural inelegance that would become his trait among the local gentry.36 Here, Gerald attributes to his Irish ancestry the desire for and defense of land ownership: “to anyone with a drop of Irish blood in them the land they live on is like their mother.” He says directly to Scarlett that, despite her youth, “’Twill come to you, this love of land. There’s no getting away from it, if you’re Irish” (39).

In contrast to Gerald’s brusqueness, Ellen’s refinement also influences Scarlett. Several issues regarding Ellen’s upbringing coalesce to inform her “efficient and unruffled” mannerism, despite “the daily emergencies of Gerald’s turbulent household” (42). The issues include Ellen’s French ancestry, her aristocratic birthplace on the Georgia coast, her early exposure to a social life by no means as troubled as Gerald’s, and her mysterious solemnity (42).37 Yet, after Gerald’s courtship, Ellen’s resentment toward her family for allegedly driving away her prior true love interest—Philippe Robillard, a murdered cousin—prompts her to marry him at the young age of fifteen, against her father’s wish. (Presumably, this decision would have opposed the wish of Ellen’s mother had she still been alive at the time.) Ellen then moves away from that “graceful dwelling” of French colonial architecture, from “the entire civilization that was behind the building of it, and she found herself in a world that was as strange and different as if she had crossed a continent,” a world called Tara (58). Located in northern Georgia, where Ellen and Gerald have constructed a magnificent home, Tara represents the clash of their personal cultures and memories but also where Scarlett and

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