| Publication |
2009.
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| Summary/Abstract |
As a young girl growing up in the
South, I was forced to watch Gone With
the Wind throughout my primary and
secondary education. As May dwindled
into June, teachers grew weary of lecturing
on multiplication tables or constitutional
history and resorted to "historical
½lms" to pass the time, with Gone With
the Wind at the top of the list. I hated the
movie at every age-and not because I
wanted to crawl under my desk and die
of humiliation every time a black person
came on screen. Rather, the ½lm's violent
content, speci½cally its sexual undertones,
gave me nightmares. In one
instance, Scarlett, confronted by a Yankee
soldier, shoves a pistol in his face
and pulls the trigger. The viewer understands
Scarlett's motivation: that implicit
in the "unspeakable horrors that
lay bound up in the name of 'Yankee'"
is the threat of rape.
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