For my thesis, building on my Mellon project, I want to continue researching the social politics of enslaved Black women’s dress and how they used clothing as a means to navigate the hostility of enslavement and maintain a sense of autonomy. Grounding this idea within a text, however, I am interested in exploring how this might manifest in a movie like Gone with the Wind. Despite the movie’s very revisionist and romanticized portrayal of slavery, I want to lean into that portrayal to ask questions about how the movie’s costuming is supporting or even disagreeing at times with its revisionist narrative. In other words, one guiding question I have is: how exactly are the costumes within Gone with the Wind telling the audience how they should feel about class, gender, and slavery? How are the costumes supporting the movie’s ideation and creation of a fictional, picturesque American South?
Stepping away from costumes for a moment to discuss gender, in Patriarchy and Accumulation On A World Scale, Maria Mies outlines how the collective image of a housewife who cares for her children and does no manual labor was the result of centuries of states infringing on women’s rights to co-opt the aforementioned and make it useful for the needs of the state. Near the end of Chapter 3, Mies describes how, although wholistically, capitalist structures were a detriment to working-class men as they only benefitted the upper classes, “proletarian men [did] have a material interest in the domestication of their female class companions” (109) as it allowed them to elevate themselves within capitalist hierarchies and “monopolize available wage-work [and] have control over all money income in the family” (109). Capitalism as understood through Mies’s analysis of 18th-century Germany was beneficial to neither working-class men nor women, yet because it allowed some leeway for men to reobtain some semblance of control, it was worth participating in even if that meant the cost of women’s rights.
Applying this concept to Gone with the Wind, I hope to examine the exchanges main character, Scarlett O’hara (like the proletariat men), makes in order to maintain her security within a capitalist, antebellum South. While it is made abundantly clear throughout the movie that Scarlett will never be on an equal playing field as the men in her life, she at the same time routinely weaponizes her class and whiteness over the enslaved workers on her plantation. The capitalist-fueled patriarchy of Gone With the Wind’s American South does not benefit Scarlett, as she is routinely mistreated by men; however, that self-same patriarchy affords her some semblance of safety and power, which manifests in the shape of the enslaved and in the elaborate outfits she wears throughout the movie. Even at the Civil War’s peak and most devastating moments, O’hara is consistently depicted as wearing clothes more intricate (and sometimes more impractical) than those around her, reinforcing the idea that her investment in this system has afforded her leisure and privileges that many others cannot partake in.
In continuing the work of Mies and other similar scholars, such as Jennifer Morgan and Helen Bradley Foster, I hope to situate my work within a Marxist and Black feminist framework or tradition and use their scholarship as aids to examine the material culture or clothing of Gone with the Wind and how race, gender, and class manifest through this aspect.