Amy
Clukey
Plantation Modernity:
Gone with the Wind and
Irish-Southern Culture
In this outmoded spot, on the margins of every dynamic, the tendencies
of our modernity began to be detectable.
—Édouard Glissant, Poetics of Relation (1997)
With the deep hunger of an Irishman who had been a tenant on the lands his
people once owned and hunted, he wanted to see his own acres stretching
green before his eyes. With a ruthless singleness of purpose, he desired his
own house, his own plantation, his own horses, his own slaves.
—Margaret Mitchell, Gone with the Wind (1936)
As it was once said in Ireland of the Fitzgeralds, ‘they became more Irish than
the Irish themselves,’ so our Southern Irish became more Southern than the
Southerners.
—Margaret Mitchell to Michael MacWhite, January 27, 1937
J
ust five years after the publication of Margaret
Mitchell’s Pulitzer Prize–winning novel Gone with the Wind ([1936]
1996), W. J. Cash’s The Mind of the South ([1941] 1991) sought to dispel
feudal myths of Old South plantocratic grandeur with a revisionary
scenario featuring a “stout young Irishman” on the frontier (14). Cash’s
use of an Irish immigrant as a typical antebellum planter indicates how
pervasive Mitchell’s version of Southern history had become. Her
novel suggests that the plantation South has much in common with
Celtic Ireland, but upon closer inspection, the analogies that she draws
between Irish Catholic displacement and white Southern decline prove
contradictory or misleading. Nonetheless, her story of Irish ascension
American Literature, Volume 85, Number 3, September 2013
DOI 10.1215/00029831-2079305 © 2013 by Duke University Press
506 American Literature
has remained compelling for generations of readers and critics: Gone
with the Wind is undoubtedly the most enduring narrative of global
plantation culture, as Scarlett O’Hara’s iconic status and continued
transnational marketability aptly demonstrate.1
The last ten years have seen a reexamination of Mitchell’s depictions
of Irish identity. This Irishness is familiar to the novel’s readers or even
to viewers of David O. Selznick’s Academy Award–winning 1939 film
adaptation. You might recall, for instance, Scarlett’s father’s endearing
brogue, the O’Hara preoccupation with land ownership, and, of course,
the family plantation named after the seat of the high kings of Celtic
Ireland. Critics have examined these Irish signifiers, and a host of others, in the context of Irish immigration to the South, as well as cultural
similarities between the two locales and the diasporic ties that manifest in the novel’s authorized 1991 sequel, Alexandra Ripley’s Scarlett,
and its unauthorized 2001 parody, Alice Randall’s The Wind Done
Gone. 2 While these readings tell us a great deal about how Mitchell
depicts immigration to the region, colonial history shows that the connections between Ireland and the US South go beyond the well-documented transatlantic mobility of the Irish diaspora. As such, a comparative perspective is necessary to fully understand that the novel’s
famous blending of Irish ethnicity and Southern history is part of a
larger transnational phenomenon; although Gone with the Wind seems
to be a defiantly local literary expression, it is in fact a product of the
global socioeconomic and cultural matrix I call plantation modernity.
In what follows, I seek to move past cultural similarities between Ireland and the South in order to establish the Anglo-Irish big house and
the American plantation as contiguous colonial sites—and the AngloIrish big-house novel and American plantation fiction as contiguous
literary traditions. The framework of plantation modernity reveals historical connections and ongoing cultural exchanges among various
locations within the plantation complex. 3 Bounded, yet global, the plantation’s wide-ranging instantiations reiterate startling commonalities
across the circum-Atlantic world. This concept, I argue, helps us move
beyond facile comparisons of Ireland and the US South to see that not
only are these societies formed by the same material and ideological
forces, but the plantation has been an important catalyst of transatlantic modernity. Indeed, this lens reveals the ways American plantation
cultures have been integrally shaped by Irish colonial history—and
vice versa.4
Plantation Modernity 507
Plantation modernity helps us answer the question of why Mitchell’s
particular construction of Irish-Southern culture is so resilient—and
to move beyond a recognition of the role reversal that occurs when the
colonized become the colonizers—by delving further into the novel’s
ideological apparatus. Most crucially, a plantation framework that considers Irish and Southern histories illuminates the novel’s construction of transnational white ethnic identity. The plantation allows us to
think meaningfully about Gone with the Wind’s relationship to fiction
from Ireland and the Caribbean in order to see it as a product of, rather
than a retreat from, transatlantic modernity. From this perspective,
the novel reconstructs the conflicted role played by the Irish in the formation and development of the plantation complex and demonstrates
the intricate (often coercive) intercultural exchanges between the
plantation cultures of Ireland and the United States. In other words,
Southern plantation culture is itself a continuation of Irish plantation
culture, a continuity that Gone with the Wind registers, however ironically or incoherently.
Other Plantations: Comparing Transnational Colonialisms
Plantation modernity, as I construct it, decenters the metropole from
considerations of twentieth-century literature and accounts for supposedly regional literatures like the respective renaissances of Irish,
Caribbean, African American, and Southern letters so often excluded
by metrocolonial models. This framework, rather than simply comparing plantation fiction from a variety of countries (for the purposes of
this article, Ireland, the United States, and Haiti, but potentially many
others), takes the plantation as a cohesive culture across national
boundaries even as it acknowledges differences among its various iterations. Thus, plantation modernity effectively reorders the interdependencies of core-periphery relations and dismantles binaries that
pit the cosmopolitan and global against the parochial and local—as
does twentieth-century plantation fiction itself. A “poetics of relation”
in Édouard Glissant’s (1997) sense, plantation fiction creates a web
of associations between those places elided by metropolitan conceptions of modernity.5 While nineteenth-century literature in the United
States often presents the plantation as uniquely regional, modern fiction from across the Atlantic world challenges this exceptionalist pose.
A comparative approach suggests, rather incontrovertibly, that those
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things that we think of as quintessentially American are constitutively
transnational.
Following Mary Tiffen and Michael Mortimore (1990, 8–10), I define
a plantation as a specialized farming estate associated with monocrop agriculture that requires large-scale production, a sizeable labor
force, a high degree of capitalization, and an essential infrastructure for
export. Further, the plantation’s agricultural products require immediate processing, resist quick changes in production, and use vertically
integrated, technologically advanced facilities. Despite persistent narratives that locate its origins in a dreamy feudal past, Tiffen and Mortimore show that the plantation is a distinctly modern institution that
is built on, rather than existing in isolation from, the economic structures of capitalism. Indeed, it emerged out of the early ventures of what
C. L. R. James (1989, 33) calls “the maritime bourgeoisie” of midsixteenth-century Europe, not from the remnants of an aristocracy
that was shattered by those same socioeconomic shifts. Plantation
ideology derived not from steadfast traditions, but from the demands
of the market and the defense and legitimation of (often human)
property.
The plantation is not a sustainable or static institution as its beneficiaries hoped, but a modern boom-and-bust phenomenon that exhausts
natural resources and thrives on global frontiers. In the course of its
geographic spread, the plantation complex underwent many permutations. What began as merely one model for sugar production within
the internal frontiers of southern Europe itself became the dominant
mode of agricultural production the world over, producing a range of
socioeconomic institutions, political ideologies, and literary traditions.
Hence we can see in the Irish plantation an early stage of what would
become a global institution. Irish plantations were, after all, recognizably large-scale, capitalist enterprises that focused on monocrop agriculture, exported raw materials for commodity production, and relied
on an exploited, if not terrorized, labor force. And, like their North
American counterparts, Irish plantations began as a form of settler
colonialism before becoming increasingly specialized and corporatized in the nineteenth century and militarized in the twentieth century. Through the framework of plantation modernity, the slave ship
finds a correlation in the coffin ships that followed the Irish famine; the
deforestation of Ireland under Cromwell’s invasion parallels the destruction of the Mississippi Delta’s piney woods during western expansion;
anti-Catholic penal laws mirror post-Reconstruction black codes; and
Plantation Modernity 509
Anglo-Irish “rackrenting” bears a striking resemblance to Southern
sharecropping. Finally, there’s the recurring iconography of the big
house. Perhaps the most prominent and adaptable symbol of the global
plantation complex, the big house varies dramatically in design from
one location to another. Yet it serves the same function the world over:
to establish and sustain through architectural symbolism the planter
family’s wealth, prestige, and centrality.6 These phenomena transcend
isomorphic coincidence, reflecting continuous economic and social
structures.
I do not wish to suggest that these individual plantation cultures are
identical, interchangeable, or homogeneous. Rather, Irish and American plantations reflect global patterns refracted through and changed
by local histories, ecologies, and conditions. In an Irish context, landed
estates and big houses take the place of plantations; landlords replace
planters; and the Anglo-Irish Ascendancy echoes the North American
plantocracy and Caribbean sugarocracy. This difference in terminology between Irish and American studies, however, obscures the commonalities among Old World and New World plantations. What is
needed in transnational studies is both the conventional definition of
the plantation as a model of settler colonialism and a new conception
that views big-house culture within a global economic framework. This
sense of shared history has been lost in large part because the American plantocracy’s reliance on African, and later African American,
slave labor imbued New World plantations with a distinctive racial
dynamic that has overshadowed both white indentured servitude and
early Irish-Southern connections. While the fifty or sixty thousand
Irish captives enslaved before 1700 constitute but an infinitesimal fraction of the estimated eleven million people of African descent enslaved
before universal emancipation, the Irish diaspora nonetheless played a
significant role in the formation of the early plantation complex (see
O’Callaghan 2001, 86).7
Reintegrating the Anglo-Irish big house into considerations of plantation culture helps illuminate the ways that Ireland served as a testing
ground for British colonial practices that were later exported abroad.
The British saw their plantation schemes in Ireland and the Americas
as related elements of a singular colonial project, and the plantation
took on explicitly imperial forms when Elizabeth I and later Cromwell
used it to facilitate settler colonialism in Ireland. First introduced in
Counties Laois and Offaly in 1556, the colonial design of the plantation
complex was perfected in a series of “transplantations” in which native
510 American Literature
Irish landowners were forcibly relocated to the infertile lands of Connaught or to sugar plantations in the Caribbean. The loss of the native
Irish aristocracy after the Flight of the Earls in 1607, and later the Wild
Geese in 1691, further entrenched British settlement in Ireland. As
Terence Dooley (2007, 9) observes, by the end of the seventeenth century, “the vast majority of people living in Ireland belonged to landed
estate communities” in some capacity, as laborers, servants, agents,
middlemen, or planter families.
These plantation schemes also formed part of a nascent circumAtlantic agrarian capitalism fueled by colonial imperatives. The British soon exported the structure of the plantation complex to the West
Indies, where it initially relied heavily on the forced labor of Irish
indentured servants and slaves. By Cromwell’s own account, the thirty
Irish men and women who survived the massacre at Drogheda were
immediately sold into slavery on Barbadian sugar plantations (see
O’Callaghan 2001, 24). Steve Garner (2007, 120) estimates “that maybe
30 per cent or so of the white inhabitants of the Anglophone Caribbean
colonies in toto were Irish in the mid-seventeenth century (that is
approximately 20 per cent of the whole population).” Despite this early
history of subjugation, by the nineteenth century a significant number
of Irish immigrants served as members of the slaveholding planter and
managerial classes.
From this perspective, it is less surprising that so many Southern
writers who helped construct or deconstruct plantation mythology
in the United States had Irish or Scots-Irish heritage, including William Gilmore Simms, John Pendleton Kennedy, Edgar Allan Poe, Mark
Twain, Joel Chandler Harris, William Alexander Percy, Flannery
O’Connor, and even, tenuously, William Faulkner. And it becomes less
coincidental than structural that many Irish writers like Dion Boucicault, Oscar Wilde, Edith Somerville and Violet Ross, Seán Ó Faoláin,
and Elizabeth Bowen forged connections across the Atlantic with the
US South, recognizing uncanny similarities between Irish and Southern cultures.8 Similarly, we can begin to understand why Irish writers
like Patrick Kavanagh, Kate O’Brien, Brian Moore, Patrick McCabe,
Roddy Doyle, Ciaran Carson, and Derek Mahon, among others, have
alluded to Gone with the Wind and its film adaptation in their work.9
The Irish had their own version of plantation fiction in nineteenthcentury big-house novels that centered on the social foibles and marriage plots of the Ascendancy class. Despite the well-documented
global itinerancy of the Irish, the genre has been read as local and paro-
Plantation Modernity 511
chial; however, it forms an important and largely unrecognized connection between Irish and American studies.10 While the generic conventions of plantation fiction have not yet been applied to Irish contexts,
the isolationist assumptions that usually attend considerations of bighouse fiction must be displaced, since the category fails to recognize
that the structures undergirding the big house developed out of a
larger transatlantic and socioeconomic phenomenon. Placing the big
house novel within the context of circum-Atlantic literature reveals
that, like all plantation fiction, it mediates the global forces of capitalism, imperialism, and modernization. Although Irish and Southern
authors undoubtedly responded to specific, local events in drafting bighouse and plantation novels, the two genres have parallel genealogies.
Formed from the same socioeconomic origins and corresponding
ideological impulses, these novels participate in what W. J. McCormack (1992, 50), in regards to Anglo-Irish culture, characterizes as
“retrospective naming”—an attempt to consolidate, resuscitate, or at
least document plantation culture as it seems to be eclipsed by other
economic modes. The terms Ascendancy and big house did not come
into common usage in Ireland until 1792, as McCormack shows. This
timing indicates a “high degree of nervousness—Ascendancy arises at
the moment of energetic plans for Catholic Emancipation, and the Big
House is scarcely large in any objective measure of things” (49–50).
Although plantation fiction’s popularity in the United States began
before the Civil War, it increased exponentially in the years that followed it. American writers helped to promulgate Lost Cause rhetoric
mourning the defeat of the Confederacy and to popularize Old South
imagery romanticizing the lifestyle of the antebellum elite just as plantation production underwent post-Emancipation transformations, leading C. Vann Woodward (1971, 154–55) to declare, “One of the most
significant inventions of the New South was the Old South—a new idea
in the [eighteen] eighties, and a legend of incalculable potentialities.”
It is precisely these discourses of retrospective naming—Irish and
Southern—that shape Mitchell’s novel.
Strange Bedfellows and Peculiar Institutions:
Irish Catholics in the Anglophone South
Mitchell synthesizes transatlantic racial discourses by fusing images
of the stage Irishman with Lost Cause nostalgia for the slaveholding
era. These seemingly unrelated discourses prove so compatible in the
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novel because they both emerge from cross-oceanic colonialism, specifically the literatures, iconographies, and ideologies generated by
the plantation in Europe and the Americas. Thus, Gone with the Wind
registers the ways nineteenth-century Southern history extends the
Ulster and Munster plantations of seventeenth-century Ireland and
disrupts the familiar dynamics of Irish-British antagonism in order to
portray Irish assimilation into the American planter elite. Although
Mitchell clearly relies on Southern stereotypes from nineteenthcentury romance, she also draws on demeaning stereotypes of Irish
culture drawn from British imperial discourses—discourses that
emerged out of British plantation schemes in Ireland and gained currency in nineteenth-century Europe and North America. In so doing,
she combines sentimental images of drunken Irishness with a planter
mythology that posits the South as a gracious but doomed culture
ground under the heels of industrial capitalism.
This synthesis of transatlantic colonial discourses is most evident in
the figure of Scarlett’s father, Gerald O’Hara. Born in County Meath
soon after the Act of Union that officially absorbed Ireland into the
United Kingdom, Gerald leaves Ireland in 1822 with a price on his
head after he kills a landlord’s agent who mockingly whistles “The
Boyne Water.” This Protestant folksong celebrates the victory of William of Orange in the Battle of the Boyne—the very battle in which the
O’Haras lost their land. The family is already known for “suspected
activities against the government” (Mitchell 1996, 60), but Gerald’s
crime is not so much an act of calculated political rebellion as a case of
heated temper. Standing 5'4'' tall, Gerald has a diminutive stature that
makes him not only endearingly comic, but also “hardy” (61). Uneducated but literate, soft-hearted but hotheaded, with a predilection for
drink and ballads, Gerald is the stereotypical Irishman of popular
nineteenth-century drama.
These features make Gerald ideally suited for life as a Southern
planter. His success is further enabled by his easy adoption of extant
planter socioeconomic principles. Replicating plantocratic institutions,
Gerald successfully assimilates into the predominantly Protestant
Anglophone elite: “With the whole-heartedness that was his nature, he
adopted its ideas and customs, as he understood them, for his own—
poker and horse racing, red-hot politics and the code duello, States’
Rights and damnation to all Yankees, slavery and King Cotton, contempt for white trash and exaggerated courtesy to women” (Mitchell
Plantation Modernity 513
1996, 62). As Don Doyle (2000, 58, 80, 99) argues, settlers on the inland
frontier tended to come from established East-Coast planter families
and assiduously recreated plantation institutions within new settings. A
foreigner by birth, Gerald participates in this kind of settlement when
he arrives in the United States in the early nineteenth century.
Southern values, Mitchell indicates, are Irish values. In both Ireland
and the South, “a lack of the niceties of classical education carried no
shame, provided a man was smart in the things that mattered. And raising good cotton, riding well, and shooting straight, dancing lightly,
squiring the ladies with elegance and carrying one’s liquor like a gentleman were the things that mattered” (1996, 26). Gerald eventually marries into the coastal Francophone gentry and wins the approval of even
the most conservative guardian of elite Southern values and tradition,
his neighbor Mrs. Wilkes. The compatibility of Irish culture with Southern culture allows Gerald to hew closely to planter norms and singlemindedly navigate the divide between the entrenched coastal aristocracy and the coarser inland plantocracy. The novel indicates that,
because his estate “Tara” simultaneously replicates Celtic holy ground
and the Southern plantation complex, the Irish American planter can
reclaim his ancestral rights on the northwest Georgia frontier. In the
process, he colonizes lands seized from Native Americans, just as his
own family’s lands were seized and colonized by Protestant settlers.
One of the most obvious ways that Gerald upholds planter hegemony
is in his role as a slave owner. As members of the lower classes, Irish
Southerners rarely owned slaves. However, they were just as likely
to support slavery as other whites in a region where both Catholic
and Protestant Irish religious leaders usually buoyed the monied elite.
Many Irish Southerners even saw abolitionism as an anti-Catholic
movement associated with British culture, Protestantism, and imperialism (see Quinlan 2004, 50).11 Given this context, and the tendency of
Irish Southerners like Gerald to assimilate to local political and social
mores, it is not surprising that Gone with the Wind continues the racist
portrayals of black slaves established in such plantation romances as
Victor Hugo’s Bug-Jargal ([1826] 2004) and Thomas Dixon’s The Clansman ([1905] 1970).12 Mitchell’s romanticized depictions of infantile
slaves and fatherly slave owners are typical of planter nostalgia. In this
happy, hierarchical plantation household, slaves are not only members of the family, but are frequently indulged and even dominant.
Mitchell gives no indication that Gerald has any ethical misgivings
514 American Literature
about slavery. To the contrary, his humble Irish background makes
him more ambitious; he craves the status bestowed by slave ownership. At the same time, Mitchell’s paternalistic narrative suggests that
if black Southerners can be mastered by a runty Irish immigrant, then
they are essentially incapable of taking care of themselves. In short, by
recuperating sentimental stereotypes of Irish Catholics, the very stereotypes generated by British imperial discourses, Mitchell bolsters
apologist accounts of American slavery and plantation history.
Gone with the Wind illustrates that within the colonial context of the
Americas, Irish-British enmity assumed peculiar forms. Planter elites
from both Ireland and the US South indulged in Anglophilia and
desired affiliation with English aristocracy.13 Impoverished Gerald
comes to the United States carrying only his knowledge of how the
Irish have been oppressed by British colonialism, but he quickly assimilates to the Southern planter class that seeks to emulate English aristocracy. Dennis Clark (1986, 101) notes that the Irish in the antebellum
South were a defensive minority group among a predominately Protestant and anti-Catholic Anglophone population that imagined affinities
with “the baronial lifestyle” of English aristocrats, “particularly in
Georgia, the Carolinas, and Virginia where both genealogy and education emphasized the cultural connection to England. From England
the stereotypes, prejudices, and anti-Irish attitudes deriving from the
ancient English-Irish conflict passed to much of the Southern leadership.” Historically, however, Southern claims to aristocratic lineage
were largely unfounded. Although planters often professed descent
from royalists expelled from England during the Interregnum, Cash
(1991, 3) dryly notes, “Actual Cavaliers or even near-Cavaliers were
rare among Southern settlers.” Nevertheless, in his desire to become
not only a planter but also a Southerner, Gerald imitates Southern
planters who imitate English aristocrats. This mimicry undermines
his position as a defiant victim of English land confiscations but solidifies his standing with the Anglo-American elite. In Mitchell’s novel,
Southern agrarian capitalism is opposed to Northern industrial capitalism, but it remains compatible with—and depends on—English
industrial capitalism.
Gerald’s stereotypical Irish avarice makes him an ideal agent of
Anglophone colonialism. His role as a slave owner—and Mitchell’s
paternalistic portrayal of slaves—is especially ironic given that the
Irish long served as a transient working class in Britain, where they
Plantation Modernity 515
were targets of racial essentialism. As David Lloyd (2009, 14–15)
writes, in the nineteenth century the British saw the Irish and black
West Indians as associated racialized problems requiring state management. Furthermore, “The Irish functioned as non-white in relation
to Britain (and continue to do so in uneven ways) not simply because
they posed analogous problems for the rule of the state to those posed
by Jamaican Blacks, once they were emancipated. Both were regarded
as culturally recalcitrant to capital and at times politically antagonistic
in organized ways.” Although in the United Kingdom the Irish were
seen as not white enough, in the Caribbean they served as a bulwark
for the white Anglophone elite against the black masses. The whiteness of the Irish, then, fluctuated according to national and regional
conditions, but was always calibrated in relation to blackness.
Meanwhile, in the United States, the 1830s and 1840s—the precise
years of Gerald’s backstory—were crucial for evolving concepts of
Irish whiteness, as Noel Ignatiev (2008) demonstrates in his study
How the Irish Became White. Many antebellum Americans continued to
“consign the Irish, if not to the black race, then to an intermediate race
located socially between black and white” (89). Even so, Irish Americans became “Swiss guards” upholding the slave system (187). After
Emancipation, Irish Americans often competed with newly freed African Americans for employment and housing, leading to enduring
antagonisms. At the same time, Garner (2007, 126) argues that “the
involvement of Irish immigrants in racializing American projects such
as anti-Chinese Immigration campaigns in California, army campaigns against Native Americans, local ethnic (and most importantly,
occupational) cleansing aimed at removing free Blacks from work and
living space in urban centres—let alone support for the pro-slavery
Democrats in the 1860s and after—legitimized their claim to Americanness.” Gone with the Wind indicates that the plantation could easily
be added to this list, illustrating as it does the desirability of engaging
in racializing projects like slave ownership and Jim Crow segregation
for Irish immigrants eager to legitimize their claims to white Southern
identity and its associated privileges.
The novel parallels the Southern plantocracy’s experience of defeat
during the Civil War with the injustices inflicted upon Irish Catholics
by Anglo-Irish landlords. Mitchell equates Southern plantocracy
with the Irish peasantry by presenting the O’Haras as Celtic nobility
displaced by British plantation schemes. The implicit alignment of
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the white Southern elite with impoverished Irish peasants, as victims
of an ineluctable imperial-capitalist modernity, is perhaps most evident in a scene in which Scarlett compares the siege of Atlanta to the
massacre at Drogheda and declares that William Tecumseh Sherman is worse than Oliver Cromwell (a statement she makes to Rhett
Butler, a racially fluctuating character also implicitly aligned with
Irish plantation culture: in this case, the “Old English” Butlers, the
Dukes of Ormonde) (Mitchell 1996, 299–300). Victimized once by the
Anglo-Irish and then by the Yankees, Mitchell’s Irish-Southern plantocracy finds its history repeated as it finds itself again at the mercy of
an invading army that seeks to steal its lands. If the Irish are victims of
an implacable colonizing modernity, Mitchell suggests, so too are white
Southerners. Equating Celtic nobility with Southern plantocracy, the
novel coopts Irish “authenticity” and colonial grievances in order to
naturalize the slave-owning elite.
Historically and culturally, Southern planters more closely resembled Ireland’s colonizer class, the Anglo-Irish Ascendancy, than they
did the Irish Catholic peasant class that was usually denied entry to
elite social circles in both nations. Tara functions economically and
socially like an Ascendancy estate. Known for being less refined than
the English aristocracy they emulated, Anglo-Irish and Southern colonial elites displaced native landowners to establish large scale agricultural estates on the frontiers of Europe and North America, and later
found themselves at odds with—and developing distinct cultural identities from—the metropolitan centers with which they were united.
Furthermore, both groups saw their supremacy challenged in the
nineteenth century as the exploited laboring classes they relied on
were legally emancipated, yet they continued to benefit politically and
economically from the establishment of ethnic or racial divides that
would eventually be challenged by civil rights movements in the midtwentieth century.
As my discussion demonstrates, comparisons between Georgia
planters and Celtic nobility are only possible because Gone with the
Wind draws false analogies between Southern and Irish culture. Mitchell herself was famously descended from Irish immigrants to the
South—the Fitzgeralds and the Stephenses. Although she drew on
her Irish heritage for inspiration, she departed from family history in
her characterization of Gerald in order to be more “realistic” (Quinlan
2004, 124). This choice is ironic because historically Gerald’s ascension into the plantocratic ranks is by no means typical of Irish experi-
Plantation Modernity 517
ences in the South. Clark (1986, 99) shows that, before the Civil War,
Irish immigrants in the South—like their counterparts in England—
formed a significant underclass within the region, as indentured servants, runaways, and later as transient urban workers building essential
infrastructure. In the early nineteenth century, Irish laborers largely
moved through the South, often settling in insular Catholic communities like New Orleans, Charleston, and Savannah (97). Only occasionally did they rise into the upper echelons of Southern society.
Mitchell’s revisionist impetus also affects her handling of Southern
history in general. Her letters show that she sought to revise myths of
white-columned big houses and aristocratic cavaliers by assiduously
researching nineteenth-century history while writing the novel. As
her biographer Darden Asbury Pyron (1992, 311) comments, “Margaret Mitchell herself conceived of her history as radical, revisionary,
and rebellious.” However, she relied on accounts of Southern history
in vogue in the 1930s that were themselves influenced by plantation
ideologies. From these accounts, Mitchell took a paternalistic view
of slavery and rued the “scourge of Reconstruction” (1996, 491). That
she found these historical narratives more convincing than the experiences of her own family indicates the pervasiveness of imperial discourses originating from the plantation in the early twentieth century.
These discourses are not simply derived from American history, but
amalgamated from across the Atlantic world. Consequently, Gerald’s
Irishness, however clichéd, reflects the ways the Ulster and Munster
plantations served as preconditions for and catalysts of Irish involvement in New World colonialism. If Ireland was a testing ground for
the Anglophone plantation that prepared British colonialism to be
exported to the Americas, the novel suggests that it also prepared the
Irish to be colonizers. Consequently, Gone with the Wind is not only an
enduring articulation of the American dream, it is also an expression
of a uniquely Irish dream of overcoming the injustices of British colonial hierarchies—a dream that depends on those same hierarchies in
New World contexts.
Structuring Modernity:
Whiteness in the Postslavery South and Haiti
Gone with the Wind takes a backward glance at the plantation past, a
retrospection symptomatic of a plantation modernity that also produces its unique blending of Irish Southern culture. The novel also
518 American Literature
mirrors the vast changes in plantation production that occurred after
Emancipation, including the shift from traditional family-owned plantations to corporate ventures and state ownership and the simultaneous onset of British decolonization and American expansionism. While
the plantation played a formative role in the initial period of capitalistimperial expansion that followed the discovery of the New World, the
late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries mark the plantation’s
involvement in new imperial ventures led by multinational corporations and the US military. Although Gone with the Wind seems to reject
these changes in its portrayal of a rapacious Northern industrialism, it
reflects social changes caused by postslavery modernization throughout the plantation complex.
This is particularly true in regard to race and ethnicity. Mitchell
completed most of the novel in 1929, then undertook extensive revisions after it was accepted in 1935 (see Welky 2008). Consequently, the
novel is, in many ways, a product of the 1920s. Mitchell’s construction
of Irish identity would have been untenable prior to this period, when
the “whiteness” of Irish immigrants remained in question. The plantation played a central role in forging American conceptions of whiteness
during the modern era, which allowed for Mitchell’s depictions of Irish
assimilation. Grace Elizabeth Hale (2000) rejects the idea that plantation ideologies and imagery are transparent relics of the antebellum
past. Rather, she argues that these ideologies and iconographies were
actually created, circulated, and popularized in the modern era to integrate both Southern and Northern markets for participation in a developing consumer culture. Old South plantation imagery brought the
divided nation together, even as it underscored the region’s colonial
difference and helped sustain racial apartheid.
Not only does Mitchell draw on this pervasive imagery, which depicts
people of African descent as subhuman natural laborers, but these
same discourses allowed Irish Americans to “become” more white.
For instance, the murder of thirteen-year-old pencil factory worker
Mary Phagan in Atlanta in 1913 is notable, in part, because a workingclass (Catholic) Irish American girl became a symbol of white (Protestant) Southern womanhood, if only in death. Not coincidently, her murder contributed to the reemergence of the Ku Klux Klan in Georgia.14
Phagan’s newfound whiteness helped justify the reestablishment of
racial terrorism in Atlanta, just as Gerald’s whiteness is intimately
linked to Jim Crow segregation. As white Southerners of all back-
Plantation Modernity 519
grounds closed ranks against racial uplift in the early twentieth century, Mitchell’s portrait of a lovable blustery Irish planter could be
accepted as realistic and even distinctly American.
No doubt recent Irish history—the establishment of the Free State
(1922–1937) and concurrent institutionalization of conservative Catholic values—contributed to this newly sanitized image of Irish immigration as well. By the 1930s, the Irish had partially beaten back the tide
of British imperialism; Gone with the Wind’s transplantation of Irish
rebellion to Southern contexts suggests that if they could effectively
repel a powerful invading army against seemingly insurmountable
odds, so too could the South fight off Northern industrialism and maintain racial apartheid. Gerald’s story celebrates the opportunities available to enterprising citizens within the United States even as the nation
experienced unprecedented economic decline. In this fictional meritocracy, white men from all backgrounds could ascend to the ruling
class through perseverance and hard work as the plantation enables
the liberatory potentials of modern democracy—even for newly
“white” Irishmen.
As I have argued, Gerald enthusiastically embraces white supremacy
and slave ownership, but his role as a planter remains deeply vexed.
After all, in the United Kingdom landed estates are inherited through
primogeniture, and Gerald’s feisty ascendance from peasant to pseudoaristocracy undermines the very concepts of feudalism and gentry.
Given the historical liberties that Mitchell takes, why has this tale of
Irish Southern ascendancy remained so compelling? The answer lies,
I think, in the fundamental socioeconomic continuities between Ireland and plantation America (both narrowly and broadly conceived).
Michael Bibler (2009, 6) argues that plantation households share a
common hierarchical structure that he terms the meta-plantation: a
“vertical system of paternalistic and patriarchal hierarchies that constitutes the core social structure of every individual plantation—whether
it be slave or tenant, antebellum or modern.” Similarly, Glissant (1997,
65) observes that plantations are sites “in which social hierarchy corresponds in maniacal, minute detail to mercilessly maintained racial
hierarchy.” The hierarchical structure of particular households, he
continues, leads to distinctively hierarchical plantation societies within
the West Indies: “The Plantation system spread, following the same
structural principles, throughout the Southern United States, the
Caribbean islands, and the Caribbean coast of Latin America, and the
520 American Literature
northeastern portion of Brazil. It extended throughout the countries
(including those in the Indian Ocean), constituting what Patrick Camoiseau and Raphaël Confiant call the territory of créolité” (63). Not only is
each individual estate underpinned by the same essential socioeconomic infrastructure, but each plantation culture is as well.
Although Bibler’s and Glissant’s arguments concern the US South
and the West Indies respectively, their theoretical insights hold true
throughout the Atlantic world (and beyond). In addition to being part
of a global socioeconomic matrix, the fractal-like structure of the plantation continually reproduces itself on the level of individual households, communities, and societies. Olaudah Equiano (2003, 111) makes
a comparable observation in his 1789 Interesting Narrative remarking
on the brutalities of slavery: “Nor was such usage as this confined to
particular places or individuals; for, in all the different islands in which
I have been (and I have visited no less than fifteen) the treatment of the
slaves was nearly the same; so nearly indeed, that the history of an
island, or even a plantation, with few exceptions as I have mentioned,
might serve a history of the whole.”
The replication of the plantation in the West Indies that Equiano
remarks on recalls Benitez-Rojo’s “repeating island” (1997): indeed, the
plantation is central to his theories of Caribbean cultural production.
However, the “repeating island” of West Indian culture is part of the
global phenomenon of the plantation complex. From my perspective,
twentieth-century literature evinces a repeating plantation that generates socioeconomic and cultural repetition on a far larger scale, which
includes but also exceeds the Antilles to all six inhabited continents.
Such a reading of plantation culture centers previously peripheralized
West Indian and Southern literatures: far from being marginal, the circum-Caribbean exemplifies the structural and cultural replication
endemic to plantation cultures from the Canary Islands to Ireland,
Jamaica, Hawaii, and Malaysia.
This replication helps explain the uncanny homologies between
US Southern and Indian plantations that Mark Twain observed while
traveling in southern Asia in 1896. Writing to a friend in the United
States, he remarked:
“For six hours now . . . it has been impossible to realize this is India
and the Hoogli (river). No, every few miles we see a great white columned European house standing in front of the vast levels, with a
Plantation Modernity 521
forest away back—La. Planter? And the thatched groups of native
houses have been turned themselves into the negro quarters, familiar to me near forty years ago—and so for six hours this has been
the sugar coast of the Mississippi.” (quoted in Cooper 2002, 255)
As long as the plantation retains a base of cheap exploited labor, it
continues to function economically and socially regardless of whether
that labor is African or Irish (or Indian, or Chinese, and so on), relatively black or relatively white. Thus in Gone with the Wind Irish Catholic immigrants in Georgia can occupy roles that are normally reserved
for the Anglo-Irish Ascendancy in Ireland, and African American
slaves in the South, in turn, can occupy positions reserved for peasants
within Europe’s internal peripheries. The comparative lens of plantation modernity shows that Mitchell’s Irish American Dream functions
so well in the novel because the structures of the plantation are uniform everywhere.
The homologies underpinning transatlantic plantation cultures also
account for Scarlett’s less-commented-upon Francophone heritage. Her
maternal great-grandfather, identified only as “Prudhomme,” rebuilt his
plantation empire in Savannah after fleeing machete-wielding slave
insurrectionists during the Haitian revolution. In the wake of Sherman’s
march to the sea, Scarlett draws strength from her family’s history of
surviving moments of historical crisis:
Of a sudden, the oft-told family tales to which she had listened since
babyhood, listened half-bored, impatient and but partly comprehending, were crystal clear. Gerald, penniless, had raised Tara; Ellen had
risen above some mysterious sorrow; Grandfather Robillard, surviving the wreck of Napoléon’s throne, had founded his fortunes anew
on the fertile Georgia coast; Great-grandfather Prudhomme had
carved a small kingdom out of the dark jungles of Haiti, lost it and
lived to see his name honored in Savannah. There were the Scarletts
who had fought with the Irish Volunteers for a free Ireland and been
hanged for their pains and the O’Haras who died at the Boyne, battling to the end for what was theirs.15 (Mitchell 1996, 400)
Scarlett’s musings indicate that she is not only aware of this complex
plantation history, but also that she situates herself within plantation
modernity. If Gerald could build a fortune on the frontier after escaping Ireland and Prudhomme could prevail on the coast after losing
522 American Literature
his West Indian estate, then she too will triumph during Reconstruction. In this, she alludes to her family’s involvement in three instantiations of the transatlantic plantation at moments of crisis. To return
to my earlier formulation, Gerald marries a Franco-Southern heiress
in order to imitate (Anglophone and Creole) Southern planters—and,
inadvertently, Anglo-Irish landlords—who in turn imitate European
aristocrats. Mitchell sketches the socioeconomic matrix that links
these elites, who occupy the same positions within their respective
plantation societies.
If Mitchell’s treatment of Irish-Southern identity registers contemporary events in Ireland and the South, so too does her treatment of
Scarlett’s Creole ancestors register contemporary events in the Caribbean, particularly the United States occupation of Haiti that lasted
from 1915 to 1934. Lester Langley (2001, 219) explains that for many
Americans in the 1930s, the occupation confirmed “widespread beliefs
that the Caribbean was a disorderly (and unclean) place that needed
shaping up.” J. Michael Dash (1997, 27) notes that, at the same time,
“the Occupation [seemed] to present the opportunity for reliving the
paternalist myth of the Southern plantation.” Here, we can see how
shared histories of plantation colonialism in the US South and the
Caribbean became a pretext for neoplantation imperialism in the twentieth century. American efforts to adapt the West Indian plantation
would help “civilize” and control unruly black subjects through the
importation of Southern-style white supremacy.16 Less a character
than an emblem, Prudhomme, like Gerald, reflects ongoing continuities and exchanges among plantation cultures. He—along with the
United States military—ultimately leaves Haiti in failure, but his ability to rebuild and prosper in another locale suggests that American
imperial efforts may eventually find success elsewhere.
In Mitchell’s construction, the South struggles like an Irishman
against metropolitan invasion and, more subtly, the United States perseveres like a Creole slave owner who prospers by finally subordinating black subjects. This regional-national-transnational configuration
reflects both the plantation’s historical role in forming transatlantic
modernity and its continuing centrality to the American imaginary in
the twentieth century. As Jeremy Wells (2011, 4) argues: “The plantation had become, in a word, national by the end of the [nineteenth] century. It provided numerous writers new ways of imagining the nation’s
Plantation Modernity 523
founding and development; and, for an institution whose allure was
connected to its supposed pastness—its symbolizing what would later
famously be called ‘a civilization gone with the wind’—it figured conspicuously in visions of the nation’s future, too.” In particular, the plantation’s supposed success in “overcoming the problem of multiraciality” (5) provided a model for American imperialism in the Caribbean
and the Pacific. Just as Ireland served as a testing ground for British
colonialism in North America, the South could serve as a testing
ground for American imperialism in the Caribbean.
Many 1930s romances, including examples as politically diverse as
Stark Young’s conservative So Red the Rose ([1934] 1992) and Arna
Bontemps’s revisionist Drums at Dusk ([1939] 2009), present the
achievements and failures of the plantation system at a critical juncture before World War II when United States imperial efforts had met
with mixed success, but Mitchell’s novel is unique insofar as it links
the Southern imperial model to its Irish antecedent. As they navigate
the transnational eddies of plantation America, the O’Haras play a crucial role in supposedly “overcoming the problem of multiraciality.”
Scarlett O’Hara, the most iconic figure of the global plantation complex, is not only the daughter of an Irish rebel; she is the product of
plantation modernity—historically, genealogically, economically, and
socially—personifying three phases of the plantation in geographically distinct sites—in Ireland, the Caribbean, and the United States—
and foreshadowing the next.
Lost Causes
Because the plantation has adapted at every stage of capitalist
development—mercantile, industrial, finance, late—plantation modernity provides a productive framework not only for the study of literatures prior to Emancipation, but of texts published well after the plantation’s ostensible demise. Gone with the Wind allows us to see that the
Southern plantation is part of a contiguous transnational phenomenon
that is capacious enough to support a variety of cultural narratives. For
Mitchell, Southern and Irish identities serve as mutually reinforcing
antediluvian fantasies in the context of early twentieth-century racial
strife. She imagines the admission of the Irish to the upper echelons
of imperial hierarchies predicated on African and African American
524 American Literature
slavery within New World contexts, even though these same hierarchies within Old World contexts catalyzed Irish emigration in the first
place. As such, she maps accounts of Irish dominance and ascendancy
over the typical plots of plantation romance. Because it has always
been a site of intercultural contact, the plantation can be the setting in
which these racial constructions and anxieties play out. Although the
film adaptation overrides many of the ethnic complexities of the novel
itself, for example expunging Scarlett’s Francophone heritage, the
novel exemplifies the painful ironies and incoherencies of plantation
production and ideology in the modern era. Most significant, Gone
with the Wind depicts the plantation as a multipronged institution with
global reach—one that produces people like Gerald and Scarlett who
embody its contradictory ideologies by blithely inflicting their own victimization on others, and in the process, continually reproduce plantation modernity on new frontiers.
University of Louisville
Notes
The research for this essay was assisted by an ACLS New Faculty Fellows
award, with the support of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. I would like to
thank Janet Lyon, Susan Ryan, Margaret Mills Harper, and Helen Taylor for
generously commenting on previous drafts.
1 Geraldine Higgins (2011, 31) remarks that “it is impossible to read anything about Gone with the Wind without being bombarded by statistics—
it sold over 1 million copies in its first year of publication, has been translated into twenty-five languages, and 90 percent of Americans claim to
have seen the movie.” Even today, Scribner’s sells 75,000 copies of the
novel per year (Auchmutey 2011, 1). For more on the novel’s continuing
appeal, see Taylor 1989.
2 Scholarship exploring Irish culture in Gone with the Wind includes
O’Connell 1996, Cantrell 1992, McGraw 2000, Quinlan 2004, Cardon
2007, Taylor 2001, and Higgins 2011.
3 Although my findings are compatible with Monique Allewaert’s (2008)
concept of the American plantation zone, I prefer Phillip Curtin’s (1998)
term plantation complex. Curtin’s discussion of the plantation is limited
to the Mediterranean; islands off the western coasts of Portugal, Spain,
and Africa; and the New World. My work expands Curtin’s term beyond
the Atlantic in order to indicate the interrelatedness of plantation cultures on a global scale, and my discussion assumes that plantation
Plantation Modernity 525
4
5
6
7
8
zones cover a vast swath of the earth: often equatorial, tropical, and cultivated by slave labor, but not always.
Recent scholarship has explored Irish experiences in previously overlooked sites throughout the Atlantic world, but this work rarely ventures
into the US South. For instance, O’Neill and Lloyd 2009, Malouf 2009, and
McGarrity 2008 adopt transatlantic perspectives to place Irish literature
in dialogue with African American and Caribbean cultures. Just as Irish
studies has largely neglected diasporic experiences in the US South,
Southern literary studies tends to overlook the region’s connections to
Ireland, with the notable exceptions of Quinlan 2004, Crowell 2007, and
Giemza 2011 and 2012.
Recent scholarship on plantation fiction includes Handley 2000,
Costello 2007, Loichot 2007, Adams 2007, Bibler 2009, Russ 2009, Greeson 2010, and Wells 2011.
As Terence Dooley (2007, 9) notes, in Ireland ostentatious big houses
were meant “to announce the economic and social strength of their owners in their localities and as a class as a whole, and to inspire awe in social
equals and possibly encourage deference in the lower classes.”
I draw this estimate from O’Callaghan 2001. However, due to the paucity
of records pertaining to Irish slavery in the sixteenth and seventeenth
centuries, it’s impossible to know just how many people were affected by
it. Akenson 1997 focuses on the Irish as slave owners in the West Indies.
While there is ample critical and historical evidence that Irish Catholics acted in oppressive ways toward other racialized groups, the Irish-asvictims narrative remains entrenched. David Lloyd (2009, 3) notes that
critics often give way to the “weak ethical desire that the Irish, themselves a historically oppressed and colonized people, should have identified with another people similarly located—, or indeed, should have
shown solidarity with oppressed people in general.” Steve Garner (2007,
119) likewise targets “the error of consigning the Irish to an undifferentiated subaltern slot in the New World hierarchy.”
Ó’Faoláin (1957, 75) writes, “There is the same passionate provincialism; the same local patriotism; the same Southern nationalism—those
long explicit speeches of Gavin Stevens in Intruder in the Dust might,
mutatis mutandis, be uttered by a Southern Irishman—the same feeling that whatever happened in Ballydehob or in Jefferson has never
happened anywhere else before, and is more important than anything
that happened in any period of history in any part of the cosmos; there
is the same vanity of an old race; the same gnawing sense of old defeat;
the same capacity for intense hatred; a good deal of the same harsh
folk humor; the same acidity; the same oscillation between unbounded
self-confidence and total despair; the same escape through sport and
drink.”
526 American Literature
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
I am referring to Kavanagh’s journalism and his poem “Gone with the
Wind” (1964, 62), O’Brien 1999, Moore 2010, Carson 1989, McCabe 1992,
Mahon 2008, and Doyle 2012. I would like to thank Damien Keane for
alerting me to the references to Gone with the Wind in O’Brien’s and Carson’s work.
Ellen Crowell (2007) insightfully compares the big-house novel to plantation novels. My work differs from hers insofar as I argue that the bighouse novel is in fact an unrecognized form of plantation fiction. By placing more emphasis on the big house’s plantation origins, we can see that
not only does Irish plantation fiction include more than the big-house
novel, but plantation fiction as a genre includes more than Southern and
Caribbean fiction as well. While many Irish authors engage with the
genre, criticism on the literature of the big house remains limited. See
Genet 1991, Kreilkamp 1998, Kelsall 2003, and Rauchbauer 1992.
For a full discussion of Irish and Irish American attitudes towards slavery, see Quinlan 2004 (46–75), Ignatiev 2008, Rodgers 2009, and Murphy 2010.
In fact, Dixon wrote Mitchell in 1936 to praise her novel, to which she
replied “I was practically raised on your books, and love them very much”
(Mitchell 1976, 52).
For more on British-Southern relations in the nineteenth century, see Tamarkin 2008 and Foreman 2010. See Taylor 2001 for an examination of British interest in Southern culture in the twentieth century. Elsewhere, she
comments in regard to contemporary Britain: “The affection felt by southerners for Europeans, especially the British, is well reciprocated. The
closeness of ties is manifested in genealogical, cultural, and political terms,
not to mention a shared heritage and guilt about the slave trade and slavery
itself. The South appears in British culture through a number of stereotypes; there is the simple South of comical accents and mountain people or
small-town folk asleep on front porches; the romantic antebellum South of
courtly beaux and beauteous belles; and, most familiar in recent years, the
violent or gothic South of evil stirrings behind the magnolia in moonlight,
usually some terrible racial or sexual sin or secret” (1989, 21).
Phagan’s death was followed by a sensationalistic trial wherein a Jewish
man from the North, Leo Frank, was wrongfully convicted of her murder.
Frank was lynched by a group of prominent citizens who called themselves
“The Knights of Mary Phagan.” The Leo Frank case provides another
example of the ways Irish whiteness was situated in relation to other racialized ethnic groups in the early twentieth century, particularly African
Americans and Jewish Americans, with unpredictable results. For more on
the complex racial dynamics of the trial and lynching, see Dinnerstein 2008.
The surname “Robillard” belonged to a prominent nineteenth-century
planter family in Louisiana. Before that, a planter family named Robillard lived in San Domingue until the Haitian Revolution (see Dubois
Plantation Modernity 527
2004, 96). Ellen O’Hara’s genealogy doubly links her daughters to Haitian plantation culture, through Scarlett’s grandfather Robillard and
her great-grandfather Prudhomme.
16 Of course, the urge to expand the Southern plantation into the Caribbean was nothing new. As Matthew Pratt Guterl (2007, 99) reminds us,
nineteenth-century Southerners set their sights upon the West Indies
as part of an expanding American plantation empire: “The sense of
‘Southern exceptionalism’ coexisted, quite easily and naturally, with a
sense that the planter class shared a common fate with slaveholders
elsewhere in the hemisphere.”
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