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

Just 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

Amy Clukey

Plantation Modernity: Gone with the Wind and Irish-Southern Culture

American Literature, Volume 85, Number 3, September 2013DOI 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 oth-ers, in the context of Irish immigration to the South, as well as cultural similarities between the two locales and the diasporic ties that mani-fest 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 con-nections between Ireland and the US South go beyond the well-docu-mented transatlantic mobility of the Irish diaspora. As such, a compar-ative 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 Ire-land and the South in order to establish the Anglo-Irish big house and the American plantation as contiguous colonial sites—and the Anglo-Irish big-house novel and American plantation fiction as contiguous literary traditions. The framework of plantation modernity reveals his-torical connections and ongoing cultural exchanges among various locations within the plantation complex.3 Bounded, yet global, the plan-tation’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 transatlan-tic 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 con-siders Irish and Southern histories illuminates the novel’s construc-tion 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 for-mation 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 ironi-cally 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 sup-posedly 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 com-paring 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 iter-ations. Thus, plantation modernity effectively reorders the interde-pendencies 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 concep-tions of modernity.5 While nineteenth-century literature in the United States often presents the plantation as uniquely regional, modern fic-tion from across the Atlantic world challenges this exceptionalist pose. A comparative approach suggests, rather incontrovertibly, that those


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 mono-crop 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 imme-diate processing, resist quick changes in production, and use vertically integrated, technologically advanced facilities. Despite persistent nar-ratives that locate its origins in a dreamy feudal past, Tiffen and Mor-timore show that the plantation is a distinctly modern institution that is built on, rather than existing in isolation from, the economic struc-tures of capitalism. Indeed, it emerged out of the early ventures of what C. L. R. James (1989, 33) calls “the maritime bourgeoisie” of mid-sixteenth-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 benefi-ciaries 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 permuta-tions. 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, recogniz-ably large-scale, capitalist enterprises that focused on monocrop agri-culture, 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 corpora-tized in the nineteenth century and militarized in the twentieth cen-tury. 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 destruc-tion of the Mississippi Delta’s piney woods during western expansion; anti-Catholic penal laws mirror post-Reconstruction black codes; and


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 Ameri-can 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 terminol-ogy between Irish and American studies, however, obscures the com-monalities 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 Ameri-can 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 frac-tion 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 plan-tation 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


Irish landowners were forcibly relocated to the infertile lands of Con-naught 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 cen-tury, “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 circum-Atlantic agrarian capitalism fueled by colonial imperatives. The Brit-ish 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 Wil-liam 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 Bouci-cault, 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 South-ern 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 nineteenth-century big-house novels that centered on the social foibles and mar-riage plots of the Ascendancy class. Despite the well-documented global itinerancy of the Irish, the genre has been read as local and paro-


chial; however, it forms an important and largely unrecognized connec-tion between Irish and American studies.10 While the generic conven-tions of plantation fiction have not yet been applied to Irish contexts, the isolationist assumptions that usually attend considerations of big-house 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 capital-ism, imperialism, and modernization. Although Irish and Southern authors undoubtedly responded to specific, local events in drafting big-house 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. McCor-mack (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 fol-lowed 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 plan-tation production underwent post-Emancipation transformations, lead-ing 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


novel because they both emerge from cross-oceanic colonialism, spe-cifically 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 nineteenth-century 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 cur-rency 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 Wil-liam 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). Unedu-cated 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, con-tempt for white trash and exaggerated courtesy to women” (Mitchell


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 rais-ing good cotton, riding well, and shooting straight, dancing lightly, squiring the ladies with elegance and carrying one’s liquor like a gentle-man were the things that mattered” (1996, 26). Gerald eventually mar-ries 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 South-ern culture allows Gerald to hew closely to planter norms and single-mindedly navigate the divide between the entrenched coastal aristoc-racy 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 imperi-alism (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 Clans-man ([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 mem-bers of the family, but are frequently indulged and even dominant. Mitchell gives no indication that Gerald has any ethical misgivings


about slavery. To the contrary, his humble Irish background makes him more ambitious; he craves the status bestowed by slave owner-ship. 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 ste-reotypes 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 assim-ilates to the Southern planter class that seeks to emulate English aris-tocracy. Dennis Clark (1986, 101) notes that the Irish in the antebellum South were a defensive minority group among a predominately Protes-tant 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 educa-tion 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 leader-ship.” 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 solidi-fies his standing with the Anglo-American elite. In Mitchell’s novel, Southern agrarian capitalism is opposed to Northern industrial capi-talism, 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


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 man-agement. 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 white-ness 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 Ameri-cans became “Swiss guards” upholding the slave system (187). After Emancipation, Irish Americans often competed with newly freed Afri-can 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 cam-paigns 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 Ameri-canness.” 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


the white Southern elite with impoverished Irish peasants, as victims of an ineluctable imperial-capitalist modernity, is perhaps most evi-dent in a scene in which Scarlett compares the siege of Atlanta to the massacre at Drogheda and declares that William Tecumseh Sher-man 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 plan-tocracy 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 resem-bled 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 colo-nial elites displaced native landowners to establish large scale agricul-tural estates on the frontiers of Europe and North America, and later found themselves at odds with—and developing distinct cultural iden-tities 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 mid-twentieth 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. Mitch-ell 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 ascen-sion into the plantocratic ranks is by no means typical of Irish experi-


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 ser-vants, 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 communi-ties like New Orleans, Charleston, and Savannah (97). Only occasion-ally 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, “Marga-ret 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 experi-ences of her own family indicates the pervasiveness of imperial dis-courses 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 involve-ment 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 colo-nial 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 pro-duces its unique blending of Irish Southern culture. The novel also


mirrors the vast changes in plantation production that occurred after Emancipation, including the shift from traditional family-owned plan-tations to corporate ventures and state ownership and the simultane-ous onset of British decolonization and American expansionism. While the plantation played a formative role in the initial period of capitalist-imperial 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 corpora-tions 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 through-out the plantation complex.

This is particularly true in regard to race and ethnicity. Mitchell completed most of the novel in 1929, then undertook extensive revi-sions 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 planta-tion 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 planta-tion 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 inte-grate both Southern and Northern markets for participation in a devel-oping 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 working-class (Catholic) Irish American girl became a symbol of white (Protes-tant) Southern womanhood, if only in death. Not coincidently, her mur-der 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-


grounds closed ranks against racial uplift in the early twentieth cen-tury, 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 Catho-lic values—contributed to this newly sanitized image of Irish immigra-tion 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 main-tain racial apartheid. Gerald’s story celebrates the opportunities avail-able to enterprising citizens within the United States even as the nation experienced unprecedented economic decline. In this fictional meri-tocracy, 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 pseudo-aristocracy 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 Ire-land 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 consti-tutes 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 cor-responds 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


northeastern portion of Brazil. It extended throughout the countries (including those in the Indian Ocean), constituting what Patrick Camoi-seau and Raphaël Confiant call the territory of créolité” (63). Not only is each individual estate underpinned by the same essential socioeco-nomic 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 plan-tation continually reproduces itself on the level of individual house-holds, 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 gener-ates 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 cir-cum-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 col-umned European house standing in front of the vast levels, with a


forest away back—La. Planter? And the thatched groups of native houses have been turned themselves into the negro quarters, famil-iar 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), rela-tively black or relatively white. Thus in Gone with the Wind Irish Catho-lic 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 planta-tion modernity shows that Mitchell’s Irish American Dream functions so well in the novel because the structures of the plantation are uni-form 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 comprehend-ing, were crystal clear. Gerald, penniless, had raised Tara; Ellen had risen above some mysterious sorrow; Grandfather Robillard, surviv-ing 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, bat-tling 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 escap-ing Ireland and Prudhomme could prevail on the coast after losing


his West Indian estate, then she too will triumph during Reconstruc-tion. In this, she alludes to her family’s involvement in three instanti-ations 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 contem-porary events in Ireland and the South, so too does her treatment of Scarlett’s Creole ancestors register contemporary events in the Carib-bean, 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 twen-tieth 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 continu-ities and exchanges among plantation cultures. He—along with the United States military—ultimately leaves Haiti in failure, but his abil-ity 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 per-severes like a Creole slave owner who prospers by finally subordinat-ing 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 planta-tion had become, in a word, national by the end of the [nineteenth] cen-tury. It provided numerous writers new ways of imagining the nation’s


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 con-spicuously in visions of the nation’s future, too.” In particular, the plan-tation’s supposed success in “overcoming the problem of multiracial-ity” (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 junc-ture 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 cru-cial role in supposedly “overcoming the problem of multiraciality.” Scarlett O’Hara, the most iconic figure of the global plantation com-plex, 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 geographi-cally 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 moder-nity provides a productive framework not only for the study of litera-tures prior to Emancipation, but of texts published well after the plan-tation’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


slavery within New World contexts, even though these same hierar-chies 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 vic-timization on others, and in the process, continually reproduce planta-tion 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 any-

thing about Gone with the Wind without being bombarded by statistics—it sold over 1 million copies in its first year of publication, has been trans-lated 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 cul-tures on a global scale, and my discussion assumes that plantation


zones cover a vast swath of the earth: often equatorial, tropical, and cul-tivated by slave labor, but not always.

4 Recent scholarship has explored Irish experiences in previously over-looked 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.

5 Recent scholarship on plantation fiction includes Handley 2000, Costello 2007, Loichot 2007, Adams 2007, Bibler 2009, Russ 2009, Gree-son 2010, and Wells 2011.

6 As Terence Dooley (2007, 9) notes, in Ireland ostentatious big houses were meant “to announce the economic and social strength of their own-ers 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.”

7 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 Catho-lics acted in oppressive ways toward other racialized groups, the Irish-as-victims narrative remains entrenched. David Lloyd (2009, 3) notes that critics often give way to the “weak ethical desire that the Irish, them-selves a historically oppressed and colonized people, should have identi-fied 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 undifferenti-ated subaltern slot in the New World hierarchy.”

8 Ó’Faoláin (1957, 75) writes, “There is the same passionate provincial-ism; 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 feel-ing 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.”


9 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 Car-son’s work.

10 Ellen Crowell (2007) insightfully compares the big-house novel to planta-tion novels. My work differs from hers insofar as I argue that the big-house novel is in fact an unrecognized form of plantation fiction. By plac-ing 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.

11 For a full discussion of Irish and Irish American attitudes towards slav-ery, see Quinlan 2004 (46–75), Ignatiev 2008, Rodgers 2009, and Mur-phy 2010.

12 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).

13 For more on British-Southern relations in the nineteenth century, see Tam-arkin 2008 and Foreman 2010. See Taylor 2001 for an examination of Brit-ish interest in Southern culture in the twentieth century. Elsewhere, she comments in regard to contemporary Britain: “The affection felt by south-erners 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 stereo-types; 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).

14 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 racial-ized 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.

15 The surname “Robillard” belonged to a prominent nineteenth-century planter family in Louisiana. Before that, a planter family named Robil-lard lived in San Domingue until the Haitian Revolution (see Dubois


2004, 96). Ellen O’Hara’s genealogy doubly links her daughters to Hai-tian plantation culture, through Scarlett’s grandfather Robillard and her great-grandfather Prudhomme.

16 Of course, the urge to expand the Southern plantation into the Carib-bean 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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