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.Mitchell, in contrast, came to see her work as a rebuke to the very notion of “the people” increasingly popularized by Caldwell and others.The setting of GWTW within a sanitized slave economy provided its Depression-era audiences with an Edenic past to look back upon, while its ruthlessly practical heroine offered a moral model for survival after the Fall.Its depictions of African Americans as simple and helpless, as well as its portrayal of poor whites as criminal and treacherous, revised both the slave past andthe need for continued planter-class control in the present.Not surprisingly, Mitchell was explicitly conservative in her politics.The appeal of GWTW ’s general message of “survival” to Depression-era audiences has already beenestablished by critics (Morton 52–56, Pauly 164–76).Generally overlooked,however, is how Mitchell came to view her novel’s significance within the battle over class and racial formations of the era, both domestically and abroad.The extent of Mitchell’s conservatism is illustrated by one of her literary associates, who claimed, “I practiced silence during Margaret’s vituperative denunciations of F.D.R.and all his works” (Pyron 438).In a letter to archconservative psychologist Dr.Henry Link in 1941, she could not contain her pride that hehad used her character Scarlett to illustrate his individualist, anti–New Deal philosophy.Referring to GWTW, Link had written, “Ten million readers! Ten million nostalgic gasps from the victims of a machine concept of social security, a people still faintly protesting against the loss of personal responsibility”(Harwell 342).3Erskine Caldwell’s Challenge to Gone with the Wind83Georgia-born Erskine Caldwell was, by contrast (and despite his laterclaim to be “a writer, not a reformer”), heavily involved with the various social movements for economic and racial justice in the 1930s and 1940s, and heintended his work to further these movements.Caldwell sat on the nationaladvisory board of the communist Film and Photo League, supported the Com-munist Party’s presidential candidate in the 1932 election, wrote for the Popular Front tabloid P.M., and tirelessly agitated for southern sharecroppers in print and in touring lectures with his second wife, Margaret Bourke-White(Alexander 30).And despite his postwar claims never to have been a Marxistor even a fellow traveler, he traveled to Sofia as late as 1984 to receive the Bul-garian Ministry of Culture’s Medal of Merit and a standing ovation from theassembled audience (Klevar 410).Given these politics, his work eschews theplanter class to focus on the attempts of poor whites to make ends meet inthe decaying Georgia countryside, impoverished South Carolina mill towns,and Gulf Coast industrial centers of the Depression and war years.Uniqueamong proletarian realisms of the decade, however, Caldwell’s novels possessa humorous side that makes it easy for readers to both empathize with and laugh at his highly flawed characters—at their own notions of racial superiority, at their bizarre attempts to get ahead, at their sexual relationships, and more.As a result, while in both film and novel GWTW is littered with African American stereotypes and was boycotted by civil rights organizations in the1930s and 1940s, the racial and class politics of Caldwell’s work were praised by no less than Richard Wright and NAACP president Walter White (Klevar231, McDonald 114).Considered in the context of the proletarian novel, the sales figures ofCaldwell’s work are even more intriguing.Most class-conscious literary works about factory workers, mill hands, and downtrodden farmers did not achieve amass audience in the United States.Of all the anticapitalist stories of working-class life, only John Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath made the American top ten list during the 1930s.But while the work of literary leftists Mike Gold, Jack Conroy, Josephine Herbst, and John Dos Passos achieved critical praise but mod-est popular recognition, seemingly everything Caldwell put to print broke sales records.Out of the top forty best-selling works of fiction in the United States between 1895 and 1965, six were written by Erskine Caldwell (Hackett, 70 Years 12–14).I hope to illuminate the reasons these southern stories of social conflict did so well in the arena of mass culture, an arena where so many other proletarian novels did not make their mark.Addressing the popular appeal of Caldwell’s work will require an explora-tion of the politics and aesthetics of his novels, a look at their reception by critics84Erskine Caldwell’s Challenge to Gone with the Windon the left, and a brief consideration of their marketing and textual history.It must be noted that his aesthetic was not legible to most critics on the left as realism, a label necessary for a work to be considered viable, political art at mid-century [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
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.Mitchell, in contrast, came to see her work as a rebuke to the very notion of “the people” increasingly popularized by Caldwell and others.The setting of GWTW within a sanitized slave economy provided its Depression-era audiences with an Edenic past to look back upon, while its ruthlessly practical heroine offered a moral model for survival after the Fall.Its depictions of African Americans as simple and helpless, as well as its portrayal of poor whites as criminal and treacherous, revised both the slave past andthe need for continued planter-class control in the present.Not surprisingly, Mitchell was explicitly conservative in her politics.The appeal of GWTW ’s general message of “survival” to Depression-era audiences has already beenestablished by critics (Morton 52–56, Pauly 164–76).Generally overlooked,however, is how Mitchell came to view her novel’s significance within the battle over class and racial formations of the era, both domestically and abroad.The extent of Mitchell’s conservatism is illustrated by one of her literary associates, who claimed, “I practiced silence during Margaret’s vituperative denunciations of F.D.R.and all his works” (Pyron 438).In a letter to archconservative psychologist Dr.Henry Link in 1941, she could not contain her pride that hehad used her character Scarlett to illustrate his individualist, anti–New Deal philosophy.Referring to GWTW, Link had written, “Ten million readers! Ten million nostalgic gasps from the victims of a machine concept of social security, a people still faintly protesting against the loss of personal responsibility”(Harwell 342).3Erskine Caldwell’s Challenge to Gone with the Wind83Georgia-born Erskine Caldwell was, by contrast (and despite his laterclaim to be “a writer, not a reformer”), heavily involved with the various social movements for economic and racial justice in the 1930s and 1940s, and heintended his work to further these movements.Caldwell sat on the nationaladvisory board of the communist Film and Photo League, supported the Com-munist Party’s presidential candidate in the 1932 election, wrote for the Popular Front tabloid P.M., and tirelessly agitated for southern sharecroppers in print and in touring lectures with his second wife, Margaret Bourke-White(Alexander 30).And despite his postwar claims never to have been a Marxistor even a fellow traveler, he traveled to Sofia as late as 1984 to receive the Bul-garian Ministry of Culture’s Medal of Merit and a standing ovation from theassembled audience (Klevar 410).Given these politics, his work eschews theplanter class to focus on the attempts of poor whites to make ends meet inthe decaying Georgia countryside, impoverished South Carolina mill towns,and Gulf Coast industrial centers of the Depression and war years.Uniqueamong proletarian realisms of the decade, however, Caldwell’s novels possessa humorous side that makes it easy for readers to both empathize with and laugh at his highly flawed characters—at their own notions of racial superiority, at their bizarre attempts to get ahead, at their sexual relationships, and more.As a result, while in both film and novel GWTW is littered with African American stereotypes and was boycotted by civil rights organizations in the1930s and 1940s, the racial and class politics of Caldwell’s work were praised by no less than Richard Wright and NAACP president Walter White (Klevar231, McDonald 114).Considered in the context of the proletarian novel, the sales figures ofCaldwell’s work are even more intriguing.Most class-conscious literary works about factory workers, mill hands, and downtrodden farmers did not achieve amass audience in the United States.Of all the anticapitalist stories of working-class life, only John Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath made the American top ten list during the 1930s.But while the work of literary leftists Mike Gold, Jack Conroy, Josephine Herbst, and John Dos Passos achieved critical praise but mod-est popular recognition, seemingly everything Caldwell put to print broke sales records.Out of the top forty best-selling works of fiction in the United States between 1895 and 1965, six were written by Erskine Caldwell (Hackett, 70 Years 12–14).I hope to illuminate the reasons these southern stories of social conflict did so well in the arena of mass culture, an arena where so many other proletarian novels did not make their mark.Addressing the popular appeal of Caldwell’s work will require an explora-tion of the politics and aesthetics of his novels, a look at their reception by critics84Erskine Caldwell’s Challenge to Gone with the Windon the left, and a brief consideration of their marketing and textual history.It must be noted that his aesthetic was not legible to most critics on the left as realism, a label necessary for a work to be considered viable, political art at mid-century [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]