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Pan Macmillan, the publisher of Margaret Mitchell's classic 1936 American novel Gone With The Wind, has added a trigger warning in the preface of the book's most recent publication telling readers that the text is "harmful" and "problematic" because of its "white supremacist" qualities.
The Telegraph reports that the publisher specifically hired a white writer, Philippa Gregory, to pen an essay to accompany the trigger warning and detail the book's "white supremacist" elements to avoid hiring a black writer and giving them the "emotional labour" of such a task.
Gone With The Wind is set before and during the American Civil War and tracks protagonist Scarlett O'Hara, the daughter of a Southern plantation owner, as she navigates the tumult of her times. The story begins with O'Hara living in relative comfort and excess as she considers a variety of men to be her suitors but her lifestyle radically changes through the course of the war.
The book's publisher now warns readers that they could find the way Mitchell depicted the South as "racist" and "'hurtful or indeed harmful" and that the reader will encounter "shocking elements."
The warning reads:
Gone with the Wind is a novel which includes problematic elements including the romanticisation of a shocking era in our history and the horrors of slavery. The novel includes the representation of unacceptable practices, racist and stereotypical depictions and troubling themes, characterisation, language and imagery.After the trigger warning, an essay appears by Philippa Gregory, The Other Boleyn Girl author, to tell the reader that Mitchell wrote her novel as an endorsement of the "Lost Cause" view of the American Confederacy, which is to say that the South was fighting for freedom from the Union under justified reasons.
The book remains true to the original in every way and is reflective of the language and period in which it was originally written and they believe changing the text to reflect today's world would undermine the authenticity of the original, so has chosen to leave the text in its entirety.
This does not, however, constitute an endorsement of the characterisation, content or language used.
Gregory said the book, "defends racism" and "glamorises and preaches white supremacy."
Gone With The Wind was adapted to the iconic film of the same name in 1939 and starred Clark Gable as Rhett Butler, the man O'Hara eventually falls in love with, and Vivien Leigh as Scarlett O'Hara.
According to the Daily Mail:
"a newly-discovered script from Gone With The Wind revealed the bitter fallout over the presentation of slavery in the controversial 1939 blockbuster."Revelations from the script reveal that in alternate drafts of the film adaptation, slavery was depicted with much more realism and brutality than what ended up in the finished picture.
The James Bond novels by acclaimed author Ian Fleming were recently censored after Ian Fleming Publications Ltd hired sensitivity readers to review the material and make suggestions to language, especially around racial descriptions of characters. Earlier in February, Telegraph published details on the works of beloved children's author Roald Dahl being censored by their publisher, Puffin, after sensitivity readers deemed some of the language offense to modern readers. After backlash, including from PEN America, the publisher announced they were releasing uncensored "classic texts" of Dahl's body of work.
Reader Comments
Next they will go door to door searches of your houses to take your books away and burn them, then throw you in a prison because you're white.
Black and white children are not taught that the slave ships were largely owned and operated by Jews, or that the first American slave owners were black.
Black and white children are not taught about the quantity of slaves that were white (though most historians agree that roughly two-thirds of all whites came to the colonies in some form of bondage )
Black and white children are not taught about how white slaves were valued at much less (50 sterling for a black slave vs. a maximum of 5 sterling for a white "indentured servant") and treated worse than their African counterparts as the requirement that they be released in a few years actually made them more expendable to their masters.
Black and white children are not taught that the white race actually comprised a smaller percentage of slave owners in the United States than free blacks— about 28% of free blacks owned black slaves compared to roughly 1.4% of white owners of black slaves (1860 US Census)
Black and white children are not taught that, of the 10 to 15 million Africans who were transplanted to the New World, no more than 6 percent even went to the Northern Hemisphere; Almost all of them went to South America.
Black and white children are nottaught about how the Muslim trade of African AND European slaves lasted centuries longer than any white European involvement did, or about how white, Christian Americans were the first to push for the abolition of slavery as a practice.
Black and white children are not taught that, since blacks have never been the majority demographic in America, it is mathematically impossible for most whites to have owned black slaves.
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