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1. The Characteristics of the Antebellum Southern American Culture
Malcolm Cowley regarded Gone with the Wind as “an encyclopedia of the plantation legend” (1936: 161). The novel gives the representation of the antebellum South with vivid expression, “It was a savagely red land, blood-colored after rains, brick dust in droughts, best cotton land in the world. It was a pleasant land of white houses, peaceful plowed fields and sluggish yellow rivers, but a land of contrasts, of brightest sun glare and densest shade.” (Mitchell, 2013: 9) Before the Civil War, people in South lived in an Agrarian society which was fundamentally in sharp contrast with the Northern society. And it was a society where hierarchy was preferred and slavery system was implemented. The nobility once possessed a splendid life while the poor and the slaves could suffer severely, which corresponds to the “brightest sun glare” and “densest shade”. However, the true essence of the antebellum Southern culture in the novel is not that simple as the distinct contrast, especially referring to the living actuality of slaves at that time.
1.1 The Agrarian Society Based on Slavery System of Antebellum South
A feudal society as it was in the antebellum South, the land is the basis of the source of economy as well as the guarantee of the stability of the feudal system. In Gone with the Wind, Mitchell frequently presents the description of the land ---“the moist hungry earth, waiting upturned for the cotton seeds... ”(2013: 9) “the sun was low across the new-plowed fields...”(2013: 12) “the uncultivated fields, studded with tiny pines and underbrush...”(2013: 47) “...the bare granite boulders pushing up through the red earth...”(2013：48) ---- the Old South was covered with red fields and hundreds of thousands of cotton was the most important foundation of the Southern economy. However, in an agricultural society, a large amount of labor force is becoming an inevitable need and it was exactly satisfied by the slave system which originated from the time of colonization.
1.1.1 The Agrarian Society and Plantation Life
Differ in the forms of economy at the antebellum era, industry was dominant in the Northern America whereas agriculture in the South, which is known as the Agrarian society. Mitchell chose North Georgia, her own home as a setting, because it “was the high tide of prosperity then rolling over the South” (2013: 55). Most of the lands were covered with cotton. As “all of the world was crying out for cotton, and the new land of the county, unknown and fertile, produced it abundantly” (2013: 55), the profit the cotton brought at that time was considerable. Many of such sections had made the South respectively rich. In 1860, more than a half of the 1% richest American people lived in the South (詹姆斯·柯比等, 2012).Thus, it is safe to say that lands and fields were almost the symbol of wealth and power. Often these planters who possess large pieces of land and great numbers of slaves were often regarded as the noble.
As the North was in the early period of industrialization, the business man in the South was still disdained, no matter how rich they could become. Scarlett’s father Gerald O’Hara, an Irish immigrant, is engaged in business with the help of his two elder brothers who are all businessmen, after he just comes to America. But soon he keenly felt that “the social stigma attached to those ‘in trade’” (2013: 45). Instead, he wants to be a planter. He wish to see “his own acres stretching green before his eyes” and he desires “his own house, his own plantation, his own horses, his own slaves” (2013: 45).
However, unlike Gerald, most planters in the South are born to be the one. Beatrice Tarleton, for example, the mother of the twins Stuart and Brent, has on her hand a large cotton plantation which has been inherited generation by generation. And the most typical planter is John Wilkes, “silver-haired” and “erect”, radiates “the quite charm and hospitality that was warm and never failing as the sun of Georgia summer” (2013: 92).