Publishers have put a set off warning at the start of the best-selling 1936 novel “Gone with the Wind.”
Margaret Mitchell’s novel, which later spawned the enduring Hollywood movie by the identical identify, is ready in Georgia across the Civil Struggle and consists of depictions of slavery.
“We need to alert readers that there could also be hurtful or certainly dangerous phrases and terminology that have been prevalent on the time this novel was written and that are true to the context of the historic setting of this novel,” writer Pan Macmillan says in warning forward of the e-book’s 2022 version, in line with a report within the Telegraph, a British newspaper.
The story of slave-owning Scarlett O’Hara “consists of problematic parts together with the romanticisation of a stunning period in our historical past and the horrors of slavery,” the warning reads.
“The novel consists of the illustration of unacceptable practices, racist and stereotypical depictions and troubling themes, characterisation, language and imagery,” Pan Macmillan’s discover continued.
Whereas the writer mentioned that the e-book’s textual content is unchanged as a result of that may “undermine the authenticity of the unique,” it put the warning in as a approach of claiming that it doesn’t endorse the “characterisation, content material or language used.”
Pan Macmillan additionally had historic novelist Philippa Gregory write an essay after the warning, the place the creator argues that Mitchell “defends racism” and “glamorises and preaches white supremacy” within the traditional novel.
The writer additionally specified that it sought a White author to put in writing the foreword as a result of asking a Black one would inflict “emotional labour” on that particular person.
“Gone with the Wind’s” set off warning comes at a time when the Miss Marple sequence by Agatha Christie and the James Bond novels by Ian Fleming have additionally been edited to take away racial references and sure passages, in line with the Telegraph.
The movie model of “Gone with the Wind” was briefly faraway from the HBO Max streaming platform in 2020 through the protests sweeping the nation following George Floyd’s homicide.
HBO returned “Gone with the Wind” to its website a number of weeks later, however this time with a disclaimer to start with saying that its “remedy of this world via a lens of nostalgia denies the horrors of slavery, in addition to its legacies of racial inequality.”
There are also two movies that go along with the disclaimer.
One options Jacqueline Stewart, a Turner Traditional Films host who’s Black, contextualizing the film, and the opposite is a panel dialogue on the movie’s legacy from 2019 on the TCM Traditional Movie Competition.
