From Uncle Remus to Song of the South: Adapting American Plantation Fictions
2015; University of North Carolina Press; Volume: 47; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1353/slj.2015.0002
ISSN1534-1461
Autores Tópico(s)Literature, Magical Realism, García Márquez
ResumoFrom Uncle Remus to Song of the South:Adapting American Plantation Fictions Daniel Stein (bio) In The Southern Plantation: A Study of the Development and the Accuracy of a Tradition (1924), Francis Pendleton Gaines describes an image that remains etched into the American consciousness to this day: The scene represented an old negro who sat on a little eminence and gazed wistfully across a valley. On the opposite hill the world of actuality merged into a cloud-like vision, the semblance of the ex-slave’s dream: the old plantation; a great mansion; exquisitely groomed ladies and courtly gentlemen moving with easy grace upon the broad veranda behind stalwart columns; surrounding the yard an almost illimitable stretch of white cotton; darkies singing at work in the fields; negro quarters, off on one side, around which little pickaninnies tumbled in glad frolic. (qtd. in Wells 33) To Gaines’s early-twentieth-century readers, this scene would have been intimately familiar. It presented a site they had often visited in their imagination but had never actually seen, a site that only existed as a simulacrum of a simpler [End Page 20] and happier past. Such fictions of the plantation had made their entrance into American literature with proslavery romances like John Pendleton Kennedy’s Swallow Barn; or, A Sojourn in the Old Dominion (1832), and they had been contested by sentimental abolitionist novels like Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1851–1852). Yet it was in the years after the Civil War, when slavery had been abolished, that the plantation became the emblem of the South as mythical space in American culture.1 By the final decades of the nineteenth century and the early decades of the twentieth, “portraits of plantation life . . . filled the pages of the nation’s periodicals and found their way into dozens of books, achieving . . . a form of cultural conquest of their own,” as Jeremy Wells argues (2). Think of novels like John DeForests’s Miss Ravenel’s Conversion from Secession to Loyalty (1867), but especially of dialect story collections like Thomas Nelson Page’s In Ole Virginia; or, Marse Chan and Other Stories (1887) or Charles Chesnutt’s African American revision of the plantation romance in The Conjure Woman (1899). Think also of Thomas Dixon Jr.’s racist novels about the Ku Klux Klan, which inspired D. W. Griffith’s monumental Birth of a Nation (1915) as a tribute to an American Republic rebuilt on the ideology of white southern supremacy. Or skip forward a few decades to Margaret Mitchell’s bestselling novel Gone with the Wind (1936) and David Selznick’s movie adaptation (1939), which remain among the nation’s most popular stories of southern resilience and grandeur. As films like Birth of a Nation and Gone with the Wind illustrate, fictions of the southern plantation are not confined to the pages of American literature. They constitute a transmedia phenomenon that include nostalgic songs like those collected in Stephen Foster’s The Old Plantation Melodies (1890), visual culture from postcards to coon illustrations, and food products like Aunt Jemima pancakes. Americans were so inundated with representations of the southern plantation that Francis Pendleton Gaines diagnosed “the penetration of the plantation concept . . . into the popular consciousness” (qtd. in Wells 33). In fact, as John Lowe notes, fictions of the southern plantation were “remediated” (Jay David Bolter and Richard A. Grusin’s term) so many times that they have become “America’s favorite mythology” (qtd. in Wells 38)—a mythology that has produced places as different as Tara in Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind, Sutpen’s Hundred in William Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom (1936), Sweet Home in Toni Morrison’s Beloved (1987), and Candyland in Quentin Tarantino’s Django Unchained (2012). Examining such places can yield insights [End Page 21] into the entanglement of racial images, fictional spaces, and their “remediation” at crucial times in American history, especially if we follow Tara McPherson’s imperative to track the “popular and emotive legacy” (18) of the plantation South as a productive space in the American imagination. I will do so in this essay by looking at Walt Disney’s controversial live-action–cartoon hybrid movie Song...
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