Tea at Trianon: Cotton, Slaves and Arrogance

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Tuesday, June 23, 2020

Cotton, Slaves and Arrogance

The South was more than "cotton, slaves and arrogance." It saw the merging of several different cultures, including those of several African nations, as well as the Spanish, French, Irish, German, Italian, English, and Scottish cultures. Every state was unique, and had a different historical background. From The Spectator:

Gone with the Wind is about the perils of romanticizing. The movie begins with young men romanticizing the impending Civil War. ‘War! Isn’t it exciting, Scarlett?’ exclaims one of the Tarleton twins. With the women napping upstairs during a barbecue at Twelve Oaks, the men smoke cigars and confidently assert that ‘gentlemen always fight better than rabble’. When the war is announced, the barbecue erupts into cheers and music, as the partygoers rush outside, twirling their skirts and hats. Charles Hamilton runs up to Scarlett: ‘Isn’t it thrilling? Mr. Lincoln has called the soldiers, volunteers, to fight against us!’

Charles Hamilton will be dead two scenes later, catching measles and pneumonia before he ever sees a battlefield. The Tarleton twins will perish at Gettysburg. The throng of exuberant partygoers will be replaced by the throng of injured bodies stretching endlessly through the streets of Atlanta in one of the most iconic shots in cinematic history. Almost no man present at the barbecue will live to see the end of the war.

The two men who do survive the war are the two who refuse to romanticize it: Ashley Wilkes, who observes that ‘most of the miseries of the world were caused by wars. And when the wars were over, no one ever knew what they were about’; and Rhett Butler, who warns that while the Yankees have factories, shipyards, coal mines, and a fleet, ‘all we’ve got is cotton, slaves, and arrogance’.

[...]

In other words, Gone with the Wind is guilty of the very thing it criticizes in its characters. It depicts the hazards of romanticizing, while itself being a romanticized depiction. But perhaps this is intentional. Perhaps Scarlett’s declaration that she has loved something that didn’t really exist is meant as a meta-cinematic warning: everything we have watched is also a fantasy, ‘no more than a dream remembered’, as the opening says. Rhett is revealed as the film’s truth-teller in more ways than one. ‘Cotton, slaves and arrogance’ — that’s all the South really was, and we mustn’t forget it. (Read more.)