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"The Prong of Love"

"The Prong of Love" Jacquelyn Dowd Hall Southern Cultures, Volume 5, Number 1, 1999, pp. 44-48 (Article) Published by The University of North Carolina Press DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/scu.1999.0069 For additional information about this article https://muse.jhu.edu/article/423800/summary Access provided at 18 Feb 2020 16:58 GMT from JHU Libraries ESSAY by Jacquelyn Dowd Hall rew Faust's central and important insight is that readers of Gone with the Windmust attend to how representations of race and gender work together. I could not agree with her more. But I also think that she oversimplifies that dynamic by fail- ing to place it firmly in historical context and underestimates the roots of the book's appeal in what Anne Jones, following Zora Neale Hurs- ton, calls, so wonderfully, the "prong of love" — the racialized myths of hetero- sexual romance. Faust notes quite righdy that Gone with the Wind, for all of Margaret Mitchell's professed fascination with the Civil War, is very much a book of the 1920s. I would push this point even further. The longing for blackness, the "fluidity be- tween black and white positions," which (like Joel Williamson in his essay "How Black Was Rhett Butier") Patricia Yaeger so perceptively sees lurking in the novel's images, "hidden in http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png Southern Cultures University of North Carolina Press

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Publisher
University of North Carolina Press
Copyright
Copyright © Center for the Study of the American South.
ISSN
1534-1488

Abstract

Jacquelyn Dowd Hall Southern Cultures, Volume 5, Number 1, 1999, pp. 44-48 (Article) Published by The University of North Carolina Press DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/scu.1999.0069 For additional information about this article https://muse.jhu.edu/article/423800/summary Access provided at 18 Feb 2020 16:58 GMT from JHU Libraries ESSAY by Jacquelyn Dowd Hall rew Faust's central and important insight is that readers of Gone with the Windmust attend to how representations of race and gender work together. I could not agree with her more. But I also think that she oversimplifies that dynamic by fail- ing to place it firmly in historical context and underestimates the roots of the book's appeal in what Anne Jones, following Zora Neale Hurs- ton, calls, so wonderfully, the "prong of love" — the racialized myths of hetero- sexual romance. Faust notes quite righdy that Gone with the Wind, for all of Margaret Mitchell's professed fascination with the Civil War, is very much a book of the 1920s. I would push this point even further. The longing for blackness, the "fluidity be- tween black and white positions," which (like Joel Williamson in his essay "How Black Was Rhett Butier") Patricia Yaeger so perceptively sees lurking in the novel's images, "hidden in

Journal

Southern CulturesUniversity of North Carolina Press

Published: Jan 4, 2012

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