Folk Visions and Archetypal Fodder in "Gone With the Wind"

I wanted to call attention to one more section in the second Kara Walker interview (please see previous post for discussion ramifications).

I mentioned earlier that Kara Walker had some interesting things to say in the way of Southern folklore and mythology, which reminded me of what she said on the subject of Gone With the Wind (since it's definitely something that's come up in Religion class). I'll repost the interview for you to read in complete (it's a really interesting interview if you're into contemporary artists and that sort of thing), but I mainly wanted to repost her thoughts on the archetypes and consequent "permutations" of the story. When asked to describe the "artistic fodder" in Gone With the Wind that influenced her work, she answered:


"What can I say? Within the story of "Gone with the Wind"—the actual novel and then the permutations of it in film and in life—my expectation, as I said, was to go in and be sort of horrified and disgusted with representations of happy slaves or ignorant slaves. The mammy figure is both soothsayer and does everything to please her white folks. And I went into my reading of the book with a clear eye towards inserting myself in the text somehow. And the distressing part was always being caught up in the voice of the heroine, Scarlet O'Hara.

Now, I guess a lot of what I was wanting to do in my work, and what I have been doing, has been about the unexpected. You know, that unexpected situation of kind of wanting to be the heroine and yet wanting to kill the heroine at the same time. And, that kind of dilemma, that push and pull, is sort of the basis, the underlying turbulence that I bring to each of the pieces that I make, including the specifics: the mammy characters and the pickaninnies and the weird sorts of descriptions. At one point Scarlet in her desperation is digging up dried up roots and tubers down by the slaves quarters and she's overcome by a "niggery" scent, and vomits. [LAUGHS] And it's scenes like that that might go washed over by the sort of vast, epic structure of the story, but that is an epic moment for me. What does that mean? And why is there an assumption that I should know what that means? And where does this idea come from, you know, why is this smell so overpowering?"


Once again this sense of opposing forces, both push and pull, as well as a barefaced acknowledgement of the offensive and the grotesque dominate the artistic visions of this astute artist. The problematic archetypes and dilemmas that inspired Ms. Walker are very similar to the subjects I want to explore in the way of Folk Art functionality, and I'm glad to finally be enthused about a topic.