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Moonshine and Magnolias: The Story of Temple Drake and The Birth of a Nation Deborah Barker (bio) Deborah Barker University of Mississippi Deborah Barker Deborah Barker’s first book, Aesthetics and Gender in American Literature: The Portrait of the Woman Artist, delineates the aesthetic debates surrounding the fictional image of the woman artist. She is associate professor of English at the University of Mississippi, and her current book project, entitled The Rape of the South, explores the uses of sexual and racial violence in the cinematic South. Footnotes 1. In 1933, the furor over the release of The Story of Temple Drake helped to strengthen the Production Code—Hollywood’s self-imposed code of censorship—and its enforcement under Joe Breen, who, in turn, prevented the movie’s rerelease. The film was not shown again until 1958. It is still associated with the pre- Code period and was shown in 1999 as part of a pre-Code film festival. As recently as July 2005 it was shown in New York at the Film Forum. 2. Ramsey discusses the advertisements of The Story of Temple Drake that prominently link Faulkner’s name to the film and even directly connect the film to Sanctuary despite Breen’s order not to use the name of the novel (20). 3. As Bernardi explains, “Griffith’s articulations of style and of race are involved in the same cinematic and discursive processes; pragmatically, they co-constitute the filmmaker’s narrative system” (“Voice” 104). 4. As is true of his innovations in cinematic structure—Griffith did not invent the new techniques but he combined them in innovative ways—his The Birth of a Nation was not the first film to associate itself with “Art” in order to appeal to a white middle class audience, but it was able to capitalize on the cinematic move to respectability in a way that captured the attention of the American public, both black and white. Many white Americans chose to see The Birth of a Nation as an unproblematic representation of the historical truth of white superiority; the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and the black press, however, condemned the film for its racism and sought to prevent it from being shown. For an extensive discussion of the black press’s response to the novel, play, and film, see Everett 59-106. 5. As Hall argues, the implied punishment for those who violate the taboos include white Southern women (333-40). “A woman who had just been raped, or who had been apprehended in a clandestine interracial affair, or whose male relatives were pretending that she had been raped, stood on display before the whole community. Here was the quintessential Woman as victim: polluted, ‘ruined for life,’ the object of fantasy and secret contempt” (335). 6. Thomas Reid, an important Scottish realist philosopher, maintained that outward beauty is a sign of the goodness of the mind (Martin 42). 7. Before The Birth of a Nation, The Leopard’s Spots and The Clansman were converted by Dixon into a successful play, which included the conflation of Flora and Marion. The scene in the cellar and the chase sequence with Gus, Flora, and Ben are Griffiths additions. This type of scene is very characteristic of Griffith’s style; he often created a sense of the home, typically a place of security, as a claustrophobic scene of entrapment with cross cuts to the danger that confronts the home, in this case the black troops. 8. At the war’s end many Southern states established Black Codes, which required African Americans to have written proof of employment and prevented anyone from offering work to an African American already under contract (Foner 198-99). The Black Codes were abolished under Radical Reconstruction, but the end of Reconstruction brought back laws, especially vagrancy laws, and “antienticement” laws which were enforced primarily to control black labor (Foner 587-98). 9. Historian Arthur S. Link asserts that the cotton crisis of 1914-1915 “left deep scars upon the South and a residue of intense anti-British sentiment,” making “the South one of the chief centers of resistance to military and naval expansion and to strong...
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