On Screenwriting and Media with Dr. Rosanne Welch
Writing, Film, Television and More!
While many Civil War films cover the Southern perspective, Friendly Persuasion involves the much rarer Northern experience, this one of a devout Indiana Quaker female minister whose family tries valiantly to uphold their pacifist values in the face of Confederate attack.
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While Anita, the abbess and Margaret managed the medical care of the soldiers, Giuseppe rode into Rome to attend the National Assembly with the dream of seeing Rome finally declared a republic. He soon learned that politics takes longer than battle and requires a different set of talents and strategies.
As the twenty-first century began to mature, so too did Americans’ ideas about who qualified as heroes of the Civil War. While conflicts over taking down statues of old Confederate generals roiled southern cities, artists around the country started making art that glorified the anti-Confederates, and films were no different. This climate bred Free State of Jones, the story of a Confederate army deserter who organizes his own interracial militia of formerly enslaved people and lower-income farmers, all dedicated to ending the war, though for differing reasons.
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They stopped at the Villa Doria Pamphili in the quarter of Monteverde, just outside the Porta San Pancrazio, one of the ancient walls of Rome where the ancient road of the Via Aurelia begins. “This Rome is a modern city. It is hard to imagine,” he said haltingly, “hard to imagine the time before Innocent X became pope and aspired to a grander and more expansive villa. His changes obliterated what this might have been in ancient times.”“A simpler family farm, perhaps,” suggested Aguyar.
This fictional vision of slavery was pervasive many years after the war, up to and including GWTW. In her book Clinging to Mammy (2007), Micki McElya posits the idea that “the myth of the faithful slave lingers because so many white Americans have wished to live in a world in which African Americans are not angry over past and present injustices, a world in which white people were and are not complicit, in which the injustices themselves—of slavery, Jim Crow, and ongoing structural racism—seem not to exist at all.”.
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Forced to concede due to the lack of manpower, munitions and other governmental support, Giuseppe dug down deep to keep his morale high. All over the regions of Italy supporters sang his praises in thanks for his bravery and loyalty. Yet, while he still believed even failure taught important lessons, at 41 years-old he worried failure might be the only legacy he left his children.
The criticism GWTW engendered then and now center on the omission of any real depiction of the horrors of slavery. Outside of Scarlett slapping Prissy on the day the maid admits knowing nothing about childbirth (despite bragging about her expertise for weeks), none of the major characters ever mistreats a slave. Critics might fault Mitchell for not doing enough historical research before undertaking the story, but Mitchell was writing from the only perspective she had been taught, the myth of the benevolent slave master, not from the perspective of an enslaved main character. Still, this first error of omission is the most blatant error.
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Chi non va, non vede. Chi non vede, non sa.”
Aguyar had been picking up Italian but looked to Giuseppe for the proper translation.
“’If you don’t go, you don’t see. If you don’t see, you don’t know.’ It’s something my mother said to me a long time ago. Who knew how true it would prove to be?”
Supervision of the drudgery work done by enslaved women kept women of both positions in daily contact. Enslaved maids slept on pallets on the floors of their various mistresses’ rooms to be awoken whenever necessary through the night. Often these maids were related to their mistresses, as in the case of Sally Hemmings, maid and half-sister to Martha Jefferson on the Monticello plantation, which created complex relationships and widely reported whispers among women of both stations of life.
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1848 – Return to Italy
Political changes in the various kingdoms on the Italian peninsula helped convince Giuseppe and many of the members of his Italian legion that now was the time to return, that now was the time to use the skills they had obtained in their battles for South American freedom to support unity in their homeland.