Making It New: 1900–1945 513is the world-weary plantation Hamlet, played here by Ashley Wilkes, the roguish,
dangerous plantation Hotspur, a role taken here by Rhett Butler. There are, inevitably,
a “Mammy,” various “Uncle Tom” figures who faithfully serve and save their white
masters, a vicious white overseer, melodious field hands, and women like Scarlett’s
friend, the gentle Melanie Hamilton, who fulfill Southern expectations of what it
means to be “a very great lady.” What ignites Gone With the Wind, however, is its
heroine. Here, with Scarlett O’Hara, Mitchell revisits a familiar character type, the
strong woman – particularly popular in the 1930s, when such characters were often
seen as potential redeemers of a barren land – and gives that character type new
complexity and depth, not least through subtle inflections of gender.
Like the heroine of many popular female narratives, from romance through the
prototypical early feminist novel to soap opera, Scarlett O’Hara is an initially
unexceptional girl who is forced into an exceptional maturity. As the opening line of
the novel has it, she is “not beautiful, but men seldom realized it” thanks to her wiles.
Nor is she educated, or even a reader (“I don’t read novels,” she declares); she does,
however, have “sharp intelligence” – and, as it turns out, determination and guile.
Like the central character in many a female narrative, in her love trials she is torn
between respectability and risk, in the respective figures of Ashley and Rhett.
However, while she possesses some of the stereotypical “feminine” characteristics,
such as a lack of interest in war and politics, what makes her remarkable is her
possession too of supposedly “masculine” traits. As she develops during the course
of the narrative, she shows herself to be tough, ruthless, competitive. She is committed
to the land, her property, and money as a means to keep that land. What is more, she
is quite unsentimental, marrying men she does not love and giving birth to three
children she uniformly finds a nuisance – as Rhett observes, “a cat’s a better mother
than you.” According to the conventions of Southern society, Scarlett is very often a
scandal: dancing in widow’s weeds, driving a hard bargain, leasing convict labor, and
cavorting after the war with Yankees. Like the central character of the classic historical
novel, too, she herself becomes a site of struggle between the old order and the new.
Or, as the narrative puts it, “her mind pulled two ways,” between nostalgia for the
past and the necessities of the present and future. At the end of the novel, Scarlett
does turn back, to Tara, her homeplace. She also turns back, in intention, to a man
who is himself, he says, seeking to recapture some of the “honor, security, roots that
go deep” of the old, antebellum days, in that she determines to try to win back Rhett.
But even this apparent victory for the backward glance, the past, is more ambivalent
than at first appears and suggests the richly layered nature of the heroine of Gone
With the Wind. In going back, Scarlett is perhaps going forward, trying for a synthesis
of the new aims and the old values: a balance between past and future registered in
her famous closing remark: “Tomorrow, I’ll think of some way to get him back. After
all, tomorrow is another day.”
What is striking, and regrettable, about this most popular of American romances
is that it combines this relatively sophisticated representation of gender, the role of
women, with a presentation of race, and in particular the African-American race,
that is regressive to the point of being obscene. The opening references to “darkies”GGray_c04.indd 513ray_c 04 .indd 513 8 8/1/2011 7:54:07 AM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 54 : 07 AM