Gone with the Wind - Ashley

Ashley Wilkes is probably the most despised character in Gone with the Wind.  The common opinion is that he's a boring sap, and everyone hates him for being, indirectly, the cause of the beloved Rhett's unhappiness.

As you may have guessed at this point, I have rather a different opinion of Ashley Wilkes.  Before I go any farther, I shall honestly confess that I was totally in love with Ashley in the beginning of the book, and I hated nasty old Rhett.  (Yes, I'm rather a slap-judgment kind of person.  At that point in the history of my relationship with Gone with the Wind I had not delved into the chemistry and reasoning and underlying faults and tragic flaws and....well, you get the picture.)  Even after I had read the whole book (twice) and thought long and hard about the characters, it was hard to lessen my knight-in-shining-armor idea of Ashley Wilkes.  I guess I have more in common with Scarlett than I thought...

I've done a lot of thinking about Ashley, and I've come to the conclusion that he's a pattern tragedy figure, with the classic all-destroying tragic flaw.  (Okay, so maybe Seton's required analysis of Animal Farm did teach me a lot about tragic characters.  Seton students, you might know what I'm talking about.)


I think Ashley's tragic flaw is really his inability to let go of his pre-war life.  All he wanted was to continue being a country gentleman, surrounded by books, his beautiful plantation, and his daydreams.  Once the Civil War was over and everyone's life was upside-down, none of that was left.  He had to work hard, in an ugly, unfair world, and he was quite unhappy and rather unskillful in this setting.

It is true that Ashley lacked backbone.  He lacked the ability to let go of his physical love of Scarlett, and he lacked the ability to take on his new life after the war destroyed his old life.  I can forgive him his "tragic flaw", though, because I completely understand how it could come about.  Sometimes I wonder if Margaret Mitchell meant Ashley to be a kind of representation of the Old South - cultured, mannered, and completely broken by the war.

Despite this flaw, I still don't see how anyone could completely detest him.  He's warmhearted and chivalrous, and he realizes the importance of honor.  (Oh, and by the way, despite the way the movie portrayed him, he's terribly good-looking.)  He's almost the quintessential gentleman.  I say almost because, in my opinion, the quintessential gentleman should be strong enough to bear adversity well and be a support to the women around him.  This, Ashley was not.

Ashley Wilkes is, as even Scarlett recognizes, a very complex person.  Like Scarlett herself, you can't completely hate him.  (Can you?  If you really understand his character?)  This is what makes Gone with the Wind such a compelling novel.  It's not just the plot, it's not just the writing; it's the characters.  Their personalities and just plain realness is what really makes the book.

Before I forget, here's a link so that you can buy the book, if you've become interested:




Last but not least, what do you think of Ashley Wilkes?  Do you agree with my analysis of him?  Oh, and would you like me to finish this series with an analysis of Melanie, or do you think that she's straightforward enough that she doesn't need to be analysed?  I'd love to hear your thoughts!

Gone with the Wind - Rhett

Again, I will be typing all sentences containing spoilers in this green color.  Enjoy! 

Everybody loves Rhett Butler, despite his being such a scoundrel.  For my part, I feel quite sorry for him.  He had a lot of potential, but he never lived up to it.

Everyone knows that Scarlett has a lot of bad qualities, and many dislike her for them.  But everyone seems to ignore Rhett's numerous bad qualities.  He was not a good person, my dear!  True, he had some nobility (which I'll discuss in a minute), unlike Scarlett, but he was still very immoral.

There would have been some hope for Scarlett if it weren't for Rhett.  True, her selfishness and her pettiness would still be there, but I doubt she would have been so wild without Mr. Butler's influence.  The Scarlett-Rhett relationship shows that "little things" really can lead us to worse things.  Rhett encourages Scarlett's skepticism, bad temper, and flouting of rules.  At the ball Scarlett goes to after Charles Hamilton's death, Rhett dances with her even though she's supposed to be in mourning.  He then gets her out of mourning.  In his conversation with her, he sneers at the Confederacy and agrees with her selfish views.  Making Scarlett even more of a monster isn't his only fault, either.  I could almost forgive him that if it weren't for his complete lack of contrition for his immoral life!  He is openly a speculator, a drunkard, and an adulterer.  And he doesn't care.  

All that shows Rhett's bad side.  But what keeps us (most of us, anyway) rooting for him is his oft-hidden and repressed nobility.  Yes, you read it right.  This profligate, immoral, irreverent man is noble, too.   Under his crust of evil, he has many truly good qualities.

One of Rhett's best qualities is his generosity.  Though he's unbelievably rich (according to Wikipedia his fortune would equal $7,475,000 in today's currency), Rhett is very generous with his money.  When Scarlett, in desperate need of money for Tara, marries Frank, he tells her that he would have given her all she needed, without payment, as soon as he got out of jail.  He gives Scarlett expensive presents, and after they're married lets her spend money like a queen.  He builds her a huge, elaborate house and lets her give lavish parties.  Rhett is also generous in the sense of sacrificing something for one he loves.  He wants his daughter Bonnie to grow up in the well-bred, moral society of the "Old Guard", so he temporarily reforms his entire life, becoming a perfect gentleman in order to win the approbation of the staunch Confederate nobility so that his daughter can one day be well-respected.  


Rhett's generosity is also shown in his rescuing the gentlemen of Atlanta during the Ku Klux raid.  He could have gotten into a lot of trouble doing that!

 Another of Rhett's better qualities, (thought not really a virtue), is that he truly loves Scarlett.  One of the hardest things for me in the novel was to see Rhett's true (though hidden) love for Scarlett and her blindness to it and continual wounding of it.  This really isn't a good quality at all though, now that I think of it, because - Scarlett being such a brat - she was not worthy to be loved, and Rhett's love for her actually shows an unfortunate weakness on his part.  His love for his stepson Wade and his daughter Bonnie, as well as his friendship with the gentle Melanie Wilkes, are much better examples of love.

Rhett understands people, almost too well. He knows that he is a scoundrel, and he can recognize a person who is not.  He is painfully aware of the fact that Scarlett's Carpetbagger friends are morally and intellectually inferior to the "Old Guard" Southern families, for example.  He's extremely intelligent, and his education is shown in his references to history and literature.

Rhett's friendship with Melanie is, to me, one of the sweetest things in the book.  Other than Ashely, he is the only one who recognizes her worth.  He knows that she is truly good, gentle, and kind, and he treats her accordingly.  When he is with her we see what he could have been. 

Another paradox in Rhett Butler's character is shown by his last-minute joining of the Confederate Army.  After all his sneering and disgust at the Confederacy, he finally breaks down and joins when he sees how much they need help.  Of course it's too late fore the Confederacy, but it was a good - and puzzing - act all the same.


Rhett Butler is truly a tragic character: he had a noble heart hidden by his cynicism and immorality.

Sorry Scarlett's in that picture.  I had a hard time finding photos of Rhett that I liked, and anyway, Scarlett got rather entwined in my post, so it's only fitting that she gets entwined in the photo as well. :p

So what do you think of Rhett Butler?

Gone with the Wind - Scarlett

 Note: I'm putting all sentences containing spoilers in this pale green color.  If you haven't read the book and you don't want to know what happens, DON'T READ the pale-green print.  Kay? If you're like me and you don't care what the spoilers are because you know you're going to forget them way before you read the book, then go ahead.  Just saying, proceed at your own risk. :p

There she is: Scarlett O' Hara, the coquettish, determined heroine of Gone with the Wind.  Everybody is fascinated by Scarlett.  It's funny, though, because she's hardly a likeable person.  She's selfish, controlling, mutinous, and little-liked by most of her fellow-characters - the female ones, at least.  (The men like her for her beauty, but nobody sane would base their opinion on the preferences of men, so that doesn't count.)
I think the reason that we don't totally hate Scarlett is that, even though she's essentially a brat, she's very, very human.  We can understand her, even though we disapprove of her.

     For me, the hardest thing to understand about Scarlett - and her worst flaw - is her selfishness.  How could she give it free reign the way she does?  She doesn't care that she's deceiving Charles Hamilton by marrying him only in order to spite Ashley Wilkes, and she's only sorry when he dies because his death makes her have to wear mourning and stay at home instead of going to parties.  She doesn't care that Frank Kennedy was engaged to her sister Suellen, either.  She shamelessly lies to him and gets him to marry her, just so she can have his little bit of money for Tara.  The thing (related to selfishness) that really drives me crazy is her indifference to her own children.  She hardly cares for them at all, and it really annoys me - I just can't understand how she can be a woman and be so indifferent to her own children.  

That brings me to another point.  Despite her flirting and interest in pretty clothes, Scarlett is really not very feminine.  She's all about money and business, and she hates the conventions and customs of her era.  She's quite headstrong, and she doesn't care what people think, so she just ignores a lot of things that women were supposed to do.  She's egged on in this, of course, by Rhett Butler...but that's another post. ;p

  She's "fast" (meaning she flirts unashamedly), she goes into business for herself, she consorts with Scallawags and Carpetbaggers, she drives places by herself, etc.  Also, she's not religious.  There is, if I'm not mistaken, only one scene in the book where she actually thinks about what the consequences of her actions could be, eternally speaking.  Other than that, she seems to be entirely without morals.  Scarlett has no respect for the sanctity of marriage, she has no qualms about loving another woman's husband, she doesn't care about the workers in her  sawmill, and she even plans to have an immoral relationship with Rhett in order to get money.  Rhett finds her penitent and ridicules her, which I find wrong, even though he was probably right about her lack of sincerity.  There is a scene in the beginning of the book where she prays the rosary with her family, but, far from concentrating on her prayers, she's busy thinking how to snare Ashley Wilkes into proposing to her.  Typical Scarlett.

The girl does have a few redeeming qualities, though they are tainted by the rest of her character - she's certainly determined, for one.  She devotes all her energy into saving Tara, knowing that if she can't get money, Jonas Wilkerson will get the property.  She fights for Tara with all she has.  Also, she will not give up loving Ashley - but that's not exactly a redeeming quality.  When Melanie's baby is being born, Scarlett stays and delivers him - mentally cursing Melanie the whole time, of course, but still, she does it, and she's nice to Melly during her labor.  Afterward, there is her almost heroic feat of taking a sick Melanie, a newborn baby, and a whining slave girl home to Tara through the war zone - she's on her own, she has a half-dead horse, and she's dodging Yankees the whole way.  That takes real determination and strength.

Scarlett's other good quality is that she doesn't care what people think.  This could be very valuable to her, if used for the right reasons.  Unfortunately, just like her determination, she uses this for the wrong things. 

Scarlett's training by her mother Ellen Robillard O'Hara and Mammy vanishes as soon as she's off on her own.  Her greatest dream, to be like her  mother, is left far behind.  The way Scarlett turns out is the exact opposite of her well-bred, charitable mother, who would be horrified by many of her daughter's actions.

Well, I hope my little (actually, rather long) post has inspired you, if you've read the book or seen the film, to investigate Scarlett's character for yourself.  If you haven't read the book or seen the film, I hope you are now encouraged to do so.  Cause it's an interesting story.  And exploring characters is fun.  (For geeky persons like myself, at least. :p)

So what do you think of Scarlett?

P.S - I found this really cute painting of Scarlett on Google images.  (By the way, be careful if you ever search for pictures that way.   Sometimes completely unrelated, very inappropriate things come up.)
Anyway, I liked this picture, so I'll close with it. :)

EDIT: sorry about the weird highlighting thing in the middle there.  It's driving me insane, but I can't get it off.  I don't even know how it got there...  *sigh*

Gone with the Wind - Intro (and a couple of announcements)

I've spent many hours  - between chapters - musing over Margaret Mitchell's famous novel Gone with the Wind.  Being interested in the Civil War, and especially the Confederacy, the story intrigues me and gives me plenty to ponder - the morality (or lack thereof) of the characters, how Scarlett can be so hateful and yet I feel sorry for her, what America would have been like had the Confederacy won the war... and so on and so on.

I read the book relatively recently.  My darling mother gave it to me as a "late Easter present", saying triumphantly, "Now this is one book that'll take you a while to finish!"  It did.  It took me four days to finish the novel, my dear reader.  For some reason, though, my mom didn't seem to consider that "a while."  Hm.
Anyway.   Since then, I've re-read it twice, and watched the film.  While I enjoyed the film, I didn't like it quite as much as the book.  Some things just weren't right, -  Scarlett's costumes for one, Ashely Wilkes' appearance for another  - yet it was quite enjoyable, though not as much fun as reading the story.

 Now, my dear imaginary readers, I have a lil' project in mind.  I am going to take all the major characters in the story, and devote a post to each of them.  I dunno if you non-existent people are too thrilled about that,  but bear with me.  I'll quite enjoy it, and if I do a good job you might too.  We shall see.



I have two other announcements as well.  
1) I'm going to be doing a weekly feature called Song Saturday.  Don't laugh - titles aren't my strong point. :p

2)  I'll be gone from the 19th - 29th, so that's ten days of no blogging - now that I'm making plans. Well, I'll live.  I shall be having fun anyway.

I must go now...goodnight!