Notes on Gone with the Wind (4)

Part 1 Part 2 Part 3

I won’t comment on anything that is beyond this week’s mark, page 616. So far I still cannot say I cotton up to Scarlett, who although has helped her family survive Civil War, is quite a capricious personality. To the eyes of people she makes money in a very unladylike, unsavory manner and therefore she meets cold shoulders everywhere she goes. Out of monetary convenience she marries Frank Kennedy who would help pay taxes for Tara and buy the sawmill. I give her credit for being so engrossed with the job of making Tata produce

What about Melanie? She doesn’t do much nor does she complain about the troubles of the war. In a way, Melanie is able both to appreciate the pragmatism of Scarlett O’Hara in the wake of the war and to appreciate the tenuous, absolutist hold her husband, Ashley Wilkes, keeps on the South’s chivalric code of honor. Part Four is a transition in regard to shedding light on the Ashley Wilkes that Scarlett does not know before.

‘It’s a curse—this not wanting to look on naked realities. Until the war, life was never more real to me than a shadow show on a curtain. And I preferred it so. I do not like the outlines of things to be too sharp. I like them gently blurred, a little hazy.’ [497]

‘I had sheltered myself from people all my life, I had carefully selected my few friends. But the war taught me I had created a world of my own with dream people in it. I taught me what people really are, but it didn’t teach me how to live with them. And I’m afraid I’ll never learn.’ [498]

‘My little inner world was gone, invaded by people whose thoughts were not my thoughts, whose actions were as alien as a Hottentot’s. They’d tramped through my world with slimy feet and there was no place left where I could take refuge when things became too bad to stand.’ [499]

I would not go as far to call Ashley Wilkes a coward. Ashley Wilkes is the foil to Rhett’s dark, realistic opportunism. He might live in a wrong time in which his talents and predilection don’t do him any good: he excels at hunting and riding, takes pleasure in the arts. Scarlett’s idealization of Ashley slowly fades as time goes on, after the end of Civil War, that she has outdone most the men in bravery and effort to sustain and subsist, she finally realizes that the Ashley she loves is not a real man but a man embellished and adorned by her imagination.

Whereas Rhett and Scarlett survive by sacrificing their commitment to tradition, Ashley cannot or will not allow himself to thrive in a changed society. He sinks even lower as he sacrifices his honor—the only thing he still values in himself—by accepting charity from Scarlett in the form of a share in her mill.

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