Scarlett O’Hara is one of literature and film’s most unforgettable heroines—brilliant, ruthless, selfish, and strangely admirable. In Gone with the Wind, Scarlett survives war, famine, and social collapse through sheer willpower and pragmatism, yet consistently fails at the one thing she claims to want most: love. Her fixation on Ashley Wilkes, her blindness to Rhett Butler, and her refusal to confront reality form a tragic study of romantic delusion and emotional immaturity that leaves nearly every character unhappy by the story’s end.

Though a logical woman who sees potential wherever it lies (in expanding a lumber business, in using criminals for labor instead of paying wages, etc. ), Scarlett has a raging blind spot for Ashley. She lost him to a girl she cannot stand, Melanie. The most sought-after belle around before the war, Scarlett even ate on the ground at the barbeque, because “a girl hasn’t got but two sides to her at a table,” meaning if she isn’t at one, she can have a dozen beaus at her beck and call.

It annoyed the hell out of her that Ashley wasn’t among them. Ashley, a diehard romantic, an idealist, and a deep melancholic, is as far from Scarlett as a man can get. He is all doe-eyed poetry and sentiment, where she is all business and ambition. As Rhett says, Ashley is a coward, because he can’t bring himself to be faithful to his wife mentally (while he lusts after Scarlett), but won’t allow himself to cheat on her physically. The unhappy pair wind up wasting their mental energies on each other while being involved with other people. Ashley loves Melanie, but lusts after Scarlett, a woman he idolizes as a feminine ideal—a charming extroverted woman who can wrap men around her little finger. “You have all their hearts,” tells her. “You don’t need mine, though you’ve always had it.”  

The story illustrates how neither person sees the reality of their ‘ideal.’ Ashley isn’t willing to face the terrible truth about Scarlett, that she is selfish and callous, willing to run away from everyone who needs her to secure her own happiness. Scarlett has never seen Ashley for his real self, either. She idolizes him in her mind as more virtuous than he is, with purer and less selfish motives than hers… when if she took off her blinders, she would consider him weak and insipid. His emotional decisions chafe against her pragmatism. He mopes and cries and sulks and longs and doesn’t live in the real world, as she comes to find out at the end, when he dissolves into ‘nothing’ without his wife. It’s not until she can have him, and he will become ‘real’ to her, that Scarlett realizes she doesn’t want him anymore, and by then… it’s too late. Rhett has left.

Rhett has wanted Scarlett from the moment he saw her, in the Biblical sense. He knows that unscrupulous as she is, she would never consider an affair with him that would ruin her reputation, so he marries her just to get the chance to bed her. He adores her, gives her everything she wants, and delights in her, but feels continual frustration that she persists in ignoring him in favor of her dream of Ashley. She attempts to bar him from her room for a while so she can live in chaste solitary with Ashley, who cannot touch his wife for fear she might die with her next pregnancy.

When he carries her off to ravish her in the middle of the night, in a drunken rage, he feels such embarrassment the next morning that his shame causes Scarlett to turn cold. She wanted to welcome him in delight, since he made her truly happy… and instead, they wind up quarreling, and separated. Their prospective joyful reunion is ruined when Scarlett treats him poorly after finding out she’s pregnant. He dodges her slap, and she miscarries the child after a terrible fall down the stairs. Another chance missed. She only wants him when he’s decided to leave, and he tells her, “I don’t give a damn,” when she begs him to stay and asks what she will do with her life.

Gone with the Wind is many things. An epic. A controversial classic. An Oscar-award winning film. A story about selfish people who wind up alone. Ashley loses Melanie in childbirth because they wanted each other sexually. He loses Scarlett when she realizes he isn’t who she thought he was and that he never truly loved her. Rhett loses Scarlett to daydreams, and she loses Rhett because he grows tired of waiting for her to realize she loves him. His love turns cold, just as hers sparks. They are an unhappy circle of people caught up in miseries of their own making.

Written for The Unhappy Valentines Blog-A-Thon.

About the Author: Charity Bishop writes historical fiction, historical fantasy, and suspense novels that explores the darkness in human hearts, and the light that refuses to be extinguished. Discover her books.