Some thoughts about Scarlett O’Hara, in whose defense I have wanted to write something, somewhere, for some time. Scarlett was 17 years old at the beginning of Gone With the Wind, and yet this bit of female fluff may have been the only person in the novel to actually object to the war–supposedly because she missed the fun she used to have. She had enough determination to escape from the burning city of Atlanta with a woman who had just given birth. Scarlett, usually portrayed as a heartless hussy, took pity on a thirsty wounded soldier and stayed to help nurse the wounded and the dying. She held on to her family’s farm through hard work–her own, and whatever she could get out of her unwilling sisters. She shot a marauding enemy soldier, and figured out how to bury him so he wouldn’t be found. She ran a successful business, buried two husbands, her parents, and one of her children. All this by the time she was twenty-five–not forgetting that she could make a good-looking dress out of the curtains. And yet Scarlett remains in the popular imagination a useless belle of the ball–a silly, vain little hussy, albeit with a bit of spunk. What would a woman have to do to be a person? If the nearly universally known and remembered heroine of America’s most popular novel and movie can’t do any better than this, how can a real woman?
Suggestion--read the book or watch the movie--then decide who you think Scarlett is.
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