The time is 1861, and the action is centered around Atlanta Georgia, and the
surrounding area. It begins at Tara, the O’Hara plantation. Scarlett quickly
moves to Atlanta, soon after her late husband’s death. she returns to Tara,
though, during the burning of Atlanta by the Yankees. Once she has made Tara
successful again, and she needs money for the house, she gets Frank Kennedy to
marry her. So she moves back to Atlanta. Once Frank is killed, Scarlett marries
Rhett, and the two of them build a huge house outside of the city. Characters
Scarlett O’Hara-Hamilton-Kennedy-Butler The main character of the book,
Scarlett was very beautiful, and very stubborn. With her “magnolia white
skin” and the “smallest waist in 3 counties”, she was somewhat
irresistible to men. She used this to her advantage in every way she could. It
did get her places, but where it didn’t, she had to resort to her wits, and
stubborn disposition. she decides that she loves Ashley Wilkes, and vows that
she will get him to say that he loves her back. This presents her first problem.
To solve this problem, or to get back at Ashley for not marring her, she gets
Charles Hamilton to marry her, instead. That was a short lived marriage, because
he was killed by pneumonia at a camp in war. He did give Scarlett a baby, whom
she named Wade Hamilton. She was very distraught after this, because it made her
realize that Ashley might die. She was sent to her sister in law, Melanie
Wilkes, who was Charles’s sitter, and Ashley’s wife. They lived with their
aunt Pittypat in Atlanta, until the Yankees came to the city and burned it. Then
Scarlett and the girls fled to Tara, where Scarlett felt safe. There, she vowed
to get the plantation running again, even if it met killing the Yankee who tried
to rob the house. She did get Ashley to proclaim his love for her, but never any
more than that. She married Frank Kennedy for his money when the plantation
needed money for taxes. They were married until Scarlett, ever the business
woman, was out for a drive in the country and got robbed. This demanded action
from Frank, and he was shot trying to get his revenge. At his funeral, Rhett
asked Scarlett to marry him. She of course said yes, and they lived together for
quite a while in their huge house on the outskirts of Atlanta. They had a child,
whom they named bonnie, to add to Scarlett’s brood of 2 from her previous
marriages. But tragically, Bonnie was killed when she fell from her horse. This
caused problems between Scarlett and Rhett, and they ended up leaving each
other. Scarlett realizes, to late, that she did in fact love Rhett, and tries to
get him back, but he is to far gone. She vows at the end of the book to get him
back, saying that after all, tomorrow is another day. Rhett Butler Rhett is a
very scandalous man. he doesn’t care what anybody says about him, and
doesn’t think that anybody else should care, ether. He meets Scarlett at the
Wilkes’s ball at the beginning of the book, and vows to have her someday. He
becomes active in her life in Atlanta, after Charles’s death. He was not
received in his hometown of Charleston, where he was accused of rape. He and
Scarlett went around the bush all the time, and he was the only man that her
charms would now work on. He saw through them. Rhett exemplifies a strange
mixture of good and bad in a man. He is good in that he loves Scarlett, and will
do just about anything for her, but he is bad in that he goes to whore houses,
and stuff like that. When he and Scarlett get married, he is very jealous of her
devotion to Ashley. but this subdues when Scarlett has Bonnie, whom he loved
very much. When she died, he was heartbroken. I do believe that he loved his
child more than his wife. He realized this, too, and broke off his relationship
with Scarlett for ever, he says. thus the end of the book. Ashley Wilkes Ashley
was a very tragic character. He married his cousin, Melanie Hamilton, much to
Scarlett’s dismay. But they married anyway, and when Ashley came home to
Atlanta for Christmas, Melly ended up pregnant. He was a thoughtful, scholarly
man. A dreamer, yes. A man inclined to retreat from unpleasant realities,
especially realities that appear insoluble. But also a man with fire in his
spirit, even if only a flicker, and steel in his backbone when necessary. Ashley
is braver than the other young bucks of "The Troop". They rush off to
war expecting a Summertime lark of high adventure, but Ashley goes knowing the
war can only mean death and misery. Even the impetuous hotheads respect his
judgment and abilities and elect him Captain. And Ashley's "hot anger"
flares fast enough when Grandpa Merriwether insults him for rationally
expounding a case for ratifying the 15th Amendment. Was Ashley a defeated man,
broken by the war? Yes, but the war was not some little thing, easily shrugged
off. It took a catastrophe of horrific and devastating magnitude to bring him
down. Could he have made a new life of his own without Scarlett’s help? Yes,
he arranged the offer of the banking position in New York by himself. Not as
good as what Scarlett provided for him in Atlanta, but his own doing. Was he a
good husband, a good man for a woman? Absolutely. Melanie knew him all her life,
understood him and married him willingly. We can trust Melanie on this point.
The fact that she loved him deeply is as fine a recommendation as he could have
had. Tragic, yes. Pathetic, no. Defeated, yes, but still a good man. Not a man
who could win a bitter war or build a new South on the ruins of the old. But
still, if the South had more like him, more voices of sense and reason, it
wouldn't had seceded in the first place. And the whole tragedy of war and
destruction could have been avoided. That's the real Ashley. Melanie
Hamilton-Wilkes Melanie Hamilton married Ashley Wilkes early on in the book. In
fact, the first problem that Scarlett has in the book is trying to coax Ashley
away from Melly. Melly was one of my favorite character. No other book has had a
person who was so good, so pure, yet so real. She was braver than Scarlett,
really, for she saw the world as it was and yet remained the same. Scarlett
lived in a world of her own and was warped by things that happened to her. In
the beginning, she and her brother, Charles, (who later became Scarlett’s
first husband, thus linking the two characters) came for a visit from Atlanta.
The Wilkes threw a barbecue to announce the engagement of Ashley, their oldest
son, to Melly, his cousin. "The Wilkes' always marry their cousins",
someone commented, (I can never remember if it was Brent or Stuart Tarlton).
When Ashley went off to war, she and Scarlett lived with Aunt Pittypat in
Atlanta. It is in that house that she gives birth to her son, Beau. Melanie had
a heart shaped face, with a long widow's peak. She was not beautiful, but had
more inner beauty than any other character. She was thin and shapeless, and
looked like a child masquerading in her mother's hoopskirts. Melanie was forced
to let her husband go to war, and she did everything she could for the Cause to
help him. She shared his views and opinions, and was proud of him. She was
gentle and sweet, and good with children. It was she who taught Scarlett’s
children, Wade and Ella, how to love and be loved, for Scarlett was not a good
mother to them. She became the center of the community during Reconstruction,
and she was blindly devoted to Scarlett. Perhaps she could see Scarlett’s good
qualities and loved her for them. She would defend her until her last breath.
The servants I chose to use the servants as my last character, because they were
always so devoted to the families that they belonged to before the war. They
were probably some of my favorite characters, because they gave me a different
view of slavery. I had always thought about it as the awful thing that black
people had to go through, the whippings, the cruelty that occurred that is so
comely taught to us. But these slaves made it look different. They loved their
owners, and would give their lives for them. Take Big Sam, Tara’s head field
hand. When Scarlett was attacked by the Yankee and ‘nigger’ outside of
Atlanta before frank died, it was Sam who saved her, Sam who took her home. He
could have been killed, and was running from the law because he killed a man,
but he loved the O’Hara family for being so good to him enough to save
Scarlett. Or you could look at Mammy. She was Ellen’s mammy, first, and when
Ellen married Gerald, she came with. Mammy brought up the girls, and was always
someone to talk to, a strong post in the storm to hold on to. It was mammy who
Scarlett longed to run to when she was upset, after her mother died. Mammy and
Tara, that is. There were Pork, and Dicley. Pork was Gerald’s main man, whom
he won in a poker game, when he won Tara. Pork was always there for Gerald, and
was very dedicated to the family. After the war, during the Reconstruction, he
stole and pillaged for them, often at a risk to his own life. His wife, Dicley,
was the same way. When Scarlett and Melly came home to Tara after the fire, it
was Dicley who saved Melly’s baby with her milk. All in all, I took these and
other examples as proof that not all slaves were treated wrongly. That was very
comforting to me. Plot Scarlett O’Hara has a bunch of problems, some of which
she brings on herself, others that she has no control over, but always seems to
make them worse. She gets off to a great start at the beginning of the book,
with her display in the parlor of the Wilkes’s house when she proclaimed her
love for the engaged Ashley. It was here that Rhett met her, and here when Rhett
decided to have her eventually. Out of spite of Ashley, Scarlett gets Charles
Hamilton to marry her very quickly. Scarlett ends up pregnant very quickly, and
then Charles dies in the war. Scarlett ends up in Atlanta living with
Charles’s wife, Melly, and his aunt Pittypat. She lives there until the
burning of Atlanta, and the time in-between these she becomes very scandalous.
She allows Rhett to court her, even though she is supposed to be in mourning of
her late husband. When Atlanta burns, Scarlett, Melly, the children, and Prissy
all travel back to Tara. Scarlett vows to make the plantation run again, and
succeeds. But then it comes time for taxes, and she doesn’t have enough money
for them. So, she decided that the only solution to her problem is to marry
Frank Kennedy. She does this, and pays off the tax dept. She becomes a business
woman, and while riding outside of Atlanta, alone, she is stopped and a Yankee
and a ‘nigger’ attempt to rape her and steal her money. After this incident,
Frank is ‘forced’ to get revenge, but gets killed in the mean time. At his
funeral, Rhett proposes to Scarlett. This begins a whirl wind marriage. After
many problems with each other, including Rhett accidentally pushing Scarlett
down the stairs of their huge home and causing her a miscarriage. At the end of
the book, Rhett pushes Scarlett away, and she runs back to Tara again, with the
quote, “I’ll think about it all tomorrow, at Tara. I can stand it then.
Tomorrow, I’ll think of some way to get him back. After all, tomorrow is
another day.” Theme This book is full of symbolism. One of the biggest symbols
is the earth, or Tara. I believe that the main theme of this book is that the
earth is constant, the earth will always be there, that when all else is gone,
you can still go on with the earth. Scarlett is tightly tied to Tara, because
her father always said that it was the earth that made the land beautiful, that
the earth was the most important part of life on the plantation. Whenever
something bad happens to Scarlett, she runs to Tara where she will feel safe.
This is proven in the quote from Scarlett at the end of the story. I also think
that another big theme is that if you are determined to succeed, you will. I
think that Scarlett’s determination in everything she did is what caused her
to thrive. She was very successful in anything she set her mind to. She got
Ashley to tell her that he loved her. She got the plantation back on it’s
feet. She got Frank Kennedy to marry her, and pay off the debt at Tara. She got
Charles to marry her. She got her business running, and very well at that. She
got Rhett to love her, and marry her. I took this as a clue that anything can be
achieved, good or bad, if you stick your mind to it. That was a very important
message, in my opinion. Opinion This has to be one of my favorite books of all
time. I read it once when I was in 7th grade. I loved it then, but I realize now
that I never really understood anything in it. I think I modeled myself after
the good parts of Scarlett back then. In 7th grade, this installed in me a
confidence that I could do whatever I wanted to. When I read it again this year,
it not only reaffirmed that confidence, it added to it. I realized that there
was more to this book than just the love story. There was much more to it. I
realized that you have to take the good with the bad. You have to deal with the
bad things that come along, and try to make the best of them. I think that
Scarlett was a little lacking in this area, because she always seemed to make
bad situations worse before she accidentally made them better. I admire the
author, Ms. Mitchell, for her brilliance. This was definitely an awesome book.
Author’s biography American author of the enormously popular novel GONE WITH
WIND (1936), story about American Civil War and Reconstruction as seen from the
Southern point of view. The book was adapted to highly popular film in 1939,
starring Clark Gable and Vivian Leigh. At the novel's opening in 1861, Scarlett
O'Hara is sixteen-year-old girl. In the twelve year span of the story she
experiences Secession, Civil War, Reconstruction, as well as romance, love,
marriage, and motherhood. Margaret Mitchell was born in Atlanta. Her father was
a prominent lawyer, president of the Atlanta Historical Society and mother a
suffragist. Mitchell graduated from the local Washington Seminary and started in
1918 to study medicine at Smith College. In her youth Mitchell adopted her
mother's feminist leanings which clashed with her father's conservatism - but
she lived fully the wild times of the Jazz age and wrote about them in
nonfiction. When Mitchell's mother died in 1919 she returned to home to keep
house for her father and brother. In 1922 she married Berrien Kinnard Upshaw.
The disastrous marriage was climaxed by spousal rape and was annulled 1924.
Mitchell started her career as a journalist in 1922 under the name Peggy
Mitchell, writing for the Atlanta Journal. Four years later she resigned after
an ankle injury. Her second husband, John Robert Marsh, an advertising manager,
encouraged Mitchell in her writing aspirations. From 1926 to 1929 she wrote Gone
With the Wind, dressing in boys' trousers while writing and combining stories of
Civil War heard in childhood to historical material. The outcome, a thousand
page the novel was not published until 1935 when she first shoved it to an
editor. The work broke sales records and was awarded in 1937 the Pulitzer Prize.
Although Gone with the Wind brought Mitchell fame and tremendous fortune, it
seems to have brought little joy. Hounded by the press and public, the author
and her husband lived modestly and traveled rarely. Also questions about the
book's literary status, melodrama and racism led to critical neglect which
continued well in the 1960s. During World War II Mitchell was volunteer selling
war bonds and volunteer for the American Red Cross in the 1940s. She was named
honorary citizen of Vimoutiers, France, in 1949, for helping the city obtain
American aid after WW II. Mitchell died in Atlanta on August 16, 1949 - she was
accidentally struck by a speeding car. Authorized sequel for Gone with the Wind,
entitled Scarlett and written by Alexandra Ripley, appeared in 1992. In the
story Scarlett journeys to Ireland with her children and meets again Rhett
Butler. LOST LAYSEN, a lost novella by Mitchell, written when she was 16, and
given to her close friend, was published in 1995. The romantic story was set on
a South Pacific island.