Accepting the novel as canon, and NOT the film, let’s see… Scarlett’s got the store she inherited from her second husband Frank Kennedy, a lumber business, and a huge home in Atlanta. And she’s got her son Wade Hampton Hamilton and her daughter Ella Lorena Kennedy. Without Rhett and Melanie, and considering that incident that ended up with Scarlett wearing that red dress to that party of Melanie and Ashley, Scarlett is pretty much an outcast to proper society in Atlanta. India Wilkes will make certain of that and she’ll get her brother Ashley and his son Beau. So all Scarlett has is business interests in Atlanta. If she’s smart, she’ll hire competent management for them. If she’s not, she’ll sell them. Don’t know about the house. I can’t imagine she’d want to live there as an outcast alone except for staff but don’t know who could afford to buy it other than carpetbaggers. She’s too shortsighted to donate it as, I don’t know, a home for war orphans or a rest/nursing home for veterans.
She’ll go to Tara to recoup and plan getting Rhett back, but Rhett’s too wise to her ways to not spot any manipulations a mile off. Dunno if he’ll divorce her, or even ever go to see her at Tara. He was fond of Wade, but I don’t know if that’s enough for him to let himself get within eyesight of her. I can see if Scarlett ships Wade off to school, like in Charleston, Rhett moving there to be a Dutch Uncle to the lad.
I need to read the novel again.
Mrs. Plant (v.2.0) swiped the contemporary film edition that my Grandmother gave me.
Mrs. Plant (v.2.0), aka my ex, a Yankee, liked the novel so much that she collected various editions, including mine. :dubious:
I think she tried, and perhaps at some point they were able to have a friendly relationship, but it was over (though not likely), but it was over. He went back to Charleston, if she wouldn’t leave him alone there he went to Europe, but he never reconciled with her.
She had money, so she almost certainly found somebody else to marry her, but Rhett replaced Ashley as “the one who got away”. Ashley meanwhile moved to New York and married a local rich widow.
Rhett left Scarlett in 1873. Do you think that their fortunes survived the Panic that year? Or that Rhett was in Charleston for the earthquake in the 1880s? Did Scarlett ever go hungry again?
So no one thinks Scarlett got knocked up by Rhett after a near-death experience and moved to Ireland to live with her dirt poor cousins and her daughter, Cat, until a freshly widowed Rhett came looking for her just in time to save her from the peasants who thought she was colluding with the English and had betrayed her cousin the gun smuggling priest?
Still not the worst sequel-by-another-author that I’ve ever read.
If Bonnie hadn’t died, or if Scarlett hadn’t miscarried, then yeah, she would’ve got him back. She’s finally grown up enough that she’s capable of a proper loving relationship, and that would’ve come through in her relationship with the kid - and since Rhett would never have walked out on his own child, he would have been around to see how she’d matured into the person he’d always hoped she would. I think gradually that would have won him over.
Without that link, though (and I think it’s very deliberate how Mitchell shows that every real link between them has been broken)…no. Yes, Scarlett’s matured, but there’s no outlet for that new capability for actual love - and even if there were, Rhett wouldn’t be around to see it. I think he stays as far from her as he can.
I’m kind of ashamed to admit it, but I read the sequel when it came out (I was about 16) and I thought it was a pretty good bodice-ripper, if nothing else. I remember thinking if the story continued from the Charleston jaunt without the Ireland diversion it could have been pretty plausible. I mean, if I were Scarlett, going to visit my inlaws to play the long-suffering, dutiful wife would be the way to go. Since divorce was uncommon in that time and place, Rhett would either see that Scarlett was capable of growing up and forgive her, or at least they would end up in some sort of an amicable arrangement. He was certainly no better behaved than she, on balance. I mean, he has the freedom to run off for months or get drunk with hookers every time life doesn’t go his way, but Scarlett is supposed to mope around and make doilies? Besides, IIRC, when she was caught with Ashley, she had long since stopped pursuing him.
Now the “prequel,” about Rhett’s origins…that one I’ve never been able to finish.
Rhett Butler is a stalker. He flat out tells Scarlett “I thought I could make you love me.” He only wants what he can’t have. Scarlett was a challenge and, when Rhett realized he couldn’t make her love him, he gave up.
Neither of them knows anything about romantic love.
I think Melanie said she was grateful Scarlett saved her from having to live among the Yankees; I also don’t remember anything about “pickaninnies.”
Scarlett almost became capable of adult love of Rhett when they were on their honeymoon in New Orleans. He indulged her and showered her with everything that the war years had deprived her of. She loved their “long amusing talks” in bed in the dark by the glow of his cigar. If only she could have sustained this when they returned to real life! But she reverted to Spoiled Brat™ and took up pining after Ashley again. What a dimwit. When I was young and impressionable I thought she was terrific but now that I’m old and crotchety, she pisses me off.
(This is all book by the way. I’ve read the book way more than I’ve seen the movie.)
Yeah, I’m perfectly happy to regard Alexandra Ripley’s Scarlett as the last word on the subject, if only because I’m grateful to that book for getting me through a long international flight back in 1995.
I didn’t think it was a particularly good book, but it got the panoramic-sweep aspect right. If we’re talking about Scarlett O’Hara I don’t want an intensive Woolfian scrutiny of the seismic impacts of mundane routine on her inner life of memory, I want social upheavals and massive parties and lace-trimmed accessories and firearms and anarchy and desserts and disasters.
I think Rhett has thrown in the towel. Love dies. Whatever they had on either side, was it even love? or obsession? Obsession can die, too… I think Rhett left for Charleston, I think he has a son there and decided he didn’t want to be just a check-writing cipher living out of town…Ashley and Beau, his son, are free to go to New York. There are plenty of opportunities there for an educated man, after the war… Scarlett goes to live at Tara. Mammy is failing in health. Scarlett’s daughter Ella is possibly a little retarded, maybe from Scarlett getting poor nutrition (or drinking too much alcohol) while carrying her. Maybe Scarlett stays at Tara and does the best she can to bring up Wade to take over her businesses, and try to get Ella married off eventually. Maybe she pursues Rhett, but I think on his end it’s over. (this is all from what I gleaned from the book).
In New York, sure. He had connections there and already had a job offer when Scarlett conned Melanie into making him stay and continue working at the lumber business.
Socially, Scarlett’s bridges were burned beyond repair in Atlanta. In Tara, if she carefully spread some of her money around, and exercised a LOT of charm and tact among the older women, she could have become the Grand Dame of local society. That is if her sister Suellen can restrain herself from punching the crap out of Scarlett at every social gathering they attend.
No. Because the book ended. If Scarlett was going to get Rhett back it would have been part of the novel. But when the novel ends, the story is finished.
So Rhett walked out and is never coming back. But Scarlett will never accept this and will spend the rest of her life trying to get him back.
No. She only wants what she can’t have. As soon as she can have Ashley, she doesn’t want him. Rhett says he thought he could make her love him, but he, too, only wants what he can’t have. GWTW is not a romance, it’s a tragedy. Nobody gets what they want, everybody dies.
Scarlett, by the way, should have been a man; she’s not fit to be a woman in that society. She’s too smart and she doesn’t accept her place and her role. She is calculating and manipulative but doesn’t want to use that the way women in that time did and take that small female role. That role is never going to make her happy. She is in a better position than her slaves but not by much.
