When Scarlett is telling Rhett about her, she says “She was married three times and had any number of duels fought over her.” It’s after Rhett tells her that her grandparents will admire her and her grandchildren will think “What a rip Grandma must have been” and right before Scarlett vomits in front of him.
You’re right. Ellen’s father must have been husband number 3.
Something I’ve always wondered about is the Rhett/Ashley relationship. What did they really think of each other? What happened anytime they had to do something together? They seemed to do the whole surface get-along thing, but it’s still an interesting question to me.
I think Rhett liked him okay but didn’t respect him. He thought (not without reason) Ashley was weak and helpless and not particularly bright. Basically Ashley was everything he hated about most people in Charleston high society.
What Ashley thought of Rhett is harder to gauge since the book never really lets you into his head. Ashley is such a totally resigned character- he doesn’t act, he just reacts, and he’s so defeated, that he probably has an attraction-repulsion (not in the romantic sense) towards Rhett the way an ashmatic kid brother would react to an obnoxious successful cool older brother.
And of course Rhett is somewhere between jealous and disgusted at Scarlett’s love for Ashley. I think he realizes long before she does that she’s not really “in love” with him but in love with the notion of him and the time of her life he represents.
Early in the book and in the movie Gerald tells Scarlett that if Ashley had asked for Scarlett’s hand he’s not at all sure he’d have said yes. He thinks of him as an effete phlegmatic inbred aristocrat who’ll never do anything on his own that he doesn’t absolutely have to do.
Something I’ve wondered:
1- Do you think Melanie knows that Scarlett is in love with Ashley? (I don’t think she regards it as adulterous but I think she realizes the attraction to him.)
2- Do you think Ashley likes the fact that Scarlett is attracted to him?
I think this is what I have so much trouble picturing – what does Ashley think of Rhett? I like this idea of the brother relationship. Very interesting.
It’s hard to tell about #1 and I definitely think #2 is true.
Melanie appears to be one of those people that truly thinks the best of others. She might see Scarlett’s “love” as something more akin to the love of an older brother or cousin, but not quite the same as that either. Like a protector love. I don’t know how to explain it. I think she knows that Scarlett “loves” Ashley, but I think she puts it more on the level of how she would love a man in that position to her.
I think Ashley is all over the fact that this “hot young thing” is throwing herself at him every chance she gets. He has enough of the gentleman in him to try to resist, but he definitely likes it!
The interesting thing about Rhett and Ashley is that they do have some similarities. They both are smart enough to know that the South going into war is a foolish endeavor. They both know they’re going to lose, and that they’re going to lose spectacularly. But they react very differently to this knowledge. Ashley joins the war even though he hates it, because he sees it as the “honorable” thing to do. And Rhett scoffs at this idea of honor, and chooses to wisely save his own neck and make a buck in the meantime.
But in the end, even Rhett falls prey to “The Cause” and ends up leaving Scarlett stranded between the two armies in the Georgia countryside to join up.
As to whether Melly knows, it’s hard to say. I think that even if someone came up to her and said, “Melanie, Scarlett is after your man, and here are the photos to prove it” she still wouldn’ t believe, because she couldn’t and wouldn’t *allow *herself to believe. She loves them both too much to even consider the possibility. But has the idea ever flitted through her mind, even for a moment? I think it must have, especially during the whole India/Melanie feud.
And yes, Ashley likes Scarlett’s attention, and it’s one of the main reasons I despise him as a character. He had multiple chances to cut Scarlett off, to tell her “look, it ain’t happening, it’s never going to happen, I love my wife, I don’t love you, leave me alone.” If he had done that, Scarlett wouldn’t have held on to the dream of him all those years, and she would have had a much happier life. As it is, he just leads her on with all that “I love your spirit, but we can’t be together, alas!” crap.
A big budget musical version of GWTWopened in London last year, and then closed a few weeks later. Major money loser. It wasn’t the first attempt to make it into a stage show: Japan, England, and Australia have all had versions.
I’ve tried to think if there is any conceivable way it could work as a 3 hour or less musical. The book after all isn’t that much longer than Les Miserables. I’m sure somewhere there is a genius who puts Andrew Lloyd Webber/Tim Rice and Boublil/Schönberg and Rodgers/Hammerstein all to shame, but personally I just can’t think how it could be done as a single show without cutting and hacking some necessary limbs and appendages along the way.
However, and I don’t know if this has ever been done with a musical (i.e. not an operatic saga), if it were to be two or more plays ala Angels in America or The Kentucky Cycle it could possibly work. It would take a masterpiece of marketing, and I’m not sure if you’d want two plays running at once or appearing at the same theater on consecutive nights or how you’d work it exactly. The obvious split of course is the “as God is my witness” moment.
Would anybody here go see such a double musical? This assuming of course that it gets excellent buzz (which the London one didn’t and for exactly the reason you’d suspect- it tries to cram waaaaaaay too much into two and a half hours, including her older children and some of the County characters).
It’s been along time since I read the book, and I’ve seen the movie dozens of times.
Rhett and Ashley haven’t spoken since Rhett stole Ashley’s lunch money regularly in Junior High.
Melanie knows about Scarlet and Ashley in the film…“Look, here’s our Scarlet”, but she’s so damn sniveling nice that she pretends it’s not there.
Sorry, I can’t provide the exact quote, but during Scarlett and Rhett’s marriage, Ashley says something to Scarlett along the lines of, I can’t bear to think of a jerk like him putting his big hairy mitts on you, whereupon Scarlett goes home and tells Rhett she wants separate rooms. Ashley thinks Rhett is a cad, a ruffian, and Not a Gentleman.
I think that’s more proof of Ashley’s wishy-washiness. Scarlett finally realizes, after Melanie’s death, that Ashley just wanted to have sex (of course, the book never comes out and says it, but she tells Ashley that he just wants her like Rhett wants that Watling woman) (although I do think for Scarlett, sex = love, because while he was splitting rails he was tempted to “take her in the mud” but didn’t, and Scarlett thinks because he didn’t, he doesn’t love her, and Ashley says he could never make her understand) and that Rhett was the one who truly loved her.
I think Melanie never suspected a thing. Even on her deathbed, she asks Scarlett to look after Ashley, because he isn’t “practical.” I’m sure Ashley did a good job hiding his feelings for Scarlett from Melanie, and Scarlett, for all she claimed she “hated” Melanie, never does come out and tell her, “Hey, bitch, I love your husband, now get the hell out of the way.”
As an aside, thanks to this thread, I started re-reading GWTW last night for the umpteenth time. I’m 51 and read it for the first time when I was 12, and read it yearly for about 20 years. (My paperback copy is held together with cellophane tape, the original cellophane tape, not that transparent stuff that’s on the market now.)
I agree that Melanie neverever knew that Scarlett loved Ashley “that way.”
And maybe this time, Rhett won’t leave Scarlett.
I started reading it again over the weekend.
I used to read it every year from about 14 up until grad school, but since the years go by more quickly now, it’s probably been 5 years since the last time I looked at it. I last saw the movie sometime last fall when I was doing a Leslie Howard filmfest from my DVD collection (along with ‘Of Human Bondage’ and ‘The Scarlet Pimpernel’.)
So when are we having that trivia game?
My feeling on the ‘Does Melly know?’ question is that she doesn’t. Even if she had any idea that Scarlett had romantic feelings for Ashley, she simply wouldn’t be capable of believing that Ashley had corresponding feelings for Scarlett or that there had ever been even so much as a kiss between them.
I think Ashley absolutely loved the attention from Scarlett. I think he basked in it, and it gave him a real power trip to know that if he crooked his little finger, this head-strong, intelligent, beautiful woman who could really do anything she wanted to do through sheer force of will, would bend to him. For all that, though, I do believe that he truly loved Melanie. I think he was conflicted between lust and love, and just strong enough to stop himself, but not strong enough to put an end to the whole damned thing.
I read the book the first time when I was 9, and every two years after that. On my latest re-read I was struck by the real depth in the relationship between Scarlett and Melanie. It’s so easy to get caught up in her yearning for Ashley, and her passion/heat with Rhett, but the real solid relationship, the one that mattered, the one that actually meant something, was with Melanie. It wasn’t just because Melanie had was so good and pure that she never knew Scarlett’s true self–Melanie was a smart woman who understood the world. She was very pragmatic and had a deep well of strength inside of her. I think Scarlett truly, genuinely loved her. Her protests that she hated Melanie rang more and more hollow throughout the book.
I think it’s especially telling that Ashley really upset Scarlett several times, and not just because he wasn’t in love with her. When Ashley pissed her off the most was when he revealed himself to be incapable of something–he didn’t work hard enough, he didn’t listen to her, he didn’t run the mill the way she wanted. She wasn’t even really pleased with him at Tara. But she never had the same complaints about Melanie. Even when she was stuck in bed, she kept the children occupied so Scarlett could do what she had to do.
I know a lot of people don’t like Scarlett because she’s cold, selfish, flighty, a bitch, etc. But she’s always going to be my hero because who she loved, she loved fiercely. And even the people she didn’t particularly love, she would take care of if they were “her people.” She might have spit in the face of the Old Guard and scandalized all of Atlanta and made some mistakes, but she fought so hard–harder than anybody else–to hold her family together and keep Tara running. And I think that Melanie was one of the reasons she had the strength to do that.
It’s also easy to forget how young Scarlett is. At the end of the book she’s 28, which while not exactly a yout’ is still an age when many people haven’t figured themselves out. Add to this that she’s been a mother since she was 17, twice widowed (not that she loved either one of them) and was only 19 when she had to take over Tara and responsibility for all the people there. She’s been through things that would give most anybody something akin to PTSD not to mention the morally objectionable or outright wrong things that she absolutely has to table emotionally and “think about tomorrow” in interest of sanity.
Of all her sins the one I’d judge her hardest for is the first one- her marriage to Charles Hamilton. This was because it was completely avoidable; she married him for spite and greed (in the book she thinks about the fact that Charles is very rich and unlike the Tarletons and Calverts doesn’t have a lot of brothers he’ll have to split it with). Of course had he lived it’s possible they’d have grown to love each other, but meanwhile she didn’t particularly care.
Her other “sins” all have asterixes that either provide exenuating circumstances or exonerate her altogether. Her marriage to Frank, while built on lies and resulting in his unhappiness [and arguably his death], was not only necessary but also largely selfless: had she lost Tara she and Wade would have been able to move in with Aunt Pitty as they owned half her house, and Melanie, Ashley and Beau would have moved in, which would have filled the house to critical mass in and of itself, but what would have become of Gerald, Mammy, Dilcey, Prissy, and Careen? There’s no way they could all pile into an already crowded house in Atlanta. Also from the business point: even after the war Tara’s worth far far far more than the $300 in taxes owed, or at least it will be again, but there’s no way to borrow it; if Suellen married Frank she’d spend that money on clothes and furniture and perhaps an Atlanta house and in a few years the clothes and furniture would be worthless and the house worth nowhere near as much as 1000 acres of land on the river, so financially it makes sense.
The killing of the deserter was justifiable homicide. Had he lived the best case scenario would have involved theft of the tiny amount of valuables they had left, and more likely it would have involved rape and possibly murder. He needed killin’. The robbing of his body is spoils of war- not like they can track down who the gold and earrings belonged to.
Marrying Rhett- she was up front and honest. He knew she loved Ashley (with a bunch of footnotes) and that she was marrying him for his money, for the first time with 3 husbands she was completely honest about it.
I’ve known many people like Scarlett in terms of maturity. I even have a tad of it myself. It’s a “split maturity” (I’m sure there’s a word) that happens when kids/teenagers have to act far more mature than their years: in some ways at 17 they have a mental age of 55 and at the same time when they’re 28 they have a mental age of 15, because the usual maturation process has been warped.
So I agree: she’s a cold hearted bitch in some ways, but extremely admirable in others. She could easily have said “baby be damned” and either abandoned Melanie like Pitty, her closest blood relative, did or just plopped her in a carriage and hoped for the best, but she stayed with her. She really did ruin her hands picking cotton and certainly not for new hoop skirts for herself (the scene from the book that’s not in the movie that most makes you say “Noooo!” is when Yankees burn that cotton). Melanie and perhaps Ashley would have been far more noble in the eyes of the world (though Melanie did plan to kill the Yankee) but everyone would have starved, while for Scarlett the starvation of those she loved was no more acceptable an option than her own and possibly less so.
I think a part of the appeal of Scarlett is that all people can see her in the matriarch of their own family. My mother for example: she wasn’t always easy but she had an almost overdeveloped sense of duty and obligation even to people she didn’t particularly like (but had agreed to care for), and she had that strength and resilience of “don’t worry what’s socially acceptable if it needs doing”. We all want to think we have her strength and her perseverence, and if we don’t then we damned sure better have a Scarlett in our lives who does.
Melanies are wonderful to know but on those nights when you need somebody to wear dark clothes and meet you at the bridge with a meat saw, the Melanies ask lots of questions while the Scarlett’s just need to know which bridge you’re talking about.
I always admired Scarlett. She was tough, she adapted, to quote Grandma Fontaine, she was buckwheat, even if she didn’t do as good a job kicking the trash off her coattails as she should have done.
Melanie had a different sort of strength. She may have been physically weak, but she stood by her friends and family like a Mama Bear.
I have a hardback issue of the book from 1939 or so. It’s got a special type of font it in and that’s what I got used to reading whenever I read GWTW.
I guess Mitchell, if she had lived, would have been like Harper Lee…“I had my moment in the sun, there’s no way I’ll trump it, so I can justifiably rest on my laurels.”
I think every mother wants her daughter to be like Melanie.
At least my mother did; she wanted to name me Melanie after Melanie in the movie. My dad was like, no way, this baby has a big head and they’ll just call her something like “Melon-Head” at school.
When my mom took me to see a re-release of the movie when I was nine I came home and got one of my mom’s old party dresses and dressed up in it and decided I wanted be Scarlett. My mom was not exactly scandalized but she was like, You really don’t want to be like her, do you? She was spiteful and selfish.
I thought: Yeah, but she was cool. Always the center of attention and really pretty and tough.
Me, I thought Scarlett was great. Hah, so did my dad, I found out. Maybe that’s why he objected to the name Melanie for me.
Although I do kind of have a big head.
Sampiro, I absolutely agreed with everything you said up to this. After all, it was Melanie who fought side by side with Scarlett to put out the fire the Yankees set to Tara. It was Melanie who grabbed a sword and came out to kill the Yankee straggler, even though she could barely walk at the time. It was Melanie who, despite the fact that she hated confrontation and unpleasantness of any kind, stood staunchily by Scarlett when India made her accusations against Scarlett and Ashley. She told the town to choose sides–it was either her and Scarlett or India.
I believe if Melanie loved you, she’d be at that bridge, no questions asked, and might even bring some extra tools she thought might come in handy.
She was offered a fortune to write a sequel but turned it down. One book I read claimed Selznick commissioned a script with the working title “The Daughter of Scarlett O’Hara” (no idea if Ella was retconned or if he arranged a fourth marriage or a reconciliation with Rhett) as a Vivien Leigh vehicle but had to kill it when legal told him they did not have the rights to do a sequel and Mitchell would not grant consent.
I cannot find a cite, but I swear I didn’t make it up: supposedly Mitchell worked on another novel, not a sequel but a separate book altogether, with the working title *Ropa Carmaginia *(sometimes Europa). The main character was a mulatto- no idea if she was light enough to cross the color line. (For this reason in my sequel Scarlett’s mulatto ancestress, Solange’s mother or perhaps grandmother, will be named Europa… or perhaps Dakota Scout.)
Correction: Mitchell’s unfinished novel about miscegenation was entitled Ropa Carmagin and it was actually written before GWTW. The story is about the love affair between a mulatto man, a white woman, and their child who can pass for white. It was never published and the manuscript supposedly was destroyed, but it is rumored she had resurrected it shortly before she was killed (not saying there was a connection- seems to have been totally a case of a drunk driver [with a long history of DUIs]).