Gone with the Wind
Margaret Mitchell (1936)
“A thousand-page monument to one woman's refusal to be destroyed -- and a deeply uncomfortable window into how America romanticized its own worst history.”
Character Analysis
Selfish, magnetic, indestructible. Scarlett survives everything -- war, starvation, widowhood, social exile -- through sheer refusal to accept defeat. Her fatal flaw is not selfishness but blindness: she cannot distinguish between what she wants and what she needs, between the fantasy of Ashley and the reality of Rhett. She is the novel's argument that survival and morality are separate skills, and that possessing one does not guarantee the other.
Proper Southern speech in public that slips into blunt directness in private. Internal monologue is modern, impatient, transactional. Her language becomes coarser as the novel progresses -- reflecting her transformation from belle to businesswoman.