Southern economics was based on large agricultural plantations that depended on slaves as the workforces, and Lincoln's policies, which the South considered were against states' rights, had set the stage of destruction for the Southern elite. Thus, the South was willing to fight for their rights and their culture. Their pride ultimately became their downfall, the stand they took for basic principles went too far and far too long.
During the war, traits that Scarlett had been told to repress becomes her salvation, as her masculine qualities emerge. Early in the novel, she had said that she wished she was a man, and by the war's end, "her reactions were all masculine" (Mitchell pp). Faust notes that Mitchell "chooses to make the gradual emergence of her stereotypically masculine traits a significant aspect of Scarlett's growth and maturation" (Faust pp). Faust writes, "When Atlanta burns, Scarlett becomes first a retreating general and then, after she arrives at Tara, her family's patriarch and protector - even shooting a Yankee marauder in their defense" (Faust pp).
The female characters repress their own desires and aspirations, for "it was a man's world...the man roared like a bull when a splinter was in his finger, and the woman muffled the moans of childbirth lest she disturb him" (Mitchell pp).
Mitchell writes that the Old South, was a "happy feminine conspiracy" in which women flatter men in order to be well treated themselves (Mitchell pp). Faust notes that "Scarlett's desires, her natural tendencies towards androgyny, directly confront and challenge the deceptions that have rested at the heart of the civilization of the Old South " (Faust pp). Thus the Scarlett who emerges from the ashes of the war manages...
Mitchell writes that no slave had ever been sold from Tara and only one had been whipped and that was because he neglected a horse, and moreover that Scarlett's father had even purchased unneeded slaved in order to keep husbands, wives and families living together (Faust pp).
Mitchell presents the Civil War not only from a female point-of-view but from the "particular perspective of a woman of the early twentieth century," who had lost her fiance during World War I and "found herself experiencing in war's aftermath an upheaval in female roles and gender expectations" (Faust pp). She drew on her childhood memories of listening to family members tell stories of the conflict, and projected her personal sense of war's futility and her own crisis of female independence onto her nineteenth-century heroine (Faust pp). As a divorcee and an aspiring journalist and career woman, Mitchell herself embodied the departure from traditional female behavior that shaped the lives of so many young women in the 1920's (Faust pp). Her heroine never truly loved another human being, but rather projected her energies into maintaining her lifestyle.
Works Cited
Faust, Drew Gilpin. 1999. Clutching the Chains That Bind: Gone with the Wind critique. Southern Cultures. March 22. Retrieved October 27, 2005 from HighBeam Research Library Web site.
Mitchell, Margaret. Gone With the Wind. A Project Gutenberg of Australia eBook.
Retrieved October 27, 2005 at http://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks02/0200161.txt
