Paradoxically, hope is also Scarlett’s Achilles heel. “Don’t think you can lay down the load, ever,” says Grandma. And when the wind has passed, it springs up, almost as straight and strong as before.”īut never – never – can Scarlett pause in this battle for survival. But ripe buckwheat’s got sap and it bends. When a storm comes along it flattens ripe wheat because it’s dry and can’t bend with the wind. “We bow to the inevitable,” she tells Scarlett. At one of the lowest points, Scarlett’s neighbour, the elderly Grandma Fontaine, insists that Scarlett continues to hope. Mitchell carefully analyses the nature of human resilience, and holds up hopefulness as the critical tool for getting through the worst times. “But there’s more in empire wrecking.” This is hope, but not hope for all. “There’s good money in empire building,” Rhett notes. Instead, it is the carpetbaggers and the speculators who thrive in the collapse of the south the people who seize their moment, abandoning the past for the possibilities of the future. It is not the “good” characters who renew themselves from the disintegration of a civilisation as Rhett Butler, Scarlett’s eternal sparring partner, points out: “The nicest people in town are starving.” Reading this novel in 2016, it is notable which characters survive and prosper in the new world. Everything beyond her circle is essentially irrelevant. She has a one-track mind, to the point of selfishness – she barely manages to fake interest in “the Cause”, the southern US states’ doomed stand against the Yankees.
Scarlett maintains this headstrong hopefulness as society collapses around her.
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