用女性主义批评方法解读《飘》

文学批评课程论文

论文题目：The Interpretation of \"Gone with the wind\"——

with Feminist Approaches 用女性主义批评方法解读《飘》

学生姓名: 杜雅妮 学 号:709202220 班 级:英语09-2

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The Interpretation of \"Gone with the wind\"——with

Feminist Approaches

Abstract

Gone with the Wind as only work of American female writer Margaret Mitchell first published in 1936 and won the Pulitzer prize in literature in 1937. It’s not only a successful commercial novel but also a classic. Although it’s popular but it never get any attention from literary critics. In the history of literature Gone with the Wind does not gain much reputation, people consider it as a romantic love story and a best seller. Actually Gone with the Wind is a valuable work to be analyzed with feminist approaches. Here I’d like to analyze Gone with the Wind into 3 parts. The first part will be a brief introduction of the writer Margaret Mitchell. The second part will introduction of feminist approaches. The third part I will analyze Gone with the Wind with feminist approaches. And for the last part we will get the conclusion that Gone with the Wind not only a book for entertainment but also a masterpiece to chew.

Key words: Feminist Approaches Gone with the Wind Margaret Mitchell

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用女性主义批评方法解读《飘》

内容摘要

《飘》是美国女作家玛格利特米切尔的唯一一部作品，出版于1936年，1937年获得普利策文学奖。这不仅仅是一部成功商业小说，也是一部经典名著。尽管这是一部深受欢迎的成功小说但是却从未得到文学评论的重视。在世界文学史上，《飘》的文学地位并不高。在人们看来，这不过是一部浪漫的爱情故事、一本成功的畅销小说而已。实际上《飘》是一部值得用女性主义批评方法去解读的大师之作。在这里我将用三部分来用女性主义批评方法分析《飘》。第一部分将会是一个简短的关于作者玛格利特米切尔的简介。第二部分是介绍女性主义批评方法。第三部分是利用女性主义批评方法去解析《飘》。第四部分我们会得到论证，《飘》不光是一部供人消遣娱乐的畅销书，也是一部值得好好品读的大师作品。

关键词：女性主义批评方法 飘 玛格利特米切尔

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Contents

1. Introduction------------------------------------------------------------------------ 1.1 Introduction of Margaret Mitchell-------------------------------------------- 1.2 Introduction of Gone with the Wind------------------------------------------ 2. The Theoretical Foundation----------------------------------------------------- 2.1 Feminist Approaches----------------------------------------------------------- 3. Feminist Analyze of Gone with the Wind-------------------------------------- 3.1 Scarlett O’Hara------------------------------------------------------------------ 4. Conclusion---------------------------------------------------------------------------

Introduction

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Gone with the Wind, first published in 1936, is a romance novel written by Margaret Mitchell, who received the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for the book in 1937. The story is set in Clayton County, Georgia and Atlanta during the American Civil War and Reconstruction, and depicts the experiences of Scarlett O'Hara, the spoiled daughter of a well-to-do plantation owner, who must use every means at her disposal to come out of the poverty she finds herself in after Sherman's March to the Sea. The book is the source of the 1939 film of the same name.

1.1 Introduction of Margaret Mitchell

Margaret Mitchell was a Southerner and a lifelong resident and native of Atlanta, Georgia, who was born in 1900 into a wealthy and politically prominent family. Her father, Eugene Muse Mitchell, was an attorney, and her mother, Mary Isabel \"May Belle\" (or \"Maybelle\") Stephens, was a suffragist. She had two brothers, Russell Stephens Mitchell, who died in infancy in 1894, and Alexander Stephens Mitchell, born in 1896.

Mitchell's family on her father's side were descendants of Thomas Mitchell, originally of Aberdeenshire, Scotland, who settled in Wilkes County, Georgia in 1777, and served in the American Revolutionary War. Her grandfather, Russell Crawford Mitchell, of Atlanta, enlisted in the Confederate States Army in July 1861, and was later severely wounded at the Battle of Sharpsburg. After the Civil War, he made a large fortune supplying lumber to rapidly building Atlanta. Russell Mitchell had twelve children from two wives; the eldest was Eugene, who graduated from the University of Georgia Law School.

Mitchell's maternal great-grandfather, Philip Fitzgerald, emigrated from Ireland, and eventually settled on a slaveholding plantation nearJonesboro, Georgia, where he had one son and seven daughters with his wife, Elenor. Mitchell's grandparents, married in 1863, were Annie Fitzgerald and John Stephens, who had also emigrated from Ireland and was a Captain in the Confederate States Army. John Stephens was a prosperous real estate developer after the Civil War and one of the founders of the Gate City Street Railroad (1881), a mule-drawn Atlanta trolley system. John and Annie Stephens had twelve children together; the seventh child was May Belle Stephens, who married Eugene Mitchell. May Belle Stephens had studied at the Bellevue Convent in Quebec and completed her education at the Atlanta Female Institute.

1.1.1Atlanta

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In 1912, Eugene Mitchell built the family home, a white columned two-story frame house on the east side of Peachtree Street just north of Seventeenth Street in Atlanta. Past the nearest neighbor's house was forest and beyond it the Chattahoochee River.[9] Prior to living on Peachtree Street, the Mitchells lived in a two-story Victorian house on Jackson Hill, east of downtown Atlanta. Jackson Hill was an old, affluent part of the city. At the bottom of Jackson Hill was an area of African American homes and businesses called \"Darktown\". Margaret Mitchell was born in her grandmother Annie Stephens's house on Cain Street, just around the corner from the Mitchells' home on Jackson Street. Her childhood was by all accounts a happy one. She was a precocious child and became an avid reader. She liked to write action stories. Her extended family and surroundings in Atlanta immersed her in Civil War lore.

1.1.2Parents

Mitchell's parents were influential in her life; her father offered more criticism than praise, which drove Mitchell's independence, and her mother spoke to both her children directly, giving them advice on matters of drinking and sex. One of Mitchell's most vivid memories of her mother was awomen's suffrage rally led by Carrie Chapman Catt. Margaret sat on a platform wearing

a Votes-for-Women banner blowing kisses to the gentlemen while her mother gave an impassioned speech

1.1.3The South (of her imagination)

While \"the South\" exists as a geographical region of the United States, it is also said to exist as \"a place of the imagination\" of writers. An image of \"the South\" was fixed in Mitchell's imagination when at six years old her mother took her on a buggy tour through ruined plantations and \"Sherman's sentinels\ the brick and stone chimneys that remained after William Tecumseh Sherman's \"March and torch\" through Georgia. Mitchell would later recall what her mother had said to her:

She talked about the world those people had lived in, such a secure world, and how it had exploded beneath them. And she told me that my world was going to explode under me, someday, and God help me if I didn't have some weapon to meet the new world.

From an imagination cultivated in her youth, Margaret Mitchell's defensive weapon would become her writing.

Mitchell said she heard Civil War stories from her relatives when she was growing up:

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On Sunday afternoons when we went calling on the older generation of relatives, those who had been active in the Sixties, I sat on the bony knees of veterans and the fat slippery laps of great aunts and heard them talk.

On summer vacations, she visited her maternal great-aunts, Mary Ellen (\"Mamie\") Fitzgerald and Sarah (\"Sis\") Fitzgerald, who still lived at her great-grandparents' plantation home in Jonesboro.[ Mamie (1840–1926) had been twenty-one years old and Sis (1848–1928) thirteen when the Civil War began. As a child, she had a pony and went riding with a Confederate veteran and a young lady of \"beau-age\". She played on earthen Civil War-era fortifications.

1.2 Introduction of Gone with the Wind

Gone with the Wind takes place in the southern United States in the state of Georgia during the American Civil War (1861–1865) and the Reconstruction Era (1865–1877) that followed the war. The novel unfolds against the backdrop of rebellion wherein seven southern states, Georgia among them, have declared their secession from the United States (the \"Union\") and formed the Confederate States of America (the \"Confederacy\"), after Abraham Lincoln was elected president with no ballots from ten Southern states where slavery was legal. A dispute over states' rights has arisen involving enslaved African people who were the source of manual labor on cotton plantations throughout the South. The story opens in April 1861 at the \"Tara\" plantation, which is owned by a wealthy Irish immigrant family, the O'Haras. The reader is told Scarlett O'Hara, the sixteen-year-old daughter of Gerald and Ellen O'Hara, \"was not

beautiful, but\" had an effect on men, especially when she took notice of them. It is the day before the men are called to war, Fort Sumter having been fired on two days earlier.

There are brief but vivid descriptions of the South as it began and grew, with backgrounds of the main characters: the stylish and highbrow French, the gentlemanly English, the forced-to-flee and

looked-down-upon Irish. Miss Scarlett learns that one of her many beaux, Ashley Wilkes, is soon to be engaged to his cousin, Melanie Hamilton. She is stricken at heart. The following day at the Wilkeses' barbecue at \"Twelve Oaks,\" Scarlett informs Ashley she loves him and Ashley admits he cares for her. However, he knows he would not be happily married to Scarlett because of their personality differences. Scarlett loses her temper at Ashley and he silently takes it.

Then Scarlett meets Rhett Butler, a man who has a reputation as a rogue. Rhett had been alone in the library when Ashley and Scarlett entered, and felt it wiser to not make his presence known while the argument took place. Rhett applauds Scarlett for the unladylike spirit she displayed with Ashley. Infuriated and humiliated, Scarlett tells Rhett, \"You aren't fit to wipe Ashley's boots!\"

Upon leaving the library and rejoining the other party guests, she finds out that war has been declared and the men are going to enlist. Seeking revenge for being jilted by Ashley, Scarlett accepts a proposal of marriage from Melanie's brother, Charles Hamilton. They marry two weeks later. Charles dies from measles two months after the war begins. Scarlett is pregnant with her first child. A widow at merely

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sixteen, she gives birth to a boy, Wade Hampton Hamilton, named after his father's general. As a widow, she is bound by tradition to wear black and avoid conversation with young men. Scarlett is despondent as a result of the restrictions placed upon her.

Melanie, who is living in Atlanta with Aunt Pittypat, invites Scarlett to live with them. In Atlanta,

Scarlett's spirits revive and she is busy with hospital work and sewing circles for the Confederate army. Scarlett encounters Rhett Butler again at a dance for the Confederacy. Although Rhett believes the war is a lost cause, he is blockade running for the profit in it. The men must bid for a dance with a lady and Rhett bids \"one hundred fifty dollars-in gold\"for a dance with Scarlett. Everyone at the dance is shocked that Rhett would bid for Scarlett, the widow still dressed in black. Melanie smooths things over by coming to Rhett's defense because he is generously supporting the Confederate cause for which her husband, Ashley, is fighting.

At Christmas (1863), Ashley has been granted a furlough from the army and returns to Atlanta to be with Melanie. The war is going badly for the Confederacy. Atlanta is under siege (September 1864), \"hemmed in on three sides,\" it descends into a desperate state while hundreds of wounded Confederate soldiers lie dying or dead in the city. Melanie goes into labor with only the inexperienced Scarlett to assist, as all the doctors are busy attending the soldiers. Prissy, a young Negro servant girl, cries out in despair and fear, \"De Yankees is comin!\" In the chaos, Scarlett, left to fend for herself, cries for the comfort and safety of her mother and Tara. The tattered Confederate States Army sets flame to Atlanta as they abandon it to the Union Army.

Melanie gives birth to a boy named Beauregard, and now they must hurry for refuge. Scarlett tells Prissy to go find Rhett, but she is afraid to \"go runnin' roun' in de dahk\". Scarlett replies to Prissy, \"Haven't you any gumption?\" Prissy then finds Rhett, and Scarlett begs him to take herself, Wade, Melanie, Beau, and Prissy to Tara. Rhett laughs at the idea, but steals an emaciated horse and a small wagon, and they follow the retreating army out of Atlanta.

Part way to Tara, Rhett has a change of heart and he abandons Scarlett to enlist in the army. Scarlett makes her way to Tara without him where she is welcomed on the steps by her father, Gerald. It is clear things have drastically changed: Gerald has lost his mind, Scarlett's mother is dead, her sisters are sick with typhoid fever, the field slaves left after Emancipation, the Yankees have burned all the cotton and there is no food in the house.

The long tiring struggle for post-war survival begins that has Scarlett working in the fields. There are so many hungry people to feed and so little food. There is the ever present threat of the Yankees who steal and burn, and at one point, Scarlett kills a Yankee marauder with a single shot from Charles's pistol leaving \"a bloody pit where the nose had been.\"

A long succession of Confederate soldiers returning home stop at Tara to find food and rest. Two men stay on, an invalid Cracker, Will Benteen, and Ashley Wilkes, whose spirit is broken. Life at Tara slowly begins to recover when a new threat appears in the form of new taxes on Tara.

Scarlett knows only one man who has enough money to help her pay the taxes, Rhett Butler. She goes to Atlanta to find him only to learn Rhett is in jail. As she is leaving the jailhouse, Scarlett runs into Frank

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Kennedy, who is betrothed to Scarlett's sister, Suellen, and running a store in Atlanta. Soon realizing Frank also has money, Scarlett hatches a plot and tells Frank that Suellen has changed her mind about marrying him. Thereafter Frank succumbs to Scarlett's feminine charms and he marries her two weeks later knowing he has done \"something romantic and exciting for the first time in his life.\" Always wanting Scarlett to be happy and radiant, Frank gives her the money to pay the taxes on Tara.

While Frank has a cold and is being pampered by Aunt Pittypat, Scarlett goes over the accounts at Frank's store and finds many of his friends owe him money. Scarlett is now terrified about the taxes and decides money, a lot of it, is needed. She takes control of his business while he is away and her business practices leave many Atlantans resentful of her. Then with a loan from Rhett she buys a sawmill and runs the lumber business herself, all very unladylike conduct. Much to Frank's relief, Scarlett learns she is

pregnant, which curtails her activities for awhile. She convinces Ashley to come to Atlanta and manage the mill, all the while still in love with him. At Melanie's urging, Ashley takes the job at the mill. Melanie soon becomes the center of Atlanta society, and Scarlett gives birth to a girl named Ella Lorena. \"Ella for her grandmother Ellen, and Lorena because it was the most fashionable name of the day for girls.\"

The state of Georgia is under martial law and life there has taken on a new and more frightening tone. For protection, Scarlett keeps Frank's pistol tucked in the upholstery of the buggy. Her trips alone to and from the mill take her past a shanty town where criminal elements live. On one evening when she is coming home from the mill, Scarlett is accosted by two men who attempt to rob her, but she escapes with the help of Big Sam, the former negro foreman from Tara. Attempting to avenge the assault on his wife, Frank and the Ku Klux Klan raid the shanty town whereupon Frank is shot dead. Scarlett is a widow for a second time.

Rhett puts on a charade to keep the men who participated in the shanty town raid from being arrested. He walks into the Wilkeses' home with Hugh Elsing and Ashley, singing and pretending to be drunk. Yankee officers outside the home question Rhett and he tells them he and the other men had been at Belle

Watling's brothel that evening, a story Belle later confirms to the officers. The men are indebted to Rhett for saving them, and his Scallawag reputation among them improves a notch, but the men's wives, with the exception of Melanie, are livid at owing their husbands' lives to Belle Watling.

Frank Kennedy lies cold in a coffin in the quiet stillness of the parlor in Aunt Pittypat's home. Scarlett is in a remorseful state. She is swigging brandy from Aunt Pitty's swoon bottle when Rhett comes to call. She tells Rhett tearfully, \"I'm afraid I'll die and go to hell,\" to which Rhett replies, \"Maybe there isn't a hell.\" Before she can cry any further, Rhett asks Scarlett to marry him saying, \"I always intended having you, one way or another.\"[19] Scarlett declares she doesn't love him and doesn't want to be married again. However, Rhett kisses her passionately, and in the heat of the moment she agrees to marry him. One year later, Scarlett and Rhett announce their engagement.

News of the impending marriage is the talk of the town. Mr. and Mrs. Butler honeymoon in New Orleans, spending lavishly. Upon their return to Atlanta, the couple take up residence in the bridal suite at the National Hotel while their new home on Peachtree Street is being constructed. Scarlett chooses a modern Swiss chalet style home like the one she saw in Harper's Weekly, and red wallpaper, thick red carpet and black walnut furniture for the interior. Rhett describes the house as an \"architectural horror\". Shortly after the Butlers move into their new home, the sardonic jabs between them turn into full-blown quarrels.

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Scarlett wonders why Rhett married her. Then \"with real hate in her eyes\" she tells Rhett she is going to have a baby, a baby she does not want.

Wade is seven years old in 1869 when his sister, Eugenie Victoria, named after two queens, arrives in the world. She has blue eyes like Gerald O'Hara and Melanie gives her the nickname, \"Bonnie Blue,\" in reference to the Bonnie Blue Flag of the Confederacy.

When Scarlett is feeling well again, she makes a trip to the mill and talks to Ashley, who is alone in the office. In the conversation with him, she comes away believing Ashley still loves her and is jealous of her intimate relations with Rhett, which excites her. Scarlett returns home and tells Rhett she does not want more children. From then on, Scarlett and Rhett sleep in separate bedrooms, and when Bonnie is two

years old, she sleeps in a little bed beside Rhett's bed (with the light on all night long because she is afraid of the dark). Rhett turns his attention towards Bonnie, dotes on her, spoils her, and worries about her reputation when she is older.

Melanie is giving a surprise birthday party for Ashley. Scarlett goes to the mill to keep Ashley there until party time, a rare opportunity for Scarlett to see Ashley alone. When she sees him, she feels \"sixteen again, a little breathless and excited.\" Ashley tells her how pretty she looks, and they reminisce about the days when they were young and talk about their lives now. Suddenly Scarlett's eyes fill with tears and Ashley holds her head against his chest. Then in the doorway of the office Ashley sees standing his sister, India Wilkes. Before the party has even begun rumors of an adulterous relationship between Ashley and Scarlett have started, and Rhett and Melanie have heard the gossip. Melanie refuses to accept any criticism of her sister in-law and India Wilkes is banished from the Wilkeses' home for it, causing a rift in the family. Rhett, more drunk than Scarlett has ever seen him, returns home the evening of the party long after Scarlett. His eyes are bloodshot and his mood is dark and violent. He enjoins Scarlett to drink with him. Not wanting Rhett to know she is fearful of him, Scarlett throws back a drink and gets up from her chair to go back to her bedroom. But Rhett stops her and pins her shoulders to the wall. Scarlett tells Rhett he is jealous of Ashley and Rhett accuses Scarlett of \"crying for the moon\" over Ashley. He tells Scarlett they could have been happy together saying, \"for I loved you and I know you.\" Rhett then takes Scarlett in his arms and carries her up the stairs to her bedroom where passion envelops them.

The following morning Rhett leaves town with Bonnie and Prissy and stays away for three months. Scarlett finds herself missing him, but she is still unsure if Rhett loves her, having told her so when he was drunk. She learns she is pregnant with her fourth child.

On the day Rhett arrives home, Scarlett waits for him at the top of the stairs. She wonders if Rhett will kiss her, but to Scarlett's irritation, he does not. He tells her she looks pale. Scarlett tells him she is pale because she is pregnant. Rhett sarcastically asks her if the father is Ashley. She calls Rhett a cad and tells him no woman would want a baby of his. To which Rhett responds, \"cheer up, maybe you'll have a miscarriage.\" At that comment, Scarlett lunges at Rhett, but he side steps and she tumbles backwards down the stairs. She is seriously ill for the first time in her life, having lost her child and broken her ribs. Rhett is remorseful, believing he has killed her. Sobbing and drunk, Rhett buries his head in Melanie's lap and confesses he had been a jealous cad.

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Scarlett, who is thin and pale, goes to Tara taking Wade and Ella with her, to regain her strength and vitality from \"the green cotton fields of home.\" When she returns a healthy woman to Atlanta, she sells the mills to Ashley. She finds Rhett's attitude has noticeably changed. He is sober, kinder, polite and

seemingly disinterested. Though she misses the old Rhett at times, Scarlett is content to leave well enough alone.

Now Bonnie is four years old in 1873. A spirited and willful child, she has her father wrapped around her finger and giving into her every demand. Even Scarlett is jealous of the attention she gets from him. Rhett rides his horse around town with Bonnie in front of him, but the household mammy, \"Mammy,\" insists it is not fitting for a girl to ride a horse with her dress flying up. Rhett heeds Mammy's words and buys Bonnie a Shetland pony, whom she names \"Mr. Butler,\" and teaches her to ride sidesaddle. Then Rhett pays a boy named Wash twenty-five cents to teach Mr. Butler to jump over wood bars. When Mr. Butler is able to get his fat legs over a one foot high bar, Rhett puts Bonnie on the pony, and soon Mr. Butler is leaping bars and Aunt Melly's rose bushes.

Wearing her blue velvet riding habit with a red feather in her black hat, Bonnie pleads with her father to raise the bar to one and a half feet. He gives in and raises the bar, warning her not to come crying to him if she falls. Bonnie yells to her Mother, \"Watch me take this one!\" The pony gallops towards the wood bar, but trips over it splintering the wood. Mr. Butler tumbles to the ground then scrambles to his feet and trots off with an empty saddle. Little Miss \"Bonnie Blue\" Butler is dead.

In the dark days and months following Bonnie's death, Rhett is often drunk and disheveled, while Scarlett, though deeply grieved also, seems to hold up under the strain. With the untimely death of Melanie Wilkes a short time later, Rhett decides he only wants the calm dignity of the genial South he once knew in his youth and he leaves Atlanta to find it. Meanwhile, Scarlett dreams of love that has eluded her for so long, but she still has Tara, and \"tomorrow is another day.\"

The Theoretical Foundation

2.1 Feminist Approaches

Feminist literary criticism is literary criticism informed by feminist theory, or by the politics

of feminism more broadly. Its history has been broad and varied, from classic works of nineteenth-century women authors such as George Eliot and Margaret Fuller to cutting-edge theoretical work in women's studies and gender studies by \"third-wave\" authors. In the most general and simple terms, feminist literary criticism before the 1970s—in the first and second waves of feminism—was concerned with the politics of women's authorship and the representation of women's condition within literature.

Since the development of more complex conceptions of gender and subjectivity and third-wave feminism, feminist literary criticism has taken a variety of new routes, namely in the tradition of the Frankfurt School's critical theory. It has considered gender in the terms of Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysis, as part of the deconstruction of existing relations of power, and as a concrete political investment.[1] It has

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been closely associated with the birth and growth of queer studies. The more traditionally central feminist concern with the representation and politics of women's lives has continued to play an active role in criticism.

Lisa Tuttle has defined feminist theory as asking \"new questions of old texts.\" She cites the goals of feminist criticism as: (1) To develop and uncover a female tradition of writing, (2) to interpret symbolism of women's writing so that it will not be lost or ignored by the male point of view, (3) to rediscover old texts, (4) to analyze women writers and their writings from a female perspective, (5) to resist sexism in literature, and (6) to increase awareness of the sexual politics of language and style.

Feminist Analyze of Gone with the Wind

3.1 Scarlett O’Hara

Character development

Scarlett O'Hara is not beautiful in a conventional sense, as indicated by Margaret Mitchell's opening line, but a charming Southern belle who grows up on the Clayton County, Georgia, plantation Tara in the years before the American Civil War. Scarlett is described as being sixteen years old at the outbreak of the Civil War in April 1861, which would put her approximate birth date in early 1845/late 1844 [1]. She is the oldest of three daughters. Her two younger sisters are the lazy and whiny Susan Elinor (\"Suellen\") and the gentle and kind Caroline Irene (\"Carreen\"). Her mother also gave birth to three younger sons, who were all named Gerald Jr. and died as infants.

Selfish, shrewd and vain, Scarlett inherits the strong will of her Irish father Gerald O'Hara, but also desires to please her well-bred, gentle French American mother Ellen Robillard, from a good and well respected Savannah, Georgia, family.

Scarlett believes she's in love with Ashley Wilkes, her aristocratic neighbor, but when his engagement to his cousin, the meek and mild-mannered Melanie Hamilton, is announced, she marries Melanie's brother, Charles Hamilton, out of spite. Her new husband goes to train with Wade Hampton's Legion but dies within two months of measles, and never sees battle. The war progresses and near the end of the war the Yankee army, led by the infamous General Sherman, makes its way to Georgia. Scarlett's mother dies of typhoid fever, and her sisters are gravely ill. The Yankee army burns the family's store of cotton, steals the food and livestock, but spares the family home. Scarlett flees nearby Atlanta where she had been living with Melanie, her sister-in-law, and Melanie's aunt during the war ahead of the invading Yankee army, expecting to arrive at Tara to be cared for by her parents. Instead she finds the home and lands damaged, and the family barely surviving.

In the face of hardship, the spoiled Scarlett uncharacteristically shoulders the troubles of her family and friends, and eventually the not-so-grieving widow marries her sister's beau, Frank Kennedy, in order to

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get funds to pay the taxes on and save her family's beloved home. Her practical nature leads to a willingness to step on anyone who doesn't have her family's best interests at heart, including her own sister. Over the course of the story Scarlett sheds all her illusions — except her \"love\" for Ashley. The war's upheaval of Scarlett's life and the transforming choices she makes can be seen as a metaphor for the challenges life commonly presents to women, to face or deny; Scarlett's story particularly resonated with a 1936 readership which had just gone through a similar upheaval — the Great Depression.

One of the most richly developed female characters of the time on film and in literature, she repeatedly challenges the prescribed women's roles of her time. As a result, she becomes very disliked by the people of Atlanta, Georgia. Scarlett's ongoing internal conflict between her feelings for the Southern gentleman Ashley and her attraction to the sardonic, opportunistic Rhett Butler—who becomes her third husband—embodies the general position of The South in the Civil War era.

References

1 玛格利特米切尔[美] 1994年《飘》青海出版社 2 维基百科词条

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