The Wrath to Come by Sarah Churchwell

Author:Sarah Churchwell [Churchwell, Sarah]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781789542974
Publisher: Head of Zeus

PART SIX

YOU, MISS, ARE NO LADY

22

What a Woman

‘You, Miss, are no lady,’ Rhett tells Scarlett, informing the audience in the story’s opening scenes that its heroine is not a good Southern belle. Scarlett has just made an antebellum pass at Ashley by telling him that she loves him. When Ashley replies that he will honour his engagement to Melanie, despite having just told Scarlett that he ‘cares’, she denounces him as a cad and slaps his face. After he makes a dignified exit – in the novel, he kisses her hand, while in the film Leslie Howard turns an affronted cheek – she hurls a china bowl against the fireplace.

That is when Rhett Butler, highly amused, makes his presence known in the story. Scarlett tells him he is no gentleman for eavesdropping, and he responds that she is no lady, while making clear it’s a compliment: ‘Don’t think I hold that against you. Ladies have never held any charm for me.’

Its sustained critique of nineteenth-century ideas of femininity remains by some way the most modern aspect of Gone with the Wind, its feminism frequently invoked in mitigation of its racism. This was no coincidence: Margaret Mitchell’s mother, Maybelle, was one of Georgia’s foremost campaigners for women’s suffrage. She raised her daughter under the terms of a middle-class white feminism that consciously rejected Victorian separate spheres and the cult of ladyhood, fighting gender hierarchies and ignoring any others. A friend and colleague of Mitchell’s from her time as a journalist considered her ‘intensely feminist’.1

Scarlett O’Hara ‘found the road to ladyhood hard’, Mitchell tells us early on, making clear that one is not born but becomes a lady. For the first half of the story, Rhett tries to lure Scarlett off the road to ladyhood, until the war takes care of that for him. Scarlett is a modern woman confined in corsets and crinoline: she has a brain for business and resents being trapped by motherhood (in the novel she has three children, whom she spends most of her time ignoring; the film, likewise viewing them as encumbrances, dispensed with the first two). Scarlett seeks independence but lacks the financial autonomy that would let her determine her own fate.

She has been raised to be like her mother and Melanie, both of whom embody the gentle flower of Southern ladyhood: self-sacrificing, pious, politically submissive but morally indomitable, fiercely loyal and compassionate. Scarlett shares only their fierce loyalty, as Mitchell makes plain from the novel’s opening words. The book begins (aptly) with a series of denials, telling us all the things Scarlett isn’t. She is not beautiful, she is not modest, she is not demure, she is not quiet, she is not decorous: ‘For all the modesty of her spreading skirts, the demureness of hair netted smoothly into a chignon and the quietness of small white hands folded in her lap, her true self was poorly concealed.’

In other words, Scarlett is not a conventional heroine of an antebellum romance. ‘The green eyes in the

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