Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Gone with the Wind, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
The Civil War and Reconstruction
Looking Forward vs. Looking Back
Classism and Racism
Practicality, Tenacity, and Selfishness
Women and Power
Summary
Analysis
On a day in mid-November, everyone is grouped around the table finishing supper. Pork suggests they kill the sow that day. Suddenly, Melanie hears someone coming and everyone rushes to the door. Sally Fontaine gallops up on a horse and shouts that the Yankees are coming. Gerald says the Yankees have already been here. Scarlett, though, knows she has to hide their food, their sow, and their horse. She instructs the enslaved persons to run the pigs into the swamp and drop the silver in the well. When Melanie asks what she can do to help, Scarlett tells her to drive the cow and calf into the swamp. Melanie screams for her baby as she rides away, but Scarlett promises to not let anything happen to Ashley’s baby.
The first thing Scarlett thinks about when she hears that the Yankees are coming is their hard-earned food. Through acquiring livestock, she has been able to secure the plantation’s future more and more: the horse gives them the mobility to go to town and seek help from the neighbors, and the sow assures them of a large source of food. Therefore, even more than her beloved house, Scarlett feels the need to safeguard their food, especially since winter is coming.
Themes
Scarlett runs into the house, Wade sobbing at her heels. She goes to her bureau and grabs the Yankee man’s wallet. Where should she hide it? If she hides it in her bodice, the Yankees will strip her naked to get it. She wishes Melanie was with her. She picks up the baby from his cradle. Out the window she sees her sisters running to the woods with baskets of food, and Pork running with Gerald and two pigs under his arms. Dilcey complains that the sow bit Prissy and has trapped her under the house. Scarlett gathers up the trinkets from the Yankee man’s backpack.
Scarlett fills the role at Tara that a man would traditionally fill: she gives the orders and manages the money. However, she also is taking care of Wade and Melanie’s baby. In this way, she takes on both masculine and feminine roles. She still isn’t sympathetic, though, as when she ignores Wade’s anguish.
Themes
Scarlett decides to hide the wallet in the baby’s diaper. She runs downstairs, wondering if she’s alone. Then she sees Wade cowering by the stairs. He runs to her and grabs her dress. She tells him she can’t carry him. She looks around the house and whispers goodbye. The Yankees will burn it all. Then she stops. She can’t leave Tara. She stays in the hall, feeling brave. She hears marching hooves and clanking sabers, and the command “dismount!” She whispers gently to Wade to run towards the swamp, but Wade looks at her like a baby rabbit. He clings to her and they walk down the steps to meet the Yankees.
Scarlett’s pride in Tara is enough to overcome her fear of being an unprotected woman in an empty house. She walks proudly down the steps to meet the huge army of Yankees just as Gerald had stood on the front steps to greet the Yankees the first time they came to Tara. She channels her father, not Ellen—again calling into question whether Scarlett will ever achieve her goal of being like her mother.
Themes
By now Sherman is burning and looting all of Georgia, but, for Scarlett, when the Yankees enter Tara, it’s a personal rather than national insult. She clutches Wade and the baby while the Yankees slash feather beds looking for treasures. The tobacco-chewing sergeant asks Scarlett for the trinkets in her hands. She flings them to the floor. He asks her to hand him—not throw—Ellen’s garnet earrings. He asks what else she has, looking at her bodice. Scarlett insists she has nothing.
The war is happening on a large scale all over the South, but it is also happening on a personal level. Gone with the Wind mostly explores the personal tragedies that the war causes. In this way, the novel is told from the female perspective, because women were the ones at home experiencing the war’s personal tragedies.
Themes
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Scarlett hears the Yankees take the ducks. Then she hears squealing and a gunshot. Prissy must’ve abandoned the sow. Scarlett stands in the hall as the Yankees run around breaking things and stealing. A man appears holding Charles’s sword. Scarlett had given that sword to Wade on his birthday as a token of his father. Scarlett says they can’t take that sword; it’s from the Mexican War. They examine it and see that she’s right. The sergeant decides to give the sword to Scarlett, angering the Yankee who found it. The angry man vows to give the Rebels something to remember him by and disappears into the house. As the men set fire to the cotton, a Yankee sneers at Scarlett that she doesn’t have much. Scarlett reminds him that the Yankees have been here before.
Although Scarlett didn’t care about Charles, she understands the value to Wade of his sword. Also, Charles’s weapons have come in handy to both Scarlett and Melanie throughout the story as they have defended themselves. Scarlett’s boldness in asking the Yankees to spare her the sword seems to wound the pride of the man who found it, and he sets out to get revenge. In this way, Scarlett’s sentimentality over the sword is a weak moment that perhaps puts her at greater risk, even as it brings her closer to Wade.
Themes
Scarlett notices that one of the Yankees holds Ellen’s gold thimble. Once it had been on Ellen’s beautiful finger, and now it will end up on some Yankee woman’s finger. Scarlett drops her head so the Yankees can’t see her cry. The Yankees depart with the stolen goods. Scarlett smells smoke and sees the cotton burning through the window.
Scarlett realizes she can’t ask for Ellen’s thimble the way she asked for Charles’s sword, in part because it’s seen as a luxury and not a necessary tool, like the sword. Ellen’s sanctity as a great lady is spoiled by the fact that a Yankee woman will use her thimble.
Themes
Scarlett sees smoke coming from the kitchen as well. She lays down the baby and runs into the kitchen, where she discovers that the Yankee who’d been upset about the sword threw lit branches on the floor. She rushes to the dining room for a rag rug. Wade lies in the hall with a peaceful expression on his face. Scarlett believes he’s dead, but she races to the kitchen anyway. In the kitchen, she soaks the rug in water and beats the flames. The flames climb higher. Then the door swings open and Melanie rushes in. They beat the flames together. Melanie shrieks and hits Scarlett across the shoulders. Scarlett collapses.
Scarlett is so frantic to put out the fire burning in the kitchen that she runs right past Wade, even though she believes he is dead. She has become very adept at putting aside tragedies in order to do what she needs to do. Melanie again proves to Scarlett that she’s not just silly and useless when she helps put out the fire.
Themes
Scarlett wakes on the porch, her head in Melanie’s lap. Her body hurts from burns, but Melanie assures her the fire is out. Scarlett hears Wade hiccupping—he isn’t dead. She looks at Melanie’s sooty face, and says she looks like a “nigger.” Melanie laughs and says she hit Scarlett because her back was on fire. Scarlett explains that the men didn’t hurt or rape her. Melanie smiles happily. Then she finds the wallet in the baby’s diaper. She hugs and kisses Scarlett. Scarlett felt a new respect for Melanie, who is always there when she needs her.
For the second time, Melanie impresses Scarlett with her bravery and her willingness to take action, rather than just sit idly and watch. Before, Scarlett found Melanie’s constant presence irritating, but now she has started to rely on it—Melanie is different from Scarlett, but the women are similar in that they are both willing to do what needs to be done.
Themes
