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Foreshadowing
Chapter 25
Explanation and Analysis:
Gone with the Wind is an example of historical fiction and a coming-of-age story, or bildungsroman. Throughout the course of the novel, Scarlett O'Hara learns how to survive amid the chaos and confusion of the American Civil War as experienced in Georgia, a Confederate state. Her development from a pampered and silly young girl to a pragmatic and determined young woman is evident in a famous passage in the novel, in which Scarlett vows to do whatever is necessary to survive:
There was no going back and she was going forward. Throughout the South for fifty years there would be bitter-eyed women who looked backward, to dead times, to dead men, evoking memories that hurt and were futile [...] But Scarlett was never to look back [...] “As God is my witness, as God is my witness, the Yankees aren’t going to lick me. I’m going to live through this, and when it’s over, I’m never going to be hungry again. No, nor any of my folks. If I have to steal or kill—as God is my witness, I’m never going to be hungry again.”
After escaping from Atlanta as the city falls to the Union army, Scarlett returns to Tara, her family home in North Georgia. To her horror, she learns that Tara has not escaped the ravages of war and her troubles are not yet over. As she looks over the burnt ruins of Twelve Oaks, the Wilkes's family home, she vows not to let the "Yankees" defeat her and to never experience hunger again. Her insistence that she will "steal or cheat" to survive if necessary marks the extent to which the Civil War has shaped her worldview. Though her youth was carefree and she was spoiled by her family and the various enslaved people at Tara, Scarlett grows into a determined and ruthless young woman who refuses to succumb to nostalgia for the past.
Related Themes:
