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Personification
Definition of Satire
Satire is the use of humor, irony, sarcasm, or ridicule to criticize something or someone. Public figures, such as politicians, are often the subject of satire, but satirists can take... read full definition
Satire is the use of humor, irony, sarcasm, or ridicule to criticize something or someone. Public figures, such as politicians, are often the subject of... read full definition
Satire is the use of humor, irony, sarcasm, or ridicule to criticize something or someone. Public figures, such as politicians... read full definition
Chapter 1
Explanation and Analysis—The Troop :
Mitchell uses hyperbole in a lightly satirical passage that describes the young men of North Georgia as they prepare for the Civil War, assembling into an amateur militia called The Troop:
The Troop met twice a week in Jonesboro to drill and to pray for the war to begin. Arrangements had not yet been completed for obtaining the full quota of horses, but those who had horses performed what they imagined to be cavalry maneuvers in the field behind the courthouse, kicked up a great deal of dust, yelled themselves hoarse and waved the Revolutionary-war swords that had been taken down from parlor walls [...] There was no need to teach any of the men to shoot. Most Southerners were born with guns in their hands, and lives spent in hunting had made marksmen of them all.
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Chapter 7
Explanation and Analysis—Bulwer-Lytton:
Mitchell alludes to English writer and politician Edward Bulwer-Lytton in a passage that gently satirizes the tastes of Scarlett's relatives who live in Charleston:
Unlock with LitCharts A+Aunt Pauline and her husband [...] lived on a plantation on the river, far more isolated than Tara. Their nearest neighbor was twenty miles away by dark roads through still jungles of cypress swamp and oak. The live oaks with their waving curtains of gray moss gave Scarlett the creeps and always brought to her mind Gerald’s stories of Irish ghosts roaming in shimmering gray mists. There was nothing to do but knit all day and at night listen to Uncle Carey read aloud from the improving works of Mr. Bulwer-Lytton.
Chapter 8
Explanation and Analysis—Southern Hospitality :
In a passage that lovingly satirizes Southern cultural conventions, Mitchell employs hyperbole in her description of White Southerners taking extremely long visits to family members:
Unlock with LitCharts A+When a Southerner took the trouble to pack a trunk and travel twenty miles for a visit, the visit was seldom of shorter duration than a month, usually much longer. Southerners were as enthusiastic visitors as they were hosts, and there was nothing unusual in relatives coming to spend the Christmas holidays and remaining until July. Often when newly married couples went on the usual round of honeymoon visits, they lingered in some pleasant home until the birth of their second child. Frequently elderly aunts and uncles came to Sunday dinner and remained until they were buried years later.
Chapter 38
Explanation and Analysis—Uncle Tom's Cabin:
After the war, Scarlett ingratiates herself with the "carpetbaggers" from the North in order to do business with them and increase her fortune. In a satirical passage, Mitchell alludes to Uncle Tom's Cabin, a widely popular 1852 novel by Harriet Beecher Stowe that helped fuel the abolitionist cause by depicting the horrors of slavery:
Unlock with LitCharts A+Accepting Uncle Tom’s Cabin as revelation second only to the Bible, the Yankee women all wanted to know about the bloodhounds which every Southerner kept to track down runaway slaves. And they never believed her when she told them she had only seen one bloodhound in all her life and it was a small mild dog and not a huge ferocious mastiff. They wanted to know about the dreadful branding irons which planters used to mark the faces of their slaves and the cat-o’-nine-tails with which they beat them to death [...]
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