In Gone with the Wind, the Civil War destroys the South as the characters know it. In the midst of this destruction, some of the characters look back longingly to the past, while others look forward only to the future. When Scarlett returns to Tara and finds her mother dead and her father insane, she is nearly overcome with grief and desperation. However, as she lies in the spoiled garden at the burn site of Twelve Oaks, she decides that the past is the past, and that she will never look back. This decision not only helps her cope with hardship, but it changes who she is: she is no longer the soft, youthful Scarlett O’Hara but a woman willing to do whatever she needs to be successful in the future. The future is, for Scarlett, the only thing that matters—it’s only by looking forward that she’ll be able to rebuild her life to resemble the lavish life she lived as a girl before the war. Other characters who are willing to look to the future and adapt to the changing times, like Rhett Butler, are also able to succeed in the quickly changing postwar South.
In contrast, Ashley is unable to look anywhere but to the past, and therefore he can’t cope with the harsh demands of the poverty he experiences after his family’s plantation is burned during the war. Similarly, the whole South struggles to look forward. The Old Guard continues to revere the Confederate Cause even after the South loses the war, and they would rather be poor than resort to moneymaking practices that they consider undignified. To Scarlett, these people are foolish for loving the past even though it is gone. She even tires of Ashley and begins to think of herself as somewhat foolish when she realizes her love for him is only a habit from her past. Looking back, however, is something the novel suggests can also be a form of self-preservation, or a way to deal with grief, as when even Rhett begins to look to the past after the death of his and Scarlett’s daughter.
Ultimately, though, the novel suggests that striking a balance between looking forward and looking back is the most effective way for a person to move forward. Ashley represents the dangers of looking only to the past when he’s left an unsuccessful widower after Melanie’s death. Scarlett, on the other hand, looks only to the future and befriends Carpetbaggers and Scallawags in the years after the war—but because of her unwillingness to look back, she finds herself with neither friends nor love at the end of the novel. The Democrats, however, stand as the novel’s most successful example of looking to the past to inform their future. They ultimately gain control of Georgia’s legislature, which allows them to impose a new version of the old South, which the North sought to banish with Reconstruction.
Related Themes from Other Texts
Looking Forward vs. Looking Back ThemeTracker
Looking Forward vs. Looking Back Quotes in Gone with the Wind
“Only when like marries like can there be happiness.”
There was something exciting about this town with its narrow muddy streets, lying among rolling red hills, something raw and crude that appealed to the rawness and crudeness underlying the fine veneer that Ellen and Mammy had given her. She suddenly felt that this was where she belonged, not in serene and quiet old cities, flat beside yellow waters.
Why had he gone, stepping off into the dark, into the war, into a Cause that was lost, into a world that was mad? Why had he gone, Rhett who loved the pleasures of women and liquor, the comfort of good food and soft beds […] who hated the South and jeered at the fools who fought for it? Now he had set his varnished boots upon a bitter road […] and the end of the road was death.
What a little while since she and everyone else had thought that Atlanta could never fall, that Georgia could never be invaded. But the small cloud that appeared in the northwest four months ago had blown up into a mighty storm and then into a screaming tornado, sweeping away her world, whirling her out of her sheltered life, and dropping her down in the midst of this still, haunted desolation.
Was Tara still standing? Or was Tara also gone with the wind that had swept through Georgia?
Something that was youth and beauty and potential tenderness had gone out of her face forever. What was past was past. Those who were dead were dead. The lazy luxury of the old days was gone, never to return. […] 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, bearing poverty with bitter pride because they had those memories. But Scarlett was never to look back.
“[before the war] there was a real beauty to living. […] And now it is gone and I am out of place in this new life, and I am afraid. Now, I know that in the old days, it was a shadow show I watched. I avoided everything which was not shadowy, people and situations which were too real, too vital. […] I tried to avoid you too, Scarlett. You were too full of living and too real and I was cowardly enough to prefer shadows and dreams.”
She came to the end of the long road which had begun the night Atlanta fell. She had set her feet upon that road a spoiled, selfish and untried girl, full of youth, warm of emotion, easily bewildered by life. Now, at the end of the road, there was nothing left of that girl. Hunger and hard labor, fear and constant strain, the terrors of war and the terrors of Reconstruction had taken away all warmth and youth and softness.
No matter what sights they had seen, what menial tasks they had done and would have to do, they remained ladies and gentlemen, royalty in exile—bitter, aloof, incurious, kind to one another, diamond hard. […] The old days had gone but these people would go their ways as if the old days still existed, charming, leisurely, determined not to rush and scramble for pennies as the Yankees did, determined to part with none of the old ways.
[…] It took money to be a lady. She knew Ellen would have fainted had she ever heard such words from her daughter.
The hate that enveloped the Bullock regime enveloped her too […] Scarlett had cast her lot with the enemy and, whatever her birth and family connections, she was now in the category of a turncoat, a nigger lover, a traitor, a Republican—and a Scallawag.
Where did she want to get? That was a silly question. Money and security, of course. And yet—Her mind fumbled. She had money and as much security as one could hope for in an insecure world. But […] now that she thought about it, they hadn’t made her particularly happy, though they had made her less harried, less fearful of the morrow.
[Scarlett] could see so clearly now that he was only a childish fancy, no more important really than her spoiled desire for the aquamarine earbobs she had coaxed out of Gerald. For, once she owned the earbobs, they had lost their value, as everything except money lost its value once it was hers. And so he, too, would have become cheap if, in those first far-away days, she had ever had the satisfaction of refusing to marry him.
“I want the outer semblance of the things I used to know, the utter boredom of respectability […] the calm dignity life can have when it’s lived by gentle folks, the genial grace of days that are gone. When I lived those days I didn’t realize the slow charm of them…”
“I’ll think of it all tomorrow, at Tara. I can stand it then. […] After all, tomorrow is another day.”
