Gone with the Wind’s protagonist, Scarlett O’Hara, acts mostly out of selfishness. Even before the war, Scarlett marries Charles Hamilton just to spite Honey Wilkes for being mean to her, and she willfully strays from the ladylike example her mother Ellen O’Hara sets. Even though she hopes to one day be a great lady like Ellen, Scarlett feels that her mother’s selflessness and dignity are not enough to get her the things she wants. This belief causes Scarlett to detest Melanie, Ashley’s fiancé and eventually his wife, because Scarlett sees Melanie as selfless, dignified, and wholly ineffective at doing anything, and it makes Scarlett double down on her selfishness. When the war begins, Scarlett justifies her selfishness by telling herself it’s the only way to weather and overcome the scarcity and hardship she encounters. When she fears she will lose Tara because she can’t afford the taxes, she goes to Atlanta and marries Frank Kennedy, her sister Suellen’s wealthy fiancé, lying to him that Suellen has married another man. Scarlett also decides that there is no possibility of her being a good person if she’s not also wealthy. To this end, she takes over Frank’s lumber business, deals with Yankees, and hires convicts to work at the mill, allowing them to be starved and mistreated because it saves her money. At times, these things weigh on her conscience, but she constantly tells herself that she’ll think about it tomorrow when she has money and can afford to be a great lady like her mother.
However, wealth ultimately doesn’t make Scarlett happy and as time goes on, she’s less able to justify the consequences of her selfishness. Although she marries Rhett Butler for his money and befriends rich Carpetbaggers and Scallawags to rise in class, she realizes she misses her Southern friends, that she needs Melanie, and that she loves Rhett. However, by the time she realizes this, it is too late; Melanie is dead and no one—not even Rhett—loves her anymore. This tragic ending shows that Scarlett's selfishness and tenacity, although sometimes useful as they help her survive during and after the Civil War, also come with irreparable consequences.
Related Themes from Other Texts
Practicality, Tenacity, and Selfishness ThemeTracker
Practicality, Tenacity, and Selfishness Quotes in Gone with the Wind
It was a man’s world, and she accepted it as such. The man owned the property, and the woman managed it. The man took the credit for the management, and the woman praised his cleverness.
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.
Nothing her mother had taught her was of any value whatsoever now and Scarlett’s heart was sore and puzzled. It did not occur to her that Ellen had could not have foreseen the collapse of the civilization in which she raised her daughters, […] that Ellen looked down a vista of placid future years, all like the uneventful years of her own life, when she had taught her to be gentle and gracious, honorable and kind, modest and truthful.
Now, struggling against hatred for Ashley’s wife, there surged a feeling of admiration and comradeship. She saw in a flash of clarity untouched by any petty emotion that beneath the gentle voice and dovelike eyes of Melanie there was a thin flashing blade of unbreakable steel, felt too that there were banners and bugles of courage in Melanie’s quiet blood.
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.
Her conscience battled with her desire for money. She knew she had no business exposing human lives to the hard little man’s mercies. If he should cause the death of one of them she would be as guilty as he was.
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.
She had never before known this type of fear. All her life her feet had been firmly planted in common sense and the only things she had ever feared had been the things she could see, injury, hunger, poverty, loss of Ashley’s love. […] Those fears had never weighed her down as this feeling of wrongness was doing.
She had thought, half an hour ago, that she had lost everything in the world, except money, everything that made life desirable, Ellen, Gerald, Bonnie, Mammy, Melanie and Ashley. She had to lose them all to realize that she loved Rhett—loved him because he was strong and unscrupulous, passionate and earthy, like herself.
She had never understood either of the men she had loved and so she had lost them both. Now she had a fumbling knowledge that, had she ever understood Ashley, she would never have loved him; had she ever understood Rhett, she would never have lost him.
“I’ll think of it all tomorrow, at Tara. I can stand it then. […] After all, tomorrow is another day.”
