“Gone With the Wind” by Margaret Mitchell (post 2): Scarlett shows evidence of dissociation, the mental mechanism of multiple personality.

As I begin this thousand-page novel, my hypothesis is that the four main characters are based on the author’s four main alternate personalities: the naughty one (Scarlett), the nice one (Melanie), the enterprising one (Rhett), and the intellectual one (Ashley).

If naughty, nice, enterprising, and intellectual are more or less autonomous, alternate personalities—as opposed to being the facets of a single personality—then there should be evidence of dissociation, the basic mental mechanism of multiple personality.

Evidence of dissociation would include memory gaps for memorable events; a tendency to deal with upsetting things by putting them out of one’s mind; trance/dreamlike states; and not remembering and/or not identifying with intimate aspects of one’s own life:

“Within two weeks Scarlett had become a wife, and within two months more she was a widow…In after years when she thought of those last days of April, 1861, Scarlett could never quite remember details. Time and events were telescoped, jumbled together like a nightmare that had no reality or reason. Till the day she died there would be blank spots in her memories of those days” (1, p. 128).

Scarlett thought: “This can’t be real. It can’t be. It’s a nightmare. I’ll wake up and find it’s all been a nightmare. I mustn’t think of it now…I can’t think now. I’ll think later, when I can stand it” (1, p. 129).

“…the dreamlike trance…” (1, p. 130).

“She had very little interest in Wade [her infant son] and sometimes it was difficult to remember that he was actually hers” (1, p. 134), possibly because other personalities had been pregnant and given birth.

1. Margaret Mitchell. Gone With the Wind. New York, Scribner, 1936.