“Gone With the Wind” by Margaret Mitchell (post 7): Scarlett, whose “personality was changing,” had a “new person who walked in her body”

Following the siege of Atlanta, the death of family members, hunger, and the devastation of life as they had known it, the psychological effects are described for four characters: Melanie, Wade, Gerald, and Scarlett.

Melanie is more of what she always had been, kind and sympathetic. Little Wade and old Gerald are who they always were, but are very impaired by posttraumatic anxiety and dissociation. Scarlett is the only one who is described as switching from one personality to another:

“They were…all afraid of the new person who walked in her body…She was not blind to the fact that her personality was changing…” (1, p. 432).

After killing a Yankee soldier, Scarlett decides, “I won’t think about it any more…I reckon I must have changed a little since coming home or else I couldn’t have done it” (1, p. 445). The narrator adds that Scarlett “had changed more than she knew…” (1, p. 445).

In contrast to other characters—except perhaps cynical Rhett, who had belatedly gone to join the South—Scarlett is the only character who is described as having fundamentally changed, and whose change is explicitly described in terms of personality.

Well, isn’t that what characters are supposed to do: grow? Melanie is described as growing: to her former kindness and sympathy is added physical bravery. In contrast, Scarlett is described not in terms of growth, but in terms of change; specifically, in the author’s choice of words, a change in “personality” (1, p. 432).

Will Scarlett ever revert to her previous personality? Will she switch back and forth? Nearly six hundred pages remain to find out.

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