“Gone With the Wind” by Margaret Mitchell (post 9): Scarlett, Rhett, Melanie, Ashley, Gerald, “The Hedgehog and the Fox,” and multiple personality.

“The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing” (1). I propose to use this famous saying to contrast people with multiple personality (foxes) and people with one personality (hedgehogs).

Scarlett is the only “fox” in Gone With the Wind. Her personalities switch and alternate according to circumstances. Scarlett observes:

“…they are who they are, O’Haras, Wilkeses, Hamiltons. Even the darkies feel that way. Oh, they’re all fools!…They’ll go right on thinking and living as they always have, and nothing will change them. Melly can dress in rags and pick cotton and even help me murder a man but it doesn’t change her. She’s still the shy well-bred Mrs. Wilkes, the perfect lady! And Ashley can see death and war and be wounded and lie in jail and come home to less than nothing and still be the same gentleman he was when he had all Twelve Oaks behind him…They won’t change. Maybe they can’t change. I’m the only one who’s changed—and I wouldn’t have changed if I could help it” (2, p. 549).

Hedgehogs, people with only one personality, may do either very well or very poorly, depending on how their single personality works under the circumstances. The least successful hedgehog is Gerald, Scarlett’s father. The changed circumstances leave him stunned and immobilized. The most successful hedgehog is Rhett. His single personality, the cynical profiteer, leaves him a wealthy winner. Occasionally, giving in to social pressure, he tries to be what he is not, as when he joins the South’s lost cause, but it doesn’t work for him, so he reverts to his one true self.

Two of Scarlett’s personalities—the histrionic Southern belle and the ruthless Tara-protector—alternate successfully, depending on the circumstances.

1. Isaiah Berlin. “The Hedgehog and the Fox” (1953). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hedgehog_and_the_Fox

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