“Gone With the Wind” by Margaret Mitchell (post 3) and “Jane Eyre” by Charlotte Brontë (post 10): Scarlett and Jane have green eyes, but are not beautiful.

Gone With the Wind begins with these remarkable words: “Scarlett O’Hara was not beautiful…”

People who are more widely read than I am may be able to think of many romantic heroines who are explicitly described as not beautiful, but the only other one who comes readily to my mind is Jane Eyre.

True, both Scarlett and Jane do have green eyes, which, I suppose, is meant to show that they are special. Nevertheless, to begin a thousand-page romantic novel with an explicit statement that the heroine is not beautiful is rather daring (whether it should be or not).

“Scarlett O’Hara was not beautiful, but men seldom realized it when caught by her charm as the Tarleton twins were.”

Why does the opening line of this novel feature twins? Certainly, Scarlett’s attractiveness—she was attractive in spite of not being beautiful—would have been better emphasized by the attentions of two men who were not twins, since twins might be expected to agree, making their two opinions hardly better than one opinion.

So why make them twins?

I don’t know Margaret Mitchell’s conscious rationale, but twins are a literary metaphor for multiple personality—since, sharing the same body, alternate personalities look like twins—which I thought I’d mention.