“Gone With the Wind” by Margaret Mitchell (post 4): What could make Scarlett susceptible to romantic cliché that she loves Rhett but does not know it?

“He was in his mid-thirties, older than any beau she had ever had, and she was as helpless as a child to control and handle him…After tilts with him from which she seldom emerged the victor, she vowed he was impossible, ill bred and no gentleman and she would have nothing more to do with him…For all his exasperating qualities, she grew to look forward to his calls. There was something exciting about him…

“ ‘It’s almost like I was in love with him!’ she thought, bewildered. ‘But I’m not and I just can’t understand it’ ” (1, pp. 220-221).

One interpretation of the above is that Scarlett had never been involved with a real man like Rhett, so she does not recognize the feelings that he arouses in her. Perhaps women like bad men, but just don’t like to admit it, even to themselves. To generalize the romantic cliché: most anyone could be in love and not know it.

Could you be in love and not know it?

I don’t think most people could be in love and not know it. I think that the only way to do that would be to have more than one personality, with one personality in love, while another personality has only indirect knowledge of it. Indirect knowledge would consist of behavior and feelings for which the un-in-love personality couldn’t account.

Being in love and not knowing it does happen in real life, but it occurs more often in novels than in real life, because multiple personality is more common among novelists than among the general public.

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