I wrote this and wanted to put it on here, but I seriously couldn't be bothered editing it to make coherent sense. It was written in a stream of consciousness, so some ideas may be more stupid than others.
Also, the formatting on this post is kind of wonky, but there's nothing I could do to fix that...
**Also, I seriously spoil Gone With the Wind for you, so read at will.**
I finished Gone with the Wind, the epically long novel by Margaret Mitchell.
I stormed around for about an hour because, Good Lord, that book is 1037 pages long, and that was it? That was the ending? I was whipped along on some challenging, somewhat romantic ride through the American South during the Civil War, was forced to endure the continuing oblivious nature of Scarlett O’Hara (or Hamilton or Kennedy or Butler, I don’t really know), the sweet stupidity of Melanie Wilkes, the doomed and senseless ‘love’ between Scarlett and Ashley Wilkes, and the odd, unfathomable charisma of Rhett Butler…and in the end, what does that writer do? Lovely Melanie dies, clueless, trusting and pure to the bitter end; Rhett disintegrates because he never got Scarlett and lost his daughter-version of Scarlett in Bonnie and ceases to be the selfish rascal that made me like him in the first place; and Scarlett realizes the truths that I have known the whole freaking time, and ultimately fails to get Rhett. She was so blind for so long that she lost him! In the name of God! What kind of a moron is she?
And it (meaning the fist-clenching idiocy of it all) doesn’t even end there! Scarlett stands in the dining room at the end of the book, alone, freshly rejected by Rhett and in pure realization that she never loved Ashley in the first place, and she says to herself that she’ll think about all the drama of the evening later, because she simply can’t bear to think of it all now.
What in the bloody name of pomegranates? Why do you think this bothers me so much? Because this is what she has been doing for more than one-thousand pages, and it’s sort of wearing at this point. For all that she hates Ashley’s tendency to live in dreams and not look at what was in front of him, Scarlett is amazingly good at this too. She always says that she’ll ‘think about it later’, and then she never does! The problem gets shoved to the back of everything and ultimately ends up corroding the framework of her life. Thinking about it later is why it was ultimately better that Rhett and Melanie had Ashley buy the mill from Scarlett. Johnnie Gallagher was mistreating the convicts so badly, and she just wanted to ‘think about it later.’ Well, she never did. And Ashley got the mill, and he was fully willing to hire freed slaves and pay their wages instead of the cheap convict labor Scarlett so loved.
So this darling little adage of hers really doesn’t seem to do much good, and yet that’s how the book ends. With her thinking about how to win Rhett back ‘another day.’
The way she goes, she might never do that.
But I railed and I complained, and then I started thinking.
Honestly—I hate this ending. This is the longest book I have ever read in my life, and that was one of the most disappointing endings ever written, I think. But it makes sense. I don’t have to like it, but it makes sense.
I was born and bred on Disney and fairytales, and that was my childhood, and I wouldn't trade it for the world. I like that I had a sheltered portion of my life where I thought that everything could be okay, that everybody got a happy ending. But I’ve grown up since then. I’m not foolish enough to say I’ve grown up completely, but yes, I’ve grown up. And maybe this was Margaret Mitchell’s way of telling girls like me that we don’t always get a happy ending. Scarlett was indeed the belle of the county, and she was charming and lovely and that’s what princesses are like. In a way, to so many characters, Scarlett was a princess. But she spent so much of her life pining after something she didn’t understand, something that wasn’t even real, that she failed to appreciate what she did have, which was the love of a guy like Rhett Butler. She was selfish and greedy and stupid and cunning and far too human to be a princess.
In a fairy tale, maybe there’d be some second chance. Maybe Rhett wouldn’t have exhausted all of his love for Scarlett and they could have lived happily ever after, the end. But life doesn’t always have second chances. Not every fool gets second chances if she’s exhausted every resource, every chance thrown her way. And that’s always been a faint truth lingering in the back of my head, but this ending—this horrible, awful, maddeningly unsatisfying ending—really drove the point home. Not everyone always wins. It’s a simple, difficult truth.
I can appreciate it, but I don’t have to like it. I can still like my fairytale endings, because they belong in fairytales. I just need to start growing up and differentiating what happens in real life and what rarely ever does.
But rarely—rarely does a naïve soul like Melanie love a brazen, hard person like Scarlett and not even realize that there is no love back. Rarely is a person so loved and ignorant of that love it as Scarlett was to Rhett Butler. Rarely have I loathed and failed to understand a person, even just a character, as I have loathed and failed to understand the selfish, scheming Scarlett. She was a moron. She trampled people to get her way, she alienated people, she taunted them, used them, clung to them when they were up and kicked them when they were down. She’s no princess, but I guess that might’ve been the point.
