The controversy of Scarlett O’Hara: A toxic, white feminist icon or a complex anti-heroine?
Actress Vivien Leigh said of Scarlett O'Hara, the character she played in the 1939 film adaptation of Margaret Mitchell’s 1936 novel Gone with the Wind:
“Scarlett fascinated me but she needed a good healthy, old-fashioned spanking on a number of occasions and I should have been delighted to give it to her. But she had courage and determination and that is why women must secretly admire her - even though we can’t feel happy about her too many shortcomings.”Scarlett O’Hara has become synonymous with the self-serving, scheming Southern Belle, inescapably interwoven with the problematic treatment of the Civil War, slavery and white, female protagonists.
While she isn’t exactly a role model, her controversially iconic figure leaves me wondering if she even has a place on the spectrum of modern day feminism? Is her presence more toxic than beneficial to include when we talk about covering every aspect of female representation; the good as well as the bad? Is this ‘secret admiration’ that Leigh mentioned women must harbor for Scarlett a white feminist fantasy with a dash of white guilt? Is there any point of dragging her and all her skeletons out of the closet anymore? Haven’t we agreed to bolt that door and not take any further interest in her?
From a critical-analytical point of view, Scarlett is an anti-heroine. On the one hand, she is a woman whose identity is caught in between time and society's overwhelming and restrictive standards and her own will to push through and forward such demands and limitations. On the other hand, she is also the ultimate Southern Belle who is born into a wealthy, slave-owning Irish-American family, and the book as well as the film operate within the racist mindset of its similar contexts, taking place during the Civil War in the 1860s and written by a Southerner in a segregated America in the 1930s, respectively.
Besides being a spoilt brat, Scarlett is a survivor in the word's truest sense. She is a teenager when the Civil War breaks out and she is quite abandoned in a city that's practically on fire with a laboring woman and a scared slave girl. For the sake of the plot and the love story, she receives partly help from love interest, Rhett Butler. However, she still makes it the rest of the way on her own - despite having to cross bloody fields of the slain soldiers, through rain and heat and hide from rampaging Yankees, only to arrive at home where there's nothing to eat, her mother has died and her father's gone mad. Through staunch resolution and endurance, she does what she has to do in order to survive, no matter the means; a mannerism historically reserved for the male gender which trickles into the description of her character:
"Now her reactions were all masculine. Despite her pink cheeks and dimples and pretty smiles, she talked and acted like a man. Her voice was brisk and decisive and she made up her mind instantly and with no girlish shilly-shallying. She knew what she wanted and she went after it by the shortest route, like a man, not by the hidden and circuitous routes peculiar to women." (GWTW, Chapter 36)
She struggles to express outward or conventional motherly loving instincts towards her children or enthusiasm towards married life, besides the material gain, but she doesn't abandon her home or let her family starve. She does everything she can so that they can survive while also housing, feeding and nursing passing soldiers - even starving and almost selling herself as mistress to Rhett in order to get the much needed money. She's pragmatic and opportunistic and has a keen sense of business, even snubbing and surpassing more than half of her male counter parties along the way.
Scarlett is not a lady in society's eyes - a fact Rhett sees the minute he meets her. He comes to serve as the reverse perspective at this point; he hates to love Scarlett despite - and because - of her flaws. Margaret Mitchell also evokes the symbolism of Scarlett’s name: She's a scarlet letter, ill-fitted for society's prim and proper restrictions, but instead she's bound by heart and soul to the scarlet earth of Tara where she gets her strength from. The red soil is, of course, layered with multiple symbolic meanings besides that. Margaret Mitchell, a born Southerner herself, was known for glorifying the South and its history and she prided herself with it as the book and film gained success. She could have wanted it to be read as the blood of the many Confederate soldiers dying for their cause as well. Today, however, the red earth inescapably, and controversially so, connotes the blood of the slaves who tore their bodies apart, working and dying there, in the fields.
Scarlett's actions leave the reader/viewer in a conflicting position, depending who you ask. Previously, her disagreeable character would likely be coined to her sex; rooted in how her ruthless and driven mind was regarded as entirely 'unbecoming and unladylike qualities'. Most modern viewers will likely be torn between respecting her for single-handedly coming through all the horror of war and disliking her for her self-serving, manipulative characteristics and racist, privileged mindset.
In the end, one could say Scarlett gets what she deserves, but then again she doesn't die and though she doesn't get Rhett, she has something else: Herself and her land, Tara. The way I read it, the point is that 'not getting her man' or ‘be undeserving of him’ shouldn't be seen as a common punishment for women. Sure, she did many things wrong along the way, especially by Rhett, but he wasn't exactly faultless himself. Scarlett has other alternatives that make her life worth living. It is, after all, implied that she will try to get Rhett back some way or another - fueled by Tara and her innate, unquenchable tenacity in life - but, surprisingly, it is also alright if she doesn't get him back. What is important here is her will to try. Her unfaltering will is the story.
Of course, one of the most controversial things about Gone With The Wind is the underlying as well as explicit racist tendencies (e.g. glorifying and justifying the KKK) and furthermore, portrayal and representation of Afro-Americans. Particularly the women of color, in the book as well as the film, and their status as slaves. Hattie McDaniel, who plays Mammy, is an uncut jewel but to say she's a realistic or fair representation would be a shame since she's not given much to work with - at least, not enough to give a more complex and critical portrayal of her race and/or gender. She will forever stand as the loyal house slave among Afro-Americans - the 'Mammy archetype' - which is problematic, to say the least. Not to mention, the other highly offensive and demeaning black character, Prissy, and what actress, Butterfly McQueen, suffered through playing her. Both actresses were excluded from the premiere because it was held at a whites-only theater in Atlanta.
Scarlett caters to this racist mindset by ignoring, downplaying and/or stereotyping the roles of Afro-Americans and the presence of slavery. They are just...there. Being and doing what they are 'supposed' to be and do. She clearly expresses a close, affectionate child-mother bond with Mammy - which was not uncommon at the time, since slave owners often let their children be cared for by their slaves through most of their youth. But the treatment comes painfully two-faced since Scarlett, despite her love for her, never frees Mammy. Scarlett never sees a reason why she should and depends on Mammy for her own selfish reasons. Nor does she pay much thought to the true issue behind the Civil War and she is never directly or indirectly punished or criticized for her treatment of the slaves by the author, reflecting the author's own (lacking) awareness or blindness to the matter.
Scarlett may receive a two-faced treatment by the author for her sex and flawed personality, but is also given a cop-out by coming out alive on the other side despite all of this. She has grown in awareness in everything but her inherent racist mindset, thus Mitchell legitimizes these ‘invisible’ structures and adds a complex, yet glorified version of the Southern Belle; a twisted way to proclaim ‘yes, she was a woman and a racist, but look at how strong she was!’.
This version is undoubtedly problematic. Scarlett’s more positive qualities, her tenacity and survival instincts, can serve as an excuse to overlook or smooth the way for her toxic qualities, her racist mindset and manipulative personality. It illustrates this ‘secret admiration’ (white) women have for Scarlett that Vivien Leigh talked about; an awareness in the readers of the toxicity she represents, while also admiring or relating to her ‘freshness’; her ‘unladylike’ qualities and the fact that she isn’t this upstanding, perfect model of a woman. Perhaps, at the time, there weren’t many female anti-heroes like this who escaped relatively unscathed given their actions (most like-minded characters received more severe punishments). This was perhaps the ‘complexity’ there was? It doesn’t surprise me that female representation was so undifferentiated.
True, it’s a tale as old as time: Scarlett is unjustly shamed and vilified by society for making use of the wiles women have been taught to utilize and for putting her mind to use in order to simply survive. Obviously, we need well-written female anti-heroes and complex representation of womanhood; our flaws, deficiencies and bad choices as well as our positive qualities.
But what purpose does Scarlett serve exactly other than being an archaic idea of the rebelling, inherently racist ‘Southern Belle’? Even by critically addressing toxic/possibly toxic characters don’t we allow them the space that they don’t necessarily deserve?
It may be a Catch-22, but a reason why I wrote this article is that I find these kinds of female ideals, archaic or not, and the contexts they occupy interesting to include and constructively critique in the conversation of how we view female representation, its complex history and what inclusion means in this narrative.
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