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Chapter 31
Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Gone with the Wind, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
The Civil War and Reconstruction
Looking Forward vs. Looking Back
Classism and Racism
Practicality, Tenacity, and Selfishness
Women and Power
Summary
Analysis
As Scarlett walks back to Tara, she clutches the red clay and tells herself she’ll be okay. She loves Tara and can’t believe she’d been ready to throw it away—not even Ashley can replace Tara. As she enters the hall, she hears hooves. Jonas Wilkerson, well-dressed, steps from a fancy carriage. How could he have become so rich in these hard times? A girl in a gaudy dress steps down beside him. Her clothes are fashionable—and the girl is Emmie Slattery, the “nasty slut” who killed Ellen.
Jonas Wilkerson and Emmie Slattery, who were poor and low-class before the war, are now wealthy. By impoverishing the wealthiest people in the South, the war empowered the lower-class to citizens to take money and prestige for themselves. As far as Scarlett is concerned, this is an atrocity: it enables people she once scorned to become seemingly more powerful than Scarlett.
Themes
Scarlett screams at Emmie to get off the steps. Jonas says not to speak to his wife like that. Scarlett laughs, asking if they baptized their “brats.” Jonas says they come as friends, but Scarlett says they’ve never been friends and demands he leave. Jonas sneers that he knows Scarlett is poor. He wanted to buy Tara at a fair price, but now he’ll wait till she can’t pay the taxes then take it. Wishing she could kill Jonas like she killed the Yankee, Scarlett screams at him to get out. She’s scared those “white trash nigger lovers” are going to take Tara, and there’s nothing she can do about it. Perhaps they’d even bring Black people to live as equals in Ellen’s home.
Before the war, Emmie Slattery and Jonas Wilkerson were low-class citizens. After the war, they support the freedmen. Instead of considering why anyone would view a Black person as an equal, Scarlett only views this as a mark of someone’s low class. She sees that Jonas is trying to take power away from her, and from other formerly wealthy white people like her, by giving plantations lower class white people and free Black people.
Themes
Scarlett tries to think of a way to stop Jonas from taking Tara. Ashley had said Rhett Butler was the only person with money. She could borrow money from Rhett, pay the taxes, and laugh in Jonas’s face—but she’d need the money every year, and the taxes will probably keep increasing. Scarlett realizes if she marries Rhett, she’ll never have to worry about money again. Now that Scarlett is more mature and practical, she realizes Rhett can’t know she’s poor, or he won’t marry her. After they’re married, he’ll help with anything. The thought of being his wife is repulsive, especially when she remembers her honeymoon with Charles. Scarlett recalls that Rhett said he’d never marry—but he also said he wanted her. Marrying him would feel like prostitution and like she’s betraying Ellen, but Scarlett is desperate and knows she can never have Ashley now.
Scarlett’s determination to save Tara from bankruptcy has reached a new level. She is now willing to marry a man she doesn’t love in order to get money. Scarlett seems to think this is extreme, but it isn’t out of character for her; Scarlett married Charles Hamilton simply because her feelings were hurt that Ashley rejected her. Whether it’s revenge or money, Scarlett has always viewed marriage as a means for getting what she wants and gaining power. And as she thinks of marriage like this, she moves further away from the image of the ideal woman that Ellen represented.
Themes
This evening, Scarlett comes to the end of the journey she’d begun the night Atlanta fell. She’s a hard woman now, not a youthful girl. Scarlett knows the old days won’t return, and now she’s only afraid of hunger. Since she has nothing to lose, she’s sure of her decision to marry Rhett. Scarlett vows to get money from him, even if he won’t marry her—she’s not sure how prostitution works, but she’ll worry about that later. She wants to make herself look like a queen doing a favor for Rhett, but when Scarlett looks at herself in the mirror, she sees she’s thin, haunted, and not pretty. She’ll never woo Rhett looking like this.
There is no longer anything that Scarlett fears besides hunger, not even disgrace. She has always shrewdly viewed relationships with men as games where she must win the outcome she wants, but when she decides to win money from Rhett, she has grown up completely. This suggests that Scarlett has a more complete understanding now of her sexual power as a woman. But she also implies that her sexuality is her only weapon now, since she has no money.
Themes
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Scarlett goes to the window and leans her head against the green velvet curtains. Then, she pulls over a table and climbs up to take down the curtains. Mammy comes in and asks what Scarlett is doing with the curtains. They argue for a moment, but then Scarlett tells Mammy to get the dress patterns. She’s making a dress from the curtains, since she’s going to Atlanta to borrow money and needs a nice dress. Scarlett and Mammy argue again—Mammy insists an O’Hara doesn’t need a dress to be respected—but she gives in when Scarlett explains what’s going on with the taxes. Mammy yells for Prissy to get the dress patterns.
Scarlett’s plan to make a dress to attract Rhett out of Ellen’s curtains represents her complete departure from Ellen’s teachings. Ellen would never approve of Scarlett’s plan to essentially sell herself to get money, but Scarlett knows that times are more desperate than Ellen thought they’d ever get. Ellen’s curtains represent gentility and the Old South, and Scarlett plans to use them to get what she wants: money.
Themes
After supper, everyone helps make the dress. It feels as if they’re preparing for a ball. Scarlett says she’s going to “mortgage the house,” but no one knows what that means. Melanie teases that it must have something to do with Captain Butler. The girls donate their nicest accessories, and Melanie suggests they trim a bonnet with the rooster’s feathers. Scarlett looks at their joy with contempt. None of them had any idea what’s happening because they never change to meet bad circumstances. They believe God will solve things, but Scarlett knows only Rhett Butler can fix things.
No one else can imagine what Scarlett is planning to do. They think she is going on some vaguely romantic journey to Atlanta, and they prepare excitedly as if she’s going ball such as the kind they’d attend before the war. This shows that, for everyone except Scarlett, life still feels beautiful and romantic. To her, however, life has become a harsh, practical reality where only money can help her.
Themes
Mammy sends Ashley and Will out so that the women can fit Scarlett in the dress. Will and Ashley look at each other; they both have the same suspicion. Everything feels ominous. Ashley is worried, but he can’t do anything to help Scarlett after what happened in the orchard. He thinks he’s driven her to this, but he remembers how she’d squared her shoulders. She was so brave, always taking life as it comes. He thinks she is “gallant,” heading to Atlanta in velvet curtains and rooster feathers.
Ashley feels powerless to stop Scarlett. He thinks she looks “gallant,” a word that would usually describe a man. She is embarking for Atlanta to save her land and family—something a man would traditionally do. That he admires her for being “gallant” casts him in a less powerful—and more traditionally feminine—position.
Themes
