Gone with the Wind

Gone with the Wind

by

Margaret Mitchell

Scarlett O’Hara Character Analysis

Scarlett O’Hara is the protagonist of Gone with the Wind. She is not beautiful, but she is very charming, with dark hair, strong eyebrows, pale skin, and green eyes. She is the oldest daughter of Gerald and Ellen O’Hara, and lives at Tara when the story begins. Although she wants to be a great lady like her mother one day, she is more like Gerald: willful, passionate, and “earthy.” Before the Civil War starts, Scarlett is used to having everything she wants and to being the center of attention. She finds the prospect of the war boring and cannot cope with the fact that the man she thinks she loves—Ashley Wilkes—is going to marry Melanie Hamilton instead of her. She is often selfish and stops at nothing to get what she wants. Throughout the story, she has three husbands, Charles Hamilton, Frank Kennedy, and Rhett Butler and three children, Wade Hampton, Ella Lorena, and Bonnie Blue Butler, one with each husband. She marries Charles just to spite Ashley, even though Charles is engaged to Honey Wilkes. When the war starts, Scarlett quickly becomes a widow and goes to Atlanta where she only wants to ignore the war and have fun. When Ellen dies and Gerald loses his mind, Scarlett becomes determined to do whatever it takes to rise up out of poverty and resume her luxurious lifestyle. To get through hardship, she only thinks about the present moment, pushing off sorrow and consequences to tomorrow. Although she believes many of her actions are justified, she is often simply selfish or callous. For instance, after the war, she deceives Frank Kennedy, her sister Suellen’s beau, into marrying her so she can have his money. She usurps Frank’s sawmill business and befriends rich Carpetbaggers and Scallawags so she can rise up in society. After Frank is killed, she marries Rhett for his immense fortune. In the end, Scarlett has survived everything—poverty, danger, her daughter Bonnie’s death—but her tenacity to get what she wants costs her true love and friendship. She also finally realizes that she loves Rhett, but by this point, he insists he can’t love her.

Scarlett O’Hara Quotes in Gone with the Wind

The Gone with the Wind quotes below are all either spoken by Scarlett O’Hara or refer to Scarlett O’Hara . For each quote, you can also see the other characters and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
The Civil War and Reconstruction Theme Icon
).
Chapter 2 Quotes

“Only when like marries like can there be happiness.”

Related Characters: Gerald O’Hara (speaker), Scarlett O’Hara , Rhett Butler , Melanie Wilkes (Hamilton) , Ashley Wilkes
Page Number: 53
Explanation and Analysis:

“Land is the only thing in the world that amounts to anything, for ‘tis the only thing in the world that lasts.”

Related Characters: Gerald O’Hara (speaker), Scarlett O’Hara , Ashley Wilkes
Related Symbols: Tara, Atlanta
Page Number: 55
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 3 Quotes

It was a man’s world, and she accepted it as such. The man owned the property, and the woman managed it. The man took the credit for the management, and the woman praised his cleverness.

Related Characters: Scarlett O’Hara , Gerald O’Hara , Ellen O’Hara , Frank Kennedy
Related Symbols: Tara
Page Number: 75
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 8 Quotes

There was something exciting about this town with its narrow muddy streets, lying among rolling red hills, something raw and crude that appealed to the rawness and crudeness underlying the fine veneer that Ellen and Mammy had given her. She suddenly felt that this was where she belonged, not in serene and quiet old cities, flat beside yellow waters.

Related Characters: Scarlett O’Hara , Mammy , Ellen O’Hara
Related Symbols: Atlanta, Tara
Page Number: 159
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 23 Quotes

Why had he gone, stepping off into the dark, into the war, into a Cause that was lost, into a world that was mad? Why had he gone, Rhett who loved the pleasures of women and liquor, the comfort of good food and soft beds […] who hated the South and jeered at the fools who fought for it? Now he had set his varnished boots upon a bitter road […] and the end of the road was death.

Related Characters: Scarlett O’Hara , Rhett Butler
Page Number: 375
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 24 Quotes

What a little while since she and everyone else had thought that Atlanta could never fall, that Georgia could never be invaded. But the small cloud that appeared in the northwest four months ago had blown up into a mighty storm and then into a screaming tornado, sweeping away her world, whirling her out of her sheltered life, and dropping her down in the midst of this still, haunted desolation.

Was Tara still standing? Or was Tara also gone with the wind that had swept through Georgia?

Related Characters: Scarlett O’Hara
Related Symbols: Tara, Atlanta
Page Number: 380
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 25 Quotes

Something that was youth and beauty and potential tenderness had gone out of her face forever. What was past was past. Those who were dead were dead. The lazy luxury of the old days was gone, never to return. […] There was no going back and she was going forward.

Throughout the South for fifty years there would be bitter-eyed women who looked backward, to dead times, to dead men, evoking memories that hurt and were futile, bearing poverty with bitter pride because they had those memories. But Scarlett was never to look back.

Related Characters: Scarlett O’Hara , Ashley Wilkes , Ellen O’Hara
Page Number: 407
Explanation and Analysis:

Nothing her mother had taught her was of any value whatsoever now and Scarlett’s heart was sore and puzzled. It did not occur to her that Ellen had could not have foreseen the collapse of the civilization in which she raised her daughters, […] that Ellen looked down a vista of placid future years, all like the uneventful years of her own life, when she had taught her to be gentle and gracious, honorable and kind, modest and truthful.

Related Characters: Scarlett O’Hara , Ellen O’Hara
Page Number: 413
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 26 Quotes

Now, struggling against hatred for Ashley’s wife, there surged a feeling of admiration and comradeship. She saw in a flash of clarity untouched by any petty emotion that beneath the gentle voice and dovelike eyes of Melanie there was a thin flashing blade of unbreakable steel, felt too that there were banners and bugles of courage in Melanie’s quiet blood.

Related Characters: Scarlett O’Hara , Melanie Wilkes (Hamilton)
Page Number: 420
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 31 Quotes

“[before the war] there was a real beauty to living. […] And now it is gone and I am out of place in this new life, and I am afraid. Now, I know that in the old days, it was a shadow show I watched. I avoided everything which was not shadowy, people and situations which were too real, too vital. […] I tried to avoid you too, Scarlett. You were too full of living and too real and I was cowardly enough to prefer shadows and dreams.”

Related Characters: Ashley Wilkes (speaker), Scarlett O’Hara , Melanie Wilkes (Hamilton)
Page Number: 498
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 32 Quotes

She came to the end of the long road which had begun the night Atlanta fell. She had set her feet upon that road a spoiled, selfish and untried girl, full of youth, warm of emotion, easily bewildered by life. Now, at the end of the road, there was nothing left of that girl. Hunger and hard labor, fear and constant strain, the terrors of war and the terrors of Reconstruction had taken away all warmth and youth and softness.

Related Characters: Scarlett O’Hara
Related Symbols: The Curtain Dress, Atlanta
Page Number: 511
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 35 Quotes

No matter what sights they had seen, what menial tasks they had done and would have to do, they remained ladies and gentlemen, royalty in exile—bitter, aloof, incurious, kind to one another, diamond hard. […] The old days had gone but these people would go their ways as if the old days still existed, charming, leisurely, determined not to rush and scramble for pennies as the Yankees did, determined to part with none of the old ways.

[…] It took money to be a lady. She knew Ellen would have fainted had she ever heard such words from her daughter.

Related Characters: Scarlett O’Hara , Ellen O’Hara
Page Number: 569
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 36 Quotes

A woman could handle business matters as well as or better than a man, a revolutionary thought to Scarlett. […] She had been brought up to believe that a woman alone could accomplish nothing, yet she had managed [Tara] without men to help her until Will came. Why, why, her mind stuttered, I believe women could manage everything in the world without men’s help!

Related Characters: Scarlett O’Hara , Frank Kennedy
Page Number: 580
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 44 Quotes

Her conscience battled with her desire for money. She knew she had no business exposing human lives to the hard little man’s mercies. If he should cause the death of one of them she would be as guilty as he was.

Related Characters: Scarlett O’Hara , Johnnie Gallegher
Page Number: 732
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 47 Quotes

Already many other Southern states had illiterate negroes in high public office and legislatures dominated by negroes and Carpetbaggers. But Georgia, by its stubborn resistance, had so far escaped this final degradation. For the greater part of three years, the state’s capital had remained in the control of white men and Democrats.

Related Characters: Scarlett O’Hara , Governor Bullock
Page Number: 781
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 49 Quotes

The hate that enveloped the Bullock regime enveloped her too […] Scarlett had cast her lot with the enemy and, whatever her birth and family connections, she was now in the category of a turncoat, a nigger lover, a traitor, a Republican—and a Scallawag.

Related Characters: Scarlett O’Hara , Jonas Wilkerson , Hilton , Governor Bullock
Page Number: 812
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 53 Quotes

Where did she want to get? That was a silly question. Money and security, of course. And yet—Her mind fumbled. She had money and as much security as one could hope for in an insecure world. But […] now that she thought about it, they hadn’t made her particularly happy, though they had made her less harried, less fearful of the morrow.

Related Characters: Scarlett O’Hara (speaker), Ashley Wilkes
Page Number: 855
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 60 Quotes

She had never before known this type of fear. All her life her feet had been firmly planted in common sense and the only things she had ever feared had been the things she could see, injury, hunger, poverty, loss of Ashley’s love. […] Those fears had never weighed her down as this feeling of wrongness was doing.

Related Characters: Scarlett O’Hara (speaker), Rhett Butler , Bonnie Blue Butler
Page Number: 925
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 61 Quotes

[Scarlett] could see so clearly now that he was only a childish fancy, no more important really than her spoiled desire for the aquamarine earbobs she had coaxed out of Gerald. For, once she owned the earbobs, they had lost their value, as everything except money lost its value once it was hers. And so he, too, would have become cheap if, in those first far-away days, she had ever had the satisfaction of refusing to marry him.

Related Characters: Scarlett O’Hara (speaker), Rhett Butler , Melanie Wilkes (Hamilton) , Ashley Wilkes
Page Number: 940
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 62 Quotes

She had thought, half an hour ago, that she had lost everything in the world, except money, everything that made life desirable, Ellen, Gerald, Bonnie, Mammy, Melanie and Ashley. She had to lose them all to realize that she loved Rhett—loved him because he was strong and unscrupulous, passionate and earthy, like herself.

Related Characters: Scarlett O’Hara (speaker), Rhett Butler
Page Number: 946
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 63 Quotes

“I want the outer semblance of the things I used to know, the utter boredom of respectability […] the calm dignity life can have when it’s lived by gentle folks, the genial grace of days that are gone. When I lived those days I didn’t realize the slow charm of them…”

Related Characters: Rhett Butler (speaker), Scarlett O’Hara , Ashley Wilkes
Page Number: 956
Explanation and Analysis:

She had never understood either of the men she had loved and so she had lost them both. Now she had a fumbling knowledge that, had she ever understood Ashley, she would never have loved him; had she ever understood Rhett, she would never have lost him.

Related Characters: Scarlett O’Hara (speaker), Rhett Butler , Ashley Wilkes
Page Number: 958
Explanation and Analysis:

“I’ll think of it all tomorrow, at Tara. I can stand it then. […] After all, tomorrow is another day.”

Related Characters: Scarlett O’Hara (speaker), Rhett Butler , Ashley Wilkes , Ellen O’Hara , Johnnie Gallegher
Related Symbols: Tara
Page Number: 959
Explanation and Analysis:
Get the entire Gone with the Wind LitChart as a printable PDF.
Gone with the Wind PDF

Scarlett O’Hara Quotes in Gone with the Wind

The Gone with the Wind quotes below are all either spoken by Scarlett O’Hara or refer to Scarlett O’Hara . For each quote, you can also see the other characters and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
The Civil War and Reconstruction Theme Icon
).
Chapter 2 Quotes

“Only when like marries like can there be happiness.”

Related Characters: Gerald O’Hara (speaker), Scarlett O’Hara , Rhett Butler , Melanie Wilkes (Hamilton) , Ashley Wilkes
Page Number: 53
Explanation and Analysis:

“Land is the only thing in the world that amounts to anything, for ‘tis the only thing in the world that lasts.”

Related Characters: Gerald O’Hara (speaker), Scarlett O’Hara , Ashley Wilkes
Related Symbols: Tara, Atlanta
Page Number: 55
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 3 Quotes

It was a man’s world, and she accepted it as such. The man owned the property, and the woman managed it. The man took the credit for the management, and the woman praised his cleverness.

Related Characters: Scarlett O’Hara , Gerald O’Hara , Ellen O’Hara , Frank Kennedy
Related Symbols: Tara
Page Number: 75
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 8 Quotes

There was something exciting about this town with its narrow muddy streets, lying among rolling red hills, something raw and crude that appealed to the rawness and crudeness underlying the fine veneer that Ellen and Mammy had given her. She suddenly felt that this was where she belonged, not in serene and quiet old cities, flat beside yellow waters.

Related Characters: Scarlett O’Hara , Mammy , Ellen O’Hara
Related Symbols: Atlanta, Tara
Page Number: 159
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 23 Quotes

Why had he gone, stepping off into the dark, into the war, into a Cause that was lost, into a world that was mad? Why had he gone, Rhett who loved the pleasures of women and liquor, the comfort of good food and soft beds […] who hated the South and jeered at the fools who fought for it? Now he had set his varnished boots upon a bitter road […] and the end of the road was death.

Related Characters: Scarlett O’Hara , Rhett Butler
Page Number: 375
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 24 Quotes

What a little while since she and everyone else had thought that Atlanta could never fall, that Georgia could never be invaded. But the small cloud that appeared in the northwest four months ago had blown up into a mighty storm and then into a screaming tornado, sweeping away her world, whirling her out of her sheltered life, and dropping her down in the midst of this still, haunted desolation.

Was Tara still standing? Or was Tara also gone with the wind that had swept through Georgia?

Related Characters: Scarlett O’Hara
Related Symbols: Tara, Atlanta
Page Number: 380
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 25 Quotes

Something that was youth and beauty and potential tenderness had gone out of her face forever. What was past was past. Those who were dead were dead. The lazy luxury of the old days was gone, never to return. […] There was no going back and she was going forward.

Throughout the South for fifty years there would be bitter-eyed women who looked backward, to dead times, to dead men, evoking memories that hurt and were futile, bearing poverty with bitter pride because they had those memories. But Scarlett was never to look back.

Related Characters: Scarlett O’Hara , Ashley Wilkes , Ellen O’Hara
Page Number: 407
Explanation and Analysis:

Nothing her mother had taught her was of any value whatsoever now and Scarlett’s heart was sore and puzzled. It did not occur to her that Ellen had could not have foreseen the collapse of the civilization in which she raised her daughters, […] that Ellen looked down a vista of placid future years, all like the uneventful years of her own life, when she had taught her to be gentle and gracious, honorable and kind, modest and truthful.

Related Characters: Scarlett O’Hara , Ellen O’Hara
Page Number: 413
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 26 Quotes

Now, struggling against hatred for Ashley’s wife, there surged a feeling of admiration and comradeship. She saw in a flash of clarity untouched by any petty emotion that beneath the gentle voice and dovelike eyes of Melanie there was a thin flashing blade of unbreakable steel, felt too that there were banners and bugles of courage in Melanie’s quiet blood.

Related Characters: Scarlett O’Hara , Melanie Wilkes (Hamilton)
Page Number: 420
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 31 Quotes

“[before the war] there was a real beauty to living. […] And now it is gone and I am out of place in this new life, and I am afraid. Now, I know that in the old days, it was a shadow show I watched. I avoided everything which was not shadowy, people and situations which were too real, too vital. […] I tried to avoid you too, Scarlett. You were too full of living and too real and I was cowardly enough to prefer shadows and dreams.”

Related Characters: Ashley Wilkes (speaker), Scarlett O’Hara , Melanie Wilkes (Hamilton)
Page Number: 498
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 32 Quotes

She came to the end of the long road which had begun the night Atlanta fell. She had set her feet upon that road a spoiled, selfish and untried girl, full of youth, warm of emotion, easily bewildered by life. Now, at the end of the road, there was nothing left of that girl. Hunger and hard labor, fear and constant strain, the terrors of war and the terrors of Reconstruction had taken away all warmth and youth and softness.

Related Characters: Scarlett O’Hara
Related Symbols: The Curtain Dress, Atlanta
Page Number: 511
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 35 Quotes

No matter what sights they had seen, what menial tasks they had done and would have to do, they remained ladies and gentlemen, royalty in exile—bitter, aloof, incurious, kind to one another, diamond hard. […] The old days had gone but these people would go their ways as if the old days still existed, charming, leisurely, determined not to rush and scramble for pennies as the Yankees did, determined to part with none of the old ways.

[…] It took money to be a lady. She knew Ellen would have fainted had she ever heard such words from her daughter.

Related Characters: Scarlett O’Hara , Ellen O’Hara
Page Number: 569
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 36 Quotes

A woman could handle business matters as well as or better than a man, a revolutionary thought to Scarlett. […] She had been brought up to believe that a woman alone could accomplish nothing, yet she had managed [Tara] without men to help her until Will came. Why, why, her mind stuttered, I believe women could manage everything in the world without men’s help!

Related Characters: Scarlett O’Hara , Frank Kennedy
Page Number: 580
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 44 Quotes

Her conscience battled with her desire for money. She knew she had no business exposing human lives to the hard little man’s mercies. If he should cause the death of one of them she would be as guilty as he was.

Related Characters: Scarlett O’Hara , Johnnie Gallegher
Page Number: 732
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 47 Quotes

Already many other Southern states had illiterate negroes in high public office and legislatures dominated by negroes and Carpetbaggers. But Georgia, by its stubborn resistance, had so far escaped this final degradation. For the greater part of three years, the state’s capital had remained in the control of white men and Democrats.

Related Characters: Scarlett O’Hara , Governor Bullock
Page Number: 781
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 49 Quotes

The hate that enveloped the Bullock regime enveloped her too […] Scarlett had cast her lot with the enemy and, whatever her birth and family connections, she was now in the category of a turncoat, a nigger lover, a traitor, a Republican—and a Scallawag.

Related Characters: Scarlett O’Hara , Jonas Wilkerson , Hilton , Governor Bullock
Page Number: 812
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 53 Quotes

Where did she want to get? That was a silly question. Money and security, of course. And yet—Her mind fumbled. She had money and as much security as one could hope for in an insecure world. But […] now that she thought about it, they hadn’t made her particularly happy, though they had made her less harried, less fearful of the morrow.

Related Characters: Scarlett O’Hara (speaker), Ashley Wilkes
Page Number: 855
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 60 Quotes

She had never before known this type of fear. All her life her feet had been firmly planted in common sense and the only things she had ever feared had been the things she could see, injury, hunger, poverty, loss of Ashley’s love. […] Those fears had never weighed her down as this feeling of wrongness was doing.

Related Characters: Scarlett O’Hara (speaker), Rhett Butler , Bonnie Blue Butler
Page Number: 925
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 61 Quotes

[Scarlett] could see so clearly now that he was only a childish fancy, no more important really than her spoiled desire for the aquamarine earbobs she had coaxed out of Gerald. For, once she owned the earbobs, they had lost their value, as everything except money lost its value once it was hers. And so he, too, would have become cheap if, in those first far-away days, she had ever had the satisfaction of refusing to marry him.

Related Characters: Scarlett O’Hara (speaker), Rhett Butler , Melanie Wilkes (Hamilton) , Ashley Wilkes
Page Number: 940
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 62 Quotes

She had thought, half an hour ago, that she had lost everything in the world, except money, everything that made life desirable, Ellen, Gerald, Bonnie, Mammy, Melanie and Ashley. She had to lose them all to realize that she loved Rhett—loved him because he was strong and unscrupulous, passionate and earthy, like herself.

Related Characters: Scarlett O’Hara (speaker), Rhett Butler
Page Number: 946
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 63 Quotes

“I want the outer semblance of the things I used to know, the utter boredom of respectability […] the calm dignity life can have when it’s lived by gentle folks, the genial grace of days that are gone. When I lived those days I didn’t realize the slow charm of them…”

Related Characters: Rhett Butler (speaker), Scarlett O’Hara , Ashley Wilkes
Page Number: 956
Explanation and Analysis:

She had never understood either of the men she had loved and so she had lost them both. Now she had a fumbling knowledge that, had she ever understood Ashley, she would never have loved him; had she ever understood Rhett, she would never have lost him.

Related Characters: Scarlett O’Hara (speaker), Rhett Butler , Ashley Wilkes
Page Number: 958
Explanation and Analysis:

“I’ll think of it all tomorrow, at Tara. I can stand it then. […] After all, tomorrow is another day.”

Related Characters: Scarlett O’Hara (speaker), Rhett Butler , Ashley Wilkes , Ellen O’Hara , Johnnie Gallegher
Related Symbols: Tara
Page Number: 959
Explanation and Analysis: