The dress Scarlett makes out of Ellen’s green velvet curtains represents her willingness to do whatever it takes to get ahead. From the beginning of the novel, Scarlett dreams of being a great lady like her mother, Ellen. But when she makes a dress out of Ellen’s curtains so she can manipulate Rhett Butler into giving her money, she leaves behind her dream of being like her mother for good. The dress is intended to make Scarlett look wealthy when she isn’t, and Scarlett’s choice to make it and wear it symbolizes Scarlett’s choice to abandon her morals and focus on wealth at the expense of everything else. The dress, then, marks the turning point in Scarlett’s moral collapse. After making the dress and going to Atlanta to seduce Rhett, she stops at nothing to survive and find new ways to make money. Whenever Scarlett has qualms about the morality of her actions, she thinks of the day when she turned her mother’s curtains into a dress and decides that she has strayed too far from the dignified lady Ellen wanted her to be to go back.
The Curtain Dress Quotes in Gone with the Wind
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.