So Scarlett wasn't and was as bad as in the movie. The book gives more insight into why she was the way she was so you almost sympathize with her. It is kind of like watching a willfull child make the wrong choices, you can't control them, but you know they are going too far, causing misery where it needn't be. It is really a good picture of human nature. She was right, yet she was wrong.
I guess I am too much of a romantic because I hate how it ends, leaves you hanging at that most depressing moment rather than after everything is put right. She, however, isn't giving up, which I can't decide whether that is a good thing or not. It seems admirable and better than wallowing in depression and fear, but on the other hand, her determination hadn't brought happiness in the past, quite the opposite. It left me feeling like there was no hope rather than otherwise.
The relationship with her last husband looks so familiar to our society now. I wonder how many divorces weren't really wanted, but pride and fear kept one or the other or both from opening up. One sign from one person would have been returned by the other, but always waiting on the other person to be first, because of fear, and perhaps control.
It is a great book really. It describes the search for happiness through money and excess, through selfish pursuits and ignorance of others. And not finding it. A search for safety and security only to find they were looking in the wrong places. Of not knowing what you have until you lose it, and hanging onto childish dreams to the point of losing what you have now. Lives being controlled and shaped by their own fears and desires of acceptance. It is a great illustration of the lack of freedom there really is in satisfying our selfish desires despite what the world tells us.
I also found it an interesting perspective on the south, the war, slaves and freedom. I had never seen it depicted this way. From this view there were no wrongs done to the slaves, they were cared for by their owners- nursed through illness and childbirth, clothed and fed- to the point that when freedom came they couldn't care for themselves. Many of the slaves staying with their owners because of love and respect for them. It shows the beatings and running down slaves with dogs,etc., as stories concocted by people who would benefit most by the mess that occurred from these rumors, and that the slaves that took off after freedoms were granted were usually "mean blackies" that had been weeded out from working in the household and sent to work in the fields. Who then preyed upon white men and women without consequence. It shows the KKK as men who were really defending their women and themselves,who couldn't act on it openly or ask for help from the law, for fear of being hanged. Like reversed racism perhaps. It shows that people in the north were more racist than those in the south in that they had never associated with "blackies" so they were uncomfortable around them, and many were condescending and thought of them as they would animals that couldn't think or hear.
Overall I found it an enjoyable, well written, piece of fiction.
