Ashley Wilkes Character Analysis

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

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

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.

“[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.”

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.

[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.

“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…”

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.

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

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

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

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.

“[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.”

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.

[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.

“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…”

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.

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