Rhett Butler Character Analysis

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

“I have seen many things that you all have not seen. The thousands of immigrants who’d be glad to fight for the Yankees for food and a few dollars, the factories, the foundries, the shipyards, the iron and coal mines—all the things we haven’t got. Why all we have is cotton and slaves and arrogance. They’d lick us in a month.”

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.

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.

[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.

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.

“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.”

“I have seen many things that you all have not seen. The thousands of immigrants who’d be glad to fight for the Yankees for food and a few dollars, the factories, the foundries, the shipyards, the iron and coal mines—all the things we haven’t got. Why all we have is cotton and slaves and arrogance. They’d lick us in a month.”

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.

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.

[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.

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.

“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.”