Gone With the Wind Themes

Gone With the Wind loves to watch its characters' plans and hopes fail and turn to dust and ashes and general unhappiness. Or, alternately, it loves to have its characters hopes come true and turn...

Gone With the Wind is often thought of as one of the greatest love stories of all time. Which is kind of odd, since mostly love crashes and burns in the novel, or just crawls off into a corner to s...

As you'd expect from a historical novel called Gone With the Wind, this book is obsessed with the past. Everything before the war was better than everything after the war; once there was happiness...

For this theme, we will step aside and hand you over to a world-renowned expert on Gone With the Wind: Margaret Mitchell. Here's what she said about the novel and perseverance in 1936: If the novel...

Race and racism are mostly in the background in Gone With the Wind, just as black characters are decidedly secondary. But if you think about what it would mean to be black at the time Mitchell writ...

The biggest class divide in the Confederate South was race. White people had power, property, and money; black people for the most part weren't even able to own themselves. This sharp, absolute div...

War and violence in Gone With the Wind are presented as awful, unnecessary—and noble. The Confederate deaths are seen as wasteful, the fight as unwinnable, but at the same time the Yankees are st...

Margaret Mitchell was herself something of a pioneer for women's rights, working as a journalist at a time when few women did. In that spirit, Gone With the Wind admires Scarlett's gumption and her...