gone with the wind

 Nick Jurgensen 

 

Gone with the wind 

In Gone with the Wind, the main character, Scarlet O'hara, experiences the Civil War. Scarlet has the perspective of someone that's from the south and respects the southern culture. She was in her early twenties and lived on a plantation. Her family owned slaves and used them for labor the same as everyone else did in the south. They were an upper-class family and the men in power in the town/county were attending parties trying to have their sons find a wife. Scarlet had a couple of guys that were trying to marry her and she only wanted to marry someone that was already engaged. This increased tensions between Scarlet and everyone else because she started treating people differently to adjust for her being upset. 

In my opinion, she lived a very standard lifestyle for the time and place she grew up in. I would have felt the same way if I did not know any better and grew up around it. She felt as if having slaves was a normal thing. She talked to her slaves very differently than she did her friends and family. She was harsh and talked to them in a dominating tone. An example of this is she told the slave she is going to beat her if she does not hurry up. She viewed the war as the North just destroying the South and taking everything she and her family had. Towards the end of the movie, they show her father out of money and drinking to cope with the huge loss they took. The family and herself had lost everything from the war and did not have any way to continue on becuase they lost their slaves. I would have felt like I lost all my property and ways of living if something like this happened to me.