Gone With The Wind Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 750 words

Gone With The Wind - Essay Example In this story, the main character, Scarlett O’Hara, must come to grips with the loss of her childhood wealth and comfort as a true Southern Belle of the Old South as the Civil War rips apart the Georgia countryside of her home and renders her penniless in the devastation of the Antebellum South. This is an important distinction that is made much of in both the book and the subsequent film. At the beginning of the novel, the grandness of the plantation does not seem to equal later impressions of it. Scarlett herself doesn’t seem to really being placing the mansion and grounds into their sweeping concepts until somewhat later in the book, when the city of Atlanta is under siege. It is here that she begins considering â€Å"the sprawling white house with fluttering white curtains at the windows, the thick clover on the lawn with the bees busy in it, the little black boy on the front steps shooing the ducks and turkeys from the flowerbeds, the serene red fields and the miles and miles of cotton turning white in the sun!† (339). As the war rages on and Scarlett is forced to exist in the relative squalor and deprivation of the Reconstruction, these images become even more distanced from the real. For example, Rhett Butler decides to leave Scarlett to her misery as he goes to â€Å"hunt in old towns and old countries where some of the old time must still linge r† (1009) while Scarlett continues to place her memories of the old plantation in terms of the romantically idealized: â€Å"the banks of cape jessamine bushes, vivid green against the white walls, the fluttering white curtains† (1011). The ending impression of Tara before the war thus takes on the image that is eventually put forward at the opening of the film by the same name. For the film, it was important to portray the sprawling wealth of a southern plantation to explain both Scarlett’s headstrong, princess-like attitude as well as her expectations regarding other people’s behavior. The mansion