This page is for tropes that have appeared in Gone with the Wind.
For the rest:
- I Gave My Word: Scarlett promised Ashley to take care of Mellie during her pregnancy. Despite Scarlett's various amoral behavior, she does have a warped moral code that she takes very seriously, mostly the result of her upbringing; making a promise is very Serious Business and she prides herself on keeping her word. (The fact that she promised it to Ashley doesn't hurt either.)
- I Want My Mommy!: When Scarlett's trying to escape Atlanta and get back home to Tara and Rhett tries to forbid her from going, saying it's too dangerous, she starts breaking down and crying that she wants her mother. Cruelly, she and her party manage to reach Tara just one day after Ellen dies.
- Immediate Sequel/
Sequel Gap: "Scarlett" begins with Melanie's funeral, only a few days after the conclusion of Gone With the Wind, despite the 55-year space between the two works (both literature and film). - Innocently Insensitive: Gerald O'Hara acts like this towards his wife occasionally. He insists on shoving the task of looking over the accounts of the plantation with the recently-dismissed Jonas Wilkerson onto Ellen, and her disappointment at missing the barbecue at Twelve Oaks does not enter his mind.
- Instant Illness: In the movie, Melanie goes from healthy to lethally ill within minutes of screentime. It's never explained what struck her down. (The book explains that it's complications from an ill-advised pregnancy. This is foreshadowed briefly in the film, when Rhett reacts with worry when Melanie tells him she is pregnant, and faints in a scene taking place a while later.)
- Intermission
- Ironic Echo: John Wilkes sign outside Twelve Oaks, warning that disturbing the peace will be prosecuted. It is first seen before the barbecue, and seen the second time when Union soldiers have burnt the mansion.
- Irony: Scarlett wants to be a great lady like her mother. What she fails to realise until the end of the book that the closest person to Ellen O'Hara after her death is Melanie, whom she spends much of their acquaintance despising.
- Jerkass Has a Point: And a lot of them do in this book:
- Scarlett to Sueellen about having to root out the cotton because they need the money and there's no one else to do it. And part of the reason why Scarlett steals away Frank is because she correctly deduces that Suellen wouldn't let Frank lend the money to save Tara, wanting to be a Trophy Wife.
- Rhett's This Is Reality take on how the Civil War will go, as well as chewing out Scarlett late in the book for neglecting Wade and Ella.
- India's accusations of Scarlett coveting Ashley are very true. She still is bitchy to make them in public, even if Melanie's not around to defend Scarlett.
- Scarlett realizes that Ashley has always let her down, from the very beginning when he kept coming to see her even though he was engaged to Melanie. This is behavior that would be considered incredibly caddish even today, even moreso back in those days when the rules regarding courtship were much stricter.
- Despite her usual self-centeredness, Scarlett's absolutely right about her objections to the Ku Klux Klan, stating that it will bring the local military down on them even harder, resulting in people being jailed or hanged, or their property seized.
- Scarlett, period. Her bitchiness makes it hard to see that she's actually right or has a very valid point about most of the things she says or does
- Kick the Dog:
- Scarlett does this constantly in both mediums:
- Manipulating two relatively innocent men into marrying her, one of whom is engaged to her sister.
- Spending her second marriage running and ruining the life of her husband.
- Emotionally neglecting her children from her first two marriages.
- Contracting prison labor for her sawmill and enabling an overseer she knows abuses the prisoners, and his only punishment being wage docking.
- And then going straight against her beloved Ashley's expressed will and manipulating him into working for/with her.
- Heck, in the first chapter she is revealed to have stolen another girl's near-fiancé merely because it irritated her to see a man showing interest in anyone but her. A girl who's neither beautiful nor popular and is said to have no chance getting another man but him.
- Her brutally cruel treatment of Rhett after Bonnie's death—she outright calls him a murderer. Justified in that she was also grieving after her daughter died, though perhaps not as much as Rhett.
- Saying that the defeated, weary Southern troops "make her sick, all of them," while in close proximity to them is quite despicable and thoughtless as well, especially considering what they must have gone through defending their territory and people.
- Rhett gives as good as he gets:
- He's often downright verbally abusive to Scarlett. For someone who loves her, he doesn't seem to like her very much, as well as simultaneously resenting her for not returning his feelings.
- Threatens her with physical violence on several occasions—in one instance, she is genuinely afraid that he's going to hit her—and ultimately carries it out the night he forces himself on her. This is after threatening to tear her "limb from limb" or "crush her skull".
- Pulls a disappearing act afterwards and when he finally shows up, throws it in her face that he slept with another woman, completely oblivious to the fact that Scarlett wants to work things out with him.
- He rebuffs Scarlett every time she genuinely tries to reach out to him. The most striking example is when she tells him she's pregnant again. Until then, she's been happy about it and hoping that they have a chance to reconcile. His reaction? To ask who the father is — knowing full well the child is the result of him raping her — and to tell her, "Cheer up, maybe you'll have a miscarriage."
- The rape itself is ugly, too. Much of the dog kicking seems to come from their both misreading each other. The morning after the rape (in the book at least), both Scarlett and Rhett were ready to reconcile but both wrongly assumed the other was still angry and unconciliatory.
- The rape shows up some of the issues with arguing the Kick the Dog behaviour that Scarlett and Rhett inflict on each other. On the one hand, Rhett forces himself on her and is guilty of rape. On the other hand, Scarlett doesn't seem traumatized by this after the fact and wants to reconcile - which would be the last thing she would do if she felt genuinely violated or abused, knowing Scarlett. Then the fact that the entire scene plays out like a culmination of all their violent UST for each other, and that although both are incredibly verbally abusive to each other and make terrible threats Rhett has never laid a hand on Scarlett otherwise, makes things even murkier. Was this rough sex that Scarlett was a consenting party to, or was it rape? If she'd violently objected (really kicking, screaming and fighting him like she didn't want it) would he have stopped? Although Rhett is clearly in the wrong - even running along the moral event horizon for some - the nature of their encounter, the degree of non-consent and both parties' degree of involvement is a very murky area which could be debated for a very long time with no clear answer. In that sense, it's a microcosm of their entire relationship; how abusive and Kick the Dog was their interactions with each other and how much of a role did sex have to play?
- Jonas Wilkerson, when he's trying to convince Scarlett to sell Tara, sneers that her father has become an idiot.
- India after Scarlett is assaulted reveals with scathing glee that Frank, Ashley and the boys are part of the Klan, even though Frank promised he wouldn't join, and says that if Scarlett hadn't ridden to shantytown alone, their men wouldn't be killed. Melanie calls India out for this on seeing how pale Scarlett becomes.
- Scarlett does this constantly in both mediums:
- Karma Houdini Warranty: Despite Scarlett (rightfully) blaming the Slatterys for her mother's death, and both Jonas Wilkerson and Emmie Slattery for her father's, since Emmie married Jonas, she never seeks out retribution on either of them even when she has the means to do so. Jonas, however, does meet his ultimate fate at the hands of Tony Fontaine for supporting rights for black people. In the case of Emmie, it becomes a What Happened to the Mouse? moment since Scarlett is otherwise shown to carrying grudges for years at a time for much lesser slights than the deaths of her beloved parents.
- Kick the Morality Pet: For all the dog-kicking that Scarlett does, she drives her lover, Rhett, away from her. She's also guilty when she can't do this to Melanie after the night she and Ashley are caught hugging, because Melanie thinks too highly of her. As Rhett points out, Scarlett can't admit that she has unrequited love for Ashley without tarnishing Melanie's image of her, which would break Melanie's heart.
- Kissing Cousins: Members of the Wilkes family marry their cousins whenever possible, one of the main reasons Scarlett initially loses out to Melanie.
- In the book, Ellen O'Hara is also shown to have been in love with her cousin Phillipe.
- Truth in Television - marriage between second and third cousins was not uncommon in the 19th century and before. (And very common in some circles - one need only consult a family tree of 19th-century European royalty.)
- Kiss-Kiss-Slap: When Rhett rescues Scarlett out of the burning Atlanta, then abandons her to go fight in the Confederate Army. Before leaving, he kisses her; she enjoys it, but then gets mad and slaps him.
- There's a lot of this in their relationship.
- Lady Drunk: The extreme stress she is put under after the war causes Scarlett to become a younger one of these, but she manages to keep it a secret from everyone except Rhett. (And he finds out only because he happened to call on her while she was still trying to get rid of the fumes on her breath from a guilt-induced bender after Frank Kennedy's death.)
- Lady in Red: Scarlett fulfills this role at Ashley's party after a scandal in polite society - invoked by Rhett, who angrily insists that she look the part of The Vamp.
- Ladykiller in Love: Rhett is one of these in regards to Scarlett, and Scarlett is a female version in regards to Ashley. It doesn't stop them from owning a brothel and marrying other men, respectively.
- Land Poor: Scarlett, post-war.
- Large Ham: "As God as my witness, I'll never be hungry again!" Admittedly, it's also a
Moment of Awesome.- "Tomorrow- is another day!"
- Lethally Stupid: Bonnie's death could have been averted, had Rhett put his foot down and refused to give into Bonnie's wishes in regards to making a dangerous jump with her pony "Mr. Butler". The situation finishes with the pony tripping over the bars... and Bonnie falling, breaking her neck, and dying.
- Light Feminine and Dark Feminine: Melanie is the Light Feminine, while Scarlett is the Dark Feminine.
- Like Parent, Like Spouse: Although downplayed in the film, Scarlett's attraction to Rhett is that he has very many of the same qualities that her father has, being very much a manly man who drinks, rides, and is shrewd enough to make something of himself out of nothing. It's even mentioned in the book that she instinctively likes the smell of tobacco, riding leather, and whiskey in other men because they remind her of Gerald, which Rhett also smells like.
- Literal-Minded: Scarlett to some extent; lampshaded by Ashley and Rhett many times throughout the book.
- Lost Him in a Card Game: Gerald won Pork in poker game, as well as the deed to Tara.
- The Lost Lenore: Philippe, Ellen O'Hara's cousin and first and only real love, who is killed in a bar fight. Ellen marries Gerald shortly afterwards even though she is 15 and he is 43 to escape her father who opposed her match with Philippe. When dying, her last words are Philippe's name.
- Ellen herself becomes this to Gerald, given the way he loses his mind after her death.
- Brent Tarleton to Carreen O'Hara. Carreen eventually joins a convent as a way to cope with her loss.
- Love Dodecahedron: Even more so in the book than the movie. Scarlett marries Charles Hamilton as her first husband, who was Honey Wilkes' beau, whose sister is India, whose beau Stuart Scarlett also stole along with his twin brother Brent, who eventually became her younger sister Carreen's sweetheart, who Will falls in love with after the war but marries Scarlett's other sister Suellen instead after Scarlett marries her fiance Frank Kennedy....and on and on and on.
- Love Epiphany: Scarlett finally has one when she realizes that she doesn't love Ashley, and has always loved Rhett. She has a platonic version with Melanie when she realizes that Melanie is her best friend, and has always been there for Scarlett, defending her. Unfortunately, both of these come far too late.
- Loving a Shadow: This seems to run in the family:
- Ellen with her cousin Phillippe. Apparently, a sixteen year old whose crush has died will never love again.
- Scarlett in regards to Ashley. She even describes her idea in the book as "a pretty set of clothes" that she forced Ashley to wear.
- Scarlett with Ashley takes on much wider dimensions as well. Although in the beginning she is infatuated with him and loves him (arguably), after a few years and the devastation of the South it becomes clear that what she loves is not Ashley, she yearns for what he represents: her old life in the old South, that era and place that she loved. Because she tries to constantly look forward and doesn't allow herself to properly grieve for the end of that era and accept that it's gone (she thinks it weakens her), she projects all that desire onto Ashley and forces onto him all the expectations and longings she had from that time. She is so wrapped up in this devoted delusion of her teenage years that she doesn't even realise when she falls in love with Rhett or what having an adult relationship means. She stays emotionally stunted as a bitchy immature 17 year-old, as incapable of becoming a mother to her children as she is a lover to the person she cares about the most.
- Carreen with Brent Tarleton. She fell in love with him when she was 13 and never loves again after he's killed in the war, preferring to go into a convent.
- Gerald is so devastated by Ellen's death that he goes mad to the point where he frequently forgets that she's gone.
- India Wilkes, too. In the book, it is well known that Stuart Tarleton would have married her had he not been killed in the war, so she's essentially treated like a widow and is quite proud to act like one.
- Lowered Recruiting Standards: When things turn bad for the Confederacy, the army starts taking old men like John Wilkes, Uncle Henry Hamilton and Grandpa Merriwether, and boys younger than 18, like Phil Meade. Near the end, they even take prisoners, offering them freedom in excange for their service.
