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Scarlett's mother sends her to the Hamilton home in Atlanta to cheer her up, although the O’Hara's outspoken housemaid Mammy tells Scarlett she knows she is going there “like a spider”, to wait for Ashley’s return. Scarlett and Melanie attend a charity ball in Atlanta, where Rhett makes a surprise appearance. He has become an heroic blockade runner for the Confederacy. Scarlett shocks Atlanta society by accepting his bid for a dance, even though she is still in mourning. While they dance, Rhett tells her of his intention to win her, which she says will never happen.
Clark Gable in Gone with the Wind. Photo: Howard Frank ArchivesAt Twelve Oaks, she notices she is being admired by a handsome but roguish visitor, Rhett Butler, who had been disowned by his Charleston family. Rhett finds himself in further disfavor among the male guests when, during a discussion of the probability of war, he states that the South has no chance against the superior numbers and industrial might of the North.
The barbecue is disrupted by the announcement that war has broken out, and the men rush to enlist. As Scarlett watches Ashley kiss Melanie goodbye, Melanie’s shy young brother Charles Hamilton, with whom Scarlett had been innocently flirting, asks for her hand in marriage before he goes. She consents, they are married, and she is just as quickly widowed when Charles dies not in battle, but of pneumonia.
The story opens on a large cotton plantation named Tara in rural Georgia in 1861, on the eve of the American Civil War. Scarlett O'Hara is the eldest of three daughters of Irish immigrant Gerald O’Hara and his wife, Ellen. She is seemingly sought after by every young man in the county, except the refined Ashley Wilkes, for whom Scarlett longs. She is upset to hear of Ashley’s imminent engagement to his cousin Melanie Hamilton, to be announced the next day at a barbecue at his family’s home, the nearby plantation Twelve Oaks.
Soon Scarlett is Mrs. Frank Kennedy. She becomes a hardheaded businesswoman, willing to trade with the despised Yankee carpetbaggers and use convict laborers in her mill. When Ashley is about to take a job offer with a bank in the north, Scarlett preys on his weakness by weeping that she needs him to help run the mill; pressured by the sympathetic Melanie, he relents. One day, after Scarlett is attacked while driving alone through a nearby shantytown, Frank, Ashley, and others make a night raid on the shantytown. Ashley is wounded in a melee with Union troops, and Frank is killed.
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When Scarlett is alone with Ashley, she confesses her love for him. He admits he finds Scarlett attractive, but says that he and the gentle Melanie are more compatible. She accuses Ashley of misleading her and slaps him in anger, which is heightened when she realizes that Rhett has overheard the whole conversation. “Sir, you are no gentleman!” she protests, to which he replies, “And you, miss, are no lady!”
The tide of war turns against the Confederacy after the Battle of Gettysburg. Scarlett makes another unsuccessful appeal to Ashley’s heart while he is visiting on Christmas furlough. Eight months later, as the city is besieged by the Union Army in the Atlanta Campaign, Melanie goes into a premature and difficult labor. Scarlett must deliver the child herself. Rhett appears with a horse and wagon to take them out of the city on a perilous journey through the burning depot and warehouse district. He leaves her with a kiss on the road to Tara. She repays him with a slap, to his bemusement, as he goes off to fight with the Confederate Army.
On her journey back home, Scarlett finds Twelve Oaks burned out and deserted. She is relieved to find Tara still standing, but learns that her mother has just died and her father's mind has begun to crumble under the strain. With Tara pillaged by Union troops, and the fields untended, Scarlett vows she will do anything for the survival of her family and herself: “As God is my witness, I’ll never be hungry again!”
Gerald O'Hara dies after he is thrown from his horse while chasing a Yankee carpetbagger, one of his former plantation workers, off his property. Scarlett is left to care for the family, and realizes she cannot pay the taxes on Tara. Knowing that Rhett is in Atlanta and believing he is still rich, she has Mammy make an elaborate gown for her from her mother’s drapes. However, upon her visit, Rhett tells her his foreign bank accounts have been blocked, and that her attempt to get his money has been in vain. However, as she departs, she encounters her sister’s fiancé, the middle-aged Frank Kennedy, who now owns a successful general store and lumber mill.