How To Be A Heroine

by Samantha Ellis

  There were other things I had in common with Melanie. She looks like ‘a child masquerading in her mother’s enormous hoop skirts’ and I was, and am still, shy and self-conscious about dressing up. Melanie seeks and nurtures her female friends, but Scarlett pursues men and sees all women as enemies. I could never be that ruthless: I could never try to steal a man from someone else – but Scarlett does, brazenly declaring her love for Ashley and fully expecting him to break his engagement to Melanie for her. I would never have her confidence, or her gall. She’s not even that mortified when she realises that someone has overheard the whole thing. And not just anyone; a man.

  But what a man! Rhett Butler still makes me flutter. He’s thirty-three, tall, swarthy and apparently almost too muscular to be a gentleman. He’s got a scandalous past, he’s surprisingly metrosexual (he adores fashion), and he’s a darling with children. And may I just say here that I don’t care that Clark Gable apparently had bad breath in the film. In fact, I don’t even believe it. I might even have kissed him in spite of it. Because Clark/Rhett is a stubbly, six-foot, barrel-chested sex bomb – have you seen him banter with Claudette Colbert in the best screwball ever, It Happened One Night? Have you seen him crack into tiny pieces under Marilyn Monroe’s tortured, luminous, lostness in The Misfits? (In which he did all his own horse stunts. At fifty-nine.) It’s unsophisticated to conflate the actor with his role, but in this case, who can help it?

  Rhett tells Scarlett straight out she’s ‘no lady’. He’s like her anti-mother. Because not only does he not care that she’s not ladylike, he likes her for it. He salutes her as ‘a girl of rare spirit’. Scarlett flounces off: she doesn’t want to be a girl of rare spirit, and she’s not going to let anyone say she’s not a lady. I longed for someone to call me a girl of rare spirit. I wanted to liberate myself. (Or, as I put it in a terrible poem I wrote at the time, my pink bedroom was a womb I would smash my way out of.) So I knew it was a dreadful mistake for Scarlett to do what she does next: she walks away from Rhett and coldly, out of spite, marries Melanie’s boring brother Charles. This only makes her even less free, even more subject to her mother’s strict code of behaviour. And within two months, Charles has been killed in the Civil War and she’s a widow and not allowed to do anything. Rhett points out that the way the South treats widows is deeply unjust. He rails against women being immured in crêpe and forbidden enjoyment. Like a consciousness-raising Seventies feminist, he makes Scarlett question the rules of her society, tempts her into breaking them (by dancing!), and applauds her daring: ‘Bravo! Now you are beginning to think for yourself instead of letting others think for you. That’s the beginning of wisdom.’

  Mitchell got her feminism from her mother, a suffragette who wrapped her baby daughter in a VOTES FOR WOMEN banner and took her to rallies. When, at six, Mitchell said she didn’t want to go to school, her mother took her to see the derelict mansions just outside Atlanta, where impoverished former belles still lived like wraiths in the ruins, and warned her that one day her world might explode and only education would save her. Mitchell often said that Gone With The Wind is all about survival, but she didn’t think it was education that helped people survive; she thought it was gumption. She felt that she was living in a world destroyed. There are many problems with the way she writes about the Old South – she perpetuates damaging myths about slavery and justifies the Ku Klux Klan as a tragic necessity – but she does write powerfully and honestly about being torn from your roots. Which was another reason Gone With The Wind was my new favourite book.

  It had became clear that I would never go ‘back’ to Iraq. The 1990 Gulf War made Iraq front-page news. We watched it on TV, late at night, all sitting on my parents’ bed. They pointed out landmarks: ‘That’s Al Rashid street! That’s the river!’ It was the first time I’d seen Iraq moving and in colour. ‘If the camera turns left, we’ll see my school!’ And then we realised we didn’t want the camera to turn, because it was on a bomber plane, identifying targets, and if we saw the school it would be bombed. At first we thought that after the war Iraq would be safe to visit. We were wrong. And the more we saw footage of Baghdad, the more we became aware that the city my family knew had vanished. And of course things have only got worse since then. So I understood Ashley’s nostalgia, his longing to go back in time.

  Scarlett is the opposite of nostalgic. She’s fighting to survive. She looks forward, not back. She resents her friends and family, she sees them as burdens, but she doesn’t shirk. She doesn’t let them starve. When the Yankees are coming and everyone flees Atlanta, she stays with Melanie who is too pregnant to move. She delivers the baby herself. Only then does she ask Rhett for help. He’s so overcome by her bravery that, having promised/threatened to kiss her (‘you need kissing badly . . . by someone who knows how’) he finally does. Mitchell’s overheated prose makes it clear he absolutely knows how. He even admits he loves her – but he’s not going to fight at her side. He leaves her on the road to Tara and goes to join the losing Confederate army. He’s not immune to nostalgia, and besides, he knows she can handle herself.

  This is where Scarlett’s struggle really begins – and her ladyhood only gets in the way. She’s never been out in the sun without a hat or veil, never handled reins without gloves, she’s always been clean and neat and protected, and now she’s driving an old wagon, she’s filthy and hungry, and she is responsible for keeping the others safe. She gets home to find her mother dead, her sisters ill, her father out of his mind and Tara pillaged by the Yankees, so when Mammy complains that Scarlett’s blistered hands and sunburnt face are unladylike, she doesn’t listen. She can’t afford to.

  You could tell the whole story of Gone With The Wind through Mitchell’s descriptions of Scarlett’s hands. They start out white and folded in her lap. Later, after she swears she will never be hungry again, Ashley calls them ‘the most beautiful hands I know . . . because they are strong and every callus is a medal, Scarlett, every blister an award for bravery and unselfishness.’ As she goes from spoilt belle to ruthless survivor, she finds her mother’s advice increasingly irrelevant: ‘Nothing, no nothing she taught me is of any help to me! What good will kindness do me now? What value is gentleness? Better that I’d learned to plough or chop cotton like a darky. Oh, Mother, you were wrong!’ She does chop cotton, and work the fields. She even kills a Yankee soldier.

  But though Scarlett commits the murder, it’s only now that I notice how brave Melanie is in this scene. Weak from childbirth, she appears at the top of the stairs, in a ragged chemise, carrying a sabre. She can barely lift it, but wow! Even Scarlett grudgingly admits that Melanie may be soft on the surface but underneath she’s steel. It’s Melanie’s idea to go through the dead man’s pockets for money – the money that saves them from starving. And when Melanie covers up the murder, Scarlett frankly admires the cool way she lies under pressure.

  Why did I miss Melanie’s heroism? Why did I ever dislike a woman who talks books instead of batting her lashes? I think I was scared that I was too much like her. I didn’t want to be long-suffering, or to love a man who’s always flirting with someone else. Because, forget Scarlett being no lady, Ashley is no gentleman! Why does he tell Scarlett he cares for her but they’re just too different? He’s engaged. He shouldn’t say he cares for her at all. Why does he keep taking Scarlett in his arms and kissing her when he’s married and knows she loves him? Why does he bang on about honour when he’s being dishonourable? And he’s pathetic. He’s so bad at farming and so hopeless at business that Scarlett is driven to try to sell herself to Rhett, even though she hates him for leaving her, just to get money to keep her many dependants alive.

  As Scarlett heads for Atlanta, Mitchell doesn’t mince her words. Scarlett is proposing to commit fornication, a mortal sin, and her crime is ‘doubly prostitution’ because she is in love with Ashley. Ashley, blind as ever, thinks Scarlett’s being gallant. He doesn’t see that she’s having ‘a complete moral collapse’, in her dress made of curt
ains, laughing as though she doesn’t have a care in the world, playing the belle she hasn’t been for years. Her desperate act nearly succeeds, but she’s betrayed by, of course, her hands. When Rhett sees that her hand is scarred, rough from work, sunburnt, freckled, the nails broken, palm calloused, thumb blistered, he spits, ‘These are not the hands of a lady.’ (The most direct result of reading Gone With The Wind again is that I have become more assiduous about using hand cream.)

  After Rhett rejects her, the novel takes a really dark turn. Scarlett has to get money somehow so she steals her sister’s rich beau. She’s had to be so strong that she’s lost herself and become hard and unfeeling. As I was fighting my parents for the right to leave home to go to university, I felt myself becoming hard too. I made myself stop feeling so I wouldn’t see how much I was upsetting them. Like Scarlett, I thought some day I’d be nice again . . . but not yet.

  Scarlett has to cope with the consequences of marrying Frank. Her sister now hates her but that’s nothing compared to being tied in marriage to a man she doesn’t like. Again. In Little Women, Jo sells her hair for the Civil War; Scarlett sells herself. It’s chilling to see Frank reflecting on how much he likes her sitting on his knee and tweaking his beard and flirting and joking with him. It’s repellent that she has to do this, let alone sleep with him. Maybe this is why her spirit is so crushed that she is genuinely shocked to find out she’s better at business than Frank and most men. She finds it ‘revolutionary’. And she gets a real kick out of making money. But when Frank gets killed, trying to lynch a man who’s assaulted her, she tells Rhett she’s glad her mother can’t see who she’s become: ‘She didn’t raise me to be mean.’ I used to read this after arguments about leaving home, where I’d been shouty and bullish, and I’d feel sick.

  But now I’m more surprised by what happens on the next page. Rhett proposes, saying it might be fun, but Scarlett says marriage is never fun. I used to be as fooled as anyone else by Scarlett’s coquetry, but the sad fact is she’s never enjoyed sex. Even Melanie is ‘shyly happy’ when she goes to bed with Ashley, but Scarlett thinks of sex as ‘servitude to inexplicable male madness, unshared by females, a painful and embarrassing process that led inevitably to the still more painful process of childbirth’. Then Rhett kisses her again – yet more hot, purple prose – and she says yes. But she still thinks she’s in love with Ashley.

  Then, I sympathised. I was in love with Ashley too. But now this is horrible to read. Scarlett has fun with Rhett, but she thinks it doesn’t count because he’s not Ashley. For pages and pages, they misunderstand each other, hurt each other, taunt each other, destroy each other, and you can’t do anything to stop them.

  And then there’s the staircase scene. Some readers call it the rape scene. Rhett is drunk and hurt, and he wants to crush Scarlett’s head between his hands, like a walnut (vile image) to stop her thinking about Ashley. He seizes her and carries her up the stairs. She screams. He kisses her savagely. They go to bed. In the morning she feels she’s been used and hurt and humbled – and she’s ‘gloried in it’. In the film, Vivien Leigh wakes up purring with happiness. Did he rape her? Did she like it? She’s been so strong all the time, and now, writes Mitchell, she’s found Rhett is ‘stronger than she, someone she could neither bully nor break, someone who was bullying and breaking her’. It’s not easy reading for a feminist.

  I don’t know what happens when they get upstairs. I don’t know if there is a moment when Scarlett consents. But I do know that Rhett’s always trying to have a grown-up, honest, passionate, fun relationship with Scarlett and she can’t see it because she’s dreaming of Ashley. He wants them to be equals, intimates, to talk. He values her gumption and her mind. He wants her to stop hanging on to an infantile idea of true love as perpetual yearning and flirting and hiding your heart and playing hard to get to the end of time. (Just like in that awful book The Rules where they say you should keep playing games with your husband even after you’re married, and for ever, because then he’ll value you, and send you roses after sex. As if a few flowers would make up for a lifetime of having to lie about who you really are.) Before Rhett, Scarlett has never had fun with a man. And she wakes up happy. She’s had fun with him, just like he promised. So I don’t read it as rape.

  It’s also why I think the novel ends hopefully. Because Scarlett finally understands that Ashley does love Melanie, he’s been keeping her, Scarlett, dangling, and she loves Rhett. As a teenager I thought the best love was unrequited, so I preferred Scarlett/Ashley to Scarlett/Rhett. The dream of love was fine, but I wasn’t so ready for the real thing.

  There was a time when, unable to see what a tool Ashley is, I thought impossible love was the best kind. But I hope I’m braver about love now, and I’m tempted to make a rule that any heroine who spends a whole novel in love with someone who can’t or won’t love her back is not truly a heroine. Because unrequited love is delusional, thankless, and boring. It’s also a misuse of imagination – like Anne Shirley fancying all the wrong men before she learns what real romance is, Scarlett wastes so much energy fantasising about Ashley that she can’t see him as he really is, and she completely misses Rhett’s charms, which are legion.

  Now I hope that, after the novel ends, Scarlett gets the love she’s finally ready for and wins Rhett back. I bet she does, too. She vows to get him back the same way she vowed to never be hungry again – and she wasn’t. And Rhett says his love’s worn out but I don’t believe love ever does wear out. Anyway, before he leaves, he gives her a handkerchief. Scarlett’s mother told her, way back when, that she should never accept a handkerchief from a man; it would be far too intimate. But Rhett is always giving Scarlett handkerchiefs – and teasing her for never having her own. This last, intimate gift makes me think they will surely get back together. They must. Because you don’t find true love very often. I know that now.

  Mitchell always claimed Melanie was the book’s true heroine. And Melanie is heroic, I realise. But I still don’t want to be her. I wouldn’t want to live such a narrow life – even if she is loved, and loving, and mostly happy. At sixteen it would have been fatal to be Melanie; it would have meant staying at home. I needed to leave. And Scarlett’s courage, common sense and optimism helped me do it. I still say ‘Tomorrow is another day!’ to myself when things are hard. I still admire Scarlett’s style: compare her curtain dress to the curtain dresses in The Sound of Music – Scarlett wins, hands down. And I still try to face my troubles with gumption.

  Vivien Leigh’s feverish, transcendent performance in the film is dazzling but it doesn’t quite get across just how strong Scarlett is in the novel. She’s one of the toughest heroines I know. But as I turned seventeen, strength wasn’t quite enough. I wanted heroines who were self-aware too. That’s how Scarlett, though not herself a feminist, inadvertently led me to feminism.

  I first read The Female Eunuch in the school library, because its cover, with the limp, hollow skin of a female torso hanging off a clothes rail, was too racy for home. It took me several awestruck lunch breaks. Here was a writer who could marshal science, economics, maths, logic and autobiography to show how women were ‘castrated’ by the patriarchy. Germaine Greer said liberating ourselves would not be easy but it might be interesting. She challenged us to taste our menstrual blood; if it made us sick, we’d know we weren’t emancipated. She claimed that Mary Quant had her pubic hair shaved into a heart shape by her adoring husband – a startling glimpse of what a feminist relationship might look like. She confidently said that many things I’d thought were immutable were just conditioning, that women were being sold a story that we could rip up and rewrite. Like Scarlett learning she could dance while in mourning, chop her own cotton, beat men at business and recognise another woman’s strength, my eyes were opened.

  From Greer, I learned that there was a stereotype of female beauty and I didn’t have to conform to it – and that anyway, it might be fun and liberating to ‘undress with éclat’. I learned to stop laughin
g at men’s bad jokes. She said powerful women were using masculine methods while playing the feminine game, and I thought about Margaret Thatcher, still inexplicably prime minister, saying she owed nothing to what we still called ‘women’s lib’. Greer’s analyses of pop culture made me see misogyny everywhere. And when she showed how housewives were isolated and mired in repetitive work (she was writing in 1970, but in my community, at the start of the Nineties, nothing had yet changed), I felt even more determined to get away.

  Greer demolished my romantic fantasies: ‘I cannot claim,’ she admitted, ‘to be fully emancipated from the dream that some enormous man, say six foot six, heavily shouldered and so forth to match, will crush me to his tweeds, look down into my eyes and leave the taste of heaven or the scorch of passion on my waiting lips. For three weeks I was married to him.’ Now, this makes me laugh out loud. Luckily I am reading it at home and can laugh as noisily as I like.

  I don’t love every line of it. I wish Greer didn’t imply that women bring domestic violence on themselves, and I wish she wasn’t so peculiar about transsexuals. But it’s brilliantly defiant, bracing polemic – and practical too. I don’t mean the final, slightly unsatisfying chapter on ‘Revolution’ but her mischievous injunctions to women to try to be whole people, to love from fullness instead of from inadequacy, to be self-reliant and to hope that people will need our joy and strength.

  After The Female Eunuch, I started powering through feminist novels, hoping to find a heroine more awake to the world than Scarlett. Postfeminism was just hitting its stride, but I didn’t feel post; in my world, women stayed at home and men earned money. The fractious second-wavers made more sense to me. But their novels depressed me.

  I thought if I had a name as fantastic as Isadora Wing, the heroine of Erica Jong’s 1973 novel Fear of Flying, I could do anything. Isadora is 29, a writer and already on her second marriage, to a psychiatrist (the novel is stuffed with psychiatrists) but she wants out. She’s been fooled by ‘soupy longings’ into marrying but now she longs for other things – to travel, to be alone, to think for herself, not always about another person. She’s annoyed that no one told her that even if you loved your husband, sex eventually became ‘bland as Velveeta cheese’. (On a trip to Florida that summer I bought Velveeta cheese to see what she meant – it really is astonishingly bland.) She wants a ‘zipless fuck’ – ‘Zipless because when you came together zippers fell away like rose petals, underwear blew off in one breath like dandelion fluff. Tongues intertwined and turned liquid. Your whole soul flowed out through your tongue and into the mouth of your lover.’ She tries to find it with another psychoanalyst, lumbered with the surname Goodlove, and they travel and she reminisces about her previous relationships. The smut scared me, the chapter titled ‘Arabs and Other Animals’ mightily offended me and the final chapter, ‘A 19th Century Ending’, annoyed me. Why does Isadora go back to her husband? Why not have a twentieth-century ending?