“Gone with the Wind” is known as a novel about the love story between Scarlett O’Hara and Rhett Butler. There is no such love story. Rhett does not feel love, and Scarlett knows that the object of her love must be worthy of her.

For 1200 pages, Scarlett O’Hara invariably claims to love Ashley Wilkes. At the same time, she insists that she is not in love with Rhett Butler. In the last 15 pages, Scarlett declares that her feelings for Ashley were an illusion, and that he himself is a characterless good-for-nothing coward. She realizes that she has always loved Rhett and wants to be with him from now on. Let’s check if this is realistic.                                          

Ashley loves Scarlett, but realizes the two of them would be unhappy together. And he’s totally right. Not every over-love is suited for marriage. Midnight thunder and slowly muddying water are no match. But in their mutual contemplation lies pure and untainted love.

Ashley sees Scarlett’s determination and courage and always encourages them. He realizes that she has a fighting spirit and strength that he will never possess. This is why he admires her and leaves her to forge new paths on her own in the scorched wasteland of the South. He sees the storm in her soul and lets himself be just a speck of dust in it, but he doesn’t try to stop it.

Ashley was aware of Scarlett’s deepest essence – her connection to the earth. It was the gesture with which he placed the ball of red earth in her hand that made her unbreakable. Ashley saw in the clay a piece of strength he had lost long ago, but he was able to show it to Scarlett and save hers. Ashley knew that Tara was more worthy of Scarlett’s love than he was. And he helped her make the right choice.

Ashley saw the beauty in Scarlett’s hands. He knew that every callus on them reflected a crater in her soul and a moment of heroism. He was aware that it was those hands that showed the deepest gouges and the brightest glimmer in Scarlett’s personality. And that they were worthy of the purest and most adoring love. He saw the superhuman in Scarlett when she squared her shoulders with dignity after her last illusion of a happy future had shattered. He knew her, admired her and loved her.

Scarlett endured more than ten years of constant trials thanks to her love for Ashley. Her every action – from her wedding to Charles, to fleeing Atlanta, to running the lumber mills – was motivated by that love. Seventeen-year-old Scarlett was a spoiled brat without any notable trait in her character. Except for one bright spot of pure and devoted love for Ashley.

As long as she couldn’t have Ashley, Scarlett would make sure everyone else suffered. And that would have been the deed of any other spoiled brat with wounded pride and delusions of love. Except any other in her place would have lusted after one of the handsome officers and forgotten about Ashley long before he even got home on leave. Scarlett did not. Her love had withstood rejection, disappointment, jealousy, temptation and separation. And not a shadow of taint was cast upon her.

Scarlett promised Ashley that she would take care of Melanie while he was gone. And that promise had carried her through the death of her entire world and made her stand amidst its ruins as superhuman. Scarlett did not care about Melanie. She wanted to leave. She didn’t just need to save Melanie from the armies of the North, she needed to deliver a baby. Scarlett got over herself. For one night, she overcame all her weakness and superficiality to add a heavy shade of darkness to her eyes. And she did it all because of her word given to Ashley.

Scarlett was forced to live with only the memory of Ashley for years. All those years her image of him did not collapse. But then he returned and their love met an even greater test – his presence. Her affection withstood that as well. She could see that Ashley wasn’t a fighter, wasn’t good at his work, and was even cowardly at times. But none of that could diminish the holy light she saw in him.

From then on, the frustrations continued. Ashley did not help her in the sawmills and did not learn to tell the difference between the boards. He didn’t protect either Scarlett or Melanie when society was ready to crush them. But then Ashley was nothing but himself, or at least his lifeless, crumpled self who’d returned from the battlefield. However, after all these years, the love was still there, and Scarlett for the first time paid attention to the trust, friendship, and warmth between them.

In her last conversation with Ashley in the book, Scarlett suddenly realized that she didn’t love him. She even came to think of him as a useless weight on her shoulders. She called his feelings for her lust, like the one Rhett had for that woman, Belle Watling. She humiliated herself to the extreme when she started insulting Ashley in front of Rhett. But everyone who has sensitivity to these kind of things knows that that did not actually happen.

Ashley is the driving force in Scarlett’s life. Yes, she provided him with a job and a living, but he gave her will and strength when she needed them most. Scarlett was willing to give him whatever he asked for, even when she had nothing. And for her, the reward was always just to see his face. Ashley knew her heart and all her secret doors, which she herself would discover much later. Yes, Ashley stayed in Scarlett’s shadow after she became an accomplished superhuman. But without him, she would never have been that. To Ashley, Scarlett was the ultimate symbol of the rambunctious life in the world. To Scarlett, Ashley is the sun that makes her stand up, blossom, and live her life in its brightest colors. This is overlove.

Rhett Butler is an interesting, funny, attractive man with a bad reputation. He always claims he does not love Scarlett, but he desires her more than any woman he has ever seen. Still, he is fond of her and comes to her rescue in Atlanta. Only for him to walk away from her a few hours later, betraying with one decision everything he’s ever been a part of.

To Rhett, Scarlett’s love for Tara is the silly affection typical of the Irish and just an annoying character trait of hers that he is willing to endure. He never takes her completely seriously, and even if he did, he would see it as a secondary characteristic. Except that Scarlett O’Hara doesn’t exist without her love for Tara. Anyone who hasn’t seen the gurgling power hidden in her chest, ready to feed the red earth with life forever, doesn’t know this woman. And he has no right to claim to love her.

After the war, Rhett was ready to marry Scarlett. Until he saw her hands. Those same hands that Ashley had kissed, realizing their gift for sustaining life. The hands that would make any beating heart clench in anguish and then explode in love. Rhett managed to see in them a lie, vileness, and a reason to send her away. He, who understood best to what lowliness she could fall, could not appreciate her in her heights.

Throughout the book, the confident, capable Rhett Butler never ceases to feel threatened by Ashley, who he believes possesses only honor and manners, but not a single quality he would admire. This shows that Rhett does not actually believe that Scarlett’s love for Ashley is an illusion.  A man with self-confidence would not be jealous and would not need to prove his superiority over a false image. But Rhett knew that he wasn’t worth more than Ashley and that Scarlett had truly given her heart to his rival.

Rhett always claimed that he would not marry Scarlett. Eventually he broke his word and proposed to her. After that marriage, Rhett Butler set about turning the superhuman Scarlett O’Hara back into a lowlife worm. He denied everything holy in her soul and tricked her into indulging her basest urges. He ran corruption through her skin, poisoned her blood with moral depravity. He turned her into a rotting wreck of courage and dignity.

Rhett killed both his children with Scarlett. And the reason was not his all-consuming love for her, but his infinite weakness. Scarlett had fallen down the stairs and bruised herself just because Rhett could not muster the strength to look her in the eye. Bonnie broke her neck as a result of four years of slow killing by Rhett, who wanted to turn her into what he failed to turn Scarlett into – the end product of unhealthy selfishness, greed and viciousness. In the end, Rhett took Scarlett’s third child away from her – her sawmills. His motive, according to him, was that doing so kept her out of trouble. But in fact the sawmills were the last material evidence of Scarlett’s power, and he instinctively had to destroy them.

In the last scene, Rhett explained that every single action he took in the book was motivated by his fear of being kicked out by Scarlett. Such a sentence contains neither love nor dignity nor instinct for life. And according to Rhett, even his great love was gone, blown away by the wind like everything else in his world.

The relationship between Scarlett and Rhett is entirely based on fear, betrayal, destruction of values, and trampling of individuality. Scarlett does not love the man who had continually aimed to kill her and everything that was once important to her. As for Rhett… such a creature is incapable of love.

Ashley or Rhett? Scarlett’s relationship with Ashley always led to growth, courage, strength and beauty. The one with Rhett caused misery, decay, callousness and corruption. First we see true love and the heroine herself calls it an illusion. Then there is a lie, known as the love of the century, and the hero said that even it was temporary. The Margaret Mitchell who wrote the first four fifths of the novel clearly didn’t write the last part. She filled her pages with love flowing out of literally every word so it was obviously not her who defiled Scarlett’s love in that way. So the slander did not work. Rhett’s falsehood left with him into oblivion. And the light generated by Scarlett and Ashley still lights the cotton over Tara.