earticle

영어

This paper addresses Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind (1936), with a focus on how the heroine, Scarlett O’Hara, redefines agency for women within her three marriages that overlap with the Civil War and Reconstruction era of the South in American history. The heroine, I argue, begins as a victim within the paradigm between subject and conduit that Gayle Rubin illuminates in her essay, “Traffic in Women,” but reverses her passive role within the kinship system of marriage that initially restricts her social agency and independence. Scarlett uses femininity but does not follow conventional gender roles. In the novel’s ending, she returns to Tara not in defeat but with a will to survive and a refusal to sacrifice her life in the postbellum society of the South. Within the radically changing society depicted in the novel, my paper analyzes Scarlett’s goals and what choices she is forced to make in each marriage in order to pursue what she values and desires most.