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Gone With The Wind Analysis Essay

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Although Gone With the Wind is a novel deeply absorbed with the psyche of its heroine, Scarlett O’Hara, Scarlett herself absolutely lacks awareness of both her own desires as well as the true natures of those around her. Seen through a Freudian lens, Gone With the Wind depicts a dangerously repressive society turned breeding ground for a widespread inability to comprehend the subconscious that mechanizes the tragedy of the novel. However, although Gone With the Wind is deeply rooted in a Freudian tradition of psychoanalysis, it offers more well rounded and in places less direly pessimistic view of human nature.
The climax of Gone With the Wind consists of Scarlett making a series of long overdue realizations about her own desires …show more content…

A cornerstone conflict in Gone With the Wind is the one that occurs between Scarlett and the highly repressive society that she lives in- in line with Freud’s assertions that the society that was originally formed for the purposes of helping man achieve greater happiness is now binds its citizens too tightly in its social mores, creating more unhappiness. Throughout the novel, she is caught between being herself or taking necessary or ruthless actions and the constrictions of socially proper behavior. In the second paragraph of the novel, Mitchell describes Scarlett by saying, “Her manners had been imposed upon her by her mother's gentle admonitions and the sterner discipline of her mammy; her eyes were her own”; even within the antebellum portion of the novel, Scarlett is barely able to keep her true personality subsumed beneath a thin veneer of decorum. In the latter parts of the novel, she falls completely in the eyes of society when she marries repeatedly for money (money which enables her survival) and runs her own business. Significantly, although Scarlett’s lack of self-awareness is notable, she is surrounded by others who are similarly unhappy,

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