Gone with the Wind Gone with the Wind, by Margaret Mitchell, follows the life of a sixteen-year-old girl, Scarlett O'Hara, starting in the year 1861, living on Tara, a plantation in Georgia south of Atlanta. His father, Gerald O'Hara, an Irish immigrant, won the plantation in an all-night poker game. Scarlett is in love with the beautiful and chivalrous Ashley Wilkes, who hails from the Twelve Oaks plantation near Tara. Ashley, who believes that he and Scarlett are too different from each other, proposes to his cousin Melanie Wilkes at her family's barbecue. Scarlett, outraged, accepts the proposal of Charles Hamilton, Melanie's brother, hoping to hurt Ashley. In 1861, the Civil War begins when President Lincoln calls in the troops. Charles, Scarlett's new husband, volunteers for the Confederate Army after two months and dies of measles at the start of training. After Charles's death, Scarlett discovers that she is pregnant with his son, who will later be named Wade. Scarlett then decides that she will move to Atlanta and stay with Melanie and Melanie's Aunt Pitypat. It is there that she is reintroduced to Rhett Butler, a scandalous adventurer, who she had previously met at the Wilkes' barbecue. Rhett convinces her to ignore the restrictive social bereavement requirements of Southern widows. While in Atlanta, Scarlett begins to see Rhett more as the war continues and the Union forces begin to gain a foothold. The Battle of Gettysburg rages on, and Melanie's husband, Ashley, is captured and sent to a Yankee prison. As Union forces begin to take control of Atlanta, Scarlett is desperate to return to Tara, but has promised Ashley that she will take care of Melanie, who is pregnant. Melanie gives birth to a son, Beau, the......middle of paper......yed as shown by the symbolism of Scarlett representing the New and Old South. Scarlett has gone from falling in love with Ashley, which symbolized the lost world of chivalry and good manners, to falling in love with Rhett, who is dangerous and symbolizes the old and the new. As previously mentioned, Gone with the Wind showed a Southern bias that many other Civil War historical novels do not have. It made the Confederates of the South and the Yankees of the North appear defenseless as they entered the South and destroyed everything. Gone with the Wind definitely made me feel like I was at Scarlet's side throughout the war and the hardships she faced. I learned about the struggles the inhabitants had to overcome during this horrific time in history. Reading this I finally got a different perspective than what you normally read about. Gone with the Wind was incredible!