78 pages • 2-hour read
Gone With The Wind
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Part 1, Chapters 1-4Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Part 1, Chapters 1-2 Summary
In April 1861, 16-year-old Scarlett O’Hara lives an idyllic life. Her father is a rich plantation owner in northern Georgia, and Scarlett is the local belle who is courted by many suitors in the county. She is not conventionally beautiful, but men find her fascinating. Scarlett knows how to charm them by concealing her willful, stubborn nature.
Late one afternoon, Scarlett is entertaining the Tarleton twins, who have just been kicked out of the fourth college they attended. This isn’t of much concern to the young Southern gentlemen. Instead, they are focused on the Wilkes family, who is hosting a barbecue the following day. The brothers repeat some gossip about Ashley Wilkes marrying his cousin Melanie. Shortly after this news is revealed, Scarlett abruptly ends the conversation and sends them away.
At sunset, Scarlett walks to the end of the driveway to await the return of her father. He has spent the day at the Wilkes plantation, known as Twelve Oaks, and Scarlett hopes to find out if the rumored marriage is true. Gerald O’Hara is an Irish immigrant who started as a merchant in Savannah and won the plantation he named Tara in a poker game. He is short, florid, and bombastic but is also kind to his family and house servants. Scarlett is his first-born and his favorite because her temperament is like Gerald’s. When either of them wants something, they go after it.
Gerald recklessly jumps a fence on his horse and makes Scarlett promise not to tell his wife, Ellen. He then confirms that Ashley will marry Melanie and that the announcement will be made at tomorrow’s barbecue. Scarlett is crushed, but her father advises that she is ill-matched to wed the aristocratic, intellectual Ashley.
Part 1, Chapters 3-4 Summary
When father and daughter reach the house, Ellen emerges. The mistress of the plantation is being called to attend the birth of a child at a nearby farmer’s cottage. She is much younger than her husband and comes from a genteel aristocratic family in Savannah. Ellen married Gerald when she was only 15 after losing the love of her life in a barroom fight.
Ellen is the perfect Southern lady who never raises her voice but has nerves of steel to meet all of life’s challenges. She manages Tara with efficiency and kindness. During her marriage, she bears six children: three girls, who lived, and three boys, who all died in infancy. Gerald dotes on his wife, and Scarlett is awestruck by her mother’s grace and decisiveness. As Ellen leaves on her mission of mercy, she tells Scarlett to preside at the dinner table in her place.
During dinner, Scarlett is distracted, and her thoughts keep returning to the disaster of Ashley’s engagement. When her mother returns much later, Ellen is weary, but Mammy, the family’s chief servant, insists that Ellen eat before leading family prayers. Mammy orders the entire family about as if she were the mistress and they were her property, but her devotion to them is absolute.
Later, as Ellen leads the family in the rosary, Scarlett’s thoughts drift back to Ashley. She realizes that she has never declared her feelings for him, so he may not know of her love. She resolves to tell him about it the next day at the barbecue. After everyone retires for the night, Scarlett overhears a conversation between her parents. Ellen has just assisted with the delivery of an illegitimate child who died at birth. She knows that the father is the family’s overseer, Jonas Wilkerson, and demands that Gerald dismiss him at once. He agrees.
Part 1, Chapters 1-4 Analysis
The book’s initial segment introduces four main characters. Mitchell introduces Scarlett as an impulsive teenager who is madly in love with neighbor Ashley Wilkes. Her father, Gerald, is almost as impulsive as his daughter, and he delights in jumping fences on horseback, a reckless endeavor that foreshadows later tragedies in the novel. The real power in the family is Scarlett’s quiet mother, Ellen. In the author’s description of her, we get our first glimpse of Pining for Lost Love. Fifteen-year-old Ellen only married Gerald because the love of her life died. In some sense, her own life ended at that point. She quietly goes about the business of managing a plantation and a family, but her heart is lost in the past.
The opening chapters also introduce Mammy, the chief servant of the O’Hara household. Portrayed as loyal, devoted, and protective toward the white family she serves, Mammy reflects a racist caricature of certain enslaved Black women that persisted through the Jim Crow era. The depiction of Mammy also gives the reader a sense of how the O’Hara family treats enslaved people. House servants maintain their own hierarchy, much as the planters do. The interdependence of the enslaved and the planter class subverts expectations when Mammy demonstrates a proprietary view toward her charges. Mitchell’s suggestion that enslaved house servants enjoyed happy lives and a position of dominance within planters’ households upholds The Myth of Benign Enslavement and of a peaceful agrarian society in the antebellum South. However, both notions are drawn directly from the Lost Cause narrative.
This segment also sets up the novel’s trajectory as a bildungsroman and foreshadows Scarlett’s future attachment to Tara, when her father advises her that land is the only thing that endures: “‘Tis the only thing in this world that lasts, and don’t you be forgetting it! ‘Tis the only thing worth working for, worth fighting for—worth dying for” (50-51). Once Scarlett loses everything in her life, these prophetic words will achieve personal significance.
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