3.1 In Term of Economy 5

3.2 In Term of Culture 5

3.3 In Term of Marriage 7

4. The Awakening of Southern Women’s Self-consciousness 10

4.1 Scarlett 10

4.1.1 Scarlett before the Civil War 10

4.1.2 Scalett during the Civil War 11

4.1.3 Scarlett after the Civil War 12

4. 2 Other Women 12

4.2.1 Ellen O’Hara 12

4.2.2 Four Pillars in Atlanta 13

5. Conclusion 14

References 15

1. Introduction

Margaret Mitchell, the author of Gone with the Wind, was born on November 8, 1900 into a lawyer family in Atlanta, Georgia of the United States. Her father Eugene Mitchell was a famous lawyer as well as Chairman of Atlanta History Association during the War period. Her mother Mary Isabelle was Methodist minister who was six years younger than Eugene Mitchell. Her grandparents were farmers. They had plantations when few people lived in the Atlanta. Most of her relatives and family members were Southerners, most of who lived in Georgia. They were cotton planters, lawyers, and so on. The novel was set in the Civil War period. The reason why the author chooses this background is that her parents were born in this period and their lives and Margret’s lives were deeply influenced by it. At the age of three or four, Margaret was fascinated by Atlanta’s stories about the battles that protected the plantation life in Atlanta during the long tense period of the city before Georgia fell to the Northern army. These stories told by her grandmother later became the material source of her writing. In Margaret’s family, her mother played a great role in either her novel creation or giving her father strength, power and courage. So in the novel, we can find that the idea of new women asked for the equality and independence with men.

When Gone With the wind was published, the US was still in the Great Depression. Nearly all the people were going through the hard time. The publication of the novel gave people the courage to directly face the difficulties and make the best of what have happened. People see the gut, strength and perseverance that they needed for the fight from the carefully portrayed characters. Especially Scarlett, the heroine in the novel, became a sign of that time. When the war broke out, she came back Tara bringing Melanie and the newborn baby and found the death of her mother, the vagueness of her father and the heavy illness of her two sisters. The only thing left was an empty Tara with little substance, few labors and a huge debt resulted from the tax. In order to keep Tara, she married three times to get financial security at any cost. She was really a brave woman. She wasn’t afraid of breaking the conventions and by all means tried to adapt to the new society for survival with the gut facing all kinds of hardship. She totally depended on herself and persevered with her business in the male-dominated world firmly holding the belief that as long as she was walking, she would get the dream place some day. She was a representative of new woman and reflected the female values as precious as men’s. From the details of her experience, we can clearly see how her self-consciousness awakened, developed and worked for the eventual success. It’s she that made the novel a great literature.

Unlike self-awareness, which in a philosophical context is being conscious of oneself as an inpidual, self-consciousness, being excessively conscious of one's appearance or manner, can be a problem at times. Self-consciousness is often associated with shyness and embarrassment, in which case a lack of pride and low self-esteem can result. In a positive context, self-consciousness may affect the development of identity, for it is during periods of high self-consciousness that people come the closest to knowing themselves objectively. Self-consciousness affects people in varying degrees, as some people are constantly self-monitoring or self-involved, while others are completely oblivious about themselves. (From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia)