英语毕业论文 乱世佳人中女主人翁斯佳丽人物形象分析

Abstract

This paper intends to explore out Scarlett’s rich life in the perspective of character and destiny by an analysis of Scarlett’s personality and her destiny, based on the heroine Scarlett in the novel Gone with the Wind. Scarlett is a typical character who changed from old manor class to the new bourgeoisie, which decides the diversity of her character. This paper will give a brief introduction of Scarlett’s three main personalities: strong and masculine, independent and individualistic, responsible and trustworthy. Then there will be an analysis of the interaction of Scarlett’s personality and destiny by means of the effect of Scarlett’s personality on her destiny in the form of her main experiences in this part. Firstly, she had an indomitable spirit to dare to face the reality and do not bow to fate. This personality makes her return home and assume the whole family’s burden and fight against the fate without cowardice and grow to maturity. Secondly, she is selfish and greedy; she uses all kinds of means to gain profits. She believes in individualism. Her selfishness and vanity is the direct factor leading to her three purposeful marriages. Thirdly, she is trustworthy. This personality makes her never give up the help to Melanie who is her rival in love just for her promise to Ashley. “Tomorrow is another day”. This is the best confession to her optimistic life and her perennial interpretation of destiny.

Key words: Gone with the Wind; Scarlett; personality; destiny

1

内容摘要

本文立足小说《乱世佳人》中女主人翁斯佳丽这一人物形象，从性格和命运的视角出发，通过分析斯佳丽自身性格对其命运的影响展示斯佳丽丰富的人生。斯佳丽是一个典型的由旧庄园主阶级向新型的资产阶级转变的人物形象，这注定了她性格的多元性.本文首先会分三部分分别呈现出斯佳丽的三个主要性格：坚强，独立和个人主义，有责任感并值得信赖。接着将会分析斯佳丽性格和命运之间的相互影响。这个部分主要通过斯佳丽的经历进行分析：一.她有敢于面对现实，不向命运低头，坚强不屈的精神，这使她在战乱中她决定返还家园承担起整个家庭的重担，与命运抗衡，不怯懦，不退缩,逐渐走向成熟。二.她自私自利唯利是图，为达目的不择手段。她是一个个人主义者，自私，虚荣直接导致了她的三次有目的性的婚姻。三.她信守承诺值得信赖,这种性格使她为了信守对阿希礼的承诺，在任何时候都没有放弃对自己情敌梅兰妮的援助。“明天将会是崭新的一天”是她对生活积极进取的最好表白，也是她对命运生生不息的诠释。

关键词：《乱世佳人》；斯佳丽；性格；命运

1. Introduction

The topic on the relationship between one’s personality and destiny is hot all the time. Many people have done research on it before. Personality has always been defined as an individual thinking, mood, behavior and attitudes of the general. Destiny is close to us as well. People are excepting the knowledge of fate. This paper will do the same work by a simple analysis of Scarlett’s personality and her destiny. Scarlett is the heroine of Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell, a renowned American female writer. People in Gone with the Wind can reflect kinds of person’s personality and destiny vividly, and Scarlett is representative. So the paper will focus on Scarlett to tell her personality and destiny.

Scarlett is a controversial character. She is selfish, cold, ruthless, unscrupulous, cute, strong and also beautiful and weak. Her personality decided that she would not live a plain and common life. But just because of her over hard-edged personality in other people’s view, she suffered more both in her career or her love than people’s imagination. As her name suggests, she is a wild and strong-willed lady. She is not only charming and attractive in her appearance but also in her personality: She is a strong willed, indomitable, hard working and masculine lady of the western people. However, she is an individualist, in other words, she is a self-centered woman. She never

2

cares about the feelings of others. “To the men, she is an independent lady, she never depends on them. She shows her attitudes by different personalities. To love, she is warm and persistent. To life, she is brave and strong; To secular, she is resistant; To interest, she is unscrupulous” (Taylor 49-50).

The structure of the paper is as follows. It begins with a brief review of the present situation on the topic of the interaction between personality and destiny. Following that is a brief introduction of Scarlett’s personality which includes three parts, each part will present Scarlett’s one main personality. Next, there will be an analysis of the interaction of Scarlett’s personality and destiny. This part will analyze the effect of Scarlett’s personality to her destiny in the form of her main experiences. In this part, her growing to maturity shows her strength and masculinity; her three marriages will show her individuality; taking care of Melanie shows her responsibility and trustworthy. Finally, there will come to a conclusion of the whole paper.

2. A brief introduction of the author Margaret Mitchell and the novel

The author of novel Gone with the Wind Margaret Mitchell was born in Atlanta. Her mother was a suffragist and father was a prominent lawyer and president of the Atlanta Historical Society. Mitchell grew up listening to stories about old Atlanta and the battles the Confederate Army had fought there during the American Civil War. At the age of fifteen she wrote in her journal: “If I were a boy, I would try for West Point, if I could make it, or well I’d be a prize fighter - anything fpr the thrill” (12). Mitchell graduated from the local Washington Seminary and started in 1918 to study medicine at Smith College. In her youth Mitchell adopted her mother’s feminist leanings which clashed with her father’s conservatism - but she lived fully the Jazz age and wrote about it in nonfiction, like in her article “Dancers Now Drown Out Even the Cowbell in the Atlanta Journal Sunday Magazine.” In vain, the leader the jazz band may burst blood vessels in his efforts to make him heard above the din of the Double Shuffle and the Fandango Stamp, the newest dances introduced to Atlanta’s younger set. Formerly we had a vast respect for the amount of noise a jazz band could produce. Now we see it is utterly eclipsed.

When Mitchell’s mother died in 1919, she returned to home to keep house for her father and brother. In 1922 she married Berrien Kinnard Upshaw. The disastrous marriage was climaxed by

3

spousal rape and was annulled 1924. Mitchell started her career as a journalist in 1922 under the name Peggy Mitchell, writing articles, interviews, sketches, and book reviews for the Atlanta Journal. Four years later she resigned after an ankle injury. Her second husband, John Robert Marsh, an advertising manager, encouraged Mitchell in her writing aspirations. From 1926 to 1929 she wrote Gone with the Wind. The outcome, a thousand page novel, which was later compared with Tolstoy’s War and Peace, was published by the Macmillan Publishing Company in 1936. The retail price of the book was $3.00.

Mitchell’s book broke sales records, the New Yorker praised it, and the poet and critic John Crowe Ransom admired “the architectural persistence behind the big work” but criticized the book as overly Southern, particularly in its treatment of Reconstruction. Malcolm Cowley’s disdain in his review originated partly from the book’s popularity. John Peale Bishop dismissed the novel as merely one more of those 1000 page novels. Competent but neither very good nor very sound. In 1937 Gone with the Wind was awarded the Pulitzer Prize.

Although Gone with the Wind brought Mitchell fame and a tremendous fortune, it seems to have brought little joy. Chased by the press and public, the author and her husband lived modestly and traveled rarely. Also questions about the book’s literary status and racism, historical view and depiction of the Klu Klux Klan, which had many similarities with D.W. Griffith’s, film The Birth of a Nation (1915), led to critical neglect which continued well in the 1960s. Griffith’s film was based on the Reverend Thomas Dixon’s racist play; the author was a great admirer of Mitchell and wanted to write a study of her novel. In Atlanta the Klan kept a high profile and had it national headquarters in the 1920s on the same street, where Mitchell lived.

Scarlett is a woman who can deal with a nation at war, Atlanta burning, the Union Army carrying off everything from her beloved Tara, the carpetbaggers who arrive after the war. Scarlett is beautiful. She has vitality. But Ashley, the man she has wanted for so long, is going to marry his placid cousin, Melanie. Mammy warns Scarlett to behave herself at the party at Twelve Oaks. There is a new man there that day, the day the Civil War begins. Rhett Butler. Scarlett does not know he is in the room when she pleads with Ashley to choose her instead of Melanie.

Gone with the Wind, an all-time best-seller by Margaret.

Mitchell, is a legendary recollection of the last brilliance of the Old South. The writer's debut novel was an instant success. And the story has been bestowed an even further reaching

4

popularity since Vivian Leigh presented a vivid translation to the screen of Katie Scarlett O'Hara, a southern belle raised in her father’s white-pillared plantation Tara. A climax of Hollywood, from Director Victor Fleming for MGM, Gone with the Wind is more than a vicissitude, it is also an old, lost culture revisited.

It is Old South, which today is no more than a dream remembered. People were once there, living with the high strong slaves songs in the quarters, in security, peace and eternity. Here, Scarlett spends her young maiden years. She is well disciplined by her mother, but her blazing green eyes always betray her covert capricious self; the one who enjoys parties and the surrounding of beauties. She dreams to marry the noble Ashley Wilkes. The impending war shatters the golden peace of the South, and leaves many lives permanently changed. Plantations, treasures, and honor are ruined. Scarlett is made a most peculiar widow by the war, and then compelled into a second marriage in continuation of her struggle for the salvation of Tara. And her third marriage to Rhett Butler is also jeopardized because of her secret, stubborn ardency for Ashley. In the end of the movie, Scarlett is left only with her Tara, a plantation which symbolizes the culture of the Old South, a place where she could ever gather her strength

3. A brief introduction of Scarlett’s personality

3.1 Strong and masculine

Scarlett’s strength and masculinity manifested in the character mainly. She is the strongest and toughest one to come out of pain and difficult. She not only had to endure the same pain and suffering as other but also face the ruins and smoke of war, her mother’s and father’s death, poverty of life and loss of her daughter. Even though she had been brought up to believe that a woman alone could accomplish nothing, yet she had managed the plantation without man’ help. She believed that women could manage everything in the world without men’s help—except having babies. With the idea that she was as capable as a man came a sudden rush of pride and violent longing to prove it, to make money for herself as men did. Money could be her own and she could handle it at her own will. In chapter twenty-four, it wrote that “Her burdens were her own and burdens were for shoulders strong enough to bear the. She thought without surprise, looking down from her height, that her shoulders were strong enough to bear anything now, having borne the worst that could ever happen to her. Tara was her fate, her fight, and she must conquer it”

5