To think that Scarlett's first 2 children are one of the most overlooked bits of Gone With The Wind?

[Jane379]

I was rereading it a few days ago and it struck me how at the end, Scarlett is totally focused on getting Rhett back, nothing else. What happens to poor Wade & Ella afterwards are anyone's guess - especially as Melanie has died and Rhett seems to have checked out, and they were previously acting as surrogate parents. I suppose Mammy would probably end up looking after them?
It's hardly Scarlett's fault that she was expected to have kids despite no desire to, but she should have treated them better once they were born. I think the film toned down her attitude to them a lot, probably because it was seen as too shocking and damaged her heroine sstatus.A retelling in retrospect by Wade or Ella would be an interesting spin-off idea...

Rhett seems a pretty negative parental figure too, I think he's often assessed too positively & romanticised. Unbelievable he had Bonnie jumping like that at only 4,..the whole thing with him & Bonnie was weird, at the end he essentially says he treated her as a substitute for Scarlett.

AIBU?

I loved the book Scarlett, it was bonkers but I love it nevertheless and pull it out to read every few years.

This. The two eldest kids don't exist in the film.

I absolutely LOVE both the film and the book (although in the book Scarlett becomes too mean and horrible and basically an alcoholic towards the end which I didn't like). The book has many more characters and events than the film. The film just focused on the main storyline. I also didn't like Ashley in the film - I thought that was poor casting. You can't understand why Scarlett is so obsessed with Ashley in the film. In the book it's more understandable and also Ashley keeps giving her mixed signals and strings her alongside in the book from memory.

I always felt very sorry for the Ella & Wade in the book. Scarlett was awful to them and they were basically broken 😞 which is why Rhett didn't allow her to do the same to Bonnie.

Everyone saying about how the book was problematic - Margaret Mitchell literally wrote it from the point of view if the South and based on stories she was told by Southern soldiers and those who were alive at the time. It's the story from the Southern perspective. Rewriting it to make it politically correct defeats the purpose.

Of course, Uncle Tom's Cabin was a much more accurate reflection of the time.

Tbf Scarlett and Rhett aren’t supposed to be good parents and I’m not sure you’re even supposed to like Scarlett (although it’s been a long time since I read the book so maybe she is written as sympathetic, although I don’t remember it that way). Her whole story is of self destruction really.

I mean, even the Belle character is put in to make Scarlett look bad. I’ve always taken the story to be a bit of a parable about how survival, or in Scarletts story more like an obsessive hoarding of wealth, can demand moral sacrifices that might end up stripping your life of the things that make it valuable.
It also seems to be a lot about the trauma of war, certainly I consider the film to be a brilliant war film before it is a romance.

I think it’s definitely over for Scarlet and Rhett at the end of the book, and I have never felt like there would be a happy ending for Scarlett.

I thought that was poor casting. You can't understand why Scarlett is so obsessed with Ashley in the film.

Leslie Howard was a heartthrob at the time. And he had played dashing characters like the Scarlet Pimpernel.*

And of course Scarlett didn't really know Ashley or understand him. It was his looks and the fact that he didn't hang round her like the Tarleton boys that attracted her. And he was too weak to tell her that he loved Melanie all along. (Melanie deserved better, really.)

*I always wish he had played Lord Peter.

I always thought Scarlett would be perfectly happy without Rhett. Her true passions are Tara, making money and elbowing other people out of her way.

Exactly.. I thought Leslie Hiward was good but I feel that his performance may have suffered due to him disliking the role. He'd be unhappy to know it's the one he's best known for now.

Tragically he was killed during WWII shortly after. Apparently, he was a true gentleman and a real hero in real life too, which is why everyone thought he would be perfect for the role of Ashley.

I just thought he looked a bit too old and washed out for the role.

Yes, that was terrible. Arguably in a sense a true gentleman isn't exactly who Ashley is. He does fight in the war but otherwise he doesn't really do anything particularly noble (though arguably he's a lot more clear eyed about the futility of the war than most of the other men)

I love GWTW (book), I love Scarlett as a character but she’s a terrible mother!
I imagine the children would have been brought up by nannies and seen Scarlett once a day. Not unusual for rich people in that era.
Perhaps she was more interested in them when they were adults.

Well, and the minor detail he's a Klansman ...

God I loved that book, it was my first taste of how perplexing adult relationships could be, the first time I conceded that maybe there were things I wouldn’t understand until I was older.

Scarlett’s awfulness was very bewitching to me, I didn’t feel like I was being persuaded to learn a lesson or whatever. She was very imperfect and sometimes she paid for it and other times she didn’t.

I don’t like to do the “problematic“ disclaimer, you’d be mad to think anyone reads it and thinks it’s a manual for living. It illustrated in living colour the system for accumulating wealth via free labour. Scarlett gets annoyed at all the romantic mooning over the beautiful life they’ve lost and it’s clear in the book that that the ease and beauty they enjoy is made possible by slavery.

Eta: I rather missed the point of the thread there 😀 Yes she didn’t much like her first two children, thought they were whiny and soft, but also felt some measure of guilt about it.

@Liveafr thank goodness you cleared that up ! I was very confused. I have read the book but it was soooo long ago....the film however I could sit through any time 🥕 (For the epic "I'll never be hungry again" scene)

It's a long time since I read the book, but I listened to the recent R4 adaptation of GWTW, and I too was wondering about Ella and Wade, with Bonnie being so doted on.

First read the book over 50 years ago, have re read many times and watched the film in the cinema as well as on t.v. My husband used to work in Dunwoody, Atlanta, I have visited many times and also lived there for six months. On my first visit on the drive from the airport I noticed we were on Peachtree Street and loudly exclaimed rather loudly " Oh my God this is where Aunt Pitty Pat used to live", of course husband had no idea what I was talking about!!

It’s a while since I read it but wasn’t Rhett very attentive with wade? I seem to remember he made an effort with him. Didn’t the children live at Tara with her sisters?

... Mitchell herself based Rhett on her alcoholic & abusive first husband and Ashley on her kind but boring second husband

I didnt know this, I think I'll read it again this summer keeping it in mind...I haven't read it since I was a teenager. Its such a vivid book though I remember it more clearly than others. And yes, like others I was captivated about how flawed Scarlett is - she's almost irredeemable at times.

Re Ella & Wade, I felt so sorry for them. In those days "well-bred" women had no idea that marriage meant sex, or even what sex was. Imagine being married to a man you didn't even like and then finding out what expected of you, in many - arguably most - cases, it was rape. That may have had a big impact on Scarlett's feelings for her first children.

While I don't remember if this was in the book, the film clearly underlined Scarlett's attraction to Rhett and that he was, however problematically, an enjoyable lover.

@pondplants

I’ve always taken the story to be a bit of a parable about how survival, or in Scarletts story more like an obsessive hoarding of wealth, can demand moral sacrifices that might end up stripping your life of the things that make it valuable.

You’ve actually hit upon one of the central themes of the story. The Civil War brought great loss of familial wealth to Scarlett and from then on she was obsessed with regaining it, at the expense of her personal relationships. She only recognised this cost when she lost Melanie, but by then it was too late.

What I find so interesting about Wade and Ella is that people didn’t know what postpartum depression and fetal alcohol syndrome were when Mitchell was writing, but Scarlett is clearly suffering from PPD when Wade is a baby, and Ella isn’t terribly bright after Scarlett drank through her pregnancy. Obviously PPD and FAS existed before they had names, but the depiction of each in GWTW is so spot-on that you’d think Mitchell was consulting medical research.

It kills me how every time someone brings up GWTW, people feel the need to jump in about how racist it is, as if everyone urgently needs to be reminded of this. Of course it’s racist - and water is wet, and sunshine is bright.

@Jane379 "I think the film toned down her attitude to them a lot, probably because it was seen as too shocking"

this is one of those moments where I actually want to start shouting 😂

Wade and Ella are not in the film!!!!!

You are saying the film toned down her attitude towards them...

They don't exist in the film .... they are literally not in there.....

But that does not make him any less of a gentleman in the context of both film and book. Just an idiot in the eyes of Rhett Butler.

You're right. Rhett sees the timid boy as being alright, though not the boy he could be. He is especially nice to Wade when the boy is being ignored while Scarlett gives birth to Bonnie. Unlike Scarlett, he has a lively eye for other people, not always kind, but pretty accurate.
Certainly Wade lives with his mother after she marries Rhett, though I can't remember anything about Ella at this time.

I agree @YankSplainingit is written from a perspective which was a norm within that time and culture. I hate when people lecture about the morality of literature and want to erase elements of history or society that we don't agree with now.

This. It does my head in when texts of their time, which every text is, are criticised for being just that.
The relatively benign view of slavery in GWTW fits perfectly with a view that many slaveowners could well have had. It is not about slavery but slavery is a necessary context for the narrative.
Few principles about slavery are aired in the novel, but the disdain for owners who sold slaves downriver and Ashley's assertion that he would have freed his slaves after his father's death are notable. Now that I think of it, it's Mammy who puts Scarlett in her place in refusing to go back to Tara, claiming her freedom.

@echt that's not my memory of it at all

my copy of the book is at my mum's so I can't check

Do you mean at the end? Doesn't Mammy go back to Tara after Bonnie died. And before Rhett leaves - she tells Scarlett there's been too much tragedy in the house I think?

To me another reason why Scarlett would go back to Tara at that point would be because mammy is there. I always thought she went back to Tara first for Mother and then for Mammy. Not just because land is the only thing worth loving....

Or do you mean something else?

Sadly, I doubt she’d have been interested in them beyond what they offered her - Scarlett is a terrible mother (although I said in OP’s other thread that I’m not sure she saw her children as actual people - more just as a side effect of marriage) and her relationships are often a means to an end. She married Charles to get back at Melanie and Ashley; she married Frank because he had money; and she married Rhett because he had money, too (or that was her conscious reason, anyway). Melanie’s sweetness and respectability always was a bit of a shield for Scarlett, and she kept close to her out of necessity for survival AND to be close to Ashley. Still, I can’t judge her that harshly, because women didn’t have many moves available to keep some control of their lives. I don’t think I’d have married someone to stick it to their sister and brother in law, but I would have married a Frank for money and security.

When I was younger, I thought Ashley was lovely. Then I thought he was drippy and Rhett was great. Now I think they’re both pretty poor options. Oh, to read it again for the first time!