Rereading Gone With The Wind and struck by neglect of Wade & Ella

[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.

I think for Scarlett children were just a side effect of marriage and not little people in their own right. I hate reading about how she treated Wade during the siege of Atlanta - it makes me feel sick every time to think of how frightened he must have been. Plus, let’s be honest, Scarlett held Wade and Ella’s fathers in active contempt - at least she respected Rhett. And Rhett - yeah, he’s not ideal. He’s all for Scarlett being a boss bitch until he realises it impacts HIS child, and then suddenly he wants her not to be who she is after years of encouraging her to break her programming. And it was a bit weird, the way he treated Bonnie like a Scarlett Substitute!

Weren't children , especially girls and excess boys beyond the heir & a spare seen as a bit more cheap and disposible then? With infant mortality rates so high before maternity and paediatric care being well developed and before vaccines and safety equipment and procedures were invented, and child development and psychology was a thing, as long as they were clean and said their prayers correctly I don't think anyone would have cared much. It was a society where it was acceptable to own other human beings as slaves so children got treated pretty much as possessions too.

"I think for Scarlett children were just a side effect of marriage and not little people in their own right."

You put it better than me, but I reckon society in general considered children as not counting as a whole person.

I read it first as a teenager and was swept up in the romance of it all.

I read it really differently as an adult.

I’ve not read it for years. I might read it very differently again now I’ve had my own children etc. I’ve got a copy on the shelf. I might dust it off!