Following on from my last two blogs, this week I feel inspired to write about one of the most iconic female characters ever to bustle out of Hollywood, whose flirtatious, manipulative behaviour has divided feminists for over seven decades. Whether you regard Scarlett O’Hara as post-suffragette flapper meets post-feminist power girl or damsel in distress who relies on her feminine charms to get her way (or whether you frankly don’t give a damn), her antics have never gone out of fashion and today she is more relevant than ever.

Gone With the Wind, Margaret Mitchell’s only novel on which the classic film is based, was a product of the Great Depression, when Americans were encouraged to use their survival skills to overcome immense economic hardship, just as they are being asked to do today amid the global financial crisis. Aside from the great feminist debate, Scarlett's story is ultimately one of survival, as well as an enduring fable about the power of the Protestant work ethic.

Scarlett’s ethics are frequently scrutinised, especially in the second half of the film, as Scarlett painstakingly rebuilds the O'Hara family fortunes. First, she runs to Rhett, a man she professes to despise, and makes an elaborate show – modelling a dress she made out of an old pair of curtains – in a bid to borrow money off him. In essence, she makes a presentation to a potential investor.

When she marries her sister’s fiancé, the charge for marrying for money, not love, is laid at her feet. Of course marriage was a business transaction for Scarlett– as it was for many. As a woman she had no other power to secure financing, and so formed what is often referred to in this part of the world as a ‘strategic partnership’.  

After successfully taking over her husband’s business she buys a sawmill which becomes very profitable during the rebuilding of Atlanta, and is criticised again over her willingness to trade with the despised Yankee carpetbaggers and use convict labourers in her mill, who she allows to be treated with a ‘heavy hand’.

So far, she has done what many companies have had to do to save the family business; she goes to where she thinks the money is to try and secure a loan, and when that fails she sells a stake in herself; when the profits come in she doesn’t care where from – money is money and, having known starvation, she never intends to be without it again.

Although Scarlett’s shrewd business sense can’t excuse her many faults, I don’t think she wanted to subvert ethics as she did – but surrounded by limp male characters, she had no other choice. Sacrifices had to be made if she wanted to survive.

In her hour of need she is always alone, nay, abandoned. The doctor can’t come to deliver Melanie’s baby – she does it herself; Rhett leaves Scarlett on the bridge to trudge back to Tara alone with a sick woman and a baby; after her mother dies her father descends into madness leaving Scarlett the head of the household; Scarlett’s beloved Ashley Wilkes is a hopeless vacillator who proves to be useless on the plantation while Scarlett is picking cotton to keep food in everyone’s mouths. Scarlett is very much a one-woman business – who prospers.

Businesses that can’t demonstrate Scarlett’s gumption in these difficult times will probably be gone with the wind...