英语毕业论文 乱世佳人中女主人翁斯佳丽人物形象分析
邮寄地址-2013语文高考作文
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
(Mitchell 153). All of these descriptions
reflect Scarlett’s strength. She is just the
representation
of strength and
masculinity.
3.2 Independent and
individualistic
Scarlett is an individualist,
in other words, she is a self-centered woman. She
is cruel, selfish,
vain and greedy. This
character reflects her mind of individualism
completely. In chapter
twenty-five, Scarlett’s
cruelty and selfishness had been represented
vividly. Scarlett reigned
supreme at Tara, and
like others suddenly elevate to authority, all the
bullying instincts in her
nature rose to the
surface. It was not that she was basically unkind.
It was because she was so
frightened and
unsure of herself. She was harsh lest others learn
her inadequacies and refuse her
authority. She
bullied the negroes and harrowed the feelings of
her sisters not only because she
was too
worried and strained and tired to do otherwise,
but because it helped her to forget her
own
bitterness. She never cares about the feelings of
others. To the men, she is an independent lady,
she never depends on them; To the children,
she is not a good mother, instead, she is Satan to
them,
and she has no female friends. She used
to be the apple of Tara, she needs to pay no
attention to the
life. So the trace of cruelty
and selfish can be easily found on Scarlett’s
body.
3.3 Responsible and trustworthy
It’s
no doubt that Scarlett is responsible. In the war
time, she decided that somehow she must
keep
her father and her sister, Melanie and Ashley’s
child, the negroes. Scarlett can care about
herself and live a good life completely, but
she hadn’t done like that. She assumed the whole
family’s burden. Just responsibility can
explain her activity. Responsibility and
credibility is the
key to communicate with the
others. Scarlett decided that somehow she must
keep her father and
her sister, Melanie and
Ashley’s child, the negroes. Scarlett can care
about herself and live a
good life completely,
but she hadn’t done like that. Scarlett is
responsible, so she assumes the
whole family’s
burden. She is trustworthy also, so she never
forgets her promise to Ashley, she
takes the
task of taking care of Melanie.
4. Analysis of
the effect of Scarlett’s personality to her
destiny
4.1 Process of maturity
Before the
war: Scarlet, the individualist is quite willful.
In her opinion, “a lady’s highest
6