This page is for tropes that have appeared in Gone with the Wind.
For the rest:
- Scary Black Man: Big Sam, the foreman at Tara, is usually as gentle as a pussycat ... until Miss Scarlett is threatened.
- Screaming Birth: Melanie gives birth screaming because her body shape is unfit for it. Averted with Scarlett, who gives birth easily, with almost no pain.
- Settle for Sibling:
- Frank is engaged to Suellen but marries her sister Scarlett after the latter lies to him that her sister is no longer interested in him.
- Will is in love Carreen who becomes a nun, so he settles for her sister Suellen.
- Sexless Marriage: Rhett and Scarlett's marriage comes to fill this trope. Ditto Ashley and Melanie's after she's told she'd better not have more children.
- Shoot the Dog: Uncle Henry mentions having to shoot John Wilkes' horse, which, by the way, was Mrs. Tarleton's best horse.
- Slap-Slap-Kiss: Rhett and Scarlett are all over this one.
- Sleeping Single: Scarlett enforces this when she tells Rhett she doesn't want any more children. She's embarrassed when the entire town learns that they have separate bedrooms after word gets out that Bonnie sleeps in Rhett's room because of her nightmares.
- Sliding Scale of Shiny Versus Gritty: Goes up and down based on Scarlett's wealth at any given time.
- Soundtrack Dissonance: "Dixie" is played when the casualty list for the battle of Gettysburg is released. Even the band leader's son is dead.
- Staircase Tumble: Scarlett miscarries her fourth pregnancy after falling down the stairs.
- Stay in the Kitchen: Scarlett refuses to do this, running her own business, to the horror of her compatriots, with the exception of Rhett and Melanie.
- Surprise Party: Melanie wants to throw a surprise party for Ashley's birthday. However, Ashley reveals to Scarlett that he knows about it, because all of his male friends who had bad experiences with surprise parties warned him.
- Sweet Home Alabama: Georgia, but close enough.
- Sympathetic Slave Owner: The very first time we meet Gerald O'Hara, he's returning from having bought his valet Porky's wife and daughter so that they can be together as a family, something that was completely the opposite of what often happened. Throughout the book, nearly all of the white characters are portrayed as this, genuinely repulsed by those who mistreat and abuse their slaves—when Scarlett slaps Prissy it's explicitly stated that she's never done so before and that it's the incredibly stressful situation (Melanie's in labor and Prissy has just admitted that she lied about knowing how to deliver babies) that's driving her to it.
- Taking the Veil: Carreen, in the novel, who never bounced back after the death of her mother and her fiance Brent Tarleton.
- Talent Double: As Vivien Leigh couldn't dance, she is doubled in all non close-up shots by Sally De Marco.
- Tantrum Throwing: When Ashley leaves Scarlett's Anguished Declaration of Love unanswered, she takes a china and throws it against the wall.
- Tattered Flag: A tattered Confederate flag shows up at the end of the zoomout of the train yard scene.
- Tempting Fate: In the film, Scarlett tells Rhett she doesn't want another child.Rhett: Cheer up, maybe you'll have an accident.
- This is immediately followed by Scarlett trying to hit him and her falling down the stairs.
- When he gives in to Bonnie's demands that he raise her jumping bar, Rhett laughs as he says, "If you fall off, don't cry and blame me!". Within seconds, that's exactly what happens, only she doesn't cry, because her neck is broken and she's killed instantly.
- Title Drop:
- In the book, Scarlett uses the title phrase when she wonders to herself if her home on a plantation called "Tara" is still standing or if it is "gone with the wind which had swept through Georgia." (part 3, chapter 24).
- In the film, the quote appears at the end of the Opening Scroll ("A Civilization gone with the wind...")
- Tomboy and Girly Girl: Tree-climbing, rock-throwing Scarlett and Proper-Lady-in-training Suellen in the book.
- But truly, Scarlett and almost any other female character, from Shrinking Violet Careen to their Proper Lady mother to Silk Hiding Steel Melanie Wilkes.
- Too Dumb to Live:
- People consider Scarlett this for riding to her sawmills without a male escort. However true that may be, she did have a pistol and only didn't fire it when attacked for fear of killing her horse.
- The two men who assault Scarlett despite the fact that she's of the upper class, is carrying a pistol, and has a reputation through town.
- Melanie having another baby despite the doctor saying that another child would kill her. He wasn't being metaphorical.
- Trauma Conga Line: Within one year, Scarlett miscarries the first child she really wanted, loses her favorite living child, loses her best friend, the man she thought she loved, and the man she did love. It's even worse in the movie, where all this happens over a matter of days.
- The Un-Favourite: Suellen to Gerald.
- When Bonnie has died Scarlett wonders why it couldn't have been Ella instead. Poor girl. For that matter, she's not much better with Wade.
- Even the writing reflects this. Wade actually gets a decent amount of focus and development. Ella, with the exception of when Scarlett notes how "silly" she is, gets none.
- When Bonnie has died Scarlett wonders why it couldn't have been Ella instead. Poor girl. For that matter, she's not much better with Wade.
- Vomit Discretion Shot: Scarlett, after she digs up a radish and takes a bite out of it.
- War Is Glorious: The young men seem to think so as they rejoice and take off to enlist once the war is declared. But the notion changes quickly and turns into ...
- War Is Hell: As experienced by Scarlett, Melanie, Wade, Mammy and Gerald as civilians. Also experienced by Ashley and Rhett as soldiers. Ashley even says most of the miseries of the world are caused by wars.
- At the party on the eve of the Civil War, Ashley is the only one who hopes for a peaceful resolution. When someone asks in surprise if he doesn't want war, he replies "Most of the miseries of the world were caused by wars, and when the wars were over, no one ever knew what they were about."
- Rhett, who actually experienced quite a creditable stint in the Army of Tennessee's artillery after he joined the army following the fall of Atlanta (he marched with Hood in the disastrous Franklin Campaign and was with Joe Johnston at his surrender), is extremely reluctant to talk about his wartime experiences and only speaks of them to Wade so that the boy won't get mocked anymore by schoolmates.
- Wartime Wedding: The book has quite a lot of engagements and weddings going on before, during, and after the war.
- Ashley Wilkes and Melanie Hamilton are engaged during the very beginning of war. He ultimately survives the war, but refuses to be called a hero, depressed of the war horrors.
- Angry and humiliated with this (she had confessed to Ashley after hearing of the engagement plans), Scarlett married young Charles Hamilton a little later. He dies an unheroic death from pneumonia a few weeks later, leaving Scarlett pregnant.
- Later on, shortly after the war, Scarlett seduces her sister's fiancee Frank Kennedy for his money to be able to pay Tara's taxes. She gives birth to his daughter, and soon he's shot during a Ku Klux Klan raid.
- Right after Frank's death, Scarlett meets Rhett again, and due to his manly charms and her drunken state, she agrees to marry him.
- Wham Shot: The long shot
of Scarlett walking through the masses of dead and wounded soldiers during the Battle of Atlanta, dispelling any of the romantic notions on which the South went to war and demonstrating instead that War Is Hell. - What Happened to the Mouse?: The end of the book never mentions the fate of Wade and Ella, and how they will be able to cope with having lost two very important and loving people in their lives.
- Pork and Dilcey's baby disappears right before Sherman invades. Dilcey is a wet nurse for Beau because of the birth of her own baby, and Melanie is mentioned as watching him along with Beau. However, only Beau is mentioned when Sherman's men ransack Tara, and the unnamed baby is never mentioned again.
- What Is This Feeling?: Scarlett (in the novel) is described as undergoing various emotional sensations that are clearly indicative of her physical and later emotional attraction to Rhett, but fails to understand them, partially due to the way that women were emotionally repressed at the time, partially because Scarlett is perhaps the least introspective character ever.
- What the Hell, Hero?:
- Frequently done by Rhett to Scarlett, with the most famous of these being at the end of the film.
- Scarlett also gets in several good ones to Rhett, like leaving her, Melanie and Prissy to fight in the war at the last minute and to the mercy of Sherman's March all because of some last-minute conscience. She also chews him out for going out with Belle Watling so openly while they're married and in the middle of some rude wake-up calls.
- Melanie to India for disrespecting Scarlett in public; just because Melanie is out of earshot doesn't mean that India has the right to make "wild accusations" about Ashley and Scarlett having an affair since Scarlett is her sister by marriage and Ashley is her husband. What's more, Scarlett saved her life and gave Ashley a job so that they wouldn't have to leave; whatever the reader thinks of Scarlett's intentions, they meant a lot to Melanie.
- When She Smiles: Scarlett herself acknowledges that Suellen looks pretty when her spirits are lifted by a visit from her beau Frank Kennedy.
- Where da White Women At?: During the Reconstruction Era, this is the underlying belief of whites towards the free blacks—Rhett kills a black man who supposedly insulted a white woman, a neighbor of Scarlett's is forced to go on the run after killing both the black man who made advances to his brother's widow and the white man who planted the idea in his head, and Scarlett herself is assaulted by a black man and his white trash companion while riding through the local Shantytown, after weeks of husband Frank pleading with her to stop doing this because of the danger.
- Why Did It Have to Be Snakes?: Scarlett's greatest phobia is of going hungry, after the long ride from Atlanta to Tara. Even when she earns enough to never starve, she still has nightmares about it.
- Widow's Weeds: Scarlett, widowed twice, wears black dress and veil to both funerals.
- Working on the Chain Gang: Scarlett leases a chain gang to work at her lumber mill to save on labor costs. Ashley is uncomfortable with the way the prisoners are treated, since they are clearly underfed and over-whipped. When Scarlett points out that Ashley did not object to owning slaves, he argues that his slaves were not treated that badly.
- Wounded Gazelle Gambit: Scarlett blackmailed Ashley into becoming her business partner by crying about it to Melanie.
