Heroic Fails: Literary Heroes That Are Secretly Awful

[Blergh]

One thing I think needs to be said about Mr. Butler is that he is the only one of the   protagonists who actually regretted having participated in the lynch mob attack on the shanty town that resulted in Frank Kennedy's death and considers having participated in it a despicable and lamentable action. Even the supposed saints Ashley and Melanie have no such regrets- apart from being relieved at the former not being caught! Maybe I'm reading too much but perhaps that may have been a contributing factor besides the gift of the stiff red petticoat that helped him win over Mammy. 

[Ohiopirate02]

5 hours ago, Blergh said:

One thing I think needs to be said about Mr. Butler is that he is the only one of the   protagonists who actually regretted having participated in the lynch mob attack on the shanty town that resulted in Frank Kennedy's death and considers having participated in it a despicable and lamentable action. Even the supposed saints Ashley and Melanie have no such regrets- apart from being relieved at the former not being caught! Maybe I'm reading too much but perhaps that may have been a contributing factor besides the gift of the stiff red petticoat that helped him win over Mammy. 

I don't think Rhett participated in that raid at all.  He knew about and helped to get Ashley, et al to safety, but he was at Belle's place when it all went down.  Rhett only did that because he held Scarlett and Melanie in high esteem and wanted to save them from having their husbands be arrested.  Rhett was too pragmatic to be in the Klan.  He plays both sides throughout the book and only changes his tune after Bonnie is born.  

[nodorothyparker]

Rhett didn't participate in the night riding. He knew about it, of course as he seemed to know about most things, but he bursts in on the women that night and demands to know where the men would have gone afterward to try to save them before the Yankee soldiers ambushed them. I picked up a copy of the authorized sequel, Rhett Butler's People, for a quarter at a library sale sometime before the lockdowns and against my own better judgment spent a weekend wading through it at some point. There's plenty of criticisms that can be made about that book, but one of the things it did get right was what an utterly contradictory creature Rhett Butler could be. He could certainly talk a good game about being too smart and pragmatic to get caught up in the romanticized "Sacred Cause" of the Confederacy and Southern society, but he had his moments he was susceptible to it too. For all of his calling the men who did jump to fight the war fools, he joins the Confederate forces at the 11th hour both for the romanticism of lost causes and because he can't bear it that one of the very few times up to that point Scarlett shows genuine gratitude for him it's because he didn't caught up in the "silliness" of honor or obligation. Those things do matter to him as much as he likes to say they don't. At the end of the story he's going home to Charleston, the same city he's been emphatic the entire book about hating, to find some of the old grace and beauty he's been so derisive of.

He's in jail in the first place when Scarlett goes visiting in the dress of her mother's curtains because he killed a black man who was "uppity to a lady" and the occupying forces use that as a pretext to hold him to try to get him to lead them to the mythical Confederate treasury. The sequel tries to explain that away with a previously unmentioned friendship and making the best out of an impossible situation with another lynch mob that paints him in a better light, but the fact remains he understands how the system works and his place in it as a wealthy white man just fine.

[peacheslatour]

21 hours ago, Ohiopirate02 said:

I don't think Rhett participated in that raid at all.  He knew about and helped to get Ashley, et al to safety, but he was at Belle's place when it all went down.  Rhett only did that because he held Scarlett and Melanie in high esteem and wanted to save them from having their husbands be arrested.  Rhett was too pragmatic to be in the Klan.  He plays both sides throughout the book and only changes his tune after Bonnie is born.  

He held Melanie in high esteem. Scarlett just happened to be involved.