Society and Class Quotes in Gone With the Wind

How we cite our quotes: (Chapter.Paragraph)

Quote #4

"Nothing, no, nothing, she taught me is of any help to me! What good will kindness do me now? What value is gentleness? Better that I'd learned to plow or chop cotton like a darky. Oh, Mother, you were wrong!"

She did not stop to think that Ellen's ordered world was gone, and a brutal world had taken its place […]. (25.91-92)

Scarlett is unprepared for hardship because she grew up so rich, basically. She was at the top of the social pyramid, but the war has overturned that. Order (of social class and hierarchy) is replaced by brutality—and brutality is defined to mean that white people have to do the things that they'd formerly made black people do.

Quote #5

Scarlett did not realize that all the rules of the game had been changed and that honest labor could no longer earn its just reward. (31.24)

The point here is that after Reconstruction, Southern white people were not free, and their labor could be taken from them at whim—as when the taxes are raised on Tara and Scarlett is in danger of losing the land. The suggestion is that before the war, virtue was rewarded, and honest labor gained honest pay. This neatly erases the fact that the entire economy of the South was built on refusing to give black laborers their just reward.

Quote #6

She wanted to feel superior and virtuous about Belle but she could not. If her plans went well, she might be on the same footing with Belle and supported by the same man. (33.36)

One of the major class divisions the novel is interested in is that between good women and bad women—virtuous Southern Belles and prostitutes (in this case, named Belle as well). The war undoes this distinction, as it undoes many others.