Rhett Butler, hero of Gone with the Wind, was a blockade runner pilot during the Civil War, owning four ships that carried cotton to England. He had a mind of his own and was drawn to Scarlett O’Hara’s strong spirit. Their relationship was complicated by the war and Scarlett’s fascination with another man.
Rhett Butler is the hero of Margaret Mitchell’s 1936 Civil War novel, Gone with the Wind, which has also been made into a classic film. The real-life Rhetts are a prestigious family from Charleston, South Carolina who helped shape Charleston as a city. Rhett Butler’s character grew up near water. Rhett Butler’s time near the water provides the perfect backdrop for his later work as a blockade runner pilot in 1861 after Charleston was blockaded.
Rhett Butler owned four ships that carried cotton to England to help keep the South economically viable in the new wartime confederacy. He also traveled to Canada and the Bahamas and brought back things that were hard to obtain in the wartime United States such as women’s undergarments and medicines. The blockade riders faced much hostility and inclement weather. Rhett Butler risked capture and jail, but also reaped financial rewards as he kept his high earnings in England. Since England was not involved in the war, Rhett’s offshore earnings were secure while many other Southern men in the novel lost their money during the war.
Rhett Butler is not as hell-bent on revenge as most of the other Southern men in the novel. He tries to make others understand his point of view of him that the South cannot win a war against the North. However, these feelings make Rhett Butler unpopular with other Southerners and they don’t listen to his advice. Rhett Butler has a mind of his own and ends up in fistfights because of it and also gets kicked out of West Point.
Rhett Butler notices that Scarlett O’Hara also has a mind of her own and is drawn to her strong spirit from the first time he meets her. Scarlett was a spoiled girl before her, Tara’s, home was attacked during the war. She takes action and fights to save Tara and her family even though that was not the socially acceptable thing for a woman in the 1800s American South. Rhett and Scarlett are both repulsed by the war with the Yankees and both want things to happen rather than let it things happen to them.
Love grows between Scarlett O’Hara and Rhett Butler, but the relationship is rocky. Their happiness is not only complicated by the civil war, but by Scarlett’s fascination with another man. Rhett Butler’s famous line “Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn,” suggests that he feels Scarlett’s realization of her love for him may have come too late.
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