scarlet o'hara

This Thanksgiving holiday the AMC channel has been airing "Gone With the Wind" -- a classic, and one of my favorite movies. Sure, it's long, the music is cheesy (as is some of the acting), and it's rife with stereotypes. But I still remember when my parents let me stay up late to see it on television -- in the 1970s, the first time it was aired by the networks -- and how later I tried to carry my sister up the red-carpeted staircase at the Jefferson Hotel (on which, legend has it, the staircase in Rhett and Scarlet's Atlanta house was based); I only made it up about six steps, but the diners looking down on the lobby from the balconies above seemed entertained by my young effort.

I've often seen in astrological texts how willful Scarlet O'Hara was the perfect embodiment of a Scorpio -- intense, passionate, stubborn, and resilient. As a Scorpio myself, I've seen some of the best and worst parts of myself portrayed in that character. But since I caught the movie on the television last night, I've been reflecting on her thrive-at-all-costs drive; Scarlet didn't just survive the war -- and everything else that life threw at her, including the struggles she created for herself -- but she was wildly successful. Perhaps this was a reaction to the starvation and outright desperation she experienced during the latter part of the war and the immediate aftermath, but simple survival wasn't enough for her. Although Scarlet's most heartfelt wish turned out to be nothing more than a dream in the mist, she fought tooth and nail to save and then restore what was the core of her strength: the plantation of Tara.

So what does this have to do with anything? I'm a Southern Scorpio whose own good manners and ingrained subservience have often gotten in the way. Yes, those who know me will laugh at the word "subservient" applied to me, but it's not a bad description for what is produced by the ingratiating politeness and internal self-deprecation so common in the South. Though we may strain against the bit, it takes more than simple strength and determination to break free from that harness. In many ways, I am much like my home town of Richmond, Virginia -- a city that burnt itself to the ground at the close of the Civil War (so that there would be no supplies or munitions left for the Yankees to claim); I have often played the role of the phoenix in my own life, cycling through an ever more benign pattern of dramatic destruction followed by increasingly hopeful rebirth.

This is a big reason I had to leave Richmond, to get to a place with a different psychology behind it.

But I am still looking for Scarlet's no-holds-barred quality in myself, that determination that neither asks for nor requires anyone else's permission. As far as I've come in my thirty-some years, there is still that "not wanting to do it wrong" and "not wanting to bother anyone" that can get in the way of just doing it; though I do remind myself of the Nike slogan, there has still been this sneaking need to stop and gauge approval every forty feet. As flawed a character as Scarlet may certainly be, perhaps it wouldn't be such a bad idea to follow her example from time to time, and to mold from her literary depths a model for my own clear manifestation, for continued success in the twenty-first century.