Character Analysis
Stupid Head
Okay, so at the risk of sounding mean, we'd like to start with a, well, kind of mean-sounding question: Is Scarlett stupid? We ask because she seems to take a certain pride in how little she knows about so much.
Right off the bat, in the first scene of the novel, we learn that she would just about never "willingly open a book" (1.8). She also refuses to listen to talk of war because she "could never long endure any conversation of which she was not the chief subject" (1.18). Yup—she is vain, willfully ignorant, and constitutionally incurious. And this is not only the case when she's sixteen at the beginning of the book; throughout the novel, she just boasts about the fact that she doesn't know jack. When the war is over, for instance, she declares firmly:
I don't know why we fought and I don't care […] And I'm not interested. I never was interested. War is a man's business, not a woman's. (29.32)
It isn't just the war she deliberately doesn't concern herself with, though. She's so poorly read that as a practical joke Rhett almost convinces her to change the name of her store to "Caveat Emptor," or "Let the buyer beware" (49.53). And while we're not ones to conflate lack of education with lack of intellectual aptitude, Scarlett chooses not to be educated about so many things despite coming from a family that can certainly afford such learning. And this seems, well, a little stupid.
Stupid Heart
Willful ignorance aside, Scarlett is positively idiotic when it comes to Ashley Wilkes, a largely useless and hapless nonentity whom she spends the bulk of her life mooning after because he happens to take her fancy when she is sixteen. She's so convinced she's in love with Ashley that she spends years without figuring out how much she cares about Melanie, and is totally oblivious to the fact that she actually loves her own husband, Rhett.
Scarlett is, in short, impressively ignorant of what's going on in her head and in her heart. As Old Miss Fontaine tells Scarlett bluntly after enumerating Ashley's fault to no avail, "'Scarlett, you just aren't smart'" (40.112). Ouch.
Head and Heart Smarts
Old Miss goes on, however, to say this as well:
Oh, you're smart enough about dollars and cents. That's a man's way of being smart. But you aren't smart at all like a woman. You aren't a speck smart about folks. (40.114)
This is not entirely right—after all, in this book men are supposed to care about war, and Scarlett doesn't care a fig about the war—as she has an impressive talent for figures and business. Her ability to add up costs and losses on the fly is a big part of the reason that she's so successful in business when she starts running the lumber mills in Atlanta. And when she does, her husband Frank is:
[…] thunderstruck to discover that she could swiftly add a long column of figures in her head when he needed a pencil and paper for more than three figures. (36.19)
Here's the thing about Scarlett and intelligence: She breaks the mold. Instead of learning about the things she's supposed to, she learns about what she wants to. And while she's pretty vain and racist and all kinds of other unsavory things, in this way, she's kind of a proto-feminist. Scarlett is a woman who does what she wants instead of what she's supposed to, who willingly thinks for herself and isn't afraid to openly dismiss the ideas and values of others.
This said, it's not really fair to say that Scarlett is stupid about relationships, either. Yes, she isn't very good at figuring out what she feels. But she's awfully good at manipulating people to get something she wants. The first line of the book says that Scarlett "wasn't beautiful, but men seldom realized it when caught by her charm" (1.1). Girl is in charge in other words.
That charm isn't an accident; it's calculated. As Scarlett herself muses, it's not easy to convince men that you're weak and helpless and hanging on their every word when you're not:
It takes a lot of sense to cultivate and hold such a pose. (5.55)
And Scarlett has this sense in spades. She gets Charles Hamilton to propose to her though he's half-engaged to someone else; she gets Frank Kennedy to propose to her though he's engaged to her sister; she gets Rhett Butler to propose to her and marry her even though he avers that he's not a marrying man; and she plucks the Tarleton twins both at once to be her beaux even though they both already have girlfriends and they must know in some dim way that they can't both have her. And all this, as the book says, despite the fact that she's not particularly beautiful.
If Scarlett isn't smart about folks, then who is?
Scarlett, then, isn't smart about everything, and she isn't dumb about everything. She's got some strengths (like fractions and getting what she wants) and some weaknesses (like current events and introspection).
Scarlett in Charge
As we mentioned earlier, Scarlett's strengths and weaknesses don't really break down along dominant social gender lines of the time. Women are supposed to be good at manipulating people (which Scarlett is), but they're also supposed to be able to tell when they're in love (which Scarlett isn't). They're not supposed to care about current events (which Scarlett doesn't), but they're also not supposed to care about math (which Scarlett does). Old Miss tries to fit Scarlett's intelligence into one box (male) but it doesn't really work. Scarlett's not that easy to pin down.
But it's important that Old Miss and others want to pin Scarlett down. Many of the other characters in the novel are wanting in one way or another, too (the Tarleton twins seem about as bright as stumps, and Charles and Frank are hardly giants of intellect). But Scarlett's success, and the fact that she's a woman, seems to make her intelligence of especial interest to Old Miss, to Frank, and to the novel itself.
The real question, then, isn't, "Is Scarlett stupid?"—rather, the real question seems like it should be about why it is so important to figure out whether Scarlett is stupid. Why is her intelligence, or lack thereof, a scandal that has to be solved by defining it as either too male or correctly female or some variant of one or the other?
Scarlett's intelligence (or lack thereof) is just one indication, maybe, of how ambivalent and uncertain the novel is about Scarlett in general. She's admirable and brave and full of gumption… but those same traits are a reminder of how the pre-war South has gone kersplat, along with its old gender roles. Her successes are failures, her failures are successes, and so the novel can't quite decide if her smartness is dumb or her dumbness smart, or whether either is admirable or awful.
Timeline