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ps Rhett really knows Scarlett’s or women’s characters much, however, he does not know, or fails to grasp, Scarlett’s heart. As foolish as Scarlett is, Rhett believes that her heart belongs to Ashley Wilkes, always and forever. He also does not realize that Ashley is “a young girl’s dream of the Perfect Knight...” (Floyd, 97). (Here means before Melanie’s death). In the final chapter of the novel, Rhett tells Scarlett why his feeling for her has changed: “I wanted you to play like a child—for you were a child, a brave, frightened bull-headed child. I think you are a child. No one but a child would be so headstrong and so insensitive...I like to think that Bonnie (their daughter) was you, a little girl again” (Margaret, 1004). Rhett tells Scarlett this after she admits that her image of Ashley has been a little girl’s illusion... In discarding the illusion, the image from the past, Scarlett discards completely her girlhood; she becomes an adult, the point toward which the novel has been moving. And by the time she has been an adult, Scarlett also loses Rhett...Rhett wanted, in other words, “to be the master..., the father of the child-woman, allowing her the benevolence of his paternity” (Dawson, 17). In the final scene between two adults “this was the first time he had ever talked to her in this manner, as one human being to another, talked as other people talked, without flippancy, mockery or riddles” (Margaret, 1003), in this final scene, Scarlett matures, Melanie’s death buries the old pattern of behavior(like she has done). Time has brought changes that call for new modes of behavior. The female parent, the old order has passed away. Scarlett, the woman, is free to exert her own vital self; she is emancipated (gratifying or lamentable?). “And only completely so after Rhett leaves” (Dawson, 17). According to this, Rhett’s leaving is not sad, we should, instead, be pleased. “He’s got to go as long as she feels that Scarlett should have remained a child.” His leaving is not a mask of strength, but of weakness and of blindness, the blindness that tradition has produced (Dawson, 18). B. Scarlett and Melanie Melanie is introduced as “a tiny, frailly built girl, who gave the appearance of a child masquerading in her mother’s enormous hoop skirts” (Margaret, 102). She remains a frail girl, her breasts undeveloped, her body unable to deliver a child; and yet she mothers everyone, taking care of those who ostensibly protect her—Ashley, Scarlett, and Rhett (Blanche, 9). “She is like mother,” Scarlett thinks as Melanie lies dying, a convenient time for unwelcome relations: “Everyone who knew her has clung to her skirts” (Margaret, 988). But it is this quiet, pliable and delicate Melanie who is the tower of strength of Scarlett. With Melanie, there is the strength upon which Scarlett has relied unknowing for so many years. Melanie “is the only woman friend” Scarlett ever has, “the only woman except mother who really loved” Scarlett (Margaret, 988). Melanie “had always been there beside her with a sword in her hands, unobtrusive as her own shadow, loving her, fighting for her with blind passionate loyalty, fighting Yankees, fire, hunger, poverty, public opinion and even her beloved blood kin” (Margaret, 988). Melanie is the only one who never criticizes Scarlett’s being different for she knows that only people like Scarlett can survive. What a pity that she can not follow Scarlett! The reason is that Melanie belongs to the old order. She, o