Character Analysis
Gerald O'Hara is an Irish immigrant who makes his fortune in America through skill, luck, pig-headedness, and an ability to hold his drink while he's gambling. His determination and gumption is passed down to Scarlett. Just as Gerald is an upstart outsider who never picked up the social graces, so Scarlett "had the easily stirred passions of her Irish father and nothing except the thinnest veneer of her mother's unselfish and forbearing nature" (3.114). Daddy's girl for life, this one.
In fact, Scarlett basically reproduces Gerald's success. He had nothing, and he becomes wealthy through courage, impudence, and determination. Scarlett loses everything after the war, and then becomes wealthy through courage, impudence, and determination. Like dad, like daughter.
Scarlett's success, then, and her personality are presented as being inherited. In a novel that is so obsessed with racial difference, this is significant. Indeed, Rhett actually sneers at Scarlett and her father in racial terms. "[Y]our father was nothing but a smart Mick on the make," Rhett tells his wife. "And you are no better" (52.73). The Irish can blend in and try to become like white people, but in the novel they're always still not quite right, always a little too ethnically different.
From this perspective, the novel's seemingly compulsive need to punish Scarlett—its inconsistent but definite condemnation of her business success and gumption—is of a piece with the book's racism. The novel's regret that black people have been freed bleeds into a regret that Irish people can get ahead. Gerald and Scarlett may be admirable in many ways, but they are also "Micks," their success a sign that the perfect white world of the past is being gobbled up by the greedy, ugly, unwhite people of the world.
Or to put it another way, once you start hating people because of where their parents came from, it's hard to stop. Not familiar with the idea of Irish folks as not being white? Click here for a crash course on early immigration history.
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