Character Analysis
Melanie = Good
Melanie is the moral center of Gone With the Wind. She is filled with love and loyalty and determination; she always does the right thing. She is "a very great lady" (63.9), as Rhett says after she dies; he also says she is "'the only completely kind person I ever knew'" (63.7). Scarlett, however, finds Melanie intolerable for most of the book.
Scarlett dislikes Melanie for all the right reasons. She's a "mousy little person" (2.3) who always wants what's best for others and thinks the best of everyone, which is oppressive and annoying. She's such a goody-two-shoes, always doing the right thing and never feeling hatred or jealousy or envy. She's like the anti-Scarlett, yet she loves Scarlett all the same and never leaves her side, because she's that good.
And then she dies beautifully while trying to have Ashley's second child because she just loves him so, even though we know that he's a pitiful specimen. Melanie embodies true femininity in this book, which unfortunately for her, means self-sacrifice heaped atop more self-sacrifice until you pass on gracefully. Bummer.
Melanie = Bad
It's not just that Melanie is so pure and sweet and good that's the problem, though; it's that, in the context of the novel, her pureness and sweetness and goodness isn't actually so pure and sweet and good. The novel clearly wants us to see her as a moral paragon… but she's a moral paragon who says things like this:
Oh, Scarlett, it was these same people who robbed us and tortured us and left us to starve that you invited to your party! The same people who have set the darkies up to lord it over us, who are robbing us and keeping our men from voting! (49.83)
Speaking as a great lady and as a selfless beacon of kindness, then, Melanie uses the racist term "darkies" and laments the fact that black people have managed to gain a voice in their own government. Kindness here means racism; being a great lady means being firmly, deeply, absolutely committed to the subjugation of black people.
The characterization of Melanie is, then, an extreme example of the problem with all the characterization in the novel. The book is committed to racism. Therefore, all its heroes are racist. All its morality—the bravery of the KKK, for example—is evil. Melanie is supposed to be the epitome of goodness and virtue, but goodness and virtue in the novel is in fact injustice and cruelty. The novel makes a great effort to get you to admire Melanie. Plenty of people have clearly been able to imagine it—the book's really stinking popular—but we just can't.
Timeline