But the story works because Scarlett isn't just a soap opera vixen, she's actually divided about the feminine wiles she makes use of to get whatever it is she thinks she wants. While still a girl she senses there's something pointless about acting silly to get a husband; she says so in the scene in which Mammy makes her eat before the barbecue at Twelve Oaks so she'll no more than peck at the food in front of all the eligible young men. Scarlett is good at flirting but it leaves something unexpressed and connects her to men who don't have the temperament to fulfill her. At the same time she backs away from Rhett who cuts through her hypocrisy and appeals directly to her sensual side.

Jezebel, the temperamental-Southern-belle picture made by Warner Brothers in 1938 to beat Gone With the Wind to theaters, features a great performance by Bette Davis, probably William Wyler's best direction, and has a lot less audience-pleasing fussy-fancy trimming. But at its center it's fundamentally squarer about its heroine than Gone With the Wind. Julie's fault is expressing her will; she flouts convention by wearing a red dress to a ball and afterwards her beau is through with her. Feeling her mistakes, she later apologizes to him in virginal white, not knowing that he's come back to New Orleans with a bride. The point in Jezebel is not that the conventions of female decorum are too constricting but that Julie realizes their importance too late.

Scarlett is the more meaningfully modern character: she undervalues honor but sees through decorum too late. Her problem is that although she has a natural aptitude for kittenish Southern female propriety, she's also aware of the limitations it places on her, which is especially galling during the war and then the Reconstruction era when she's the most capable person around. (The men are dead or defeated, or, like Ashley and her second husband Frank Kennedy, less ambitious and capable in the first place, while the women are passive or, like her sister Suellen, resentful of her determination.) So Scarlett is from the start half in and half out of the Southern belle act, and the movie interestingly leaves that unresolved. At the end she wants Rhett, but she's really tied to Tara, the plantation she worked back from nearly-Trojan devastation, and to the lumber mill she built up over her husband's objections (and that she operates in a way the other characters find deplorable, for reasons we're meant to share, i.e., using convict labor, and for reasons we aren't, i.e., it's unseemly for a woman to be in business). "What does woman want" turns out to be a much more pressing and complex question for women from the inside than for men from the outside.