Ashley and Charles

[igenlode]

Well, I've now got a couple of thousand words of possibly-completed (not sure I'm happy with the ending) "Gone With the Wind" one-shot. What I don't have yet is a title -- or a summary. And for something that was supposed to be about Charles Hamilton, I have to say that there seems to be an awful lot of backstory for Ashley in it...

Mind you, if Charles gets ignored by the "Gone With the Wind" fandom, poor Ashley gets routinely bashed, so it's unlikely to make the story much more popular! Given that almost all the fanfiction.net stories in the archive feature Scarlett getting back together with Rhett after the end of the novel, they tend to depict Ashley as a spineless drunk (ironic, since one of the things incidentally mentioned about him at the start of the novel is that he had a harder head for drink then Gerald O'Hara)...

Part of the fanbase problem with the character, I think, is that we mainly see him through Scarlett's eyes, and she is, to put it mildly, an unreliable narrator, swinging from one extreme to another. There are just a couple of passages where we see for a moment through Ashley's own perceptions, plus the evidence of his letters to Melanie and what he actually says (which demonstrates, amongst other things, that he is generally honest to a fault), and a few scenes where the narration shows him taking action in things that don't concern Scarlett (and which are hence naturally of no interest to her!) -- planning with Will Benteen to avoid discord at Gerald's funeral, for example, or working with Rhett to break up the Ku Klux Klan.

He is not a fool. He sets a lot of value by honour -- which is something that Scarlett considers folly, since she is guided solely by her own desires -- and he can see very clearly that his only hope of self-respect and happiness is to keep right away from Scarlett; it is she who clings desperately on to him.

His character type is the scholar-priest, the sensitive ascetic with the courage of a man who can imagine the worst and walks ahead with his eyes open -- Scarlett wants to see him as a swashbuckling hero instead, which is a basic misunderstanding between them. Ashley doesn't pretend to be something he is not; Scarlett, remorselessly practical, isn't capable of appreciating what he is, or even (as we see on several occasions) of understanding him when he tries to describe his world.

He doesn't want to love her. She feels betrayed when it finally dawns on her that he does not.

I think the fans tend to take Ashley at [Scarlett's] face value... which is ironic, given that someone who prefers the possibilities of imaginary perfection to the uglinesses of reality and the world of the printed page to the social whirl ought to have a lot in common with the average fan-fiction writer!

---

Edit: some interesting characterisation on AO3.
'Twas a victory, yes, but it cost us dear
All Honor's Wounds

Comments

[sallymn]

I think you're right. Scarlett doesn't do anything for me, even in the movie and despite all Vivien Leigh could do, but I can see why a lot of readers, especially fans, find her magnetic....

[igenlode]

Scarlett (in the book at least) is an interesting example in popular fiction of a character who is clearly intended as an antiheroine: she is a protagonist who, like Becky Sharp, is consciously depicted as not being a nice person. Occasionally she wishes she were a nicer person -- she's not villainous, just self-centred and blind to other people's perspectives -- but generally speaking she is firmly convinced that whatever she does is justified.
Most of what we see in the book is filtered through Scarlett's perceptions, and because we see things from her point of view we tend to end up sympathizing with her plight even when she is behaving badly. But what Scarlett thinks isn't necessarily what the actual author thinks (the character of Melanie being an obvious example of this; Scarlett dismisses her as a potential rival the moment she hears Melanie talking intelligently about literature, but the reader clearly isn't intended to make this mistake!)

I have a feeling that a lot of fans don't actually understand the concept of the unreliable narrator and therefore end up adopting Scarlett's view of herself and the other characters at face value...

[sallymn]

I think you're right about fans (and readers in general) having a problem with the concept of unreliable narrators (I haven't since the day I 'met' Bertie Wooster. Also, The Murder of Roger Ackroyd.)

Writing first person or tight third person can be very interesting given this...

[igenlode]

Roger Ackroyd is obvious, but... Bertie Wooster?

[sallymn]

yep. Look at how often Bertie thinks he is in control of a situation, or that it's going in a certain direction... and the reader suspects (or pretty soon finds out) that either [a] thanks to his sweet-natured incompetence it's actually a complete disaster or [b] it looks like a complete disaster but Jeeves has had it in hand all along.

Bertie's POV voice is one of my absolute favourites in all of literature... but when he thinks he knows what's going on? - he has not the foggiest :)

Or that's my take ion it.