Tower and Town, May 2026

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Tomorrow Is Another Day

Is it the reader's task, akin to a juror's, to reach a verdict? Possibly, except when the evidence is ambiguous the reader has only the written pages, and no sitting Judge to turn to.

Take Margarett Mitchell's "Gone with the Wind," set in Georgia, a slave state, interweaving personal destinies caught up in the civil war. By the end, what verdict can be reached on the "heroine," Scarlett, her character and moral compromises?

After setting out Scarlett's limited school learning:

"Despite a succession of governesses and two years at the near-by Fayetteville Female Academy, her education was sketchy."

Mitchell will reference "school," or a derivative of it, over thirty times and later portray Scarlett buying the plays of Shakespeare, not for her own benefit, but as a gift for Melanie.

Weigh carefully the word, "Tomorrow," found over eighty times, memorably resorted to in Scarlett's closing words to herself:

"Tomorrow is another day"

while she stubbornly persuades herself she can:

"...get Rhett back"

despite his earlier stinging rejection:

"I wish I could care what you do or where you go, but I can't."

Was Scarlett procrastinating? Or simply indecisive? Or characteristically self-deceiving? Today's decisions should enable us to live purposefully; yesterday's choices probably shaped what we are today. We can recall our past choices, learn their lessons, but we cannot change them. They should teach us to assess future decision-making rather than assume we can shape the future. Scarlett's past choices seem calculated to bring short-lived gains that her tomorrow later denied. Still seeking comfort from "Tomorrow" suggests her life had not taught her well; that she remained driven by self-deceit or even bravado, fortified, admittedly, by having survived the Civil War.

Words are ambiguous, and a reader has no other evidence, nor a presiding Judge, to call on. The reader must construct the fictional character from the author's chosen words. By the last page, the judgement seems inevitable that the self-willed Scarlett has learnt the basics of self-survival but little else.

Mitchell depicted Scarlett as living life as if it were a game of chess; her constant strategy, to the end-game, being to feed her own selfish desires, her current infatuation, whether with Ashley or later, Brett, sacrificing others, as if pawns, caught-up in the fallout:

"But if Ashley didn't make the first move, she would simply have to do it herself."

Can this be Mitchell's ironic view of Scarlett, a view that should temper the tendency to accord her the modern accolade of being an assertive female?

Consider also, was it by chance or design that Shakespeare's "Macbeth" gets a contrasting mention in "Gone with The Wind"? After the Civil War battle of Gettysburg, we read:

"...Dr. Meade, after a pleasant evening at her (Melanie's) house where he acquitted himself nobly in reading the part of Macbeth..."

Had Scarlett heard Banquo's words:

"If you can look into the seeds of time And say which grain will grow, and which will not..."?

If Scarlett was listening, what happens next indicates she learnt little; and the closing words Mitchell gave her appear only to confirm Scarlett's lack of self-understanding, fuelled by an obsessive infatuation with Brett.

"Macbeth" has its own strong-willed characters although the play's context is overtly more political. Both works are grounded on the protagonists' delusion that the future can be shaped by self-serving decisions: Macbeth's to seize sovereign power, and Scarlett's to win back Brett.

Macbeth might be the main character, yet much that takes place, and much that Macbeth does, is triggered by Lady Macbeth's unrestrained ambition blinding both to foreseeable consequences and making inevitable the tragic consequences.

Possessing ruthless ambition, the Macbeths proved powerless to determine their futures or to change the past. Belatedly understanding this, Lady Macbeth kills herself; and Macbeth's anguished soliloquy, hearing of her suicide, gives voice to this dawning realisation shortly before his own violent death:

"She should have died hereafter; There would have been a time for such a word. Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow..."

Here, "Tomorrow" conveys Macbeth's painful, belated recognition that Lady Macbeth's untimely death and his, imminent, followed from their own hubristic choices.

Verdicts: Scarlett: A "strong-willed" merely "romantic" heroine? "Macbeth": A classical tragedy?

Tony Kieran

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