Ashley Wilkes
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| Ashley Wilkes | |
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| First appearance | Gone with the Wind |
| Created by | Margaret Mitchell |
| Portrayed by | Leslie Howard |
| Information | |
| Gender | Male |
| Spouse(s) | Melanie Wilkes |
| Children | Beau Wilkes |
| Relatives | John Wilkes (father) India Wilkes (sister) Honey Wilkes (sister; not in the movie) Henry Hamilton (uncle) Aunt Sarah Jane (Pittypat) Hamilton Charles Hamilton (cousin and brother-in-law) |
George Ashley Wilkes is a fictional character in the Margaret Mitchell's 1936 novel Gone with the Wind and the later film of the same name. The character also appears in the 1991 book Scarlett, a sequel to Gone with the Wind written by Alexandra Ripley, and in Rhett Butler's People by Donald McCaig.
Ashley is the man with whom Scarlett O'Hara is obsessed. Gentlemanly yet indecisive, he loves Melanie, his cousin and later his wife, but is tormented by an obsession with Scarlett. Unfortunately for him and Scarlett, his failure to deal with his true feelings for Scarlett ruins any chance she has for real happiness with the true love of her life (Rhett Butler). Ashley is a complicated character. He is not sympathetic to the cause of the North. However, he isn't an ardent Confederate patriot, either. What Ashley loves about the South is the serene, peaceful life that he and his dear ones know at Twelve Oaks, and similar plantations. At one point (following the war) he comments to Scarlett that "had the war not come he would have spent his life happily buried at Twelve Oaks."
In short, Ashley loves the South, but not necessarily the Confederacy. And, he hates war, though he fights because of his loyalty to Georgia.
He claims that he would have freed the slaves after the death of his father if the war hadn't freed them already. His willingness to free the slaves further demonstrates his impractical nature, because if the slaves were free, how did he plan to operate the plantation? However, he has a great deal of affection for the slaves on his plantation, and the role that they played in his serene, bucolic life. He particularly loved the sound of their laughter.
There is a sense in which the end of Ashley's life (as he knew it) is more than just the burning of Twelve Oaks. The four Tarleton brothers (Boyd, Tom, Brent and Stuart) are all killed, three of them at Gettysburg. Cade Calvert returns home terminally ill from tuberculosis. Little Joe Fontaine is killed in battle, and Tony Fontaine has to flee forever to Texas after killing a Yankee (specifically, Scarlett's family's former slave overseer, Jonas Wilkerson, during Reconstruction; after Wilkerson encouraged a former slave to attempt to ravish Tony's sister-in-law). These were Ashley's childhood friends, all represented in the happy scene at the barbecue, close to the beginning of the book. When the "family circle" of the county is decimated, the life Ashley loved is gone.
At one point in the book Ashley pleads, in vain, with his wife Melanie to move to the North, after he comes back from fighting in the American Civil War. However, this isn't because of any affection for the North, but because he wants to be able to stand on his own as a man, something he will never again be able to do in Georgia, now that his plantation is gone [and his home burned]. He ends up working for Scarlett, however, due to her manipulative entreaties and Melanie's naive support of her.
In a sense, he is the character best personifying the tragedy of the Southern high class after the Civil War. Coming from a privileged background, Ashley is an honorable and educated man. He shows clear contrast to Rhett Butler, who is decisive and full of life, but is vulgar and distasteful as well. Rhett is both ruthless and practical, and is willing to do whatever he must to survive. Whereas Ashley is often impractical (even Melanie admits this on her deathbed), and would resist doing many things Rhett would consider doing, because they aren't "proper" or "gentlemanly". Ashley fights in the Civil War, however, he isn't any kind of Confederate warhawk. He wishes that the Yankees would let them leave the Union in peace. As a soldier he shows enough leadership to be promoted to the rank of Major, and survives being imprisoned in Rock Island, Illinois (a notorious prisoner-of-war camp) for several months. He eventually returns home, still able-bodied. Ashley could have lived a peaceful and respectable life had the War never taken place. The War that changed the South forever has turned his world upside down, with everything he had believed in 'gone with the wind'.
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