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[Opinions] Re: he was such a nobody...
Yeah, that's right. I wouldn't have thought of it, but now that you mention it, yeah. Isn't the fact that George was really his first name indicated only once in the novel, when Melanie receives a letter from him addressed to "Mrs. George Ashley Wilkes"? One of those little details that you wonder why the author even bothered with. If he was going to be called and referred to as Ashley all throughout the book, why did she bother to make his first name George and then make just that one little reference to it?Scarlett was Scarlett's middle name and her first name was Katie and Rhett's middle initial was K. but we never find out what that stands for. But I can see the reasoning behind Scarlett going by her middle name since she was named after her paternal grandmother, whose first name was Katie and maiden last name was Scarlett.
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It's an insanely common southern convention, to have a normalish first name and go by your weird family middle name. It's soooo common that it's not even contrived for the author to do that.
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she is definitely not a Katie...Originally Mitchell was going to call her Pansy, but luckily she discarded that idea. Pansy sounds like the name of one of the slaves.Scarlett's father occasionally called her Katie Scarlett, but as you say, the only time we know that Ashley's first name was George is by the address on a letter.We never find out Honey Wilkes's real name. We only know that she got that nickname by calling everybody else Honey, which is kind of nonsensical. We know that Aunt PittyPat was really Sarah Jane too.
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