Chapter 32: "Nothing but this red land."

I'm sort of a PBS nerd, so I've spent the last few weeks slowly making my way through the Hollow Crown BBC Shakespeare series. I've never been much on Shakespeare, but I think my general lack of enthusiasm for The Bard has more to do with the plays they forced us to read in junior high and high school than on Shakespeare's own scribbles.  My English teachers forced us to read Romeo and Juliet, A Midsummer Night's Dream, and Macbeth, and in my opinion the jokes and romance in those stories are so antiquated they read more like "jokes" and "romance," and are so forgettable and old-fashioned that you almost regret having read them at all.

But the Hollow Crown features four of Shakespeare's best history plays: Richard II, 1 Henry IV, 2 Henry IV, and Henry V.   The producers and directors of these new versions of the plays had sizable budgets, which meant they had enough money to use beautiful sets and hot and/or famous actors to play the most important parts.  The biggest surprise for me was Patrick Stewart as John of Gaunt; he was only on the screen for about ten minutes, but he was there long enough to deliver one of Shakespeare's most famous speeches--the one where John of Gaunt goes on and on about England being so wonderful and amazing and ends with a description of "this blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England". 

Anyway, while I was watching Stewart deliver these lines, I started using my long dormant English major critical thinking skills to compare John of Gaunt's love of the England to Scarlett O'Hara's love of Tara.  Chapter 32 begins with Scarlett coming to terms with Ashley's rejection from the prior chapter. Unfortunately for Scarlett (and fortunately for those of us who enjoy her interpersonal drama!), our heroine does not use this juncture as an opportunity to finally move past her obsession with Mr. Wilkes.  A more mature woman would have tried to see their relationship plainly, but Scarlett is still a child in many ways, so she clings to her love for Ashley without stopping to consider the fact that their world has changed so drastically that affairs of the heart don't matter in the same way anymore.

But for all of Scarlett's stubborn idiocy when it comes to the "woolen-headed Mr. Wilkes," MM keeps Scarlett likeable and amusing in this section by reinforcing Scarlett's devotion to Tara.  Scarlett would have gladly run away with Ashley only moments before, but the thought of leaving Tara behind forever "would have torn her heart," and this sentiment endears the protagonist to the reader in the same way that a shared love of England tied Shakespeare's audience to John of Gaunt in the Elizabethan age.  Not many of us have had the fortune/misfortune of experiencing the "deathless love" Scarlett has for Ashley, but every reader has a hometown and something we think of as a homestead and I think MM was brilliant for teasing out this connection and making it easy for us to relate to Scarlett at a section of the novel when she seems to have lost touch with reality just a little bit.

I guess everybody eventually wants to go home again.  Even Scarlett and Rhett. 

Anyway, Scarlett doesn't have much time to spend feeling sorry for herself.  Because Jonas Wilkerson and Emmie Slattery show up in finery at the door to Tara and all hell breaks loose! Before this moment MM's references to women outside Scarlett's social circle have been hilariously circumspect, but now she unloads on Emmie Slattery with both barrels blazing, throwing out so many cruel words ("dirty tow-headed slut whose illegitimate baby Ellen had baptized...overdressed, common, nasty piece of poor white trash...") that the tirade always catches me by surprise.  Neither MM nor Scarlett are anything close to angels when it comes to internal dialogue, but all the terribly mean things that have been in the story thus far have usually been tempered by humor.  But there's nothing funny in any of this, particularly since Scarlett then goes all biblical on Emmie and Jonas after they express their desire to buy Tara:

"I'll tear this house down, stone by stone, and burn it and sow every acre with salt before I see either of you put foot over this threshold." 

That sounds like something out of one of the latter books of the Old Testament, doesn't it?

And that's good.  Scarlett's rage is justified, particularly since she holds a grudge against Jonas and Emmie, and it's also good because it provides an excellent, rock-steady, totally believable motivation for the oh-so-important next few chapters of GWTW.  So over the course of a half hour in Scarlett's life, MM has:

1.) Alerted us to the fact that the taxes need to be paid on Tara--and they've been raised "sky high."

2.) Told us that Ashley is still somewhat attracted to Scarlett but doesn't have any money to help pay the taxes (keep up the good work Ashley!) And:

3.) If Scarlett doesn't figure out a way to pay the taxes, Emmie and Jonas will be living in Tara. 

All of these events are emergencies, and they happen in quick succession, and we know Scarlett is broke, and...how in the WORLD is she going to get out of this one?

And then we get our answer:

"Rhett Butler." 

Awwwwwww Yeah!

Scarlett arrives at her indecent proposal to be Rhett's mistress rather quickly, but it's not as though she initiates this thought out of midair.  After all, she hates Rhett at this point in the novel and doesn't seem to have sexual desires for any man besides Ashley (although even those are pretty chaste), so instead of immediately deciding to become his mistress she goes through a few logical steps before she jumps off the cliff into moral depravity.  Initially she's going to sell her diamond earrings to Rhett for that year's tax money, but--you know what? The taxes are going to be due every year, aren't they? So she's going to need some way to get money out of Rhett in perpetuity, which is why she comes to the conclusion that she'll marry Rhett Butler in order to secure the money she needs to save Tara.  She's planning on tricking Rhett into marriage and she's repulsed by the idea of becoming Mrs. Rhett Butler, but--well, matrimony on these terms isn't really much of a crime, is it? And anyway, not one couple in GWTW has married out of "true love," so perhaps Scarlett's activities here aren't as treacherous as they seem at first glance?

I don't know. 

But I do know that Rhett Butler is on his way back into the novel, and that's a reason to give thanks!

Part Four--Chapter 31: "Honest labor could no longer earn its just reward...."

Chapter 31 of GWTW begins on a cold day in January of 1866.  Ashley has been home for some time by this point, but MM doesn't address Scarlett and Ashley's relationship right away.  In a traditional romance novel--or in lesser hands--part 4 of GWTW would begin with a depiction of the status of Scarlett and Ashley's relationship, but MM is the champion of the slow burn and she keeps us waiting while she addresses something much more important: taxes!

And--you see? While the Scarlett--Rhett--Ashley--Melly love rectangle dominates GWTW the movie and almost all commentary about the novel (even that written by people who should know better), the romantic entanglements of the four leads  is a secondary concern for MM.  Yes, Scarlett's love of Ashley and her rejection of Rhett and her frenemy relationship for Melly drives most of the events in the novel, but by the middle of the novel even Scarlett herself is too busy to think too much about her longing for Ashley.  She still loves him and wants to run away with him, but her primary concerns are food, shelter, and safety. 

Anyway, after Will Benteen goes on a lengthy tirade against the Yankees, freed slaves, injustice, etc, we learn that the scallywags and carpetbaggers have hiked up the taxes on Tara sky high.  Pork delivers this news in the movie, but out of the mouth of Will Benteen this passage seems particularly pathetic. Especially when he poses this question:

"What are we goin' to do, Miss Scarlett?" 

Now I do realize that Tara is the O'Hara farm and that Scarlett is in charge because her Pa "isn't quite himself these days." But--seriously, Will? Why is he asking her what they're going to do about raising the tax money? What's his plan? I like Will Benteen and I realize he contributes a lot to the upkeep of Tara, but he's been living on Scarlett's charity for several months without contributing a cent.  He's helpful and friendly and we all like him, but the gang at Tara needs money more than anything.  Love and affection might be sufficient consideration for helpless figures like Beau and Wade and Pa O'Hara and even Melly (she's physically weak right now), but everybody else needs to put some work in.  After all, Tara is only 20 miles from Atlanta and there's a lot of money changing hands in the city.  Maybe Will should have headed up to Atlanta and sniffed around for a job instead of simply running home to Tara to tell Scarlett the bad news.

And speaking of selfishness, Scarlett then races off to see Ashley to tell him about the tax money.  Of course Ashley doesn't have any money either, but Scarlett races out to tell him about it anyway and this is the first time she's been alone with him since he returned from the war.  Scarlett is absolutely heartbroken by the vision of her beloved Ashley Wilkes splitting rails, and MM is such an excellent writer that even the reader is struck with the sadness of the scene.  As Scarlett puts it:

"She could endure the sight of her own child in aprons made of sacking and the girls in dingy old gingham, could bear it that Will worked harder than any field hand, but not Ashley." 

And--wait, what?

So Scarlett has no problem with Wade and Will Benteen living in poverty, but the sight of Ashley swinging an axe breaks her heart? Hmmph.  I want to believe that Scarlett's discomfort with the scene stems from the difference between expectation and reality.  She loves Ashley Wilkes because he's so cultured and smooth and dreamy, so it must be quite jarring for her to see him working harder than their former slaves.  On the other hand, because Scarlett didn't know Will before the war perhaps she's not disturbed by the vision of him putting in menial labor.  That's what I'd like to believe, anyway. It's true that Scarlett isn't particularly maternal and is irritated by Wade most of the time, but I think the main takeaway from this internal dialogue is that she simply doesn't like to see Ashley working hard when she never expected him to lift a finger for the rest of his life. 

So Scarlett goes to discuss money matters with Ashley, and Ashley's no help. He doesn't have any money and he's hopeless and depressed and totally out of ideas, so he doesn't supply her with an answer for her problems.  Or does he?

"In all these months since I've been home I've only heard of one person, Rhett Butler, who actually has money."  

And isn't that interesting? It's been several chapters since Scarlett even thought about Rhett, and a first-time reader who knows nothing about GWTW could safely assume that we're never going to see him again.  He's been out of the story for 18 months by this point, and most of the men Scarlett knew before the war are dead, wounded, missing, or living in another state at this juncture in the story.  Interestingly, Scarlett has been in communication with almost everybody in the story who's still alive by this point, but Scarlett doesn't even think about Rhett during all that time.  Aunt Pitty even mentioned Rhett in a few letters (she's convinced that he managed to get away with the mythical millions of the Confederate treasury), but Scarlett apparently doesn't even think about him until this very moment.

Now, isn't it interesting that the first person who mentions Rhett Butler's name is Ashley Wilkes? There have to be other rich men in Atlanta during this time (after all, the money had to have gone somewhere, right?), but Ashley talks about Rhett.  The two men haven't officially crossed paths since April of 1865, and while Rhett knows a lot about Ashley simply by virtue of being "friends" with Scarlett, Ashley cannot know much--or anything--about Rhett.  Of course I think it's safe to assume that Melly spoke highly of Rhett for saving them during the Battle of Atlanta; I also think it's safe to assume that gossip was spreading like wildfire in Georgia during this time.  And if there's gossip then most of it's going to be about Rhett Butler, but--still. Ashley's words are a bit too on the nose for my taste, except--

You know what? Ashley discussing Rhett with Scarlett closes the cosmic circle, doesn't it? Scarlett spent most of the first part of the novel discussing Ashley with Rhett. And now part four begins with Scarlett and Ashley discussing Rhett.  Rhett and Ashley are almost never in the same place at the same time until the final third of the novel--and even then they have almost nothing to say to each other.  But they balance the story quite nicely, and I think it's therefore important that Ashley inject Rhett into this conversation. Scarlett thinks that Ashley and Rhett are mirror opposites and many essayist and literary critics agree with this assessment, but I'm not certain that that's true.  And I'm pretty certain that MM makes Ashley kiss Scarlett on that morning, during that conversation, so we can understand that Ashley is (almost) just as lustily in love with Scarlett as Rhett has been all along. 

When I read this chapter for the first time I was shocked and excited because I was a teenager.  And teenagers are more excited by kissing than they are about sex or love or marriage or money or almost anything else under the sun.  This chapter is still exciting because there are so many emotional swings and crazy behavior, and because Ashley's words about being a misfit in a changed world resonate with me in much the same way they probably struck a chord with people who read GWTW during the Great Depression and World War II. But I'm also more practical nowadays. So instead of being impressed and overwhelmed by the kisses, I'm also totally frustrated by Ashley and his unsaid words and his inability to anticipate trouble and offer solutions. 

Anyway, although I think Leslie Howard was a pretty good choice to play Ashley Wilkes, I always (always, always, always) think of Prince William whenever I read about Melly's beloved husband.  And so, because a little touch of Will is always good for the soul, here's a lovely photograph of the Duke of Cambridge looking deliciously scruffy.  He's not splitting rails or starving, but if you squint and use your imagination I betcha can see a little bit of Ashley in the future king. 

Chapter 30: "Going Home!"

GWTW made the New York Times this week!

It's a pretty brief mention, especially compared to the way the magazine commemorated the Kennedy assassination and the Banksy graffiti saga from last month, but I was honestly surprised to see the Gray Lady actually mention the novel by name.  I lived in NYC for eight years and anybody who has spent any time in the North East quickly realizes that people in the Big City pay very little attention to what happens out here in Fly Over Country.  I tried to convince my classmates and colleagues that there actually was life--good life!--outside of the five boroughs that form the New York metro area, but I don't think they believed me all that much.  So it was really quite thrilling to see GWTW in the pages of the paper of record--even though the columnist of this particular piece seems adamant about distancing herself from the novel.  Like, why'd she bother to write about GWTW if she was going to be so scornful? And why is GWTW/MM so trivial/juvenile while Fitzgerald and Hemingway and Salinger get nothing but love even for their non-masterpieces? I think GWTW is regularly dismissed as fluff when there's nothing fluffy about the novel.

Sigh.

Anyway, here we are in Chapter 30.  This chapter takes place in the summer of 1865, a time when "Tara suddenly lost its isolation," and Scarlett and friends are suddenly faced with a flood of soldiers returning from the war.  Interestingly enough, MM makes the point that "few of them were bitter" because "they left bitterness to their women and their old people."  Now, that's interesting, isn't it? Interesting and unexpected.  The men who've fought and lost are ready to move on, but everybody else is still pissed and angry at the way the war ended. We are always taught that the people who fought the Civil War were downright angry when they returned from battle (thereby automatically giving rise to the KKK and all that Reconstruction-era violence), but perhaps it wasn't really as simple as that.  Some of them were bitter and truculent to be sure, but some were also exhausted or hungry or just plain worn out with the whole thing, and it's kind of nice that MM included viewpoints that diverge from the common perception of the post-war South. 

Anyway, among this stream of soldiers, the girls also get a visit from Good Old Uncle Peter, Aunt Pitty's driver from Atlanta.  Aunt Pitty is mad at the girls for deserting her in her time of need, and she's scared of the dark anyway, so Uncle Peter has traveled to Tara to try to make the girls come back to Atlanta.  Uncle Peter and Aunt Pitty have always functioned as comic relief for the story, and MM does a great job of bringing the funny during a part of the book that could easily drag. And, what's more, Uncle Peter's visit serves an important function because he also brings a letter from Ashley Wilkes.

It's addressed to Melly (of course), but Scarlett reads it and is thrilled with the words: "Beloved, I am coming home to you." The sentiment is meant for Melly, but it gives Scarlett the warm fuzzies anyway, which means the reader also titters with excitement because we are suddenly anxious to find out what's going to happen next in the saga.  So much of the world has changed over the past few years, and all the certainty of the pre-war years has been replaced with an unpredictable world where down is up, the Confederacy has disappeared, Scarlett works the fields, and the once proud Tara has been reduced to nothing more than a burden.  In retrospect Scarlett's reaction to Ashley's letter seems downright silly, but is it really? The world is topsy-turvy and anything can happen now, and when all the rules are out the window maybe even Ashley has been altered by the times.  Before the war he was dutiful and serious and never the type to leave his wife, but now it seems downright plausible that Ashley would turn up at Tara and whisk Scarlett away for a new life in a new part of the country.

Will Benteen also makes his first appearance in this chapter, and I've always regretted that they didn't add his character to the motion picture.  Will Benteen and Archie (racist, crazy, mean-as-hell Archie) are two of the more memorable characters in GWTW, but people who haven't read the book don't even realize they exist. Obviously, adding Will and Archie and Grandma Fontaine and all of those other characters would have stretched the movie and expanded the cast and tested everybody's patience, but--still.  MM is rather hard on the lower classes in GWTW, and Will Benteen's dignified personality blunts some of the author's sharpest attacks on working class whites. 

So, even as Scarlett and Will and the rest of the gang at Tara begin to slowly plant and plow and do all that other farmy-farm stuff that city slickers like me know absolutely nothing about, MM continues to sew the seeds for the last bits of the novel right there in chapter 30 by addressing Melly's continuing ill-health.  

"Old Dr. Fontaine diagnosed her trouble as female complaint and concurred with Dr. Meade in saying she should never have had Beau.  And he said frankly that another baby would kill her." 

If you blink, you'd pretty much miss that, wouldn't you?  But on a second/third/hundredth read the words and their meanings jump out at you and make you do a double-take, don't they? Here's a rudimentary equation to show us exactly how MM builds anticipation in this part of the novel:
 Another baby will kill Melly. 
+ Ashley is on his way home. 
+ Melly loves babies. 
 +Ashley loves Melly.  
??????????

The problem with this equation is that we don't know how much Ashley loves Melly. Scarlett seems utterly convinced that their relationship is little more than a brother/sister, duty-filled, boring sort of thing, and the reader has little reason to doubt her conclusion.  Ashley is not lusty and honest like Rhett (who I'm missing terribly at the moment), and Melly never seems to give much thought to romance or whatever, so it would not be unreasonable for Scarlett to believe that the Wilkes' marriage is platonic and that Beau is something of a fluke.  I think Scarlett is so single-minded about her life that she can't even entertain the notion that Ashley can love (and lust after) Scarlett and Melly at the same time.  Every other man besides Ashley and her father (and Will Benteen?) irritates her to no end, so how in the hell could Ashley have desire for a woman who's not Scarlett? 

And we'll soon get answers to all of our questions because Ashley comes home at the end of this chapter, and things quickly start to change. 

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Chapter 29: "....And the war was over."

In GWTW the Civil War ends with a whimper. 

Interestingly enough, MM does not connect the end of the War with Lee's surrender at Appomattox Court House on April 9, of 1865. Rather , MM does not consider the Civil War to be truly at an end until "General Johnston...surrendered in North Carolina," which Wikipedia dates as April 26, 1865.  I'm a Yankee and I was always taught that the Civil War ended when General Grant and Abe Lincoln said it did, which was when the Army of Northern Virginia waved the white flag and everybody in the Union started celebrating. But of course MM was a southerner who was writing about a cast of very proud Confederates, so it's only natural that she'd date the end of the War to the date of Johnston's surrender (which also happened to be the largest surrender of the war), since Johnston's army represented the last possible chance for defense against Sherman and the gang.

Anyway, the Fontaine boys are the first ones home from the front, and they deliver the news of the end of the war to the folks at Tara.  The other ladies are sad that their dream of Confederate independence is over, but Scarlett doesn't care.  The war is over, and that means she doesn't have to worry about various armies burning her house or stealing her food or her horses, and Scarlett is too practical to shed tears over lost dreams and southern pride:

"Yes, the cause was dead but war had always seemed foolish to her and peace was better." 

And so, once again, Scarlett's blase attitude toward the end of the war highlights my contention that Gone With the Wind is not actually a civil war novel.  People want to believe that GWTW is a romanticized, dewy-eyed portrait of the Confederacy, but in my mind nothing could be further from the truth.  GWTW isn't about the Civil War--it just happens to take place during the Civil War.  It's like Mad Men: Don Draper is a contemporary of JFK, but it would be false on all fronts to pretend that anything that happens at Sterling, Cooper, Pryce, Draper has anything to do with the Kennedy administration.

The War is over, Scarlett has food, shelter and the security that her property won't be destroyed by an invading army, and:

"If Ashely was alive he'd be coming home!" 

The first time I read GWTW I honestly thought Ashley was dead at this juncture of the novel.  He's been out of the frame for nearly two whole years and nearly every other man from the first section of the novel is dead, wounded or missing, so why not Ashley?

Interestingly enough, MM builds suspense through this part of the novel by having Scarlett visit all the other plantations in the area, meeting and greeting her old friends.  There are several poignant episodes in this chapter, where Scarlett visits the families we met in the beginning of the book and reflects on how much has changed over the course of the war. When Scarlett goes over to the Tarelton house she visits the graveyard, and while the description of the three new stones above Brent, Stuart, and Tom ("they had never found Boyd or any trace of him) is really quite moving and sad even for Yankees like me, Scarlett can. Not.  Believe the Tarleton's have "wast[ed] precious money on tombstones when food was so dear..."

She's right to be practical, of course. But it's astonishing that Scarlett can't comprehend the notion that tombstones can be just as important--or more important--than food or money.  Scarlett is a mother herself by this point in the novel and she's recently lost her mother, but all she can think about is how silly it is to buy a headstone.  Scarlett's lack of sympathy is hilarious, but perhaps her harsh reaction is another little signpost MM left along the way to show us how very different Scarlett is from the typical, sentimental Southern Belle? 

The South is unraveling, the boys are all dead or sick, and Scarlett is preoccupied with day-to-day living.  This part of GWTW lacks the charm, grace, and romance of the earlier section, but here MM has stripped away all the manners and silly rules that dominated the first part of the novel and Scarlett and her friends are obliged to get by with nothing but their wits and hard work.  GWTW came out during the depression and I firmly believe Scarlett's focus and drive are the reason GWTW became so popular, which means that this middle section of the novel is the cornerstone of MM's masterpiece and not the "mushy-middle" most people make it out to be.  Anyway, next time the girls finally get word of Ashley, Will Benteen comes on the scene, and Uncle Peter pays a visit and brings some comic relief.  

Chapter 28: "The problem was food...."

Any novelist knows the middle of the novel is always, always, always the most difficult section to write.  Beginnings and endings are comparatively easy to plan and execute.  The beginning sets the tone and if you write your novel in sequence it can be a lot of fun to develop new characters with new problems.  And endings are--well, it can be pretty tough to walk away from your story and darned tough to come up with a good "landing place" for your characters, but there's something wonderfully satisfying about putting a project to bed.

But the middle is.....

I've agonized over many middle sections in my time, so I can only imagine how difficult MM found it to write the middle sections of GWTW.  All of Scarlett's original motivations are now gone (Ashley is married to Melly and a prisoner in Rock Island), and she's returned to Tara, and I'll betcha MM rewrote the middle a thousand times before she came up with a satisfying way to connect the beginning third of the novel with the final third.  Scarlett's obsession with Ashley and her desire to become Mrs. Ashley Wilkes keeps us interested (especially those of us who enjoy romance novels), but the rest of Scarlett's challenges and problems are just as compelling and MM starts developing the problems that will eventually come to a head in the last third of the novel right here in Chapter 28. 

First of all, as MM makes clear early in this chapter: "At Tara and throughout the County, the problem was food." The Civil War is not officially over, and in another novel by a less talented author who'd done less research, the protagonist's focus probably would have been on the disappointment of defeat.  But MM and Scarlett are nothing if not practical, so instead of recounting the death of the Confederacy and the maneuvers of Robert E. Lee or whatever, MM decides to narrow the conflict down to the basics of survival: food, shelter, and money.  Of course Scarlett and everybody else in the County are completely isolated from the world and haven't seen a newspaper in ages, so they couldn't exactly follow battles and events blow-by-blow even if they wanted to--but I get the distinct sense reading these chapters of GWTW that none of the characters particularly give a damn about what happens outside of their neighborhood.  And this narrow view isn't simply something that occurs because of the War or because they're hungry: Scarlett and her friends have always been fairly ignorant and isolated about the world outside of Georgia, and it would certainly take more than casualties in a far off corner of Virgina or Tennessee to get their attention.

Anyway, by narrowing Scarlett's attention onto necessities like food and shelter, MM demonstrates that Scarlett is single-minded and mature.  She shoulders the burden of feeding her family here in the center of the novel, and her hard-work and laser-like focus in this section make it quite easy for us to see how Scarlett develops into such a hard-working, focused woman in the final part of the book.

The second idea MM develops here in Chapter 28 is the continued destruction of the stratified southern society.  MM spent the first 10% of the novel explaining the rigid divisions in Southern society.  Of course our modern eyes notice the racial differences she gives us more than everything else, but I think it's also worth remembering that she draws distinctions between rich and poor planters, Northerners and Southerners, flighty girls and serious young women, wild boys like the Tarletons and quiet, studious, serious types like Ashley.  Everybody has a distinct role to play in pre-War society, but now that the war is over everybody breaks away from all of these expected behaviors. 

In this chapter we have southern belle Scarlett riding a horse and looking for food, the whole formerly wealthy family eating "rabbit and possum and catfish," and former slave (ahem!) playing an essential role in keeping food on the table.  I've read a lot of commentary about 12 Years a Slave lately, and most of the film reviews praise 12 Years while also taking potshots at GWTW and Birth of a Nation.  I'm definitely not going to defend Birth of A Nation, and I do have a few problems with some of MM's depictions of black characters, but I think it's unfair to pretend that GWTW and Birth are similar in their approach to race.  Birth demonizes African-Americans (at least it does in the clips I've seen on TV lately), but GWTW takes the opposite tact in 90% of the novel.  There are some bad or evil or wild black characters in GWTW, but Pork and Mammy (and even Prissy, to a lesser extent) have more in common with the "Magical Negro" character type than with anything particularly negative.  In any case, as I've said many times before MM is an equal-opportunity offender in the pages of GWTW, and for every "evil" black character I can count ten white characters who are portrayed in a negative light. Either way, the social structure has broken down by the time we arrive to this section of the novel; so far everybody is cooperating and behaving, but the seeds of the madness of the reconstruction period are sewn right here in the wake of Sherman's army.

The third important thread that MM starts here in Chapter 28 is Scarlett's dream.  I tend to stay away from dream sequences when I'm writing and I usually don't like them when I'm reading either, but I don't mind Scarlett's misty dream here in GWTW.  For one thing it adds a nice touch of the Southern Gothic to the story, since it's foreboding and terrifying and all of that.  However, I think MM did a great job with the dream because it's a dream about nothing.  It would have been corny if MM had included persons, places, or identifiable things in Scarlett's dream.  Imagine, for instance, if Scarlett dreamed about her mother or Ashley or the Tarleton twins? In lesser hands Scarlett's dream would have provided her with advice or encouragement, sort of like that earlier dream featuring her ancestors.  But here the dream is vague and empty and terrifying, and it gives nothing away, which adds to the uneasiness we all feel as we turn the pages in GWTW. 

Alright, so now that MM has added these story threads that will pay off later, the second half of Chapter 28 features a cameo by one of my favorite characters Frank Kennedy! He's part of the commissary department (because, of course he is!), and he brings news of the war (The Confederates have retaken Atlanta, but it has been burned to the ground...), but because he's a well-bred gentleman he doesn't give them too much bad news.  That's nice of him, I suppose, and once again MM displays her talent by "showing without telling." If Rhett or Ashley or Gerald had ambled up to Tara instead of Frank, any of the three of them would have eventually told Tara precisely what was going on in the world, if only so that she could prepare for the future.  Rhett would have given it to her straight, Ashley would have told her reluctantly, and Gerald would have done it by accident, but none of the three of them would have spared her feelings.  Scarlett is in charge and she therefore needs to know everything that's happening outside of Tara, but Frank still evidently doesn't want to upset the ladies. 

Sigh. 

Anyway, at the end of this Christmas dinner Frank timidly asks Scarlett for Suellen's hand.  Scarlett agrees even though "it was beyond her comprehension that anyone could love Suellen." After Frank says yes, he opens up a little and talks frankly to Scarlett about the fact that the war is winding down. This final disclosure provides a nice bridge for the next few chapters, but Scarlett is so practical she doesn't care much about the fortunes of the rebel government and is more concerned with the impending lack of food and resources than she is with her sister's love life. 

Next time: The Civil War ends....and life begins again.

Chapter 27: "Yes, the worst was over!" (Girl Power!)

My horoscope said today was a good day for traveling and publishing, so here I am.

Anyway, for those of you who don't know, November is National Novel Writing Month.  I fancy myself as a novelist in moments of supreme self-confidence, and I take on the challenge of writing new words about new topics every year.  NaNoWo is supposed to be about writing without editing. It's supposed to be about letting your ideas flow as you type-type-type the Fall blues away.  I always start off with a head full of steam, but eventually run out of gas because I'm pretty picky about my style and I honestly begin most mornings striking or erasing most of the things I wrote the day before. I've always been pretty darn good at writing dialogue, and I can put together a pretty decent scene. But my sequels suck.

What are sequels? I can hear you ask.  And I'm glad you asked, although I'm pretty sorry that you asked me since, as I mentioned, I'm absolutely terrible at writing them.  Essentially, sequels cap off scenes. Sometimes they are little more than a summation of what has come before, but sometimes they're a springboard for the next bit of action or simply a characters internal dialogue as they reassess whatever has just happened to them.  I can knock out thousands of lines of dialogue without missing a beat, but sequels are the secret to good writing. It's what separates the amateurs from the professionals, or so I'd like to think.

MM was darn good at writing sequels, wasn't she?

One of my favorite sequels comes at the end of Chapter 26:

"There was hope now. The war couldn't last forever. She had her little cotton, she had food, she had a horse, she had her small but treasured hoard of money. Yes, the worst was over." 

Scarlett has suffered and struggled since she left Atlanta, and in the hands of a lesser novel killing the Yankee would have been our heroine's nadir.  But because GWTW is a great novel Scarlett's murder is almost celebrated, and it propels the action over the next part of the novel.  Scarlett might be a murderer, but she's got food, money, and a horse, so what difference is a little criminal sin? MM doesn't dwell on Scarlett's soul or her mental well-being, here. She's just glad Scarlett is slowly finding a way to get by in a world gone mad, and you know what? I'm glad, too.

Except, uh-oh.  As we turn to Chapter 27 we see that all is not well. Because the Yankees are back.

Is this overkill? You think this is overkill having the Yankees return twice to Tara? Perhaps you could make the argument that MM is laying it all on a little thick, but you know what? The Yankees were all over Georgia during late 1864 and early 1865.  I don't know much about life in a war zone, but I have seen it on TV.  And TV wars are never as cut and dry as we like to think war is.  Atlanta is in ruins and we know the Yankees were massing up for the March to the Sea, but I'm pretty sure the Yankees were swarming all over Clayton county, and I'm pretty sure that they would have returned to Tara a few times to look for spoils and goodies.

Everybody else runs into the swamp when the Yankees are coming, and Scarlett is about to join them but she doesn't.  Because she's afraid the Yankees will burn Tara over her head, and Tara is all she's got left in the world.  Everybody else scampered away because they've got good sense and are totally afraid of confronting men with guns, but Scarlett isn't afraid.  Tara is her home and she aims to defend it, and if the Yankees don't like it, well..."they're only a passel of damn Yankees!"

Interestingly enough, this Chapter also includes a little bit of rape panic ("For a moment Scarlett went faint, already feeling rough hands thrusting themselves into her bosom, fumbling at her garters"), and it's fairly interesting how MM keeps that threat bubbling under the surface of the story, isn't it?

But Lordy Lordy, the end result of Chapter 27 is that the Yankees who show up at Tara take almost everything Scarlett had left.  All the things that gave her security during the sequel of Chapter 26 are gone by the end of Chapter 27.  The Yankees even try to burn the house, although Scarlett and Melly put it out pretty quickly (but with a great deal of effort).  I guess I could grumble a little bit about the slurs Melly and Scarlett toss around after they've put the fire out, but...sigh.  I won't.  I don't like to read those words anymore than you do, but I think they're pretty accurate here.  Scarlett and Melly were women of the South, and they grew up on plantations.  They were at the top of a very precisely structured hierarchy, and besides neither of these women were modern liberals, were they? Let's just say that the harsh words they use here rub me the wrong way, but they're not at all shocking or out of place.  As a matter of fact, not using those words would ring false in this situation.  This is historical fiction after all, and PC-talk hadn't been invented during 1864.

Anyway, Chapter 27 ends with a sequel that is almost as perfect as the one that winds up Chapter 26.

"I'll say this for her," Scarlett muses about Melly, "she's always there when you need her." 

And so, for all that GWTW sometimes rubs me the wrong way regarding racial harmony and equality, I think the book is very modern in its portrayal of Girl Power.  Scarlett hates Melly, but Melly loves Scarlett unconditionally.  And as the book edges forward, we are able to experience the blossoming of Scarlett's love for Melly in what feels like real time.  GWTW is often wrongly described as nothing more than a Love Story between Scarlett and Rhett, but in actuality I often think that the real romance in GWTW occurs between Melly and Scarlett.  I love Captain Butler, but the ending of GWTW wouldn't be half as tragic if Melly were still alive in the final chapter, and Chapter 27 is one of those chapters that best demonstrates the way the women's relationship gradually changes.

"Hard Times...Come Again No More..."

 Here's a great link to a James Taylor/Yo-Yo Ma version of Stephen Foster's "Hard Times Come Again No More".  I used to hate Civil War music back in my Civil War buff days, but thanks to the magic of YouTube I've been able to find interesting covers of some of the most iconic songs of the 1860's.  It's nice to hear it sound so soulful when almost every Hard Times I ever heard before this year was precise and perfect and boring.

I'll be posting more on this blog soon.  But in the meantime, buy my book here at Amazon.com, post a comment or two (or twelve if you'd like), and check back in a few days.

Cheers,

SS, The History Gal.

Chapter 26: Time hobbles on....

"The only time crying ever did any good was when there was a man around from whom you wished favors." --Scarlett O'Hara, 1864.

Is Scarlett O'Hara a bitch?

One of my colleagues was an English major in undergrad.  He received his degree from a northern college, while I got mine from a huge southern university, but we both read the same "classic" books during our four years of undergrad.  So we can both speak for hours about Hemingway, Faulkner, Twain, O'Connor, Shakespeare, and Henry Adams.  But the trouble started when I mentioned my love for GWTW.

Me: "My favorite book of all time is Gone With the Wind." 
Colleague: "No, no, no, that's only a movie, not a book."
Me: "That's not--"
Colleague:  "It's a movie about a bitchy southern belle and her life on a plantation."
Me:  "That's not--"
Colleague:  "So what do you think about Anna Karenina?"

I passed over his ignorance because he's an alright sort of a guy, but I spent the entire rest of the day thinking about his pat description of GWTW.  Specifically, I tried to come to a conclusions about whether or not Scarlett O'Hara is a bitch. And, more to the point, whether or not her bitchiness actually matters.

More than anything, I think Scarlett O'Hara is cold.  I once read a description of JFK that said he had "ice in his veins," largely because he didn't seem to care one way or another about the people in his life.  JFK was also strangely apathetic about his own life and times, which is peculiar since he was a first-hand witness to everything from the depression to WW2 to the Civil Rights movement to the beginnings of the Vietnam War.  Everybody else was up in arms about one thing or another during the 30s, 40s, 50s, and 60s, but JFK never really seemed to care much about what happened--or how it happened.  Or whether he helped it happened.  I love JFK, but I would have loved him more if he'd been more engaged with the events that swirled around him.

And I think Scarlett O'Hara is curiously cold in exactly the same way. Even at the start of GWTW Scarlett doesn't really care about the war or the slavery issue. As a matter of fact, she doesn't waste time thinking about the world outside of her home county, and even Atlanta seems like it's on the other side of the world.  She's single-minded and driven, and she doesn't give a damn (ahem) about anybody except her parents and Ashley Wilkes.  I don't know if I'd exactly call this bitchiness, but it's certainly selfishness and perhaps selfishness=bitchiness?  And if Scarlett's behavior is bitchiness, then how come Michael Corleone is largely celebrated for killing Fredo while Scarlett is a villain just for stealing Frank away from Suellen?

Because Scarlett is a woman, that's why.

Scarlett is a bitch, and her bitchiness does matter, but only because it's an integral part of the plot.  Interestingly enough, the other three principal characters in GWTW (Rhett, Melly, Ashley) love Scarlett because she's so single-minded/strong/bitchy.  Everybody else either disapproves of her or is afraid of her, but MM presents the rest of the cast as such a foolish, easily swayed Greek chorus of observers that they almost come off as patsies.  They dislike Scarlett, but they dislike her for all the wrong reasons (because she's running a store and not being "feminine" enough), and the "extras" seem like idiots in the end.

So anyway, this is the chapter where the Yankee deserter comes to Tara and Scarlett shoots him in the face and blows his nose away.  Scarlett has killed a Yankee, and she knows she should feel bad about taking a life, but--she doesn't.

Is this one of her "bitchy" moments? What should she have done instead? Maybe she should have just thrown down her gun and engaged him in a lengthy discussion about war and peace or whatever? Or maybe she could have tried to persuade him to walk away? MM brings Melly into the scene and "there was a glow of grim pride in her usually gentle face," and this look gives the reader permission to smile along with Scarlett and Melly, but what if Melly had jumped up and started arguing with Scarlett at this juncture? Would we have judged Scarlett's actions differently?

And if so, why?

Before Scarlett drags the dead Yankee away, the girls stop and go through his knapsack where they find money (greenbacks and Confederate money!), and now that he's dead they take possession of his horse, which means they can buy food and travel a little bit further to look for friends and help.  After assessing her new situation Scarlett makes the observation that:

"There was a God after all, and He did provide, even if He did take very odd ways of providing." 

And ain't that the truth?

Anyway, this chapter also includes one of my favorite one-off conversations in GWTW (which is to say, one of the few sparkling interactions that doesn't involve the dazzling Captain Butler) when Scarlett goest to visit the Fontaine's.  I love Grandma Fontaine, particularly here in this chapter because she's such a straight shooter and she's doling out common sense left and right.  I won't transcribe the entire conversation here, but if you haven't read it in a while I recommend that you revisit it ASAP.  Interestingly though, while Grandma Fontaine asks pointed questions to get Scarlett to discuss what's going on back at Tara, the old woman eventually drifts off into a few wonderful philosophical observations, ending with:

"Scarlett, always save something to fear--even as you save something to love..." 

Scarlett gets cross with Grandma Fontaine, because she's Scarlett and she's always cross whenever somebody starts talking about anything besides money, marriage (to Ashley) and other nuts and bolts stuff.  Our heroine disregards Grandma Fontaine's advice, but MM left it for the rest of us to enjoy.

Chapter 25: "There was no going back and she was going forward."

Writers write.

I've spent the past six months working too much, going on too many vacations, watching too much football, and re-reading too many of my favorite books.  I'm tired, I'm cranky, and I'm suffering from a severe creative block, but none of that matters tonight.  Because writers write.

It's really as simple as that, isn't it?

I wish MM had been inclined to write one of those books other big names churn out once-in-a-while, one of those books where a famous, wealthy writer gives the rest of us wannabes a glimpse into their creative process.  Most amateur authors (especially and including amateurs like me!) get bogged down in the "mushy-middle" of our story.  Writing a beginning is fun and writing an ending is thrilling for those of us who crave closure, but it can be very difficult to grind your way through the middle of a novel, particularly when you're not getting feedback from writers or editors or anybody except your cats, your mother, and your big sister (Hi Tam!).  GWTW could have very, very, very easily slowed to a crawl right here at Chapter 25.  Rhett has gone into the army and Scarlett is back at Tara and the armies are gone, and the countryside is nowhere near as exciting as Atlanta, and I'm sure that MM probably had to rework these sections of the novel multiple times to make it all flow so smoothly and stick together so well.

So, okay.

Scarlett wakes up at Tara in her childhood bedroom, but while her surroundings are familiar all hell has broken loose around her.  The Civil War has raged all over the county, her mother is dead, Pa has essentially lost his mind, and her sisters are suffering from typhoid. Most of the slaves are long gone, there's no food left, and the O'Hare's owe taxes to the Confederacy.  Mammy and Pork fill Scarlett in on the details she didn't quite absorb the night before, when she was so drunk and terrified.  Scarlett is hungover in this section (light sensitivity, trouble holding her head up, parched throat, and a whole bunch of other physical symptoms that all of us writers know a little bit too well!), but she's all business as she gathers information from the slaves.  And--

Is this section the first one that highlights Scarlett's changing personality? Interestingly enough, MM essentially frames this section from Pork's POV, and this switch up yields an interesting assessment of Scarlett's behavior in this chapter:

"She began asking questions so brusquely and giving orders so decisively Pork's eyebrows went up in mystification....She asked again about the fields, the gardens, the stock, and her green eyes had a hard glaze which Pork had never seen in them before." 

Pork is obviously less than impressed by Scarlett's behavior in this section, but...so? He compares her unfavorably to her mother ("Miss Ellen didn't never talk so short to nobody..."), but doesn't he understand that the world has changed drastically over the past few days? Ellen O'Hara was the trophy wife of a wealthy planter (yeah, I said it!), but those days are long gone.  Hard times call for "hard glaze," don't they?

Anyhow, Scarlett asks Pork and Prissy to help her work the fields and scrounge for food, but they can't because they're house workers and allergic to working outside, I guess.  I could fault MM for daring to make Pork and Prissy sound so lazy and worthless, but I don't think this is particularly racist since she's already painted everybody else at Tara with the same broad brush of self-regard.  Everybody is still dazed and everybody is still trying to figure out how to reconcile the class/status/power/gender/racial roles that were so rigid before the war with the new world of late-1864.

So Scarlett herself sets out alone to forage for food.  She walks over to Twelve Oaks, but finds nothing but an empty house. She happens upon some food in the slave quarters, and she immediately eats a "old and coarse and...peppery" raddish that makes her vomit.  She loses her senses for a moment, but then she starts making decisions about how she's going to live out the rest of her life.  She realizes that the "lazy luxury of the old days was gone, never to return." But instead of falling down dead or giving up, Scarlett decides right then and there that she's never going back.  And that going forward is her only option.

MM then begins contrasting Scarlett with the other southern women of her generation.  "Throughout the South for fifty years there would be bitter-eyed women who looked backward...but Scarlett was never to look back."

But--that's not right, is it?  Scarlett is never consumed with sentimentality or nostalgia like most of her friends and family members, certainly she's never crippled with memories in the manner of Ashley and so many others.  And yet--she does look back, doesn't she? She doesn't necessarily court memories or try to conjure the dead, but over the rest of the novel she can't help but compare her post-war life with her life before and during the war.  She can't forget her mother or the good times that came before, and in a way her love for Ashley is much less about any possible future the two of them could possibly have together, and much more about Scarlett's lingering girlish desire to still somehow become the mistress of 12 Oaks.

And speaking of looking back, one of my favorite scenes in the whole novel takes place here in Chapter 25.  Suellen and Careen are still sick in bed, and when Scarlett periodically goes upstairs to hang "over the foot of their bed and outline the work she expected them to do when they recovered, they looked at her as if she were a hobgoblin." Scarlett's sisters are terrified, but Scarlett keeps going up there and saying crazy stuff and alarming the sick girls "because it helped her (Scarlett) to forget her own bitterness that everything her mother had told her about life was wrong."

Ouch.  It's tough to learn that lesson at such an early age, isn't it?  Plus...Scarlett is correct because her mother's teachings can't help her now.  But Ellen taught her everything a girl like Scarlett needed to know about the world.  Cutting wood and raising crops simply weren't part of the curriculum. And it's sort of unfortunate that Scarlett feels that everything she was taught was wrong. Not just useless or antiquated, but out-and-out wrong.  Which makes the ante-bellum, Southern belle training sound exactly like my law school education.  Har dee har har.

Anyway, MM ends Chapter 25 with one of the best lines in the novel, namely that "Scarlett would hold Tara, if she had to break the back of every person on it." Now, that's a resolution, right? "Never Going Hungry Again" makes for dramatic cinema, and that famous phrase has a nice little ambiguity to it, sort of like "Here's Looking at You, Kid," since it applies to almost everybody's life at one time or another.  But Scarlett doesn't just want to avoid starvation.  She's bound and determined to keep her land even if she has to physically destroy every person living on it, which is astounding since she's talking about her family.  Scarlett always gets lumped in with Dorothy and her Yellow Brick Road, but in my opinion the Scarlett in GWTW the novel is more akin to Michael Corleone or Richard III (the Shakespeare version, anyway), than the kind-hearted, homesick Dorothy.  Scarlett has a goal in mind and she's willing to manipulate and destroy anybody who stands in her way.

And that's why I love her!

"Half time!": In which I use poorly drawn charts and graphs to illustrate a few points....

(Before I launch into my blogpost, I want to send a special shot-out to Sweet77 and her very kind comment under my last post. I was having a rough day at work last week (bad clients, bossy bosses, and the beginnings of the flu)when I glanced down at my inbox and saw her complimentary words.  Thanks for reading, Sweet77!)

GWTW the movie is not identical to GWTW the book.  

Of course, we can't exactly fault Hollywood for cutting characters and subplots.  Will, Archie, most of the folks from the county, the Confederate soldiers Scarlett met during the war, and Grandma Fontaine (just to name a few)are fantastic characters that add extraordinary depth to the novel, and I love reading about them.  But GWTW the movie already has a huge cast and a lengthy run time, and I can't fault Selznick and the gang for tightening the focus and consolidating characters in an effort at making the story more coherent.  

However, the Hollywood script writers didn't merely chop GWTW. I would also argue that they changed the fundamental flow of the story as they hacked through the pages and searched for the essence of the story.  As I've said before, MM used the Scarlett/Rhett romance(or anyway, anti-romance) as the backbone of her story, but Hollywood used the romance as the skin of the movie.  As a consequence, the movie and novel deviate greatly in the shape of their story arcs, so much so that an uninformed observer/average non-GWTW obsessive on the street would be excused in assuming that Scarlett's story looks like this: 

 Which is to say, Scarlett's story arc is based entirely around her romantic entanglements/relationships with men.  So Scarlett's movie arc begins when she hears from the Tarleton twins (I miss those guys) about Ashley and Melly's impending marriage, climaxes when she proclaims that "she'll never go hungry again" (and thusly learns to stand on her own feet), and then drops down from that point as Scarlett grows more and more self-centered and power-hungry, continuing until the bitter end when (SPOILER!) Rhett abandons her.

On the other hand, a basic reading of the novel contains those same plot points but the rising and falling actions occur in slightly different places compared to those found in the movie.  In my (very, very, very humble) opinion, I believe a rudimentary drawing of the novel's story arc would look like this:

 Which is to say it begins in the same place (with the Tarleton twins dropping the Ashley/Melly marriage bomb on Scarlett's shoulders) and rises similarly over the course of the war years, as Scarlett grows up, moves to Atlanta, befriends Rhett Butler, and continues mooning after Ashley.  I also think that the return to Tara and Scarlett's "never go hungry again" statement is an all-important plot point in the novel, but I don't think that Scarlett's story arc dips down quite so immediately in the novel.  Selznick and the rest of the film-makers (and quite a lot of critics) seem to be tying Scarlett's eventual decline (I struggle with the notion of the ending being a "come-uppance") to her determination to succeed and her ruthless behavior during the middle and ending of the novel. But I believe that MM actually applauds Scarlett's hard-work and gumption, and I doubt that MM wants the reader to believe that Scarlett "got what she deserved" because she went into business for herself.  Therefore, any "downfall" in the novel cannot begin when Scarlett decides to take control of Tara and do what she can to provide for her family.

Rather, perhaps the correct call is to say that Scarlett's fortunes during the period immediately following the Fall of Atlanta neither rise nor fall and the story arc simply goes off in a straight line for a few years. Scarlett makes a lot of decisions during this part of the novel, and she makes several tough choices including (Spoiler?) offering herself off to Rhett as a prostitute (plot point 1 in the second chart), marrying Frank Kennedy (and subsequently accidentally causing his death which is plot point 2), and then agreeing to marry Rhett for his money even though she doesn't love him (point 3).  None of these three points are Scarlett's best moments, of course, but I'm also not convinced that MM wants us to think that they lead to Scarlett's ultimate downfall and lonely ending.

However, anybody who's read the details of the Butler marriage in the last third of GWTW cannot help but be blown away by the speed/gravity/inevitability of the trouble that eventually occurs between the two of them.  2/3 of the story happens before Scarlett/Rhett get hitched, but they are completely outweighed by the weightiness and the mystery and the pain of the Butler marriage.  Once you get to the end of the book it's easy to point backward and say "she had it coming," but I'm not so sure that she does. But it's also impossible to ignore that there's something heart-breakingly predictable about the way Scarlett's life winds up.  One or another of her life choices eventually causes her to wind up alone and unhappy in 1873, but I'm still not certain which one it was. Hmmmmm....

I'll be looking for answers over the next few chapters, that much is certain.

Chapter 24 (again): "Doan holler, Miss Scarlett....dey ain' no tellin' whut mout answer!"/ The Fool's Errand

Well, well, well!

I've been pretty busy over the past month.  As a matter of fact, my summer has been incredibly busy with none of the usual dead-spots. I haven't had very much free time between my full-time job, my part-time job, and my "vacations" to various and sundry spots around the country, which means that I haven't had much time to keep up with my GWTW blog.  But today marks the official end of summer here in the U.S. of A., so it's likely I'll be able to post here on a more regular basis. Yay!

Anyway, it's September 2nd today, isn't it? The first week of September is always pretty darn notable if you're in school or planning a BBQ or what have you, but Civil War buffs and GWTW fans know very well that September 1st/2nd are important for other reasons.  Namely, it's the date that Atlanta finally fell to Sherman's troops.

Which means that, somewhat miraculously, today's date (September 2nd) is actually exactly 149 years after the events of Chapter 24 of GWTW.  So you see, even though it might have looked like I've been slagging off this summer and neglecting my writing, I planned it this way! I did!

And so here we are, with Scarlett making her way through the remnants of the countryside on September 2, 1864.  MM could have opened up this section of the novel with Scarlett and her gang arriving at Tara, but she delays the inevitable by first having Scarlett maneuver past the homes of all her lifelong friends.  They come first to the empty, dark, Mcintosh plantation home ("two tall chimneys, like gigantic tombstones towering above the ruined second floor, and broken unlit windows blotching the walls like still, blind eyes."). Scarlett calls out "hello" in the hopes that a friend will answer, but Prissy stops her quickly:

"Doan holler, Miss Scarlett....dey ain' no tellin' whut mout answer!" 

And...see? This is what I mean when I say that GWTW is not really a book about wild racist stereotypes and cringe-worthy dialect dialogue.  Prissy has been painted as nothing but a foolish girl throughout much of GWTW, but her assessment of their surroundings and of the possibility of danger is dead-on and she's quicker with her evaluation than Scarlett in this scene.  I suppose I could take this all a step further and say that the two young women react to the deserted plantation house in different ways because they come from such different backgrounds and stations in life.  After all, despite Scarlett's frenemy situation with most of the women and girls living around Tara, she can never even consider the notion that there might be something waiting for her inside a plantation house besides loving arms, good food, and safety.  On the other hand, Prissy is a slave.  She was raised in the same county as Scarlett, but her experience has been quite different, hasn't it? Scarlett immediately assumes that only friends will answer her call, but Prissy perhaps knows that not every plantation house contains help and security.  Just a thought.

Anyway, because I'm an amateur author, I would have rushed the girls and little Beau straight to the doors of Tara and gotten on with the rest of the drama.  But MM has already committed herself to delivering a lengthy book and her editors were evidently behind her, so she milks the drama for all it's worth--without making it seem like she's milking the drama at all.  They do a pretty good job of relating the tension in these scenes in the movie, what with the technicolor dark skies, the burnt out staircase at Twelve Oaks, and the gloomy darkness and mud and dirt, but MM really plays up the Southern Gothic hear, doesn't she? These parts of the book aren't memorable simply because these houses are deserted, but because they are now potentially dangerous. And the burned out remnants of the plantations also stand-in for the graves of Scarlett's old friends--the Tarleton boys, the Meades, etc--a notion she reinforces by blanketing the entire countryside in a "hideous stillness," that makes my heart ache even though this is my thousandth time reading GWTW.

As a matter of fact, even our heroine begins to doubt herself on the road back to Tara.  And here MM has Scarlett deliver one of the funnier (because it's true!) internal dialogues in the entire book:

"Why had she come on this fool's errand, against all common sense, dragging Melanie and her child? Better that they had died in Atlanta than, tortured by this day of burning sun and jolting wagon, to die in the silent ruins of Tara." 

There are times when my entire life feels like a fool's errand, and it's sometimes nice to read that even Scarlett O'Hare felt the same way along her journey.  Yes, I'll freely admit that our situations are quite different since my day-to-day irritations involve mostly arguing with judges and other lawyers and dead-beat clients and therefore don't come close to Scarlett's challenges at this point in the novel, but still.  This is a universal feeling, and it's nice to know that Scarlett and MM and Yours Truly have at least that in common.  It's good to see self-doubt and frustration put so patly on the page, isn't it?

MM now takes a little pause to remind us about how much Scarlett hates Melly and loves Ashley, a totally necessary digression that reminds us of the central conflict of the novel at a time when she could have easily had Scarlett forget all about Ashley and her devotion to the idea of their pure love until a more convenient time.  But MM throws it back up at us to remind us that Scarlett's motives are not nearly as selfless as her actions read on these pages of the book.

The girls find a cow, and MM breaks some of the tension by having Scarlett and Prissy argue about who's going to capture the cow and if they need a cow at all and whether or not the cow needs to be milked. Scarlett gets sassy with Prissy and even uses the N-word at one point (although it's her first time using it in the novel and she tells us that her "Mother wouldn't like that at all." And if the N-word is just a little bit too harsh for the story world of GWTW, why are folks still tossing it around in 2013? Makes you wonder.), but Prissy ain't budging.  Scarlett eventually relents and uses her petticoat to tie up the cow so they can take it to Tara.

And then, they're home.

They've made it to Tara!

Yay....right?

But--oh no.  The raggedy-ass horse Rhett stole for her and the ratchet wagon aren't going to be able to make it up the hill to Tara. So MM delays the action by having Scarlett and Prissy go back and forth about who should ride in the wagon and why, and eventually Scarlett convinces/berates Prissy and Wade into walking while they use the last energy of the horse to pull Melly and little Beau and the wagon up the hill.

And then they're walking again, despite their blistered feet and hunger and the darkness that surrounds them on all sides.  Scarlett tells Wade to "be a little man...and stop crying or I will come over there and slap you," which isn't exactly how you're supposed to talk to children on the scariest night of their life, is it? I can understand Scarlett's frustration in this chapter, but it's not as though Wade's fright is childish. Everybody's scared at this point, and you'd think Scarlett would be a little more understanding, but she isn't.

But they continue on anyway.

Scarlett sees the white walls of Tara and the reader is glad. Extremely glad.  But--

"Tara stood intact, yet shrouded with the same eerie quiet that hung over the whole stricken countryside." 

Uh oh.

And to make matters worse, a shadowy figure starts coming down the steps.  A man!

Double uh-oh!

But then Scarlett realizes that the man is her father.  And we are happy and glad because all her troubles are over, aren't they? Her father is at Tara! Which means our poor girls and their little babies are going to have a male protector in the house! And something to eat! And shelter!

Gerald is acting kind of stiff and strange, but Scarlett is so excited to be home and with her family she doesn't take much time to assess her father's mental health.  Instead she takes charge and she starts directing Pork and Prissy and Wade and bossing people around, and Pa tells her that her sisters are recovering and...that's good, isn't it? We're not supposed to like Suellen and Careen much, but I'm glad they got well. And Tara is still standing, so the worst of it has to be over now, right?

But no.

"Silence fell and in the silence an idea too monstrous for words took form..." 

And then Gerald drops the bomb and all of Scarlett's buried fears and anxieties erupt all at once because:

"Your mother died yesterday." 

And then MM just leaves that statement there on it's own.  She doesn't dress it in dialogue or reaction paragraphs, and she doesn't swaddle it with Scarlett's feelings.  Ellen's death is such a heavy burden for Scarlett, and such a shocking development that MM just simply lays it there on the page without adornment.  The weight of Ellen's death brings the first half of GWTW to a close with a hard, jarring clang. Everything Scarlett knew and loved is gone now, locked away forever in a dark coffin that can never be opened no matter how she jimmies the lock.  Scarlett is home now, but her mother is dead and she can never, ever truly go home again.

A scary thought.

Chapter 24: "The bright glare of morning sunlight...."

I loved my college roommates!

As a matter of fact, I loved them so much I gave them copies of GWTW for Xmas freshman year.  One of my roommates thanked me profusely and then (quite probably) never read a word of her copy, but my other roommate tore right through the book without stopping.  As a matter of fact, she read the whole thing in two days, which is quite a feat considering we were in the middle of finals and rushing around campus trying desperately to hustle a ride back to our respective cities/towns/farms.

I asked my roommate how she'd finished GWTW so quickly, and she came out with an answer:

"I skipped some of it."

"What?" I questioned, utterly incredulous that a woman my age, who I got along with and who loved women's fiction could have dared skipped parts of this sacred text.  "What are you talking about? Which parts did you skip?"

"I dunno," my roommate shrugged.  "Most of the stuff after she leaves at Atlanta, but before she marries her second husband.  The farming and reconstruction stuff.  It was just sort of boring to me."

As I said, I was shocked and concerned.  After all, if my roommate could skip these all-important scenes, then what else was she skipping out on in her everyday life? Homework? Meals? Baths?

I was mad at my roomie for quite some time, but over that xmas break I watched GWTW the motion picture for the ump-teenth time, and I realized that the Hollywood version of GWTW skips most of this stuff, too.  But we're not going to skip it, are we?

No, we most certainly are not.

Scarlett/Rhett's love story (hate story?) is definitely the backbone of the novel, but I would argue that it's the skin of the movie.  MM's book is the epic journey of one Southern woman's life from 1861 to 1873, but while it includes elements of romance and lubby-dubby-moony stuff (which I adore, by the way), that's not really what GWTW is all about.  The novel MM wrote is actually about the struggles of survival and it can be used as something of a how-to example for young women who are trying to make their way in the world. On the other hand, the movie is an epic movie in which a sassy southern lady loves the wrong man until it is too late for her to reconcile with the right one.  I love the movie dearly, but it presents limited information about Scarlett and her situation because it wraps up her time at Tara into a few scenes when in reality her experience rebuilding her homestead takes a long time.

So, Scarlett wakes up the day after Rhett abandoned them all somewhere between Atlanta and Tara.  The movie actually shows us a couple quick scenes of Scarlett hiding from soldiers, but in the book all of that information is presented as flashback.  Scarlett briefly remembers the night before (hiding from the blues and grays, etc), but then she's all business and begins searching for water and food.  The horse Rhett stole for her is still alive ("breathing heavily, sick eyes half closed, but alive"), so Scarlett and Prissy set off looking for nourishment.  She finds some apples (is MM doing a tree of wisdom/garden of eden thing here? And if so, why haven't I noticed this before?), doles them out to Melly, Prissy and Wade, and then Scarlett shoulders the burden and heads home.

Now that Rhett has disappeared (present now only in Scarlett's cursed memories of last night's wild times) and the day has broken, Scarlett can now refocus on the chief tension in the story ever since Sherman has begun to invade Georgia. As a matter of fact, MM being MM, our author even gives us a sentence that encapsulates the emotions that are truly driving this part of the story.

"It would be hours before she knew if Tara still stood and if Ellen were there."  

Throw out all thoughts of Ashley and Rhett and his krazy kisses, throw out everything Our Girl has ever obsessed over during the first third of the novel. Scarlett might be flightly and foolish and she might love the wrong man and she might despise Melly with all her power, but she is still able to see the situation for what it is. And it's a credit to her common sense and focus that she is able to forget all about all the stuff that has gone on in her life during the past few years, and is instead able to focus on what really matters: shelter, safety, and the love and support of her parents.

And then, of course, we come to one of the keystone passages in the novel, one that essentially re-states the sentence I bolded above, but which says the whole thing in a much more eloquent way:

"Was Tara still standing? Or was Tara also gone with the wind which had swept through Georgia?"  

Chapter 23 (Part III): Mmmmmmmm hmmmmmm!

"Get out," he ordered.  

If I were going to divide this all important chapter of GWTW into three parts, I would have to say that the third and final plot twist begins when Rhett orders Scarlett out of the buggy.  Nothing he has done or said over the course of the last several hours has been remotely romantic.  Of course there's that whole "coming-to-Scarlett's-rescue-and-helping-her-and-her-dependents-ride-through-a-war" bit and that's pretty difficult to ignore when all is said and done, but Rhett is so casual about helping them leave Atlanta that it seems as though sex/romance/love is the furthest thing from his mind.  It's a very big deal, but Rhett plays it like it's something he would have done anytime and for almost anybody, and it's not too difficult to imagine him sort of randomly coming to the aid of any of the Atlanta maids and matrons in their circle.  As much as the Meades and Merriweathers hate Rhett and his scandalous ways, I can imagine him helping them to safety almost as easily and logically as I accept the idea of him materializing with a horse and guiding Scarlett and the gang out of danger.

But he definitely wouldn't have ordered any of the Meades or Merriweathers out of the cart, and he definitely wouldn't have picked them up (shout out to my favorite motif!) and pulled them away for a kiss.  The first time reader of GWTW has absolutely no idea what to expect from Rhett Butler, but we know for sure that he has some sort of weird attraction to Scarlett. He likes her a lot, but does he love her? And if so, what the hell does he think love means?

We know what love means for Scarlett. At this point in the novel (and for 99% of the story) Scarlett's definition of true love can be found in her adoration of Ashley Wilkes.  She thinks about Ashley constantly and hates his wife just because she's married to him and wants to run away with him--although she doesn't really know what she would do with him if she ever got him.  (*wink wink, nudge, nudge*)

But as the words speed by here MM makes it clear to us that Rhett's attraction for Scarlett is something of a mirror opposite of Scarlett's love for Ashley. While Scarlett loves Ashley in a way that only a teenaged girl can love her crush and hasn't even actually imagined what being married to him would actually entail (beyond a few chaste kisses, of course), Rhett's physical desire for Scarlett is the engine behind whatever feelings of love he has for her in this section.

Over the course of the first part of the novel, Rhett does voice his appreciation for Scarlett's figure and good looks, but he does it in a sarcastic way that leaves doubt about his true feelings. But it's a fact that he has noticed Scarlett's attributes, and since he's an adult male he knows exactly what he wants to do with her.

Mmmmmm hmmmm.

Well, enough of my explanations and speculation.  Let's go to the good book (in this case GWTW and not the KJB) to flush out the scene that I consider to be a turning point for the entire story.  I think it's a good idea to take Rhett's statements and actions bit by bit in order to get a better idea of what exactly is happening here.

1.) "I'm not asking you to understand or forgive...for I shall never understand or forgive myself for this idiocy." Can we pause for a moment and just sit back and enjoy the balance of that gem of a sentence?  Southern writers are the best, aren't they? They can get away with rhetorical flourishes that sound phony coming out of my own typewriter....er, I meant my own MacBook.  I buy this lengthy soliloquy from Rhett, but it would have sounded totally ridiculous coming out of Jay Gatsby's mouth, right?  But anyway, it's interesting to note that Rhett is almost addressing himself in the third person here, like he's having an out-of-body experience.  It's one thing for him to expect that Scarlett won't understand or forgive him for leaving her, but if he thinks he's going to have serious doubts about joining the CSA then...don't do it, bro!

2.) "I am annoyed at myself to find that so much quixoticism still lingers in me." It's important to note here that Rhett say's he's "annoyed" to find quixoticism in his psyche, but he does not say that he's surprised.  It's there.  It annoys him that it's there, but for all his cynicism and all his practicality, there's evidently still some part of his personality--the part that hopes and dreams--that he can't repress.  Fascinating, particularly given the way the last third of the novel shapes up.  

3.) "I could not love thee, Dear, so much loved I not Honour more...for I do love you, Scarlett, in spite of what I said that night on the porch last month."  Wait....so, okay. On the night when he asked Scarlett to be his mistress, he only asked her that because he's in love with her.  Now later on when they're married I buy his explanation for pretending to be blase because he's known Scarlett for almost a decade by that point and he's seen her in action up close.  By the time the 1870's roll around Rhett knows Scarlett is brutal and selfish and all of that, but in 1864 there was no way he could have known the way she was going to turn out.  You know what, Rhett? I call BS.  I love you man, but if you really love Scarlett you've got a funny way of showing it in the beginning portions of GWTW. I'd be confused by your motivations, actions, and reactions by this point, too.  I don't blame our girl for rejection you.  You're out of hand.

4.) "His voice went on in the darkness and she heard words, but they made no sense to her.  Her mind was tiredly trying to take in the harsh truth that he was leaving her here to face the Yankees alone. Her mind said: "He's leaving me. He's leaving me."But no emotion stirred." Yes, Scarlett darlin'.  That's called shock.  Yes, he's really leaving you.  Because he's suddenly nostalgic or suddenly crazy or suddenly addicted to adrenaline and cannon fire, or suddenly so in love with you that he can't bare the thought of helping you travel the last few miles to Tara.  It ain't right and it ain't funny and it's all messed up, but he's leaving you.  For real.  I wish I could say that this is your bottom and that things are only going to get better from here, but that would be a terrible lie.  Sorry girl.

5.) "You don't want to change your mind about what I said last month? There's nothing like danger and death to give an added fillip...you would be sending a soldier to his death with beautiful memories." Well, well, well, well....

Well, well, well, well, well!

I enjoy GWTW the movie almost as much as I love GWTW the book, but not quite.  And in my opinion this is one of those places where the motion picture failed miserably.  While it's true that kissing Rhett is the last thing on Scarlett's mind in this part of the story, he does kiss her.

Call it foreshadowing or whatever, since his advances are clearly unwanted, but Rhett kisses Scarlett in this scene and she likes it.

She really, really likes it.

In fact, she likes it so much she doesn't even realize she likes it. She's reduced to merely recounting the scene without really letting us know if she's enjoying playing tonsil hockey with RKB.  There's a "warm tide of feeling," she's frightened, and she goes limp. And soon afterward she realizes that none of the other boys she's known have ever kissed her like this.  Oooo la la! In the movie it's pretty clear that Scarlett doesn't want to kiss him almost as much as he wants to kiss her, but that's an incorrect depiction of what was actually occurring in this section of the book.  VL plays it like kissing CG is totally gross (which it might have been, given the dentures and everything), but Scarlett definitely doesn't think it's gross, does she?

6.) "'Sweet,'" he whispered. "'Sweet.'" Again with the repetitive statements, right? Maybe I'll have to explore the idea in the future that one of Rhett's tells is that he repeats himself whenever he gets nervous or turned on? I don't know.  Either way, isn't it wonderful how MM contrasts Scarlett's experience of the kiss (fire, terror, warm tides of feeling, going limp) with Rhett's? She thinks this is the sultriest make-out session of all time, but Rhett thinks it's "sweet?" If this is sweet for him, then who in the hell is he kissing regularly--and how is he kissing them?  Scarlett views this whole experience to be as spicy and unhealthy and wild as a Chipotle burrito, but for Rhett it's sugary and wholesome like a lollipop? That's a nice bit of characterization, and much more effective and believable than a lengthy discussion of their lives, isn't it?

7.) "Rage and hate flowed into her and stiffened her spine and with one wrench she tore herself lose from his arms."  In later parts of the book Scarlett's "rage and hate" often seems misdirected. After they marry she's pissed at Rhett because she doesn't understand him and/or because he's not Ashley, but right here her anger is right on point.  What the hell is he thinking leaving them all there in the middle of the woods like that? They almost play all of this for laughs in the movie, but what's so funny about leaving Scarlett and poor Melly and the baby and Prissy and Wade all alone in the middle of a war? I would have slapped him into next week.

8.) "They were right! Everybody was right! You aren't a gentleman!"  "My dear girl....how inadequate."  GWTW has remarkable dialogue, and the conversations between Scarlett and Rhett have a wonderful rhythm. Usually.  Even when they're pissed at each other there's a lot of give and take whenever they discuss the world.  But not now. Scarlett's exclamations are on point, but Rhett....inadequate? Inadequate for what, exactly? Note that he doesn't say "inappropriate" or "bitchy" or "worthless," but instead he automatically says that her words are inadequate. 

Inadequate (according to m-w.com):  

Adjective Not adequate; lacking the quality or quantity required; insufficient for a purpose. (of a person) Unable to deal with a situation or with life: "inadequate to the task".

And so again I ask: Inadequate for....what? What was he expecting? What purpose did he have in mind? What does he want from her, and why is what she gave him (i.e. derision) so insufficient?  9.) "Prissy...try not to be a bigger fool than you are." This is my all-time-favorite Rhett Butlerism. It tops everything that came before it in the story and everything that comes after it, perfect and useful in all times and occasions.  Don't be a bigger fool than you are.  I have used that in many different situations and on many different people, including--and especially--myself.  It's of course extra funny because it's his goodbye to the hapless Prissy, but it applies universally, doesn't it? We are all fools, but we don't have to be a bigger fool than we are, do we?  10.) "Now she remembered all the bad names she had wanted to call him but it was too late.  She leaned her head against the bowed neck of the horse and cried."  What an ending. Or is it a beginning? Rhett Butler's departure marks the end of the first part of GWTW, and Scarlett's loneliness at the end of this scene sets up the middle.  The next third of GWTW is a total change from everything that has come before.  Even on this last morning before Sherman conquered Atlanta, Scarlett woke up safe and well-fed in a mansion, for all that she had to help Melly deliver Beau, etc.  But now her entire world has turned upside down and everything has been altered and there's no going back.

Chapter 23 (Part 2): "Like mad ghosts..."

Before I launch into a discussion about the second half of Chapter 23, I've gotta make sure I give another shout out to one of my all-time favorite GWTW/MM literary motifs: Rhett Butler Picking People Up.  

Rhett's a physical guy, all brute strength and broad shoulders and swarthy yumminess, and throughout the story so far MM has reminded us almost constantly of his power by having him pick people up time and time again.  Off the top of my head, he has thus far carried Gerald (after their big poker game and booze fest early in the novel) and Melly (when she fainted in town when she was pregnant), and he has swung Scarlett into his carriage at least once.  Well, by the time he arrives at Aunt Pitty's house in chapter 23 he's back at it again: he carries Melly down the stairs and deposits her into the back of the little stolen buggy he's going to use to take everybody away from the invading army.  Then he picks Scarlett up and puts her onto the front seat of the wagon without even pausing to complain. So, huzzah for MM for having the sophistication to use this time and again without running it into the ground.

Anyway, as soon as they leave Aunt Pitty's house the CSA blows up the ammunition trains on Marietta Street.  And Rhett is pissed because his escape plan involved "circling around the center of town" so they can "avoid the fire and that drunken mob on Decatur Street and get through the southwest part of town without any danger," but he was planning on driving down Marietta Street in order to follow that course and now Marietta is on fire.  So basically he was going to take them on a huge semi-circle around the downtown area, although a close reading indicates that it's unclear whether his route is going to go clockwise or counterclockwise from Pitty's house.  Hmmm.  My inclination is to assume they are going to go clockwise and cut through what is now Sweet Auburn, but I could be wrong.

They head straight into the fire, and this is when GWTW gets a little weird.  I sometimes think of GWTW as the ultimate Southern Gothic novel, even though it lacks the supernatural aspects that are traditionally found in that genre.  Scarlett is certainly haunted by her dream later on in the book, but MM never tries to convince us that there's anything "real" about Scarlett's fears.  Nevertheless, although Scarlett and Rhett always have their feet firmly on the ground, chapter 23 and the next few chapters are very spooky in their own way, aren't they?

Scarlett leans into Rhett ("his profile stood out as clearly as the head on an ancient coin, beautiful, cruel and decadent"), but when Rhett looks back at her his eyes are "gleaming with a light as frightening as the fire." And then Scarlett says "he seemed exhilarated and contemptuous....as if he welcomed the inferno they were approaching."

Say whaaaaa?

Exhilarated and contemptuous?

Really?

Does that mean he's an old-school adrenaline addict? And if so, perhaps that explains precisely why he rushes off to join the Army at the end of this section.  We're supposed to think Rhett is joining the CSA because he's sentimental at heart and wants to help, but could his enlistment actually have more to do with a sudden realization that he "gets off" on danger? It's one thing to be excited and over-stimulated and all of that, but he's enjoying the hell out of this, isn't he?

And then, speaking of the Southern Gothic, our friends in the broken down buggy run into the retreating army just as they're getting ready to cross Marietta Street and MM says that "they went past...so silent that...they might all have been ghosts." Not exactly Boo Radley there, but her description certainly lends a sense of foreboding to the environment, doesn't it?

Alright, so now the action shifts again as Rhett gets all sarcastic about the retreating men of the Glorious Cause retreating, and Scarlett starts hating him for not being in the army and because Charles and all the boys she grew up with and Ashley are probably dead while Rhett is just coasting by, enjoying the good life, and blah blah blah Scarlett greedy-cakes.

But now things turn again, because Rhett gets quiet and moody all of a sudden.  Which is totally out of his character, since we've thus far not seen him as anything other than amused and talkative. Is this the real Rhett Butler? Or is this how Rhett reacts to danger? Or maybe we should just take these events at face value: Rhett is a man of action, and he's spent an entire night piloting a woman and child through the dark streets of Atlanta when there's real action--real war!--happening somewhere nearby.

Once they get out of town, Rhett pulls the carriage to the side and that's when shit gets real.

"Scarlett, are you still determined to do this crazy thing?" He asks her, and the first time I read this book I had absolutely no idea what in the hell he was talking about. What was so crazy about a woman wanting to leave Atlanta when Billy Sherman (yay!) came to town? I would have left too, and so would anybody with common sense and two good legs to stand on.  Scarlett is still a young woman and Atlanta has gotten incredibly dangerous over the past few weeks--going home is a reasonable reaction when the world begins melting around you, I think.

But Rhett thinks she's cray.

I mean, I get what he's after here, but maybe he's judging her a bit too harshly.  And besides, if he thinks going to Tara was truly a bad idea, why in the hell did he help her come so far out of town? I suppose one could argue that Rhett helped her get to the burbs because he figured hiding in the dark woods was a better idea than staying on at Aunt Pitty's house, but I'm not so sure.  Maybe he's simply not thinking very clearly in this section.  He and Scarlett are both tired and over stimulated, and probably hungry and slightly dehydrated, so perhaps they could both use some water and a nap?

Either way and whatever is bothering the two of them, both Scarlett and Rhett start behaving as though they've lost their minds in this section, which is sort of amusing. If you side with Cliff's notes and other authorities and believe that Rhett and Scarlett represent the New South, then their strange behavior and ambiguous motives in this section certainly underline your point.  Neither of them knows where to go, what to do, or what to think, and both of them start making terrible decisions like the nutjobs that some people (not me, of course) think they actually are.

Rhett starts talking about maybes. 

"Maybe you can get past Rough and Ready all right...maybe the Yankees aren't there yet. Maybe you can get through there..." 

Scarlett is freaking out in this section, because she suddenly realizes that Rhett is planning on abandoning her right there, but...what is really happening here? Is this supposed to be a pep talk? What the hell is he doing? If he doesn't think Scarlett's chance of success is more than a maybe, then he should stay. Right? But then again, maybe the presence of a man of military age would have freaked out the Union or Confederate armies and Rhett left in order to do Scarlett a favor, betting that a few women and a girl had a better chance to get through rather than a rich guy and a couple of dames?  

I don't know. 

Either way, he's leaving her.  

WTF? 

"She looked around them wildly, at the livid sky behind them...had she gone crazy? Was she not hearing right?"  

And when Scarlett looks back at Rhett, he is grinning at her.  I normally laugh when he laughs, but I'm having trouble finding the joke even after all these years and even after I've read this book a thousand times.

But okay--he's leaving her. The first time I read this book I hadn't seen the movie, and I assumed he was going to drop some terrible bombshell and announce that he was abandoning them to go back to Belle's brothel or something.  But no.

Noooooo.

"I am going, dear girl, with the army." 

Scarlett initially thinks he's joking. But he ain't joking.  He's jeering at her and at himself, and "his drawling voice jibed in her ears," but he aint joking.  He's talking about patriotism, shields, and brave speeches, but he ain't joking.  Scarlett is "breathless, stunned, nauseated" as she listens to his words, and she keeps asking him if he's joking.

But he ain't joking.

She asks him for his reasons and he gives them, and I still don't know if he's telling the truth--or if there was any truth worth telling at this point during the Civil War.  He gives a number of answers, but I don't know which one is real.  But I will lay them out and discuss them here.

Reason 1.) "Because, perhaps, of the betraying sentimentality that lurks in all of us Southerners." Which....no.  I don't think that's it.  Rhett does get oddly sentimental during the last few chapters of GWTW of course, but Bonnie and all of that are still 10 years in the future. He's joining up with the CSA, but I don't think he's joining it because he's suddenly sentimental about the South.  He's growing and changing just like everybody else in the novel, but he's not changing that quickly.  This would be akin to Ashley Wilkes running away to New York without warning, to get a job at a bank on...Oh My GAWD (spoiler!). Okay, more on that later.

Reason 2.) "Perhaps because I am ashamed." This seems a little more likely at this point, but not entirely plausible. Ashamed of what, Rhett darling? Ashamed of being alive, being smart, and making money hand-over-fist? That doesn't sound like the Rhett Butler I've known and love (and obsessed over) since I was a teenager.

Reason 3.) You know what I think? I think MM put this little turn of events in because it helps sell the ending. We buy Rhett as a doting father later on chiefly because he got so corny and schmaltzy about his fair Southland in this part of the book.  Plus, every other man in the story fought for the Confederacy and it gives Rhett something to fall back on later in the book.  Plus, as a writer MM honestly needed Rhett to disappear from the novel for a while. Rhett is a wonderful character and he's amazing in so many different ways, but for the first two sections of the novel we get him in very small doses. He drops his jokes and his intrigue, he helps Scarlett, he gets jealous over Ashley, and then he blows out of town to go do whatever it is he does when he's not hanging out in Atlanta (for more on that you should check out my fan fiction!).  Plus, even when he's married to Scarlett we rarely actually spend any time with him because he's seldom at home. Rhett joined the army because Rhett needed to be out of the story for a little while. When you think about it he's almost more interesting when he's not in a chapter, because we get to hear all kinds of crazy gossip about him.

Reason 4.) But here's my newest idea: Rhett Butler enlists because he has an excellent moral compass.  According to MM (and many, many other people...ahem...) fighting for the South was the noblest thing a man could have done, right? Now our boy RKB has done some crazy stuff over the past few decades, and he pretends not to have any morals or values beyond having fun and making money, but at heart the man has a lot of....well, he's got a lot of heart. He's a bad boy with a good soul that hasn't been corrupted by all the crazy times he's had in New Orleans and Central America and San Francisco and all the other places he's visited. He's a professional gambler and a drunk and unbelievably tough and sarcastic, but he's almost always on the side of right in GWTW.  His moral compass still points north (shout out to Spielberg's Lincoln!), and in this section I would argue that he's compelled to fight for the Confederacy because it's the right thing to do--even though he either can't articulate it at this point or doesn't actually acknowledge the feeling. Maybe he's denying it, or maybe he doesn't know what's driving him, but I do believe he's taking a moral stand at this point.

So he's off to the war, but not before he steals a kiss from Scarlett.  An all-important kiss that I will cover in part three of my analysis of this chapter.  Check back soon, ya'll!