Chapter 7: "I'm wife...I've finished that..."

"Within two weeks Scarlett had become a wife, and within two months more she was a widow." 

 Mitchell begins Chapter 7 with something of a surprise ending.  Anyone reading GWTW for the first time would have assumed that Scarlett's marriage to Charles Hamilton was an IMPORTANT part of the novel. After reading chapter 6, I believe it would have been safe to believe that the remainder of the story would focus on Scarlett's life as Mrs. Charles Hamilton.  Scarlett does not love Charles and she only married him because she hoped her betrothal would infuriate Ashley, and a lesser novelist would have kept Charles Hamilton and his bumbling ways at the center of the story.  But Mitchell is superb at red herrings and misdirection, so she disrupts our expectations almost immediately by killing off Charles Hamilton and having Scarlett become a widow before the reader even has the opportunity to actually realize that the protagonist has gotten married in the first place. 

As a matter of fact, Scarlett's wedding is told entirely in flashback: "Afterward she remembered, as from a dream, the hundreds of candles flaring on the walls, her mother's face, loving, a little bewildered...and Ashley, standing at the bottom of the steps with Melanie's arm through his." Considering that most women's fiction (to this very day) is focused on weddings as the end point/goal for every story with a female main character, in GWTW there is little romance attached to Scarlett's initial marriage.  Poor Charles Hamilton doesn't even get a hero's death in battle, but instead dies "ignominiously and swiftly of pneumonia, following measles, without ever having gotten any closer to the Yankees than the camp in South Carolina." So rather than being Scarlett's life partner for the rest of the novel Charles Hamilton turns out to be nothing more than a plot device, a plausible way for Scarlett to have a child, move to Atlanta, gain some properties, and become closer to Melaine Wilkes. 

But before Scarlett moves to Atlanta to live with Melanie and Aunt Pittypat, she first visits relatives in Savannah and Charleston during this chapter.  Scarlett hates both of those older towns, and she thinks they are boring and strange and grumbles quite a lot about Charlestonian accents.  She finds them annoying and "affected," and perhaps this influences her later reaction to Rhett and his Charleston drawl, although I can't actually recall any internal dialogue about this off the top of my head.

I personally enjoy Savannah and Charleston and like them much more than I like Atlanta since they have more interesting architecture.  BUT both cities are sort of boring and slow compared to Atlanta, and they definitely lack the vibrant atmosphere of New Orleans and Nashville and Memphis and other southern towns.  This chapter is almost all exposition, but Mitchell saves it from being boring because she adds Scarlett's hilariously selfish and caustic approach to the world.  We know Scarlett was wrong for marrying Charles Hamilton when she didn't love him, and we know she is wrong for coveting Ashley when he is married to another woman, but Scarlett O'Hara is smart and funny and I found myself ultimately rooting for her in this section even though I know that her morals are all screwed up.  Mitchell's genius is at work in the first part of the novel, because she somehow makes the reader despise Melanie and Charles--two characters who are good and kind and polite--while loving Scarlett all the more despite her outrageous behavior.  We, like Rhett and Melanie, love Scarlett despite her shifty motives and terrible actions, and perhaps this adoration is why the ending of the story packs such a wallop for the reader.