Chapter 11: "Win or lose, we lose just the same."

I am not a Confederate sympathizer. 

As a matter of fact, I'm a black woman living in Chicago in the 21st century, so I am about as far away from being a Confederate sympathizer as anybody in this world.  Abe Lincoln and Cump Sherman are some of my favorite heroes, and I'll take faceless industrialization and urban-living against agrarian aristocracies every day of the week--and twice on Sundays.  It goes without saying, but I'll say it here: despite my love of Gone With the Wind, I have nothing but hatred for the CSA. You can have the Marble Man and old Blue Light and Atlanta and Dixie and I'll take Honest Abe and Phil Sheridan and New York and Marching Through Georgia.

Having said that, though, there is something high spirited about the Confederates, particularly as they are depicted in GWTW.  GWTW is fiction written from the standpoint of someone who was born and raised in the aristocracy of the Old South, so MM and I do not see eye-to-eye about the causes of the war, let alone the leaders, the realities, and the endings of the conflict.  However, she does do an excellent job of presenting the internal thought process of people from many different parts of the Confederacy.  There is a diversity of opinion in the pages of GWTW that you normally do not find in even the most well-written books.  And nobody embodies the contradictions of human behavior more than Ashley Wilkes in Chapter 11.  He has been writing Melanie long letters over the course of the war, and these letters contain his philosophy on war and peace and economics and a whole host of Important Ideas. His notions are of course lost on Scarlett who secretly rips open the letters with glee but "isn't reading Melanie's mail to learn Ashley's puzzling and uninteresting ideas," but they provide an interesting counterpoint and "pause-point" for this part of the novel.

Things have been moving swiftly over the past several chapters.  Scarlett has been living in Atlanta for a while and her situation has changed a great deal, so MM uses this as an opportunity to remind us about Scarlett's love for Ashley and to remind us that Scarlett doesn't understand anything about Ashley and to remind us that Ashley himself still has doubts about the war and about his role in the conflict.  This letter is one of the few pieces in the early part of the novel that introduces the idea that the South could lose the war. And Ashely here also writes quite a bit about how the end of the war will impact the southern way of life. 

I cannot relate to Ashley Wilkes and his life before the war.  But I can relate to the feeling that the bottom has come out of the tub, to the notion that everything you knew during the first part of your life has been totally upended by events that are largely outside of your control.  As a matter of fact, I think everybody can relate to those ideas, and that is why Ashley's words here seem so important--almost as important to the plot of the novel as Scarlett's inability to understand his meaning. 

Chapter 10: "That man is too clever with cards to be a gentleman."

Chapter 10 begins as one very lengthy, very funny reaction scene. Lesser talents (i.e. novelists like me!) would have simply topped off the scene at the bazaar with a little internal dialogue from Scarlett. But MM has given herself a huge canvas with hundreds of characters, and we open Chapter 10 with Scarlett sitting at breakfast the morning after her scandalous dance with Rhett, discussing our visitor from Charleston with Pitty and Melly. And instead of having the morning after discussion merely contain Scarlett's own impressions of Rhett, she lets Pitty and Melly voice their own opinions.  In a different novel Scarlett would have fallen in love with Rhett instantly and she would have begun voicing her support of him at the breakfast table, but this is Gone With the Wind. Scarlett doesn't even really like Rhett Butler at this point and only danced with him because she likes to party, and his strongest defender at the breakfast table is actually the nearly silent Melly--who is, of course, shrewd enough to couch her approval in appropriate terms. 

Scarlett, Melly, and Pitty agree not to let Ellen and Gerald know about Scarlett's scandalous behavior and about the way she danced with such a man as Rhett Butler. But somebody in their circle (one of the old cats) tells Ellen anyway and when she finds out Scarlett's mother is PISSED.  And she writes Scarlett a letter to tell her that "[Rhett] is a thoroughly bad character who would take advantage of your youth and innocence to make you conspicuous and publicly disgrace you and your family." Which is...true.

Ellen doesn't know Rhett, but we don't either at this point in the novel. And what little the reader knows about him is pretty bad.Yes, he seems charming and he's exciting and attractive, but it's difficult to locate his center at this juncture. Ashley is all over the place, too, but he's a County guy and Scarlett has known him her whole life, so she knows that he would never do anything to provoke scandal and shame. But Rhett could honestly be up to any and everything. Really.  He could.

Gerald comes to Atlanta to bring Scarlett home to Tara for good as a reward for her bad behavior.  Scarlett's only real plan for dealing with her father is to weep until he relents, but her childish pouting doesn't really work.  Therefore, it's up to Rhett Butler to bail her out by taking Gerald out on the town and getting him drunk and taking his money in a card game. It's interesting here to note that MM has already established Gerald as an excellent card player (he won Tara in a poker game) and a steady-drinker of spirits, but when the two men return to Aunt Pitty's house in the wee hours of the morning Gerald is passed out drunk and has gambled away a substantial sum of cash. Rhett, on the other hand, is sober and amused (as always) and he deposits Gerald on the couch. 

After that it's all a cakewalk for Scarlett--now that Gerald has brought shame on the family with his own behavior she can leverage his behavior against her own and stay in Atlanta.  Huzzah!