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.