Chapter 12: Easy Peasy....

MM pulls back at the beginning of Chapter 12.

She has spent the past several chapters doing a fairly deep dive into the lives of the four people at the heart of GWTW, and she balances out these past details by doing some "boom-shot", expository essaying about the Civil War's impact on Atlanta.  MM wrote GWTW during the 1930's, and while this was a full 70+ years since the time of the war, there were still people living in Atlanta during this era who would have been intimately familiar with the events of the war.  People who were roughly the same age as Wade and Beau, people who had been too young to actually be involved in the war, but who were also impacted by it all.  People who could remember the terror of the times, the sound of cannon, the sight of soldiers, the hunger, and the chaos of the era.  MM had grown up listening to first-hand accounts of the war, and she breaks away from her account of Scarlett's love life in order to tell us something about the events of 1862. 

But she does eventually break away from the war in order to get back to the action.  And the action in most of GWTW does not occur on battlefields far away from Georgia. Rather, Rhett Butler is the source of most of the activity in this novel, and MM brings him into the spotlight in a curious way here. She reveals tantalizing details about his background, but she presents them as though they are inconsequential because Scarlett sees him as inconsequential.  For all that:

"There was something about him that she could not analyze, something different from any man she had ever known." 

Scarlett doesn't have time to analyze her relationship with Rhett.  She's too preoccupied with Ashley and nursing to worry too much about Rhett, the same way she's too focused on Ellen's approval to pay any attention at all to Melanie.  "There was something breathtaking in the grace of his big body which made his very entrance into a room like an abrupt physical impact," which is one of my favorite descriptive lines in all of fiction, but MM only mentions all of this in passing.  And interestingly enough, Rhett's back-story is related brilliantly through the awesomeness of Southern gossip in this chapter, a nice little way to remind us of just how closely tied the people in the South were during this era.  People in Atlanta start writing their friends in Charleston in order to garner more information about Rhett Butler, and their friends relate the details of his life with the quickness.  We read: 

• about His father: "A charming old gentleman with an iron will and a ramrod for a backbone. 
• about His mother: from one of Charleston's best families. 
• That Rhett chased gold in California in 1849, then went to South America and Cuba and got into "scrapes about women, several shootings, gun running to the revolutionists in Central America and, worst of all, professional gambling..."
• At the onset of the war, Rhett bought a small swift boat, and now owned four boats and is cleaning up in the blockade.  
• He sails out of Charleston and Wilmington. 
• He took cotton from the south and ran it into Nassau, England, and Canada on dark nights. 
• He spent money freely. 
• He rode a wild black stallion (cool! I want one!).
• He wore clothes which were always the height of style and tailoring.
• He knows a lot about clothes and is "an excellent substitute for Godey's Lady's Book."

Rhett wouldn't have been received in Atlanta during normal, peaceful times. But there's a war on and he's exciting and he's one of the most successful blockcaders, so the people of Atlanta let him into their parlors and befriend him despite their misgivings.  But, Rhett being Rhett, he starts pissing people off almost right away, and one of my particular favorites is when he dresses down Willie Guinan with one of the truest, most clear-eyed statements I've ever read in American literature:

Willie Guinan (like, who is this guy anyway?): "Do I understand, sir, that you mean the Cause for which our heroes have died is not sacred?"

Rhett Butler:  "If you were run over by a railroad train, your death wouldn't sanctify the railroad company, would it?"

Oooh.  Burn. 

He's equating the CSA with...a railroad company.  They ain't gonna like that, bro.  You'd better be careful Rhett! He goes on to say:

"All wars are sacred..to those who have to fight them. If the people who started wars didn't make them sacred, who would be foolish enough to fight?  But, no matter what rallying cries the orators give to the idiots who fight, no matter what noble purposes they assign to wars, there is never but one reason for a war.  And that is money.  All wars are in reality money squabbles."  

I read those lines for the first time in the mid-1990's, during a time when the realities of war were just something I read about in books.  I've remembered his words over the years, and they've become truer as time has gone by.  Every war is a money squabble at heart. However, as Rhett and the others learn over the course of the novel, these money squabbles can also be rolled up with all sorts of reasons and given meaning in unexpected ways.  Maybe the Civil War really was only a money squabble at heart, but it also wound up freeing my ancestors, destroying the south, killing or maiming an entire generation of men, and reconfiguring the shape of the American democracy.  Greed is often a cause for war, but it's not always the only cause--and it's certainly not always a big part of the final outcome of a clash.