Chapter 21: "Spec dey's at the horsepittle..."

Oh Prissy.  

I never know exactly what to make of Prissy--or, in fact, what to make of any of MM's black characters in GWTW.  Some of MM's characterizations and political views are outside the bounds of my modern sensibilities, particularly in the later chapters that cover the events of Reconstruction and the rise of the ku klux klan.  However, although I'm disappointed in some of her opinions, I don't take much offense anymore because I sincerely believe that MM was an equal opportunity offender.  She grew up--and was dead and buried--long before the hey-days of Civil Rights and politically correctness, and while that's no excuse it's...an explanation for much of her behavior anyway.  She was a whole generation or two before Harper Lee (Mockingbird was written in the early 1960's, but takes place in the 1930's when Lee was a child), and whatever wincing I do at some of her descriptions and word choices is tempered by an appreciation for MM's almost even handed approach toward everyone and everything Scarlett encounters in GWTW.  

Because Scarlett hates everybody. 

And she hates awesomely, doesn't she? 

For all the talk about Scarlett's hysterical behavior and selfishness and single-minded-focus on money and Ashley,  she really is a pretty reliable narrator.  And she's remarkably even-handed and detailed in her analysis of other people, and totally, hilariously, outrageously mean.  She loves her parents, but everybody else (except Ashley in the early part of the novel) is just an annoyance for her. She hates upper class men and women, she hates the Yankees, she hates kids, she hates cows, she hates horses, she hates "crackers", she hates hill-folk (Archie, etc), she hates the folks of Charleston and Savannah, and she hates most of the black people she encounters, too.  She's just a hater. And a Mean Girl, to boot. So when MM's narrator/Scarlett's derision of Prissy in this section of the novel flares up I can't complain.  At least Prissy is given a definite personality in this chapter, which is more than I can say for some of the under developed people who pass through the novel.  Plus, hilariously and amazingly enough, Scarlett's increasing frustration with Prissy stems from Scarlett's own irritation with her own personal shortcomings--she's mad at Prissy because Prissy is just as scared, stupid and inept as Scarlett is when Sherman finally hits town and Melly needs help having her baby.  

I'm not in love with MM's attempt at AA dialect here either, but I can't very well complain much about her depiction of Prissy's english when she's already run Gerald's Irish accent through the ringer so many times.  Scarlett even hates the accents of Charleston and Savannah, and the narrator even gives Rhett a drawl--although his "cultured" accent is never actually given the same treatment as the Irish, the Yankee, and the black accent. I have family living in Augusta and Atlanta, and I've noticed that they speak much quicker than the slow, syrupy accents I usually mentally associate with Southern American English.  

I've even been occasionally accused of having a southern accent myself, mostly by East-Coasters who wouldn't know a Southern Illinois accent if it smacked them upside the head.  All four of my grandparents were born south of Interstate-70, and I've heard echoes of many of Prissy's pronunciations in the speech patterns of my relatives, some of my friends who have Mississippi origins, and in my own mouth sometimes, so I can't really, truly take great offense at MM's depictions throughout GWTW.  

Anyway...

The Wilkes baby is coming and Scarlett sends Prissy off to go find the Meades.  But Dr. Meade is busy at the hospital tending to the soldiers, and Mrs. Meade is off looking for her young son Phil who has been killed in battle.  Eventually Scarlett decides to head into Five Points and search for Dr. Meade herself, since Prissy hasn't successfully located the doctor.  She runs past the Leyden House and heads down Peachtree toward the depot and the hospital. I still haven't satisfactorily figured out precisely where Aunt Pitty's house is supposed to be located, but the Leyden House (124 Peachtree) is about a half-mile from Five Points, and if Aunt Pitty's was on the north side of the old town, then I figure the distance between Melly and Dr. Meade to be little further than a half-mile.  Not very far. 

But incredibly far if you're a terrified young girl, racing around the dusty town in broken down slippers and stays and that big floppy hat Scarlett rocks in the film.  

Halfway to the hospital Scarlett finds out from a passing Confederate officer that the battle of Jonesboro has been lost, the blues are victorious, and the grays are in full retreat.  And then we get this marvelous bit of internal dialogue from our girl: 

"The Yankees were coming.  The army was leaving.  The Yankees are coming." 

She's grounding and pounding her point like an MMA fighter here, isn't she?  She's being repetitive, but not unduly so, particularly since the reader is probably just as frantic as our protagonist by now.  Particularly when she turns a corner and runs into a whole bunch of looters/refugees carrying sacks of corn and potatoes and barrels of flour and greasy sides of bacon and bags of peas and everything else they can carry away from the now wide-open commissary warehouses down by the railroad tracks.  

It looks, smells, and sounds like the end of the world.  

There is no order now, now rhyme or reason or logic to anything that's going to happen to Scarlett and the rest of the characters we know so well.  Atlanta is now an open city, and chaos has broken out, although it takes Scarlett quite some time to realize what is happening and prioritize her survival.  If she'd been thinking clearly and aware of everything that is actually happening, Scarlett probably would have gone to the commissary and grabbed some of the foodstuffs for her family, but she has no idea how totally insane things are going to get in a short while.  She's never been hungry before despite the rationing and shortages of the last few years, so she has absolutely no reason to expect that she'll be practically starving by the end of that week.  

There's a "packed, hysterical mob surging in the open space of Five Points," and Scarlett is racing around looking for the doctors.  By my estimate I've visited Atlanta at least 40 times in my life, but the streets are confusing and have weird names and I still don't really know my Buckheads from my Mechanicsvilles.  But I do know the Central Business district fairly well, including the area around Five Points, mostly because I visited the city quite a lot during the post-Olympic period of the late 1990's.  Peachtree Street is still the central artery of the city of course, but in my day we used to do a lot of shopping at the Atlanta Underground and all the stores they used to have down on Decatur street.  Either way, I had my fun in those days, but even now when the whole area is experiencing a down swing I still stop by Five Points and take a picture in front of the statue every time I pass through the city.  

By the time Scarlett finds Dr. Meade the old gentleman is hysterical and "his face was the face of a man drunk with fatigue and impotent rage and burning pity." It soon becomes painfully clear that Dr. Meade isn't going to help Scarlett.  

As a matter of fact, there's nobody around to help Scarlett deliver Melly's baby since Prissy is helpless and kind of dumb (or smartly avoiding responsibility for the entire situation). Child birth was insanely dangerous during the 19th century, and Melly is going to have a terrible time delivering Beau, but with the town being overrun by Yankees and men dying left and right labor is of low priority.  

Scarlett heads home, and the earlier frantic crowd that she saw on the way into Five Points has now turned into something else.  "There were women in the mob near Decatur Street, garishly dressed women whose bright finery and painted faces gave a discordant note of holiday." They are all drunk on cheap corn whiskey (the best kind!), and Scarlett even spots Belle Watling clinging "for support to a one-armed soldier who reeled and staggered." So now all the crazed civilians Scarlett saw a few moments ago have been replaced by prostitutes and one-armed soldiers and public inebriation and a bunch of other stuff Scarlett shouldn't even know about.  

Scarlett is a southern belle and she's not supposed to interact with bad women and slaves and drunk strangers, but she's sharing the sidewalk with them now.  The home-world that MM has constructed in the first third of the novel--the society of cotton fields and knights and ladies and rules and expectations and peace--has crumbled. And it has, for now anyway, been replaced by a crazy place where up is down, black-and-white boundaries have given way to blue-and-gray terrors, and Scarlett O'Hara is going to have to fend for herself.  

Chapter 20: Oh Gawd

According to my Kindle, chapter 20 of GWTW is the official 1/3 mark of the novel.  GWTW is so long and is so sweeping, I think it's easy to think of the novel as a meandering, almost random collection of events that almost seem to drag on the plot in places.  The story takes 12 years to unwind (1861 to 1873), but the majority of the INSANELY DRAMATIC events of the novel occur during the last 300 pages of the novel (i.e. the final 3rd). And the first time you read the book or watch the movie it's pretty easy to forget almost everything that happens before (Spoiler??) Scarlett and Rhett get married.  One of the main complaints critics have about GWTW is that they don't believe that it is as tightly/expertly plotted as a modern novel should be.  

But looking at the crafting of MM's story from the standpoint of proportion, I think she does a wonderful job of dividing up the events of Scarlett's life into different sections that drive the plot.  I'll come back to this idea in the future, but I thought this was a good point to drive home just how carefully MM must have planned out GWTW while she was writing, writing, and re-writing the events of the story.  I've never seen a first draft or an original outline of GWTW, but I'll bet she had to move entire plots and stories and strike out characters and events before GWTW became the sizzling story we know and love today. 

Anyway, Chapter 20 begins with almost the same sort of exposition and explanations of Civil War battles that has dotted the entire story ever since Sherman has officially "invaded" Georgia.  Initially, MM gives absolutely no indication that this chapter is going to be any different from those we've just read--yes the battles are closer, and yes we now know the Confederates are losing men at an alarming pace, but they've been doing that for quite a while, haven't they? However, while MM leads off by describing the events of the war and other "manly" issues, she brings things into a tight focus almost immediately in this chapter by emphasizing--first of all--that the latest battle is being fought at Jonesboro, right around the corner from Tara.  Jonesboro is a familiar location for us now--we know it's the location of the nearest train station to Scarlett's home neighborhood, we know it's where the court and tax collectors are, etc.  And now they're fighting right there up the street from her house! 

So now there's an amazingly tense extra layer to the novel that we didn't experience before, because the reader is almost as concerned about the folks at Tara as Scarlett.  And then MM also drops the added stress of a courier materializing out of nowhere to give Scarlett a note informing her that her mother and and everybody else at Tara is sick with typhoid fever and that Gerald doesn't want her to try to come home because he believes she will get sick, too! 

I don't know much about typhoid fever now, and I knew even less about it the first time I read GWTW.  I think I knew that Anne Frank (and countless others, of course) died from it by the time I picked up this novel, but other than that...I certainly didn't really connect that there had been an outbreak of the disease in America during the final stages of the Civil War.  Apparently typhoid fever is different from typhus, although I guess the main difference between the two is in the cause and the severity of the symptoms I suppose.  I don't know, really.  

But I knew it was bad.  Marvelously, deliciously bad for the purposes of drama since it's an unknown disease that comes and goes for what seems to be no reason, and which can either kill people outright or leave them alive (albeit in a weakened state).  A lesser novelist might have gotten silly and gone full bore and given Ellen O'Hara something like cancer or whatever, but typhoid was excellent because it could also almost kill off Suellen and Carreen, too--and then leave them alive but totally annoying.  

Alright, so everybody at Tara is sick, they're fighting at Jonesboro, Atlanta is hot and horrible and filled with wounded people and all of Scarlett's friends are gone and...what was the other thing we were supposed to be worried about? 

Oh yeah: 

Melanie is about to have her baby.  

Gawd almighty.  

Interestingly enough, when Scarlett wakes up on September 1st there's a lull in all the chaos and confusion of the battles.  There's nothing but blue sky, and red dust, and "the road outside lay silent." The frenzied excitement of the past few chapters has gone.  All the explosions are over.  She's clearly in the calm of the storm, but the first time I read this I assumed that Scarlett had gotten a lucky break somehow. I started running through scenarios in my head: maybe her father would come save her? Or perhaps the war had passed Atlanta by and maybe Dr. Meade would come help Melanie through the delivery? Or....something? Maybe Prissy would turn out to be competent and efficient and Scarlett would just be a bystander to the birth?  

But then the cannons begin again, coming from the south (Jonesboro and Tara) and Scarlett gets heartsick.  As does the reader.  Because it is now clear that Scarlett isn't going to be able to get home without going straight through the armies, and that seems like an impossible task at this point considering she's going to be attempting to flee with Prissy, pregnant Melly, and Wade Hampton who can't be older than three at this point.  

So what is she going to do? 

What. Is. She. Going. To. Do?

Scarlett breaks into Melly's bedroom, essentially terrified, and then she runs into an even more terrifying sight: Melly is all sunken and waxy and deathly ill, and she's been having labor pains since dawn.  I know almost as little about childbirth as I know about typhoid, but even as a teenager I realized this wasn't going to be an easy birth.  

Chapter 19: "The seige went on..."

The first portion of Chapter 19 of GWTW consists almost entirely of exposition.  Writers are taught to abhor exposition--we're supposed to "show" instead of "telling"--but Margaret Mitchell does a superb job of relating events exclusively through text over the course of the novel.  She usually uses exposition to describe broad shifts in the Confederacy's fortunes, particularly when these changes happen outside of Scarlett's experience and far away from Atlanta. The Battle of Atlanta/Siege is still happening in Chapter 19 of course, but Scarlett's awareness of the outside world does not really increase simply because the war has finally come to Georgia. Scarlett is a young widow living in the only big southern city that hadn't been occupied by the Yankees by the summer of 1864, and she is close enough to the battle to hear cannons and observe the wounded first-hand, but she is not a soldier and she's not particularly interested in the war.  Scarlett is not concerned with men and munition and the state of the Confederacy, but "she was so frightened by the bursting shells she could only cower helplessly," and I believe that MM's pages describing Scarlett's terror emphasize the impact of war on civilian populations much more than a list of battle orders or weapons used or any of those other things people usually talk about when they talk about the Civil War.

Uncle Henry Hamilton comes back from the war about halfway through the chapter, and he has changed a lot since he marched away with the Home Guard in the last chapter.  He's one of Joe Brown's Pets I suppose, but Uncle Henry seems to be enjoying the war and I think MM uses him to provide us with an example of what happens to soldiers once they leave the safety of their homes/civilization.  Uncle Henry is spirited and he's skinny now, but while "he was barefoot, crawling with lice, and...hungry," his "irascible spirit was unimpaired." Interestingly enough, Uncle Henry tells the girls that he only came by to make sure that Scarlett is still with the (by now very, very) pregnant Melly, which makes me wonder precisely why Uncle Henry thinks Scarlett would have abandoned Melly at all.  Of course Scarlett has considered leaving Melly behind in Atlanta while she flees to the relative safety of Tara, but she still hasn't gone through with those plans.  And she certainly hasn't told anyone about her desire to leave Atlanta on the next train south.  So why doesn't Uncle Henry trust Scarlett here?

Uncle Henry also moves the plot along by telling Scarlett that John Wilkes is dead (a shell landed on top of him) and that Mrs. Tarleton's horse was killed in the same incident. So MM uses old Uncle Henry's seemingly random re-appearance to show us exactly how the Civil War is killing or maiming or changing everyone we've met throughout the course of the novel. It was one thing when Charles Hamilton died of disease because Charles was an almost comically weak character, but Mr. Wilkes was a solid, old school guy and it's rather shocking that even he can be destroyed by the events of the war.  I felt the same way the first time I read the novel when I found out that the Tarleton boys had been killed, since I sort of assumed that Brent or Stuart would eventually come back and that Scarlett would eventually marry one or the other of them.  They seemed so vibrant and fun that it was shocking to me that MM would kill them off when they clearly had a lot of life left to live, and their deaths also made it quite possible that Ashley himself would die before the end of the novel. 

We are now about 1/3 of the way through GWTW and the first time I read it I was flummoxed by how much of the novel I still had left to read. I'd never seen the movie the first time I read GWTW, but I'd read hundreds of Civil War textbooks and novels before I ever considered picking up MM's masterpiece, and most of them are winding down by the time they get to the summer of 1864.  The Civil War itself was ending by this time, and most biographies of Lincoln or Seward (or even Lee or Grant) are nearly finished by the the time they begin discussing Sherman's March to the Sea.  When I reached this point in the novel I finally started to understand that GWTW was as much about reconstruction as it was about the Civil War.  Which meant that everything I'd ever heard about the book--that it was chiefly about slavery, that it romanticized the ante-bellum south, etc--was inaccurate and untrue.  Which begged the question: if GWTW wasn't actually about the adventures of a young, beautiful woman during the Civil War then what was it really about?

I didn't get an answer to that question until I finished the book the first time, of course.  But I do believe that MM puts her answer/resolution to my question right there in plain sight in the final third of Chapter 19, when Rhett pays Scarlett a visit on a dark, quiet night in the middle of the siege. 

Scarlett hasn't seen Rhett since they argued outside of the hospital a few chapters ago (a scene that was also done very well in the movie as I mentioned in a previous post) and she's still a bit pissed at him.  But she's also lonely since most of her friends have left town because of the siege and she's actually kind of glad to see Rhett for the first time since the start of the story. Until now he's been little more than an irritating, Big Brotherly presence who comes and goes for what seems like no reason, but now we begin to see that Scarlett enjoys talking to him almost as much as we enjoy reading about their chats. 

But of course, their polite engagement doesn't last very long.  Rhett makes fun of Scarlett because he thinks it's amusing that she (of all people!) is stuck in Atlanta, looking out for Ashley's pregnant wife.  Interestingly enough the two of them begin discussing rape (Scarlett is afraid that the invading Yankees will rape her--and how is that for foreshadowing? MM is really something, isn't she?), but Rhett tells her frankly that the Yankees aren't really into that kind of thing.  But then the conversation turns into something much less amusing, even though MM's plays it for laughs at this point in the novel. 

In short, Rhett proposes that Scarlett become his....I don't want to say mistress since that isn't quite what he's describing. Or maybe it is. I don't know much about mistresses and even less about sexual relationships between unmarried persons during the Victorian era.  But I always think of mistresses as kept women/concubines, the sort of woman who lived in a well-appointed house and had kids out of wedlock with a rich man who already had a wife.  Sort of like Thomas Jefferson (*cough cough*) or Henry VIII and one of the women who bore him a son.  But the men in those relationships had to keep a mistress because they had an (essentially) arranged marriage with a woman from their "class", and back then certain kinds of men (Tudors, Stuarts and Wilkes, apparently) couldn't just marry the women they actually wanted to marry and instead had to fall into matrimony with women like Melly or Catherine of Aragon. 

But Rhett Butler isn't married.

And indeed, he goes out of his way to say in this section that he isn't "a marrying man."

Scarlett is rightfully confused therefore by his proposal.  In her mind--in all of our minds--a mistress is a woman who everyone knows to be in love (or at least in *like*) with an already married man, but Rhett isn't married. So....what does he want, exactly?  He wants to sleep with Scarlett of course, but...why doesn't he just flat out ask her to marry him? 

Because he knows she'll say no? Because he knows she's still in love with Ashley Wilkes?  A lot of sources and literary criticism indicate that Rhett is being disingenuous here and they flat out say that he actually does want to marry Scarlett because he loves her, but I'm not so certain that he actually wants to be married at this point in the novel. I do think that Rhett's outlook on this subject changes totally by the end of the story, of course, but I don't think that's the source of the tension we find here at the end of Chapter 19.  He actually does want to have sex with Scarlett, but he has given no indication that he actually wants to be legally and publicly tied to her for the rest of his life at this point.

Anyway, I think that if you boil GWTW down to one particular idea, that idea would have to be the tragedy of misunderstanding and miscommunication.  Because Rhett probably honestly (and outrageously!) believed Scarlett would consider his proposal with a level head, but after Scarlett hears what he's offering her response is out-and-out rage. 

As a matter of fact:

"...She did not feel insulted.  She only felt a furious surge of indignation that he should think her such a fool." 

And there you have it, gentle reader.  Rhett misunderstands Scarlett's desires (he thinks she's too mature and level-headed to be insulted by the notion of becoming his mistress) and Scarlett is moved to anger by his words.  But she's not angry because he said those words to her. Instead, she's angry because she believes his proposal means that he thinks she's a fool--and Scarlett O'Hara refuses to be anybody's fool.  

Which is why she's one of my favorite characters in all of literature.  Other women I love would have dropped dead from shock after Rhett's proposal, but Scarlett is just pissed that Rhett thought she was dumb enough to go for such an offer.  And I think that's the underlying theme behind GWTW. Scarlett O'Hara is nobody's fool, and she refuses to be played or bested by anybody including Ashley, Melly, Rhett, Wade, Mammy, Archie, India, Honey, Frank Kennedy, Suellen and anybody else who tries to get the upper hand.

"Paperback writer...." (Buy my book!)

I'll be posting more GWTW recaps/commentary later this week (and Chapter 2 of The Autobiography of Rhett Butler, CSA just went live), but in the meantime I thought I'd log on to shamelessly plug my book:

It's summer! If you enjoy romantic historical fiction and you're in the market for a great vacation read, I seriously think you should consider buying a copy of Darkest Hour. It's only $0.99 cents on Amazon.com!

Darkest Hour is a tale of misunderstanding and mismatched lovers, a 100,000 word historical romance set in glossy and comfortable modern London, but peppered with vivid flash backs of love and loss during the anxious days of the Battle of Britain. The heroine is Victoria Woods King, a sassy octogenarian corporate secretary who proudly served in the Women's Auxiliary Air Force and has spent the past sixty-five years gaily recounting her wartime exploits to all interested parties.

She is married to Laird, a sickly, stubborn, highly decorated former Royal Air Force pilot who still harbors nightmares about the war and who has consequently never spoken publicly or privately about his experiences to anyone, choosing instead to spend the past six decades enjoying a life of well-earned peace and anonymity. Their marriage has endured two monarchs, thirteen Prime Ministers, and the rise and fall of the Spice Girls, but their heretofore unbreakable bond is tested when Victoria signs them both up to participate in an upcoming museum piece on World War II. Now the two of them are forced to remember, forced to recount, and forced to reevaluate the nascent days of their love affair, and their story is a struggle between memory, hope, self-recrimination, and forgiveness that leads them both to unexpected places.

I wrote Darkest Hour a few years ago, and I lived in London for 6 weeks one winter to research every detail I put into my story.  As a matter of fact, I traveled all the way up to the Royal Air Force Museum in Travelcard Zone 4 on the rainiest, dreariest day of the year just to climb into the cockpit of a few old planes. The people at the museum thought I was nuts. And looking back, I sort of agree with them.

But I still think you should buy my book anyway.

--SS

Chapter 18: The Sounds of Battle

There was a Civil War reenactment at the DuSable Museum this weekend.  I'd seen a few signs and posters about the event around the South Side over the past few weeks, but I didn't make plans to attend even though I'm usually a sucker for history stuff.  In truth, I didn't think it would be a good use of my time, since it seemed like it would be more hot and crowded and annoying than educational, so I decided to ignore the whole thing. 

And I did ignore it.

Until the moment when I heard the boom from a cannon sometime in the middle of Sunday afternoon.  I've never served in the military and (thankfully) never witnessed a battle, so I have no firsthand experience with artillery shells, but the concussion was unmistakable. And quite unnerving, even though I knew the sounds were only the sounds of empty shells put on during a history festival.  It wasn't close enough or powerful enough to rattle our windows, but it was definitely loud enough to shake me out of my well-earned nap.  And it immediately called to mind the siege of Atlanta portions of GWTW of course (all roads in my mind lead back to GWTW eventually), which--coincidentally--is precisely where I left off in my GWTW recaps. 

By the time Chapter 18 opens, the war has come to the outskirts of the city and "Atlanta could hear the sound of battle." Sherman has now pushed the Confederate army all the way back to Kennesaw Mountain, GA, a mere 25 miles from downtown Atlanta according to our friends at Google maps.  General Johnston has called for replacements for 10,000 men, and the militia (aka Joe Brown's Pets) are filling the ranks.  This particular unit is filled with very old men and very young boys (everyone under 16 and over 60 who wasn't fit for military service, I suppose), and MM masterfully uses their parade through town as an opportunity to give us a glimpse of some of Scarlett's old friends and neighbors who are now marching off to be used as cannon fodder. 

Her friends from Atlanta are represented by Grandpa Merriwether and Uncle Henry Hamilton who are both far too old to go anywhere near a battlefield. And then we get a glimpse of Phil Meade and other school boys who are too young to go.  Ashley's body servant Mose also comes by on a horse, headed off to war again with Old John Wilkes (Ashley's father) now that Ashley is being held prisoner in Rock! Island! Old John Wilkes brings up the rear, riding Mrs. Tarleton's prized horse Nellie, and I think it's wonderful that MM used such an ingenious placement to 1.) remind us of Mr. Wilkes (and therefore of Ashley), 2.) to remind us of Mrs. Tarleton and her boys, and 3.) to give us a concrete example of just how desperate the Confederacy really has become by this point in the war.  Mrs. Tarleton wouldn't have let Nellie go unless it was a life-or-death situation, after all. 

We also learn that Gerald would have joined Joe Brown's Pet's and gone off to war if he hadn't fallen off his horse while trying to jump a fence. How's that for foreshadowing???

The Confederates do hold the line up in the mountains for nearly a month according to MM, but then Sherman begins to move again and he swings to the other side of town and captures Decatur--and with it the railroad that connects Atlanta with Augusta.  General Hood (Johnston has been replaced) tries to fight back on July 20 during the Battle of Peachtree Creek, but the Confederates lose. 

And the men come straggling back into Atlanta, streaming right past Aunt Pitty's house with a variety of injuries.  Some of them are just thirsty, but others have bullet wounds and most are bleeding heavily.  In the end, Sherman takes over or cuts all the railroad lines out of town except the line heading south past Jonesboro and Tara, and Scarlett is terrified at the prospect of fighting going on around her hometown. 

Everybody starts to leave Atlanta next, and Aunt Pittypat goes to Macon.  Scarlett wants to send Melly to Macon with Aunt Pittypat so she will be free to run away to Tara, but Melly is too pregnant to travel. So Scarlett has to stay with Melly alone in Atlanta while the battle comes ever closer to their doorstep...

MM pulls off a nice little trick here, doesn't she? I can see that having Scarlett stay in Atlanta to help Melly have her baby was probably a plot point while she was developing this novel, but she doesn't rush into this situation.  Yes, Scarlett has already promised Ashley that she would stay with Melly while the latter has her baby, but MM also takes away all of Scarlett's other options slowly but surely. She can't escape anywhere besides south anyway since the railroads are already closed in all the other directions. Except, she can't go south either now, since that railroad is already clogged with all sorts of traffic and there's more than a good chance that the Yankees will capture a fleeing railroad car and put them in prison or whatever.  Atlanta is under siege and there are dead men and cannon balls everywhere, and all the normal civilians are getting the heck out of town, and we know that Scarlett and Melly need to leave ASAP. 

But they can't.

And it is this tension, the tension between staying and leaving, that drives this part of the novel. 

Part 3/Chapter 17: The End of the Beginning of the Middle of the Start...

I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that Gone With the Wind is a long, long, long book.  My first experience with the novel was a three-day-marathon during the hot summer of 1995, when the temperature in Chicago was over 100 degrees for what felt like an entire month and (what felt like) half the elderly population of the city died of heat stroke.  Our window AC was no match for the humidity and I couldn't sleep anyway, so I was either going to spend my nights watching old Cary Grant movies on AMC or reading GWTW. 

But every time I've read GWTW since then it has been something of a slog. I love the book a little more each time I read it, but nowadays I'm pretty busy and I have to limit my recreational reading to train platforms, buses, airplanes, and occasional lunch sessions.  I started re-reading GWTW in January of this year, but I didn't finish until nearly April because it is a very, very long book.

But that's part of the reason why we love it so, I think.  GWTW takes place over 12 long, hard years, and the reader ages along with Scarlett--even if you finish it during a single weekend like I did the first time I picked up the book.  The movie is pretty good--and pretty long--but the cinematic version lacks the power and bite of the novel because it lacks the feeling of time passing.  Hell, in the movie it seems as though Scarlett is only married to Frank Kennedy for about 10 minutes...

Anyway, Chapter 17 beings with more narration.  It is May of 1864 and Sherman is now in Dalton, GA.  MM tells us that the people of Atlanta had begun to think of the TN/GA border as being "a long way off," and I suppose it did seem quite a distance away for the people of Civil War-era Atlanta. 

However, I made the drive from Chicago to Atlanta last year. I've drive through Georgia a million times, but I had never been to Chickamauga or Look Out Mountain before, so my sister and I got up early on our way back so we'd have a chance to check out the Northwest corner of Georgia.  It might have seemed like the other side of the moon to the people of Atlanta, but last year we got up at dawn and made it from Augusta, GA to Chattanooga, TN before lunchtime. 

So...yeah. It's not far at all.  And once you get out of the mountains up near the border, there's nothing but flat land between Atlanta and TN.  Well...flatland and Waffle House.  Which is amazing.

Anyway,  in Chapter 17 Aunt Pittypat is having a party and Cary Ashburn and the Meades come over for dinner. Rhett is there too, stirring up trouble as usual.  The Meades and Captain Ashburn are trying to pretend the war isn't going badly for the Confederacy.  Rhett is having none of it (of course), so he starts poking holes in their arguments and pointing out that the Confederacy is running out of men and weapons.  Scarlett goes to the piano and starts playing a few tunes in order to soothe everybody's anger and make them forget about the war for a while, but the only things she can think of are sad war songs.  Rhett comes over and suggests that she play "My Old Kentucky Home" and the two of them sing it together which is an incredible turn of events. Like, since when can Scarlett sing? And who would have guessed that the two of them could sing in harmony together at random like this? I suppose MM is using this to show that Scarlett and Rhett really are in sync with each other and attuned to each other somewhere deep down.  

Anyhoo, here's a great link to Paul Robeson's version of My Old Kentucky Home. And now here's a link to good old Butterfly McQueen as Prissy doing My Old Kentucky Home in GWTW. 

Now that MM has set up the pins--in this case Dr. Meade's assertions that the South with prevail and that the Yankees will never get into Atlanta--she knocks them down with exposition about the battles that occurred in Georgia during the late spring of 1864.  Sherman is flanking Johnston at battle-after-battle, and Johnston is forced to withdraw "his thinning line a few miles farther."

And now the wounded start to flood into Atlanta.  Scarlett and Melly and their female neighbors have been nurses for a while, but this is the first time they have to deal with fresh wounds, the first time they have to work on men who are severely wounded and unlikely to recover. Scarlett almost immediately gets "sick of the hospital, the foul smells, the lice, the aching unwashed bodies." She wants to go home to Tara--the second time she has threatened to go home to Tara in the recent chapters--but she's thwarted by the old ladies who run the hospital: they need every pair of hands available for work right there in Atlanta.

So Scarlett must stay in the ATL.

However, she still plays hooky and escapes  up Peachtree Street, when Rhett Butler drives by in his carriage.  She berates him into taking her for a ride, and he gets out and lifts her into the buggy (Drink! Rhett's carrying somebody in his arms again!).  And Scarlett notices how:

"The muscles of his big body rippled against his well-tailored clothes, as he got in beside her, and, as always, the sense of his great physical power struck her like a blow."

Mmmmmmm hmmmmm. 

Anyway, I'm a big fan of Ken Burns' Civil War series, and I particularly love the way he handles Sherman's 1864 Georgia campaign.  But for my money, there's no more astute analysis of the situation than Rhett's in this chapter. Of General Johnston, Rhett informs Scarlett that:

"He'll have to keep falling back if he wants to protect the railroad; and mark my words, when they push him out of the mountains and onto the flatter land around here, he's going to be butchered." 

Military strategy always seems complex in movies and in reenactments, but once you know something about battles and theory it's easy to see that Rhett is right.  Wars might be fought over ideas and rights and taxes and representation and land grabs and slavery, but battles are usually much simpler. Normandy was about controlling the English Channel.    Iwo Jima was about controlling an air strip.  Vicksburg was about the Mississippi shipping lanes, and the Battle of Atlanta was all about the railroad.  As a matter of fact, most of Sherman's March To The Sea was centered around destroying the South's railroads and tying them up. And anybody who says anything differently is pulling your leg. Don't listen to them! Listen to Rhett Butler!

Chapter 16: January/February of 1864

(Shameless plug: I've written the first chapter of some GWTW fanfiction over on fanfiction.net.  It's called The Autobiography of Rhett Butler, CSA and you can find it at http://www.fanfiction.net/~historicalromancegal33. Click on over and check it out!)


Chapter 16 of GWTW begins with a lengthy exposition of how the Civil War progressed during January and February of 1864.  However, unlike her earlier discourses on the events of the war which had an almost impersonal, textbook quality to them, MM connects most of the events that happen on the battlefield in early 1864 with the characters we have gotten to know so well over the past 15 chapters.  Significantly, although the Civil War has now gone on for almost three years, January and February of 1864 was the very first time that The War actually came to Georgia.  Thus far the Civil War has only been fought in faraway, exotic places that Scarlett doesn't know particularly well, dots on the map like Vicksburg, Gettysburg, and Bull Run.  She has lost many friends over the course of the war (I'm always particularly sad to see the Tarleton boys go!), but now the fighting has finally reached Northwest Georgia and things are starting to get real. 

So now, instead of simply relating the results of battle after battle, MM begins in chapter 16 to tell us about how the realities of war have changed the people of Georgia.  For instance, she informs us that:

• Rhett Butler "had sold his boats when blockading grew too hazardous, and...was now openly engaged in food speculation." (A smart man, Rhett!)
• And Gerald O'Hara who "had three years' crops of cotton stored under the shed near the gin house at Tara, but little good it did him.  In Liverpool it would bring one hundred and fifty thousand dollars, but there was no hope of getting it to Liverpool.  Gerald had changed from a wealthy man to a man who was wondering how he would feed his family and his negroes through the winter."

Fortunes are starting to shift, and the big changes in the fortunes of the Confederacy are starting to impact everybody Scarlett knows.  Atlanta itself is thriving, but things are falling apart in the rest of the south. 

On the other hand, by the time we check in with Scarlett about halfway through Chapter 16, we find out that she feels as though her life is finally coming together. The entire world is on the verge of falling apart, but Scarlett doesn't care because she's still thinking about the kiss she shared with Ashley. As a matter of fact, she's so convinced that Ashley loves her and not Melanie that she spends most of her time trying to figure out exactly when and how she and Ashley are going to run away together after the war is over. 

Unfortunately for Scarlett, real life intrudes cruelly on her dreams of future happiness. Because Melanie is pregnant! Scarlett is absolutely gobsmacked by this news, because she has apparently actually convinced herself that Melanie and Ashley aren't actually in love and don't have sex. Scarlett's naive astonishment is laughable to me now, but I remember being shocked by this turn of events the first time I read GWTW.  And because MM is awesomely skilled, she also has Melanie drop a nice little tidbit of info, telling Scarlett that the baby will be due in either August or September of 1864, a time-span that undoubtedly sent shivers down the spines of every Georgia woman who read this novel in the 1930's. Nowadays this would roughly be the equivalent of a novelist having a pregnant character living in New York in the year 2001 announce that she's due to deliver in the second week of September. 

Yikes!

Scarlett hilariously--and childishly--vows to go home to Tara after learning this news, but the very next day they get word that Ashley is missing in action.  And Scarlett starts to feel guilty about her lust for Ashley, even to the point where she believes that God is punishing her for trying to steal another woman's husband.  The first reports are "Missing--believed killed," but this is eventually changed to "Missing--believed captured," which gives the household hope, as well it should.

Scarlett spends most of her time worrying about Ashley, but Melanie actually goes down to the telegraph notes to get news about Ashley, despite her pregnancy and the fact that it isn't decent for pregnant women to be seen in public.  She's frail and she faints in the telegraph office and Rhett Butler helps her home and carries her up the stairs to her bedroom and makes a deal with her: if Melanie agrees to take better care of herself, he'll use his connections to get information about Ashley's whereabouts. Melanie agrees and they eventually find out that Ashley has been captured and is now a prisoner in Rock Island.  It's good that he's still alive, but Rock Island is far away in Illinois (all the way up there?!), there's a lot of snow in Illinois, and President Lincoln and the rest of the Yankee government have no interest in exchanging prisoners.  So Ashley is in Rock Island and he's going to stay in Rock Island for the rest of the war, which is a nice little trick by  MM. Ashley is reasonably safe because he is no longer on the front-line, but Scarlett and Melanie are rightfully nervous anyway because being a POW during the Civil War was certainly no guarantee of survival. 

Anyway, this chapter features one of my favorite recurring motif's in the novel (and in the movie!): Rhett Butler carrying people.

MM constantly describes Rhett as a big, brawny guy, but she shows this fact  even without telling because one of Rhett's major functions in the story is picking various people up bodily and carrying them off to a different place.  It's early in the novel, so thus far he has only actually carried Gerald (when he was drunk that night) and Melanie (in this chapter, interestingly enough, he carries her up the stairs at Aunt Pitty's house), but (SPOILER) later in the story he carries Ashley, Bonnie, and Scarlett.  It's a funny little character trait and a nice way of presenting his strength without forcing it down our throats.  I read once that they did multiple takes of the scene in the movie where Rhett carries Scarlett up the stairs after Ashley's party. The first take was perfect, but apparently the director thought it would be funny to make Clark Gable carry Vivien Leigh up that huge staircase a bunch of times.  Ha ha!

Chapter 15: "Ashley's return"

MM begins chapter 15 with the abrupt statement that Ashley is coming home for Christmas furlough.  And we are treated to a description of how Ashley has changed since Scarlett has seen him last.

"He was bronzed and lean now, where he had once been fair and slender, and the long golden mustache drooping about his mouth, cavalry style, was the last touch needed to make him the perfect picture of a soldier." 

Oooooh la-la!

 I love that sentence for a variety of reasons, not the least of which is that it's a run-on. I remember my crushes from my teenage years, and I probably would have described them breathlessly, in a similar style to this, if anybody had given a damn about my love life at the time. For me, this sentence highlights Scarlett's immaturity, particularly since Scarlett seems almost oblivious to the internal changes that have taken place inside of Ashley.  Scarlett--via MM's narration--tells us that Ashley now has a "fagged, haunted look," and that he is "as alert as a prowling cat, with the tense alertness of one whose nerves are perpetually drawn as tight as the strings of a violin."  However, Scarlett being Scarlett, she does not analyze why Ashley has changed so much since she's seen him last.  She has no real interest in his alertness or the horrors of war or anything else that Ashley has experienced since he left Georgia.  The entire world is changing around her, but Scarlett is so focused on Ashley and his tanned skin and delicious mustache, she doesn't have time to worry about the state of the Confederate Army or what 1864 will bring. 


No, by chapter 15 Scarlett's concerns are much more personal and immediate, and that is why she is such a remarkable character.  Although Ashely and Melanie have been married for more than 2 years by the end of 1863, this is the first time Scarlett has actually been forced to see the two of them as man and wife. As the movie demonstrates (and this is another great scene in the motion picture), once all the talking and welcoming-home comes to an end, Ashley and Melanie go upstairs and shut the door and...do whatever it is that married people do when they're alone together and haven't seen each other for a long, long time.  Scarlett doesn't like the visual of the two of them sneaking off alone together, and, truth be told, I don't think the reader is supposed to like it either.  Credit MM's awesome talent for misdirection for convincing us throughout the first 14 chapters of the novel that Ashley actually does belong to Scarlett. Scarlett is convinced that Melly and Ashley are nothing more than a brother/sister couple and the reader rides right along with this viewpoint.  So it's actually pretty disturbing when Melly and Ashley happily tip-toe off to their marital bed, leaving Scarlett in the dark both literally and figuratively. 

Then, of course, chapter 15 ends with the confusing kissing scene between Ashley and Scarlett.  Scarlett sort of forces him to kiss her goodbye, but--you know what? Every time I read this part of the book I get more and more confused.  Scarlett asks Ashley to kiss her goodbye, and you could easily make the argument that she basically jumps him in this scene, but if that's the case then...why on earth does Ashley immediately kiss Scarlett on the mouth? Rhett has only given Scarlett pecks on her cheek thus far, but Ashley kind of just..goes for it here. And he even "pressed her body close to his," which---

You know what? It's easy to think that Scarlett is childish and stupid in her devotion to Ashley. And it's easy to chalk up her assumption of Ashley's love as nothing but a delusion or whatever.  But I also think that Ashley likes playing games. Scarlett actually tells him that she only married Charles Hamilton as a ruse and she tells him that she loves him, but Ashley doesn't respond to any of this at all. Scarlett probably wouldn't have listened to his words, but Ashley still could have said something to explain himself. But he doesn't. Instead he just shakes his head a few times, looks sad, and then heads back to the war. 

No wonder the poor girl is so confused!

Chapter 14: "Summer of '63"/ "General Lee must have lost the battle..."

(Shameless Plug: If you love Gone With the Wind, then you'll love--or at least like--my new fan-fiction submission over at http://www.fanfiction.net/~historicalromancegal33. It's free and fun and you should check it out!). 

Chapter 14 of GWTW begins with another expository "boom shot." MM is not a historian and I think Gone With the Wind is at its best when the author tightly focuses on the Scarlett--Ashley--Rhett love triangle, since she knows her characters much better than she knows the facts of the Civil War.  However, I think she's quite skillful with her presentation of the facts of the mid-Civil War period in this part of the novel, particularly since she doesn't begin by filtering the events of 1863 through the eyes and ears of her Scarlett and Melanie.  The War is coming to Atlanta of course, but Sherman and the gang haven't arrived quite yet.   Our girls don't have firsthand knowledge of the battles and they don't really have any experience with the hardships of hunger and poverty they'll know so well by the end of the story. 

However, instead of limiting the action to what happens inside of Aunt Pitty's house, MM uses Chapter 14 as a chance to make the South itself a character. Interestingly enough, the South is no longer merely the a geographic region that just so happens to house the characters in this drama. Now MM has turned the South into a psuedo-person, something that speaks, thinks, hopes, and breathes.  The South is a living entity now--something similar to the Confederacy but not necessarily identical to the government structure--and, even if I'm allowed to side-step the politics surrounding notions of the Lost Cause and all that that entails, I think it's fascinating that Mitchell has anthropomorphized a nation without any of the usual heavy-handed language that accompanies such an effort. 

Anyway, Mitchell races through the battles of 1863 by highlighting The South's changing attitudes and expectations, and then she introduces the Battle of Gettysburg and General Lee's other adventures in Maryland and Pennsylvania by first giving us excerpts from one of Darcy Meade's letters home to his mother.  Next, she tells us that there's gossip about a fight in Gettysburg and that all the telegraph wires are tied up and then--horror of horrors:

"On the third of July, a sudden silence fell on the wires from the north, a silence that lasted till midday of the fourth when fragmentary and garbled reports began to trickle into headquarters in Atlanta." 

She goes on a little bit longer in her discussion about how the town of Atlanta received this silence, and even drops a nice little description saying that "hideous rumors...fled up and down the quiet streets like darting bats."

(I wish I could write something half that good!)

But then, almost abruptly she is done setting the scene.  She has given us plenty of background to work with so that the reader understands the stakes and understands exactly what the outcome of Gettysburg meant to the people of Atlanta--and to Scarlett, Melanie, and Pitty--and the second part of Chapter 14 begins with MM painting a picture of those three ladies sitting in front of the Daily Examiner office with the rest of their neighbors, almost hysterical with fright.

The ladies wait for quiet some time before Rhett Butler edges up the street toward their carriage sitting on a "fine horse, in shining boots and handsome white linen suit, so sleek and well fed, smoking an expensive cigar..." and this is one of the few scenes from the book that looks and feels the same in the movie.  There's more of an edge in the book of course, and the scene is a bit more tense since everybody present seems ready to rip Rhett to shreds (he's asking for it here, IMHO), but this is one of the few scenes that wasn't smushed or rearranged to the point of absurdity when they put it on the big screen. 

Given the way the rest of the novel plays out, a less talented/less confident writer might have used this chapter as an opportunity to demonstrate Rhett's inner turmoil.  I certainly would have given into the notion of having Rhett break down in the face of so much hatred, but MM stays firm in this scene. Rhett is oddly, suspiciously nice to the townswomen, even after they've been pretty mean to him, but he gives absolutely no indication at this point in the story that he's going to rush off to sign up for the Confederate cause in less than a year-and-a-half. 

The first time I read GWTW I just assumed he was a "bastard" who just didn't care about the Confederacy (who could blame him?), but now that I've read GWTW 1,000 times...I still don't think he cares about the Confederacy. At least not at this particular moment.  One of the marvelous things about Rhett Butler is that he appears fully-formed and mature at the beginning of the novel unlike Ashley and Scarlett, but he does grow and change over the course of the story.  He's sure of himself of course, but he grows as a character. And, more to the point, he allows himself to change.