(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.
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