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.
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