Writers write.
I've spent the past six months working too much, going on too many vacations, watching too much football, and re-reading too many of my favorite books. I'm tired, I'm cranky, and I'm suffering from a severe creative block, but none of that matters tonight. Because writers write.
It's really as simple as that, isn't it?
I wish MM had been inclined to write one of those books other big names churn out once-in-a-while, one of those books where a famous, wealthy writer gives the rest of us wannabes a glimpse into their creative process. Most amateur authors (especially and including amateurs like me!) get bogged down in the "mushy-middle" of our story. Writing a beginning is fun and writing an ending is thrilling for those of us who crave closure, but it can be very difficult to grind your way through the middle of a novel, particularly when you're not getting feedback from writers or editors or anybody except your cats, your mother, and your big sister (Hi Tam!). GWTW could have very, very, very easily slowed to a crawl right here at Chapter 25. Rhett has gone into the army and Scarlett is back at Tara and the armies are gone, and the countryside is nowhere near as exciting as Atlanta, and I'm sure that MM probably had to rework these sections of the novel multiple times to make it all flow so smoothly and stick together so well.
So, okay.
Scarlett wakes up at Tara in her childhood bedroom, but while her surroundings are familiar all hell has broken loose around her. The Civil War has raged all over the county, her mother is dead, Pa has essentially lost his mind, and her sisters are suffering from typhoid. Most of the slaves are long gone, there's no food left, and the O'Hare's owe taxes to the Confederacy. Mammy and Pork fill Scarlett in on the details she didn't quite absorb the night before, when she was so drunk and terrified. Scarlett is hungover in this section (light sensitivity, trouble holding her head up, parched throat, and a whole bunch of other physical symptoms that all of us writers know a little bit too well!), but she's all business as she gathers information from the slaves. And--
Is this section the first one that highlights Scarlett's changing personality? Interestingly enough, MM essentially frames this section from Pork's POV, and this switch up yields an interesting assessment of Scarlett's behavior in this chapter:
"She began asking questions so brusquely and giving orders so decisively Pork's eyebrows went up in mystification....She asked again about the fields, the gardens, the stock, and her green eyes had a hard glaze which Pork had never seen in them before."
Pork is obviously less than impressed by Scarlett's behavior in this section, but...so? He compares her unfavorably to her mother ("Miss Ellen didn't never talk so short to nobody..."), but doesn't he understand that the world has changed drastically over the past few days? Ellen O'Hara was the trophy wife of a wealthy planter (yeah, I said it!), but those days are long gone. Hard times call for "hard glaze," don't they?
Anyhow, Scarlett asks Pork and Prissy to help her work the fields and scrounge for food, but they can't because they're house workers and allergic to working outside, I guess. I could fault MM for daring to make Pork and Prissy sound so lazy and worthless, but I don't think this is particularly racist since she's already painted everybody else at Tara with the same broad brush of self-regard. Everybody is still dazed and everybody is still trying to figure out how to reconcile the class/status/power/gender/racial roles that were so rigid before the war with the new world of late-1864.
So Scarlett herself sets out alone to forage for food. She walks over to Twelve Oaks, but finds nothing but an empty house. She happens upon some food in the slave quarters, and she immediately eats a "old and coarse and...peppery" raddish that makes her vomit. She loses her senses for a moment, but then she starts making decisions about how she's going to live out the rest of her life. She realizes that the "lazy luxury of the old days was gone, never to return." But instead of falling down dead or giving up, Scarlett decides right then and there that she's never going back. And that going forward is her only option.
MM then begins contrasting Scarlett with the other southern women of her generation. "Throughout the South for fifty years there would be bitter-eyed women who looked backward...but Scarlett was never to look back."
But--that's not right, is it? Scarlett is never consumed with sentimentality or nostalgia like most of her friends and family members, certainly she's never crippled with memories in the manner of Ashley and so many others. And yet--she does look back, doesn't she? She doesn't necessarily court memories or try to conjure the dead, but over the rest of the novel she can't help but compare her post-war life with her life before and during the war. She can't forget her mother or the good times that came before, and in a way her love for Ashley is much less about any possible future the two of them could possibly have together, and much more about Scarlett's lingering girlish desire to still somehow become the mistress of 12 Oaks.
And speaking of looking back, one of my favorite scenes in the whole novel takes place here in Chapter 25. Suellen and Careen are still sick in bed, and when Scarlett periodically goes upstairs to hang "over the foot of their bed and outline the work she expected them to do when they recovered, they looked at her as if she were a hobgoblin." Scarlett's sisters are terrified, but Scarlett keeps going up there and saying crazy stuff and alarming the sick girls "because it helped her (Scarlett) to forget her own bitterness that everything her mother had told her about life was wrong."
Ouch. It's tough to learn that lesson at such an early age, isn't it? Plus...Scarlett is correct because her mother's teachings can't help her now. But Ellen taught her everything a girl like Scarlett needed to know about the world. Cutting wood and raising crops simply weren't part of the curriculum. And it's sort of unfortunate that Scarlett feels that everything she was taught was wrong. Not just useless or antiquated, but out-and-out wrong. Which makes the ante-bellum, Southern belle training sound exactly like my law school education. Har dee har har.
Anyway, MM ends Chapter 25 with one of the best lines in the novel, namely that "Scarlett would hold Tara, if she had to break the back of every person on it." Now, that's a resolution, right? "Never Going Hungry Again" makes for dramatic cinema, and that famous phrase has a nice little ambiguity to it, sort of like "Here's Looking at You, Kid," since it applies to almost everybody's life at one time or another. But Scarlett doesn't just want to avoid starvation. She's bound and determined to keep her land even if she has to physically destroy every person living on it, which is astounding since she's talking about her family. Scarlett always gets lumped in with Dorothy and her Yellow Brick Road, but in my opinion the Scarlett in GWTW the novel is more akin to Michael Corleone or Richard III (the Shakespeare version, anyway), than the kind-hearted, homesick Dorothy. Scarlett has a goal in mind and she's willing to manipulate and destroy anybody who stands in her way.
And that's why I love her!
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