GWTW made the New York Times this week!
It's a pretty brief mention, especially compared to the way the magazine commemorated the Kennedy assassination and the Banksy graffiti saga from last month, but I was honestly surprised to see the Gray Lady actually mention the novel by name. I lived in NYC for eight years and anybody who has spent any time in the North East quickly realizes that people in the Big City pay very little attention to what happens out here in Fly Over Country. I tried to convince my classmates and colleagues that there actually was life--good life!--outside of the five boroughs that form the New York metro area, but I don't think they believed me all that much. So it was really quite thrilling to see GWTW in the pages of the paper of record--even though the columnist of this particular piece seems adamant about distancing herself from the novel. Like, why'd she bother to write about GWTW if she was going to be so scornful? And why is GWTW/MM so trivial/juvenile while Fitzgerald and Hemingway and Salinger get nothing but love even for their non-masterpieces? I think GWTW is regularly dismissed as fluff when there's nothing fluffy about the novel.
Sigh.
Anyway, here we are in Chapter 30. This chapter takes place in the summer of 1865, a time when "Tara suddenly lost its isolation," and Scarlett and friends are suddenly faced with a flood of soldiers returning from the war. Interestingly enough, MM makes the point that "few of them were bitter" because "they left bitterness to their women and their old people." Now, that's interesting, isn't it? Interesting and unexpected. The men who've fought and lost are ready to move on, but everybody else is still pissed and angry at the way the war ended. We are always taught that the people who fought the Civil War were downright angry when they returned from battle (thereby automatically giving rise to the KKK and all that Reconstruction-era violence), but perhaps it wasn't really as simple as that. Some of them were bitter and truculent to be sure, but some were also exhausted or hungry or just plain worn out with the whole thing, and it's kind of nice that MM included viewpoints that diverge from the common perception of the post-war South.
Anyway, among this stream of soldiers, the girls also get a visit from Good Old Uncle Peter, Aunt Pitty's driver from Atlanta. Aunt Pitty is mad at the girls for deserting her in her time of need, and she's scared of the dark anyway, so Uncle Peter has traveled to Tara to try to make the girls come back to Atlanta. Uncle Peter and Aunt Pitty have always functioned as comic relief for the story, and MM does a great job of bringing the funny during a part of the book that could easily drag. And, what's more, Uncle Peter's visit serves an important function because he also brings a letter from Ashley Wilkes.
It's addressed to Melly (of course), but Scarlett reads it and is thrilled with the words: "Beloved, I am coming home to you." The sentiment is meant for Melly, but it gives Scarlett the warm fuzzies anyway, which means the reader also titters with excitement because we are suddenly anxious to find out what's going to happen next in the saga. So much of the world has changed over the past few years, and all the certainty of the pre-war years has been replaced with an unpredictable world where down is up, the Confederacy has disappeared, Scarlett works the fields, and the once proud Tara has been reduced to nothing more than a burden. In retrospect Scarlett's reaction to Ashley's letter seems downright silly, but is it really? The world is topsy-turvy and anything can happen now, and when all the rules are out the window maybe even Ashley has been altered by the times. Before the war he was dutiful and serious and never the type to leave his wife, but now it seems downright plausible that Ashley would turn up at Tara and whisk Scarlett away for a new life in a new part of the country.
Will Benteen also makes his first appearance in this chapter, and I've always regretted that they didn't add his character to the motion picture. Will Benteen and Archie (racist, crazy, mean-as-hell Archie) are two of the more memorable characters in GWTW, but people who haven't read the book don't even realize they exist. Obviously, adding Will and Archie and Grandma Fontaine and all of those other characters would have stretched the movie and expanded the cast and tested everybody's patience, but--still. MM is rather hard on the lower classes in GWTW, and Will Benteen's dignified personality blunts some of the author's sharpest attacks on working class whites.
So, even as Scarlett and Will and the rest of the gang at Tara begin to slowly plant and plow and do all that other farmy-farm stuff that city slickers like me know absolutely nothing about, MM continues to sew the seeds for the last bits of the novel right there in chapter 30 by addressing Melly's continuing ill-health.
"Old Dr. Fontaine diagnosed her trouble as female complaint and concurred with Dr. Meade in saying she should never have had Beau. And he said frankly that another baby would kill her."
If you blink, you'd pretty much miss that, wouldn't you? But on a second/third/hundredth read the words and their meanings jump out at you and make you do a double-take, don't they? Here's a rudimentary equation to show us exactly how MM builds anticipation in this part of the novel:
Another baby will kill Melly.
+ Ashley is on his way home.
+ Melly loves babies.
+Ashley loves Melly.
??????????
The problem with this equation is that we don't know how much Ashley loves Melly. Scarlett seems utterly convinced that their relationship is little more than a brother/sister, duty-filled, boring sort of thing, and the reader has little reason to doubt her conclusion. Ashley is not lusty and honest like Rhett (who I'm missing terribly at the moment), and Melly never seems to give much thought to romance or whatever, so it would not be unreasonable for Scarlett to believe that the Wilkes' marriage is platonic and that Beau is something of a fluke. I think Scarlett is so single-minded about her life that she can't even entertain the notion that Ashley can love (and lust after) Scarlett and Melly at the same time. Every other man besides Ashley and her father (and Will Benteen?) irritates her to no end, so how in the hell could Ashley have desire for a woman who's not Scarlett?
And we'll soon get answers to all of our questions because Ashley comes home at the end of this chapter, and things quickly start to change.
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