(Before I begin, let me apologize for taking so much time off between blog posts. I got an unexpected promotion at my day job, so my schedule went from 40 "easy" hours per week of lollygagging and daydreaming to a very tough 70 hours per week of deadlines and depositions. C'est ma vie.)
Alright, let's get back to business.
Chapter 39 of GWTW begins with Scarlett alighting from the train in Jonesboro. She's raced home to Tara because Gerald is dead, and--isn't it interesting that she came all the way down there without Good Old Frank? As a matter of fact, we never actually witness any of Scarlett's husbands visiting dear old Tara, not Charles, not Frank, certainly not Rhett. MM seems almost determined to keep Tara as a place apart, something separate from the intrigues and crazy-stuff and wifely duties that seem to be part and parcel of Big City life in Atlanta. In Atlanta Scarlett is, at varying times, Mrs. Charles Hamilton, Frank Kennedy's shopkeeping wife, and Mrs. Rhett Butler. But back at Tara she's just plain old Scarlett. Food for thought, right?
Anyway, I believe that chapter 39 and all the events surrounding Gerald's funeral are brilliantly written. MM is a master plotter as I've said many times before, and she manages here to build tension and excitement even though there's nothing particularly remarkable or interesting about Gerald dying. We like Gerald as a character of course, and we're genuinely sad to see him go, but he's been sick for some time. Plus, this is GWTW and we've been mired in death--senseless, horrible, never ending death--since the very first chapters of the novel. Most of the boys from the county are long dead, so why should we feel particularly sorry about Gerald's death when he got to live a comparatively long life?
And yet, MM is such a good writer that we do in fact wind up feeling very, very sorry.
But then again, I'm getting ahead of myself. So let me just switch gears for a minute and point out that Chapter 39 (and the rest of the funeral sections)acts as something of an echo/mirror of the Wilkes BBQ that opens the novel. All the extras have died of course--the Tarleton's, Charles, Ellen, etc--but the major players are still in the story, and Scarlett's return to Tara gives us the chance to see them all with fresh eyes for the first time in quite a long while. Ashley and Melly are at Tara, but now they're getting old and wearing rags instead of the finery they sported before the Civil War. Suellen and Careen are front and center too, and their personalities (sour and sweet as they are) remain true despite all the events that have swept over them during the past five or six years. And then there's Scarlett: in the beginning of GWTW she's a young girl, fretting over which green dress to wear so she can charm Ashley into marrying her. But now she's pregnant and wearing a big black dress and her ankles are swollen, and her major concern is hiding her big belly and puffy ankles from Ashley's perfect sight.
Oh Scarlett.
In addition to worrying about how Ashley is going to view her now that she's pregnant with Frank's child, Scarlett is also obsessed with holding back her tears. It's dark and there's really nobody around and her father just died for heaven's sake, but Scarlett doesn't want anybody to see her crying. I don't exactly know why she's so obsessed with not being seen with tears in her eyes, but kudos to her for trying to maintain her composure. Although her lot in life would probably be improved if she'd let people see her break down once in a while, if only just to keep things fresh. Even nowadays folks never really know what to do with a woman who hides her emotions, and I can only imagine how scornful Scarlett's neighbors would have been in the face of her massive ability to control her emotions.
Although, and here's a thought, maybe Scarlett isn't working very hard to control her emotions. Sadness and despair aren't really her thing anyway, and she's already had to come to terms with death many times over the first parts of the novel, and her father had been very sick for a long while. I'm not saying that Scarlett isn't sad that her father is gone, but perhaps she hasn't decided to wear a mask and fool the world. She feels things, but maybe she doesn't feel them very deeply.
(On the other hand, and I think this is a major difference between the two characters, the ending of the novel gives us every indication that Rhett Butler is emotional almost to a fault. His face is practically frozen into a mask most of the time, but down below he's a swirl of love and hate and lust and ambition and a lot of other stuff. When he cracks up during the last third of the novel, you get the impression that his breakdown is the logical result of decades of repressed emotion.)
And speaking of not feeling things too deeply, Good Old Will Benteen picks Scarlett up from the train station. Good Old laconic, easygoing, Will Benteen. Will Benteen is one of the few guys in GWTW who doesn't fall madly in love/lust with Scarlett. I suppose that's because he's saving all his pent up desire for Carreen, but at the same time I think MM is subtly driving home an important theme of the novel. The chapters in GWTW that occur during the height of reconstruction can be fairly easily categorized as round 2 of Rebs vs. Yankees. But in reality this is the beginning of the raging battle that erupts in the final third of the novel, the battle between the clear-eyed, rational characters who thrive in the new era and the dewy-eyed, nostalgic people who can't stop reliving Pickett's charge. Will, Scarlett, Rhett, and Mammy (!) belong to the first group, and everybody else (besides Melly, I think. But she's sort of a special case) are in the second camp. Will probably sized Scarlett up from the first moment he saw her, recognized that she was fundamentally hard and self-sufficient, and decided to pursue Carreen since she's nice. Except, of course, because "Baby Sister" belongs to the second, nostalgic group, she decides to devote her life to the church.
Sigh. Nobody's happy in GWTW, are they?
Anyway, so Will starts giving Scarlett the lowdown on what's been happening at Tara since the last time we checked in with the county gang. This section could be boring exposition, but it's fascinating because it really functions as a nice little update with our old friends. Plus, MM does a wonderful job of maintaining interest through the magic of dialect. Will's speech patterns read almost comically on the page, and he drops a lot of homespun phrases that never cease to bring a smile to my lips ("snatchin' her bald-headed" is a personal favorite of mine). But he's perceptive and Scarlett trusts his descriptions and assessments, and so do we. He says what he thinks, and we admire him for thinking it. And for having the gall to say it directly to Scarlett's face.
I don't know how I'm supposed to exactly feel about the saga of Gerald and Suellen and the oath of citizenship, but I think I know how MM feels about the whole thing. GWTW has been dismissed as racist and backward, but with the exception of a few things that I'll get to at a later date, I don't think MM was particularly political. And, for all of her obviously affection for the county life and Tara and the other "fine plantations" of the South, I get the impression that MM was actually more of a city girl. I think she preferred faster-paced Atlanta living to the slow, simple life back at Tara. I may not agree with MM's politics and I get the sneaking suspicion that we would be members of opposite political parties, but--
GWTW is not about race or politics at all. GWTW is about money and survival, plain and simple. It's about greed and capitalism and the kind of self-sufficiency that modern readers usually only encounter in Ayn Rand. Chapter 39 is a forgettable, throwaway chapter that ramps us up to the good stuff of Gerald's funeral(something we can already tell is going to be a hot mess like a Bravo reality show), but MM was such an excellent writer that she stays interesting and consistent even in the paragraphs of what would have otherwise been a pretty dry conversation. Because in this chapter, Scarlett gets good and mad at Suellen when she learns that her sister tried to trick her father into signing the citizenship agreement. But once she learns that there was $150,000 on the table (2.7 million in today's money!), Scarlett mentally changes her tune:
"One hundred and fifty thousand dollars," murmured Scarlett, her horror at the oath fading....After all, anything you could get out of the Yankees was fair money, no matter how you got it."
And that's the point of GWTW when you get down to it. With the exception of Ashley's love (and that's debatable at this point in the novel, even if our heroine doesn't realize it), Scarlett would do anything to be rich again. She was already sort of selfish and self-serving at the beginning of GWTW, but the end of the war has taught her that money is the only thing that matters. This might be one of the moments were the subtle differences between Scarlett and the rest of the gang becomes much more pronounced. As a matter of fact, I'm almost certain this is one of those moments, since Will and Melly and everyone else are downright horrified at the thought of Gerald being disloyal to the Confederacy and don't give a darn about the money. And yet, at the same time, I'm also pretty sure that MM is on Scarlett's side, and that she feels the same way. Love and patriotism are important, but security might be the most important thing in MM's fictional universe.
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