Oh boy oh boy oh boy.
I think I forgot about the deliciousness of chapter 42. Events have been sort of crawling since Scarlett married Good Old Frank Kennedy, but now that the Wilkes' are back in town danger seems to be bubbling out everywhere. But before I dive in, let me just highlight one of my all-time favorite passages in GWTW:
Scarlett's child was a girl, a small bald-headed mite, ugly as a hairless monkey and absurdly like Frank.
Poor Ella Lorena. The child winds up kind of being a mess anyway, mostly thanks to Scarlett's secret alcoholism, but Scarlett hates her so much that she doesn't even have one good word to say about her from jump street. Everything we learn about Frank's daughter is bad, isn't it?
1.) Ella's a girl. Post-war Atlanta wasn't the worst society for girls, but it certainly wasn't the best. Men from my generation always really, really want boys, so I can only imagine how a girl child was received back in Scarlett's day.
2.) Ella's small and bald-headed--and ugly: I don't know. Most babies I've seen are small and bald, aren't they? Even Magical Prince George of Cambridge was red and wrinkled and bald when he was born, and he's practically perfect in every way. But then again, back in the 1860's a girl had nothing to trade on but her looks, and even the beautiful and talented Scarlett could only get so far in life without relying on a husband. Poor, poor Ella.
3.) Ella is absurdly like Frank: And this is probably Ella's biggest sin. She's exactly like Frank, which means she's sickly and timid and boring and a constant source of agitation for Scarlett.
Yikes.
Anyway, MM never had children and she's rarely had a good word to say about any of the young people in GWTW, but I think Poor Ella really pulls the short straw, doesn't she? Even Wade and Beau toddle along in the shadows, cute and slightly annoying and crying on occasion (and Bonnie gets the celebrity treatment, of course), but poor Ella is ugly and stupid and suffering from fetal alcohol syndrome to boot. What a mess.
So, the kettle of KKK action starts to boil over in chapter 42. The Klan has been nothing more than a hint or a whisper throughout most of the book, but now the KKK comes front and center in Scarlett's life. Because a white woman allegedly has been raped by a negro, you see. The Yankees see absolutely nothing wrong with having a trial and putting the white woman on the witness stand (i.e. the B-plot of To Kill A Mockingbird), but of course every southerner is downright outraged at the prospect of a lady testifying in public about such an act. Now interestingly enough, MM does not provide any information about how people would behave if the white woman in question had been raped by a white man. But then again, such a circumstance is utterly out the question for MM, isn't it? Since we all know that none of the men in Scarlett's circle would ever rape a woman and--
See what I mean?
GWTW is often dismissed as a simplistic, racist depiction of the Old South, but this little section once again demonstrates how sly and sophisticated MM actually was. Sometimes it seems that 99% of the "action" passages in GWTW occur because Scarlett and her circle of female friends are afraid of being raped by a stranger--be that stranger a freed slave, a Yankee soldier, a deserter from the Confederate army, or a convict or some other man from outside their society. And yet (SPOILER ALERT) the only "rape" that occurs in the pages of the book happens between a man and his wife in their own home. So who's the real boogeyman in post War society?
I'll come back to that. Oh yeah, I promise I'll come back to that.
Anyway, moving past the subject of rape, I think it's also worth evaluating Scarlett's assessment of exactly who was "crack-brained" enough to actually join the KKK. Every man Scarlett knows was a member of the Confederate army, but Scarlett thanks God that "Ashley had too much sense to belong to the Klan and Frank was too old and poor spirited." So Scarlett thinks that only young, lively idiots could possibly be in the KKK. This uninformed opinion is logical, since a quick sweep of any given news program demonstrates that most violent perpetrators are young and dumb, but it's also a flawed assessment because the KKK was such a radical departure from the norm. Most criminals are motivated by violence or greed or whatever, but the KKK were, first and foremost, politically motivated. The ranks of the KKK were filled during the 1870s largely by former CSA soldiers who were enraged by reconstruction and the 13th, 14th, and 15th amendments to the Constitution. They believed their world had been flipped upside down, and they joined the KKK to rage against the machine, so there's plenty of room for former rich guys like Ashley and old dudes like Frank in the organization. Scarlett doesn't understand this, perhaps because she doesn't understand how powerless the men of her time and place felt after the war was over. But then again, as Rhett says, Scarlett lacks the impersonal view. Ashley and Frank's Klan membership might seem pretty obvious to the reader, but it's exactly the kind of thing that would go right over Scarlett's head.
MM also shows us Scarlett's obliviousness and heartlessness and general lack of morality in this section in the words our heroine uses when Frank puts her on house arrest to keep her out of trouble when the KKK friction starts bubbling over:
"She had shot one man and she would love, yes, love to shoot another."
Now, I don't think anybody reading GWTW thinks Scarlett was wrong to shoot that army deserted back at Tara. But this is a textbook Freudian slip, isn't it? Killing in self-defense is one thing, particularly in your own home, but it's a bad idea to court disaster and danger. We understand Scarlett's desire to go to work, but wisdom and self-preservation dictates that she should probably stay home until things get a little bit safer.
But she can't. Because she's Scarlett and because, frankly, I think MM was trying to draw a contrast not just between Scarlett's behavior and the behavior of the other women in her social circle, but also between Scarlett's actions and the actions of the men in Atlanta's high society. Even the men are too terrified to travel on the outskirts of the city without a posse, so Scarlett's insistence is a total and deliberate contrast to what everybody else is doing. Scarlettt's earliest transgressions involved breaking small social rules (i.e. showing her bosom before evening at Ashley's party, chasing after a married man, improperly mourning for Charles Hamilton, and running a business during a time when women were supposed to be only slightly more educated than a slave), but now she's totally outside the box and she's breaking every rule in the book and her reason is greed which is not a very good reason at all for the people of Atlanta.
Anyway, interestingly enough Melly solves Scarlett's conundrum by enlisting Archie's help, which is sort of like pouring gasoline on a smoldering fire come to think of it. I know I don't talk about Melly's character much in this blog, mostly because Melly's personality is the most consistent and least intriguing of the other three major characters. Which is not to say that I think Melly is overly simple or that I don't like her--on the contrary, I think Melly's dependable, calm, logical, loving reactions are a wonderful counterpoint to the wild world of Scarlett/Rhett/Ashley. But whereas it sometimes seems as though you need a complicated calculus formula to try to predict what the other three are going to do in any given situation, Melly is never more complicated than trigonometry and she's usually actually as simple and elegant as a multiplication table. It takes a lot of brain power and maturity to understand
But that doesn't necessarily mean that number is any more interesting or useful than 6X6=36.
As a matter of fact, the older I get the more I appreciate the Melly's of the world, the selfless, predictable types who mean what they say and say what they mean. MM clearly adores Melly too, which is why it's doubly interesting that Melly is the character who solves Scarlett's security problem by enlisting the help of the low-class, murdering, misogynistic, ex-con "with a bald head, which shone pinkishly dirty, and a grizzled beard so long he could tuck it in his belt," and who "moved as swiftly as a snake."
Archie is so gross, you guys! He's racist and gross and "mountain born" and he chews tobacco and carries a heavy pistol, and he's horrible and he and Scarlett are instantly, predictably at odds. Scarlett "didn't like the looks of this elderly desperado," but she agrees to let him drive her around because "his presence would simplify matters," which is a hilarious and wonderfully ironic foreshadowing of things to come, isn't it? Wait, is it possible to have ironic foreshadowing or is that a contradiction in terms? Anyway, Archie is another of those characters who would have been one-off bit players in any other novel, but which MM uses to add layers and veracity to her story world. A good work of fiction needs to take the impossible and coincidental and disguise it with enough window dressing for it to seem truer than the real world, and MM uses colorful characters like Archie and Mammy (who could smell a Republican the way a horse could smell a rattlesnake, by the way) and Gerald and Suellen as padding for the weird Scarlett/Rhett/Ashley love triangle that would otherwise seem utterly fantastic. Archie could have easily been a one dimensional character, but he arrives on the scene with his own character traits and his own grudges and his own background, a point driven home by the fact that he's an ex-con who was put in jail for killing his wife and brother when he found them having an affair [Correction: Archie didn't kill his brother because "he got away."]. During the 1865 portion of the novel, those at Tara had been deathly afraid of running into one of the convicts that had been let out during the last days of the Civil War, and now thanks to Melly, Scarlett and the rest of the Atlanta social circle are now interacting with Archie on a daily basis.
Anyway, Archie eventually quits driving Scarlett because Scarlett decides to lease convicts for her mills. And this is when things start getting interesting from a political standpoint.
"Everyone said it was wrong to take advantage of the miseries and misfortunes of others.
""You didn't have any objections to working slaves!"" Scarlett cried indignantly.
Ah, but that was different. Slaves were neither miserable nor unfortunate. The negroes were far better off under slavery than they were now under freedom, and if she didn't believe it, just look about her."
Now it's interesting here, because I think this is the very first time we've had any character equate slavery with misery and misfortune. And I think it's extra-extra interesting because the first person to even acknowledge even a hint of an idea that slavery was wrong is the main character in GWTW. Rhett was the first person to speak bluntly about the socio-economic reality of the Southern agrarian culture, but even he never actually says that slavery is bad or wrong or not an optimal position for the slave. He's branded a rebel for simply acknowledging the structure of the plantation society, probably because if you realize that the southern society is only one version of capitalism then you're forced to at least consider the possibility that other forms might be fairer or more profitable and that sort of thinking is very dangerous in the 19th century South. I would love to say that MM was being deliberately antiquated in the rhetoric she uses for "everyone's" answer to Scarlett's feelings about slavery, but I'm not so sure. I've said before that I don't think MM is writing a book that particularly glorifies the institution of slavery, but I also don't think MM was a latent liberal in the style of Mark Twain or any of the Southern writers who came after her. I'll come back to this idea more as we get closer to the end of GWTW, but suffice it to say that I think MM was writing a novel about reality and survival and the importance of security in a world that could go topsy-turvy at any moment, and if having money meant having slaves then she seems to be okay with the institution.
Sadly, during the past few days we've had to revisit the ridiculous old "blacks were better off under slavery" argument and consider Donald Sterling's racist remarks all while digesting the Supreme Court's latest post-racial decisions, so anybody who thinks MM and the world of GWTW are too far in the past to be relevant isn't paying attention.
Well, that was all fairly unpleasant, wasn't it? But MM is a master-plotter and GWTW is a great book, so instead of another chapter pounding home MM's ideas about race and class and ex-cons and everything else, she follows Chapter 42 with Chapter 43 in which Rhett returns to the story--and this time, he's pretty much back for good. Yay!
