Saturday, August 9, 2014

Chapter 48 (part 1): "Between them, Scarlett and Rhett had outraged every tenet of [the] code..."


I've been working too hard on other things that are not this blog, and this is the first free weekend I've had since the very start of summer.  I could have spent this weekend drinking shandies and reading on my back porch, but instead I've decided to carve out some time to update my blog.  So, welcome back everybody!

Chapter 48 of GWTW covers the Butler honeymoon in New Orleans.  New Orleans has loomed fairly large over the course of the novel, and it functions as an off-stage, anti-Atlanta, all fun times and scandal and rivers and brothels while Atlanta has been nothing but hard times and gossip and red-dirt since the beginning of the book.  It's no coincidence, of course, that New Orleans comes into focus during the Butler honeymoon. As Rhett reminds Scarlett and the reader in this chapter, he was "engaged in some of [his] nefarious schemes [in New Orleans] during the war," so we'd be forgiven for assuming that Rhett got up to some of his shady business dealings in Louisiana whenever he wasn't bugging Scarlett/saving Scarlett's life in Atlanta. New Orleans is the one place in the south (and perhaps the world) where Rhett can just be Rhett, so the Butler honeymoon functions as a nice little window into the actual life of Rhett.

So what do we learn?

Quite a bit, actually.  Mitchell drops several bombs in this chapter, filling out many details of Rhett's background which is refreshing since she's given us such a fuzzy sketch for so long. Rhett sticks out like a sore thumb in Atlanta because of his flashy clothes, loose morals, and all that gambling and whoring (and, you know, proudly owning a whore house), but he fits right in in New Orleans where Scarlett meets many, many men who "had the same hard reckless look Rhett wore. Their eyes were always alert, like me who have lived too long with danger to be ever quite careless." Now Rhett's eyes are usually described as bland/blank, but he's also very observant and watchful as a rule. Although I never quite get the sense that he's looking out for danger, but instead it seems as though he's just scanning his environment for information that can help him get over in his next scheme. I'm not faulting him for that, by the way. Just sayin'.

Anyway, Rhett and his homies trade gossip and stories about:
Other men in the novel are Confederate veterans, so they reminisce about Gettysburg, Vicksburg, and the Army of Northern Virginia. So by having these men skip over these historical events and talk about all these shady/illegal activities, I think we're supposed to assume that Rhett's friends spent the past six years sitting out the war and making financial gains while all the other men of their generation were getting blown to bits.  The difference between Rhett and his unnamed friends, of course, is that we know for SURE that Rhett did all of those things and did his time in the Confederate Army. So while his buddies might be amoral swindlers, Rhett comes off as a smart guy who stayed away from the Civil War until his southern heart overtook his good sense.

Come to think of it, all four of the major characters in GWTW have a multi-layered, multi-faceted relationship to the southern cause, don't they? Scarlett didn't care one way or another about the Civil War at all--she pretended to care, of course, but she never really bought into the Southern cause. Mostly because she thought it was a waste of time, energy, resources, and men.  Melly spent most of the war devoted to Ashley, but she was never really a die-hard about the whole state's rights thing. Ashley fought on the front lines with Bobby Lee for most of the conflict, but he was always a reluctant soldier from the very beginning.  But of course, one of the most wonderful things about GWTW is that everybody in the story is wonderfully complex and conflicted almost all the time. MM doesn't spend much time helping us learn the thoughts and motives of the other characters in GWTW, but you do get the sense that she wanted us to realize that very few southerners were absolute, rabid supporters of the confederacy.  Everybody supported the war and all the men eventually joined up (or tried to join like poor Gerald), but everyone had their own motives and ideas about the general direction of the war.

Anyway, Scarlett likes New Orleans. She really, really, really likes New Orleans.  She likes the clothes, she likes the jewels, she likes the alcohol, and she likes the food.  MM actually performs a very clever and sophisticated maneuver by having Scarlett go on and on about food in this chapter.  After all, we could never forget how hungry they all were after the war, but--that was a long time ago now.  Scarlett has been married to Frank for some time, and the casual reader (i.e. one who didn't finish the book in three days like yours truly) would be forgiven for forgetting all about Scarlett's vow to Never Go Hungry Again.

But MM hasn't forgotten. And she uses this honeymoon interlude as a well-designed call-back to Scarlett's days of hardship.  Scarlett has been living a fairly cozy middle-class life in Atlanta for years now, but our heroine still can't quite shake the feeling that poverty will return.  This is what drives her through the last twenty percent of the book (we're at 82% here in this chapter!), the thing that makes her greedy and selfish even after she marries Rhett and she can afford to be kind and sensible.  Of course every character in the book has faced immense hardship, but I think the other characters in the book fail to see just how unique Scarlett's situation was after Sherman blew through Atlanta. 

Scarlett has tried hard to forget how tough things were back at Tara after the war. But I think of all the characters in the book, Scarlet's path after the fall of Atlanta was the most difficult because there were no obvious answers or solutions to her problems.  Rhett was in the Confederate army throughout most of 1864 and 1865, and nobody doubts the difficulty of fighting a war that has already been lost, but his objective during that time was pretty clear: don't die.   Ashley was in prison during the latter half of the war, but all he had to do was survive. I'm not saying survival in a POW camp during the 19th century was easy, but it's also not complicated.  Melly had just given birth to her baby during the Fall of Atlanta and she is very weak during 1864, 1865, and 1866. But again, her only objective was to stay alive. 

Not so for Scarlett.

No, Scarlett O'Hare couldn't even consider the idea of falling over and expiring. Once she got back to Tara she was in a world of trouble, and she had to spend her days and nights figuring out how to feed her family, how to avoid the scavengers in the neighborhood, how to keep Tara safe from harm.  Melly spent that time teetering between life and death, but Scarlett didn't have that luxury. The entire world--or anyway, the entire world of Scarlett's novel--depended on her, and the thought of giving up and dropping dead was never part of her program.  She was the captain of a sinking ship and she spent all her time focused on keeping Tara afloat. 

Scarlett doesn't have true battle scars, but she does have Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. However, unlike the soldiers in the novel who probably cower at every loud bang they hear, Scarlett's PTSD is centered on food and money.  And while you might be able to avoid loud noises for the rest of your life, Scarlett encounters food and money every single day and she seems to take stock of her financial progress every time she sits down to a meal.

And so, after the last chapter featured nothing but blanc mange (yuck!) and cheap liquor, this chapter is all about decadence and excess and all the deliciousness New Orleans has to offer. We read details about the meals, as a matter of fact. We don't get any details about the Butler wedding, but we get a lot of information about the honeymoon meals.

In the space of one paragraph Scarlett eats:

Interestingly enough, Scarlett has spent a great deal of time drinking liquor since the fall of Atlanta. However, she's been drinking cheap, tame stuff compared to the champagne Rhett orders in New Orleans.  She gets twisted and turnt up on champagne one night and sings "Bonnie Blue Flag" at the top of her lungs and wakes up with a nasty hangover, and she's all humiliated because she's never seen a woman drunk except "that Watling creature on the day when Atlanta fell." And let's just pause right here and ruminate on how tight GWTW really is for a second.  GWTW is a sprawling book with a huge cast of characters, but MM doesn't waste words and she doesn't waste characters, and it's a nice call-back to have Scarlett halt in the middle of her honeymoon and compare herself to Belle.  Remember the SAT syllogisms ya'll? Well here in this chapter MM is executing a nice little multiple choice quiz for you.

Atlanta: New Orleans as: (Choose One, if you can)
A. Scarlett: Belle  
B. Ashley: Rhett 
C. South: North
D. Melly: Scarlett
E. All of the Above



Answer: A, B & E. But not necessarily C or D, for reasons that will become clearer as we get closer to the end of the book. 

Alright, I'm going to drink beer on my deck. I'll post my thoughts and analysis on the rest of this all-important chapter next time, gang. 

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