Chapter 48 (part 2): "She learned everything about him except what he really was."

"In fact, in those two weeks in New Orleans, she learned everything about him except what he really was." 

Well, what is he?

GWTW is full of excellent sentences and wonderful paragraphs and little turns of phrase that blow my mind every time I read this novel. But no collection of words in GWTW has anything close to the impact and the weight of this particular line, delivered at this particular time, in this particular situation.  So as I break down the last half of this chapter, I think it's imperative that I start by unpacking the true meaning of this line.

First of all, let's begin by acknowledging the absurdity of Scarlett's statement.  She's only been married to Rhett for a little more than two weeks, yet she actually thinks that she knows everything about him after such a short amount of time? Granted, Scarlett and Rhett have spent a lot of time together since April of 1861, and Scarlett has picked up quite a bit about him over the course of their friendship, but you get the sense that she actually believes that two weeks are all she needs to understand every facet of Rhett's personality.  She has been studying Ashley closely for ages and she still can't quite figure out what makes him tick, and Ashley is practically an open book compared to Rhett.  The man's a professional poker player, for goodness sakes! You'd think Scarlett would realize that Rhett doesn't let her see anything he doesn't want her to see, but Scarlett had always overestimated her own smarts, hasn't she? She's brainy but she's the least emotionally perceptive person in the novel, and her conclusions about other people and their true selves and their motives are always a little bit off base.

But the real interesting part of this sentence is the use of the word what. 

MM says that Scarlett "learned everything about him except what he really was."

Why does she use what instead of who?

What does what really mean?

According to Google, what is a word with a lot of meaning. Who has an easy answer, I think. Who is about someone's permanent identity, right? Let's try it:

• Question: Who is Rhett Butler? 

•  Answer:  A Charleston-born aristocrat who rebelled against the old south and forged his own wicked path toward power and money.  He has black hair, a swarthy complexion, and a mustache. Maybe you've heard of him?

Okay, that was easy enough.  

• Question:  What is Rhett Butler? 

• Answer: What do you mean by what? 

 
I've often come back to my idea that romance novels/romantic stories are really just mysteries.  But unlike regular mysteries that are about solving crimes, the mystery in romance novels always winds up being the everlasting passion the hero has for the heroine.  The POV in women's fiction is usually planted firmly inside the heroine's head. We understand her motives, her desires, her fears, her loves better than she knows herself, but at the same time the hero's behavior is erratic and impossible to understand until, of course, you realize that he's been behaving so strangely only because he's madly in love with the heroine.  It's a story as old as Pride and Prejudice, but I would argue that it goes back even to the bible. After all, God spends the entire Old Testament behaving erratically and doing super weird stuff all the time (apples, floods, wars, famine, fire, falling towers, etc), but once Jesus shows up to explain that God is only doing this because he "so loves the world," we begin to see God's actions in the Old Testament clearly, as the actions of a deity who is in love with us. Or anyway, I think that's what we're supposed to get out of it.  So what is Rhett in this chapter?

He's:

1. A Raconteur (he tells all kinds of stories about "courage and honor and virtue and love in the odd places he had been, and follow them with ribald stories of coldest cynicism.");
2. A Lover ("ardent...tender...");
3. A Mocking Devil ("who ripped the lid from her gunpowder temper, fired it and enjoyed the explosion");
4. A Maid (he feeds her and brushes her hair which is sort of sweet, but also deeply strange in my opinion);
5. A tease (tickling her feet and tearing her "rudely out of deep slumber" when she least expects it);
6. A good listener; 
7. A bad listener;
8. An incredibly sardonic and sarcastic companion; 
9. Flippant; 
10. Daring; 
11. A bad boy in church; 
12. A good boy at the theater; 

And last, but certainly not least, he's:

    12. A Man

Through and through.  I'm not sure how Scarlett would define manhood, but for our purposes let's rely on Google's basic definition: A man is an adult human male. Which is to say, not a child.  Scarlett then goes on to compare him to the other males she's known, men like her father and the Tarleton's and the Fontaines and Charles and Frank.  They were masculine and they were all very good at doing all the things men are supposed to do, but the were all sort of childish in Scarlett's eyes.  MM calls them "boys at heart," full of antics and fun and silliness.  Actually, I think Scarlett does indeed define manhood in this section, doesn't she?

"Only Ashley and Rhett eluded her understanding and her control for they were both adults, and the elements of boyishness were lacking in them."

So Scarlett equates manhood with...elusiveness? She believes that a male is only a man if she can't control him through her usual sexy tricks? And what does it say about our heroine when we realize that the only two men she respects are also the only two men who don't play her game?


Hmmph.

So far, the Butler honeymoon as been idyllic despite all the drinking and carousing.  But then things go pear shaped all of a sudden on the last full night in the honeymoon when Rhett uses his spidey-sense or his vulcan-mind-meld capabilities and realizes that Scarlett is dreaming about Ashley as she drifts off to sleep in his arms.  And he gets mad.

Like, really mad. 

The final pages of their honeymoon plays out as brilliant foreshadowing for the events of the rest of their ill-fated marriage. 

Rhett catches Scarlett dreaming about Ashley which causes Rhett's "heavy arm beneath her neck [to] become like iron," which causes him to swear ("May God damn your cheating little soul to hell for all eternity" which isn't, like something you'd exactly say off the cuff, is it?) which causes him to leave the room in a huff (despite Scarlett's questions and protests) which causes him to reappear the next morning drunk and sarcastic which causes Scarlett to be "quite cool to him" which causes him to get even angrier as "she dressed under his bloodshot gaze and went shopping," which causes him to be gone when she returns which means that he does not appear again until it's time for supper which causes Scarlett to eat her large meal in silence which causes her to over indulge which causes her to drink way too much which eventually triggers her nightmare. 

And, sadly and predictably, Rhett is drunk or hungover when he comes in to rescue Scarlett from her nightmare. It's a very sweet scene as written, a sweet scene that most probably launched several generations of women into puberty.  What's better than a well-dressed Rhett Butler coming to Scarlett's rescue in Atlanta just before the town burns to the ground? How about a disheveled, hungover Rhett rescuing Scarlett from her nightmare in the darkness of the wee hours? After all, the real world holds a number of scary dangers, but nothing is more terrifying than unspecified, imagined threats.  Scarlett can face down armies and shoot a deserter in the face, but her dream shakes her to her core. 

Poor thing.

Good thing she's got such a strong, incredibly sexy, incredibly capable husband around to help!

His face is still unreadable, but his shirt is open to the waist (drool),  and his brown chest is covered with thick black hair (double drool), and....when I was a young girl my taste ran to squeaky voiced, safe boys like Michael Jackson (Thriller era, of course), and Joey McIntyre. But ever since I first read GWTW I've had a soft-spot for hairy guys with mustaches and drinking problems. I think this scene is probably the reason, more than any other.  He's just smoking hot here, really. And then to top it off, he doesn't calm Scarlett by talking about dream and love and nightmares or anything silly like that. Instead he brings her back to reality by discussing money, investments, and real estate. 

Sigh.

Now, the reality is that Rhett has been on a bender for at least 24 hours by the time we arrive at this conversation.  His eyes were crazy bloodshot yesterday morning, and they're still bloodshot by the time he calms Scarlett's fears, and that's not a good look, you guys.  For the sake of analysis, let's say Rhett has been doing roughly one shot per hour for the past 24. If we assume that Rhett has the same height and weight as Clark Gable (6'1" & 200lbs), then his BAC on that night would have been about 0.481%. Which is in the staggering/alcohol poisoning/sudden death range. He can handle his liquor, but if he continues to drink like this he is totally doomed.  I think Mitchell draws our attention to his bloodshot eyes in this chapter because she wants us to contrast this Rhett (still young, still with it Rhett) with the bloated, totally destroyed man who dumps Scarlett at the end of the book.  Here he's clearly alcohol dependent, but you get the sense that he can control his drinking.  But by the end of GWTW the liquor controls him, and his downfall is sad and heartbreaking.