And....here we go.
This is what we've all been waiting for, isn't it? The first time I read GWTW, all those years ago, I could tell by this point that MM was leading us toward something. Something big. But I had absolutely no idea what that something was going to entail. I had no idea where she was taking us or why she was taking us there, but I was in such a hurry to ride with her that I stayed up all night reading. And this was during my high school years, you guys. I've always been something of a bookworm, but until I read GWTW I'd never picked up a story that I couldn't put down when my eyelids grew heavy or something good came on MTV.
But Scarlett and Rhett and Melly and Ashley were something different. This story was a radical departure from everything that had come before, which is saying quite a lot because I didn't read GWTW until after I'd read Romeo and Juliet, Gore Vidal's American History series, Dubliners, Their Eyes Were Watching God, and The Canterbury Tales. I always loved Gore Vidal's style and I enjoy Shakespeare more now that I've set my own hand at writing than I ever did as a spoiled American teenager, but in the history of English-language fiction nobody has ever wrapped up the threads of a plot the way MM does in the final chapters of GWTW. And she has set the stage so well, hasn't she? All four of our major characters has played the hero, the villain, the fool, and the loyalist by this part in the novel, and their lives are so interconnected we cannot imagine how any of this can change.
But we know it must.
We know it.
We can taste it, the same way you can taste rain in the air in the summer even before you hear the first rumble of thunder. I was trying to convince my sister the other day that MM crafts the first 2/3 of GWTW like a chess game because, you know, she moves the pieces around on the board until everything is strategically arranged just in time for the end game. My sister didn't agree with me.
"Actually, I think it's more like she...I don't know. Like she spent the first parts of the novel setting a beautiful table and now it's time for her to invite a bunch of crazy people in for dinner."
We're both right, I think. Either way, MM has set the scene beautifully over the course of the novel. MM's Atlanta is a living, breathing world full of people we probably know better than our neighbors, but she's such a genius that in all that scene setting she has never once let us forget the love quadrangle that is at the heart of this novel. And after nearly a decade of the four of them almost studiously avoiding conflict, there's too much tension now. Ashley has privately (and unwittingly) cuckolded Rhett in private, and now Mr. Wilkes and Mrs. Butler are going to accidentally humiliate Rhett and Melly in public.
This day has been coming for a long time.
A long, long, long time.
And now, finally, here we are.
So Ashley is having a birthday party.
Another birthday party. Happy birthday Ashley! I think it's so interesting that MM bookends most of the action of GWTW between two of Ashley's birthday parties. Ashley as a character so rarely does anything at all. He's a boring guy, a family man, and he doesn't own any brothels and he doesn't gamble or drink to excess, and he's unremarkable in practically every way. But Scarlett is obsessed with him. She's still obsessed with him. So although the reader can't help but be attracted to Rhett, there's a perverse logic to the notion that Scarlett's social downfall and personal destruction occurs because of the events surrounding Ashley's birthday party. Anyway, it's Ashley's birthday and he's a pillar in the community in addition to being a pillar in the novel, so Melly's throwing him a huge surprise party.
And Scarlett, Melly, India, Aunt Pitty, and Good Old Archie are largely in charge of decorating the party. That's a crowd of five which is a large number considering how small the Wilkes house is supposed to be. Plus, of the five people working on the decorations, one of them is the witless Pitty and the other two are Scarlett's sworn enemies. Has Scarlett forgotten how much Archie and India hate her? And, for all that Scarlett thinks of him as a desperado and a "smelly old hill-billy," Archie is true blue devoted to Melly. In fact, he's so devoted to her that MM has India remind us all about his adoration for the Wilkes family:
"I think he'd really like for somebody to insult you, so he could kill them to show his respect for you."
Melly blushes, but she knows it's true. And we know it's true. Which is what makes the way all of this plays out so very fascinating. Because you could argue, of course, that India is wrong, that Archie's devotion doesn't extend that far because he doesn't actually kill Scarlett even after he sees her hugging Ashley. But while Archie doesn't kill Scarlett with his own hands, he does hustle right off to tell Rhett what he saw and I'd be willing to bet that Archie only did this because he assumed that Rhett would kill both Scarlett and Ashley.
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I love GWTW the movie, but in my opinion neither Leslie Howard nor Vivian Leigh does justice to Scarlett and Ashley's big scene of nostalgia. Of course there are limitations to the emotions you can convey on screen and I don't think the directors of GWTW were particularly ambitious when it comes to all the little tricks Hollywood throws out there to jolt the audience into feeling whatever characters on the screen are feeling, so it's probably not LH's or VL's fault. But the two of them don't have much chemistry, and this is fine for the earlier scenes when it's all about sex and lust. But you never get the impression that there's a meeting of the minds when they're speaking their lines in this scene; you never get the sense that they understand each other. MM makes it very clear that Scarlett and Ashley's sexual tension is fading into friendship during this scene, but in the movie there's nothing to indicate to us that their embrace wouldn't have turned into more if they hadn't been caught by India and Aunt Pitty. We haven't been given any reason to believe that Scarlett is no longer madly in love with Ashley in the movie up to this point. By contrast, they do a magnificent job of depicting Ilsa Lund's ambiguous feelings and love for both Rick and Viktor in Casablanca, yet you never get the feeling that Scarlett is changing her mind at this point in GWTW.
Still a great film though, right?
Alright, the last time we saw Ashley he was bitching about Scarlett sleeping with Rhett, right? Well, he's no longer as angry about the Butler marriage as he seemed to be in the last chapter. Oddly enough, Ashley even goes out of his way to align himself with Rhett in this chapter, smiling as he reminds Scarlett that he and Rhett are "fundamentally alike." I wonder what's behind his change? I suppose you could say that Ashley's reversal is a weakness in the narrative and that MM has him switch up just because she wanted him to, but I disagree. I think she extinguishes Ashley's hatred in this scene because his change of heart reminds us that 1.) Ashley is a human being who changes his mind just like the rest of us human beings and 2.) that we have absolutely no idea what in the world is happening behind closed doors at the Wilkes' residence.
Which is to say, Ashley may have been snacking sour grapes in the last chapter because he was dealing with sexual frustration or some sort. I think it's safe to say that between Ashley and Melly you could say---actually, I don't even want to say it. It's sort of icky for me to pry into the sexual affairs of the Wilkes family, isn't it? MM purposefully side-steps frank sexual discussions and an immature reader could be excused from assuming that even Scarlett and Rhett only had sex a few times, but I would also argue that while MM avoids a discussion of sex for the sake of sex, she also seems quite comfortable addressing the consequences of sex. Which is to say, MM doesn't talk about what happens between the sheets, but she does discuss babies and pregnancy and, as I said in my last post, Scarlett certainly seems to think that sex=pregnancy.
Right?
So while we know for sure that Scarlett and Rhett hooked up a few times, Melly and Ashley probably haven't done the deed since Beau was born. And that boy is 8 or 9 by this point in the story, which is a good enough reason for Ashley to have been in such a bad mood in the last chapter. And if stuffy, stiff, holier-than-thou Ashley has been driven to madness and hatred by the absence of sex, then what on earth is Scarlett's sexual prohibition going to do to Rhett?
***************
Actually though, nobody in Atlanta thinks about what any of this is going to do to Rhett.
Even Scarlett doesn't think about Rhett except as an after thought, and she lives with him! Rhett was my first concern when I read about Scarlett and Ashley getting busted by the Keystone Cops, mostly because he's my dream man but also because he's so unpredictable and crazy I had no idea how he was going to react to all of this. I genuinely feared for Scarlett's safety as I read about her walking up the steps in their empty home, which is fascinating because up to this point Rhett hasn't done anything remotely violent to Scarlett. As a matter of fact,we haven't actually seen him lose control in anyway, although we have heard rumors about the murders he's committed outside the pages of the narrative. We've seen laughing Rhett and quiet Rhett and exhausted Rhett and patriotic Rhett and fatherly Rhett and prisoner Rhett and good son Rhett and bad son Rhett and rich Rhett and boyfriend Rhett and friend Rhett and lover Rhett and honeymoon Rhett, but this our first opportunity to see angry Rhett.
But if nothing else, to this point Rhett Butler has been predictably unpredictable. That's part of his charm, isn't it? We know him well by this point, but in reality we don't know him at all. We like him and we trust him, but we don't know who he really is or what he's really like deep down. Every time we get a glimpse of his internal world he either walls himself off immediately or buries the truth in lies, and we cannot read him even after all these years. A lot of people might link Rhett's poker face to his poker career, but I think MM has shown us that Rhett probably started concealing his feelings in childhood. It couldn't have been easy growing up on the Charleston Battery under the thumb of a father who clearly hated everything about him, and I think Rhett learned early on to disguise his feelings or to stop having feelings altogether or, even better, that's probably how he learned to smile so convincingly in moments of distress. That's sort of the only thing we know about Rhett, isn't it? That's his only poker tell that we can decode even at this late date: if he's smiling, something truly terrible is happening.
Anyway, Rhett knocks before he enters Scarlett's room. And then "he entered and closed the door." Now, keep in mind that this entire conversation occurs upstairs in Scarlett's enormous mansion, and he could have very easily kept the door open most likely since all the servants are keeping their distances from Scarlett's room, but he closes the door behind him anyway. Why?
I think Rhett seeks privacy in this moment because he knows he's going to have to give Scarlett a pep talk in order to get her out of bed. The entire town of Atlanta knows that Scarlett got caught playing kiss face with Ashley that afternoon, but Rhett seems to believe it's important that nobody besides the two of them realizes that Scarlett is terrified. As he says: "While I may endure a trollop for a wife, I won't endure a coward," and I'm still not exactly sure why bravery means so much to him. But it does. He doesn't care if his wife is caught smacking lips with another man, but the idea of Scarlett staying home when everybody expects her to stay home and be guilty is too much for him to take.
Rhett keeps his cool for the most part throughout the rest of this chapter, but as he helps Scarlett get dressed for the party, he seems to enjoy hurting her. His movements and his gestures become increasingly violence, but it's pretty difficult for me to decide if his rage is building steadily inside of him as he interacts with Scarlett in her bedroom and then jerks her elbow and leaves a bruise as he guides her into Miss Melly's party or if he's already blind with anger when he walks into the room and is merely squeezing it down and holding it in until the party is over and he's back home and can finally let all his emotions brim over.
It's also interesting to note that even during this conversation, Rhett is still holding Scarlett at arm's length and he never once comments on his own feelings. He's pissed on behalf of Bonnie and the other kids, and his pissed at Scarlett because of what he thinks she's done to Melly, but he never even alludes to what he's thinking or feeling about any of this. Probably because he doesn't want to reveal too much, but also because, quite probably, he's feeling so many emotions he doesn't even know what to think.
Poor Rhett.
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