"And apologies, once postponed, become harder and harder to make, and finally impossible."
Credit to Scarlett for finally maturing enough to consider apologizing to Rhett. But it's a shame--a terrible, painful shame--that Scarlett still doesn't understand Rhett or her relationship with Rhett enough to realize that she needs to apologize for much more than just the words she said after Bonnie's death. She's been hurting him and slighting him for a long time, but she's blind to almost all of it, and she feels that Rhett's terrifying decline is a direct result of Bonnie's demise.
But he's been going downhill for a while.
The best thing about GWTW is that almost all of the characters change substantially over the twelve years of the novel. Scarlett and Rhett and Melly and Ashley stay the same of course because people like them do not fundamentally change their personalities, yet even within this sameness there's a great deal of transformation. MM returns time and again to the idea of Rhett's profile being similar to the profile of roman emperor on a coin, and while the face on the coin changes from that of a young conqueror into a bloated despot it's important to remember that the value of the coin itself never actually alters. It's still the same money, but there are two sides to every coin and both sides are always present whether you like them or ignore them or not.
There are a lot of different ways to construct characters in works of fiction. Superheroes like Batman and Superman and Spiderman are built on their layers and the conflict between their alternative personalities, but GWTW is not built that way. Rather, for Scarlett, Rhett, Melly, and Ashley their positive traits and negative traits are all tied up together in one bundle. Rhett is a hedonist at heart. He's a hardworking hedonist, but restraint and limits are not exactly his strong points. He reigned himself in while Bonnie was alive, but now that she's gone he just totally gives himself away to excess.
He drinks and drinks and drinks and whores and whores and whores. Or anyway, Scarlett seems to think Rhett is getting down with his pros over at Belle's, but that doesn't mean he actually is doing anything of the sort, does it?
Not that it matters, bless his drunken heart.
He's regressing now, as we all do whenever we encounter something traumatic or we lose someone important to us. He's revisiting all the things that he thinks made him so happy when he was a younger man, but we sense that they certainly don't make him happy anymore (if they ever actually did, which is up for debate, of course). Whiskey and sex probably got him through his hardest times when he was learning how to make his way in the world, but he's older now and there's no satisfaction to be found. His eventual departure to Charleston at the end of GWTW seems random the first time you read it, but it actually makes perfect sense because he's already traced his steps back to his earliest days in Atlanta and New Orleans, so he's got nowhere left to go but back home to Charleston. Back home to his mother and his family and all the things he threw away when he was young and hungry.
And I don't know, you guys. It's just sad.
Terribly, terribly sad.
MM has taken us for a roller coaster ride that rivals anything I've been on at amusement parks around the world. We've gone up and down and around with Scarlett, we've been thrilled and we've been sickened and we've been surprised and we've been cynical and we've lived through a hell of a lot. We are 97% through GWTW now, but as you read these final chapters it is still impossible to figure out precisely what's going to happen in the rest of the book. The possibilities still seem almost endless, but we're running out of time. Plus, the four of them have already been through so much, haven't they?
But Scarlett....
Oh dear. Oh dear, dear, dark, depraved, corrupt, crazy Scarlett.
Scarlett seems to be taking Bonnie's death rather well, and her mental state seems surprisingly strong considering she just lost her child. Except...you guys, I don't know.
She seems so clueless in this chapter. And so lost.
Scarlett has never been very perceptive, but her inability to understand herself and other people is quite shocking in chapter 60. Its almost cruel, isn't it? The way she sort of expects Rhett to work through his grief in a manner of weeks, her confusion over his black depression, her stray desire to reach out to him despite everything that went down in the last chapter, just...all of it.
One description that really breaks my heart is when Scarlett describes Rhett as looking "at her out of black blank eyes that made no opportunity for her to speak." And it hurts because it seems that Scarlett is being ridiculously obtuse and stubborn here. His eyes might be blank, but can't she tell he's in a living hell? Yes, he has a poker face. Yes, his eyes are blank. But why is she pretending that she doesn't know that he's using his mask to hide his pain? Even the first time reader of GWTW understands Rhett and sympathizes with his feelings, but Scarlett....
Why does it have to be like this, you guys?
Is this when our alliances and allegiances and support flips for good? I don't know.
I love Scarlett you guys. I really do. But I'm not so sure that MM loves her by the end of the novel. Because MM has created such a chasm between our understanding of Rhett and Scarlett's understanding of her husband, that we have no choice but to resent our protagonist. Rhett Butler is God. And he's going understandably bat-shit insane in front of our eyes and Scarlett is doing absolutely nothing to stop it, and it just fucking sucks. Although, what could she have done?
There's too much acrimony between the two of them now. Scarlett is his wife, but in reality Scarlett is the very last person who could give Rhett Butler comfort at a time like this. Hell, I'm willing to wager that even Rhett's estranged father would have a better chance of pulling him back to reality than Scarlett. She's been killing him slowly for a long time, and now that he's drunk and distant and crazy, what could she do or say to help?
And then, in a moment of utter selfishness and bitchiness that makes me think Scarlett is actually crazier than Rhett in this period after Bonnie's death, we get this incredibly funny, incredibly horrible little gem from the mind of MM:
"Oh for another girl, pretty and gay and willful and full of laughter, not like the giddy-brained Ella. Why, oh, why couldn't God have taken Ella if He had to take one of her children?"
I'm all for joking on Ella and Wade, but come on, Scarlett. Come on MM. Say it ain't so. Nobody could be that mean. It makes me laugh every time I read it because it's so unexpected and blunt and wild and weird, but my God! If that's the way Scarlett's mind works, then...who is this woman, really? Bonnie's death should make her appreciate Wade and Ella more, shouldn't it? Either Scarlett is not thinking clearly or she is truly monstrous and it's almost impossible to figure out which and I'm confused and scared because what in the world is happening to them? What is happening to all of us?
"He was bitter now," MM tells us as she describes Rhett from the perspective of the local women who watch him as he moves through the town, "Where he had been pleasantly jeering, brutal where his thrusts had once been tempered with humor."
The first time I read GWTW I was young enough and inexperienced enough and stupid enough to believe that the decay that creeps into the final chapters of the novel were particular to Rhett and Scarlett. I thought their alcoholism and desperation and unhappiness and bitterness and hopelessness and rudeness were products of their environment. I thought they were cautionary tales. I thought they became broken shells of themselves because they'd lived such hard, dramatic lives and lost a child, but now that I'm older I understand that their pain is universal.
