"Tomorrow--well, tomorrow was another day. Tomorrow she would think of some excuse, some counter accusations, some way of putting Rhett in the wrong."
Scarlett is fighting for her social survival now, but it's so sad that she is trying so desperately to turn all of this around on Rhett. Of all the people involved in this situation, Rhett is the least culpable. He wasn't even there when Scarlett and Ashley got busted at the lumber yard. Scarlett and Ashley weren't committing any crimes at the lumber yard, but if we're talking crime and punishment then surely Rhett and Melly are the true victim's in this scenario. Sadly--and predictably-Scarlett's first instinct is to worry about Ashley and his reputation and whether or not Melly's husband is going to hate her now, which....sigh.
It's sad and it's unfortunate, but Scarlett's stance does make sense in a screwed up, immature way. Because Scarlett is in love with Ashley Wilkes. Still. She's living in Rhett's mansion and she's living like a queen on Rhett's money, but she is still in love with Ashley. And why not? Even now, even after all of this, there is still something appealing in Ashley, isn't there? I still love Joey McIntyre and the rest of the New Kids on the Block, and my heart still quickens whenever I see one of the boys I loved in grade-school posting a comment on Facebook, so it would be a lie to pretend that Scarlett is delusional here. Scarlett's love for Ashley is as real as anything else in the story. Now, that's not to say that it's not built on hopes and dreams and puffery, and Scarlett would do well to reevaluate her understanding of Ashley Wilkes as time passes, but that's not fair. Loving Ashley is part of her identity and her secret crush on Ashley has gotten her through some truly tough times, and the book would run out of steam if Scarlett suddenly fell out of love with Ashley after everything she's gone through to stay connected to him.
Anyway.
So here we go.
If Scarlett's love for Ashley is part of her identity, I think Rhett's love for Scarlett is as much a part of him as his mustache. Scarlett wouldn't be Scarlett if she wasn't chasing after Ashley, and Rhett wouldn't be Rhett if he wasn't head over heels in love with Scarlett. He cannot bring himself to hate Scarlett now. He still loves her. He knows he should hate her, but he still loves her and I think he's having trouble balancing his anger against his love. He's furious here, but he's also humiliated and I don't think Rhett ever learned to deal with mortification. He's all masculine swagger and Scarlett has backed him into a corner and he doesn't know what the hell he should do.
"He was drunk and showing it," MM tells us, as Scarlett enters the dining room, "and she had never before seen him show his liquor, no matter how much he drank."
I find this incredibly difficult to understand because Rhett drinks a lot. You hardly ever see him at night without a drink in his hand, and even Bonnie eventually tells him to stop coming home with liquor on his breath, but Scarlett has never seen him drunk? Hmmm. Is it that she's never seen him drunk, or is it that she misunderstands his personality so much she doesn't know what he's like when he's actually drunk? Ugh. She needs to start paying better attention to her husband, ya'll.
There's so much tension in this chapter, you guys. And I think the source of that tension lies in the fact that Rhett is acting like a stranger. We've been reading about Rhett Butler for one-thousand pages, and we know him almost as well as we know Scarlett by this point in the novel, but MM switches it up on us very quickly in this chapter. He's been wearing his mask for so long we actually started to believe that he really was aloof and cool and careless; we and Scarlett really do believe that "nothing mattered very much to him, that he thought everything in life, including her, an ironic joke." But MM flips it all around very quickly in this chapter, and we realize that his behavior up to this chapter has been little more than a facade.
Casablanca was on last week and I love that movie almost as much as I love GWTW, and my favorite scene is the scene where Rick Blaine is drinking on his own at night at his cafe. He's blind drunk and nursing his pain and you get the sense that he hates himself for still having such feelings for Ilsa, and it's so spot on for how Rhett is feeling in this part of the novel that it's easy to think of these two scenes as two halves of the same whole. Except--and here's the difference between these two stories and between these two characters--Rick's famous scene ends with Humphrey Bogart slumped over in harmless despair. On the other hand, Rhett's drunken scene ends with--
Oh good gracious.
Oh me, oh my.
This should be the end of GWTW, shouldn't it? MM could have very easily saved her readers and her characters all the sweet torture of the next few chapters by simply having Rhett pack his bags and leave Scarlett right here and now. But MM is a never-say-quit, never-say-die author and a vengeful God to boot, so instead of having mercy on her creation she takes everything up another level and toys with Scarlett and Rhett and Ashley and Melly until they're all broken and bruised and bloody and dying. Goodness.
************
"There was something in their depths she did not recognize, could not understand, something deeper than anger, stronger than pain, something driving him until his eyes glowed redly like twin coals." And how wonderful is that? Rhett's normally coal black eyes are now lit with fire and glowing red and I love everything about this. Everything. The drinking, the swearing, the violence,the heartbreak, the darkness, the unpredictability of the moments, the shock of realizing we barely know who Rhett really is, the creeping realization that Scarlett might actually be in mortal danger, the weird thrill when all our fears are realized and he gives into passion and drags her up the stairs.
It's delicious.
Yes, that's right. I said it. I know I'm not supposed to say it. And if this was anybody but Rhett I would probably be utterly repulsed by all of this, but in truth I love everything about this. I trust Rhett implicitly, and I never really get the sense that he'd actually kill Scarlett or anything like that. But it's not like such a result would be totally outside the realm of possibility either and there are more questions than answers in this chapter and it's wonderful and horrible and exhilarating and crazy and I love this so much I don't even know how to contain myself.
But listen:
Rhett begins his discussion of that day's events by putting some distance between himself and the events of the evening. He calls it a comedy as a matter of fact, "an amusing quality," which is all the more insane because he then describes a scenario that is anything but funny:
1.) the erring woman (being stoned by the village)
2.) the wronged husband (supporting his wife)
3.) the wronged wife (Oh Melly); and, of course
4.) the lover ("looking like a damn fool and wishing he were dead")
Where's the joke in any of this?
I have a pretty good sense of humor and my humor is pretty black and gallows because I was raised on Rhett Butler and Kurt Vonnegut, but even I can see that there's nothing funny in any of this. I suppose he's laughing because there's no irony in any of this. Everything played out exactly as even the simplest observer could have predicted, but I would argue that there's internal irony in this situation, isn't there? There's emotional irony in all of this. Rhett expected Scarlett to chase Ashley, but I don't think he expected to be humiliated. And I certainly don't think he expected it all to hurt so much. He wants and expects Scarlett's everlasting devotion to Ashley to sting a little bit; he expects it to be a paper cut, something that can be covered by a band-aid and easily forgotten. But he's bleeding out instead. Scarlett pricks him in his most vulnerable spot, and he's oozing blood all over and he's drinking to staunch the flow and he's talking to preserve his sanity and he's raging out so he won't lose consciousness. Tragic.
It's interesting to note that he lashes out at Scarlett here, but he doesn't actually insult her. Instead, he confronts her by forcing her to listen to the truth. He's mentioned Scarlett's aversion to the truth more than a few times since they got married, and now he seems to take pleasure in filling her head with truth after truth after truth. He wants her to see what he sees. He wants her to understand what he understands, and he's not going to rest until he's sure that she gets it. You can make an argument of course that his physical/sexual assault at the end of the chapter is the height of his cruelty toward Scarlett, but I really do think the frankness in his words, the honesty he's throwing out at her in this chapter, is his best weapon against his wife. His words aren't particularly shocking, but Scarlett doesn't like to hear them. She wants to escape from Rhett and the things he's saying, but he's not about to let her wiggle out of the room.
He's so mad he gets Biblical on Scarlett, taunting her for lusting in her heart after Ashley. The allusion is lost on Scarlett because she hasn't cracked a bible since, well, ever. Rhett, on the other hand, seems to read the bible a lot. He's got a Sky Masterson-esque mastery of the good book, and he's so well versed in the New Testament that you'd start to wonder if he trained for the priesthood at some point in his life. Anyway, take note that Matthew 5:28 might seem to be an on-the-nose verse for Scarlett's situation, but that particular parable of Christ is actually an admonishment for men to stop lusting in their hearts after women. Even Rhett cannot readily think of an example in which a woman lusted after a man the way that Scarlett lusts after Ashley. This is a case of first impression as we used to call it back in law school, and Rhett seems almost utterly perplexed by the novelty of a wife loving another woman's husband so much that it blots out her good judgment.
Anyway, Rhett starts telling the truth about Ashley and Scarlett. And then he starts telling the truth about himself for the first time.
"And I was cast out because my coarse ardors were too much for your refinement--because you didn't want any more children. How bad that made me feel, dear heart! How it cut me!"
This is the very first time Rhett has ever admitted that Scarlett's behavior has hurt him. He's been pretending that Scarlett's celibacy is no big deal. He's been pretending that he's barely noticed the rejection, but now we see that he's been quietly nursing his pain and going mad. The first time I read GWTW I took him at his word. I assumed that he'd been tired of Scarlett for a while and that he was quite content to get his sexual fulfillment from the prostitutes at Belle's sporting house. But now he actually admits that he's howling at the moon this whole time.
***************************
I'm going to Atlanta in a few weeks. And while I'm there, I'm going to spend half my time visiting GWTW sights in Jonesboro and downtown Atlanta and over toward the Flint River where Tara would have been located. The other half of my time will be spent at Warm Springs, where I will tour FDR's little White House because I'm a nerd and a history buff and can't think of anything cooler to do with a lost weekend in Georgia. I don't know if you watched Ken Burn's Roosevelt documentary series when it aired a few months ago, but even if you didn't I'm sure you've heard somewhere down the line about the weirdness of Eleanor and Franklin's marriage. They had six children together, but they were fifth cousins and she hated sex, and eventually she found out that FDR was having an affair with her secretary and for a few months it seems like the two of them were headed toward a divorce.
But they stayed together.
Eventually they decided to stay together.
And they went on to do amazing things. They went forth and were brilliant, as my old English professor at Mizzou Anne Mack used to say. They were marvelous. They were the real deal, the liberal dynamic duo, and between the two of them they invented the modern, fair American democracy. I love them to pieces. But their marriage sucked.
It sucked.
Everybody knew it was weird. Even they knew it was weird. They rarely spent any time together, even while he was president and he carried on his own affairs while she....well, I don't exactly know what is rumor and what is fact when it comes to Eleanor Roosevelt's life. She might have had love affairs with men and women over the years, but nobody has ever hinted at the idea that she wasted any of her romantic love on Franklin. They were barely friends, as a matter of fact.
And perhaps that was for the best.
Perhaps that's all any of us can hope for, when you get right down to it. You can't control who you love, after all.
The heart wants what it wants.
And nobody knows that better than Rhett Butler.
He doesn't want to want Scarlett any more. He wants to be able to walk away and leave her alone once and for all, but he can't do it. He can't quit her. Even after all of this, he still can't quit her. He should be utterly disgusted and annoyed with her now, but even as he rains bitter tirades of truth down on her you get the sense that he can't decide whether he wants to crush her head together like a walnut or make sweet, sweet love to her until she forgets all about Ashley. He thinks she's a child because she's hanging on to her love of Ashley, and as this conversation evolves you can tell that there's a part of him that wants to use sex to turn her into a woman. I'm not even sure that it's a real idea in his mind. I'm not sure he knows what he wants to do until he's actually doing it. Frankly, I think Rhett is so drunk and so angry in this chapter that at some point all his rationality and reason is replaced by nothing but biology, nothing but chemistry. Rhett Butler the cool husband has been replaced by Rhett Butler the riverboat gambler who in turn has been replaced by Rhett Butler the sexually frustrated alpha male animal, and this person (this stranger) is finally pushed aside by Rhett Butler the highly volatile chemical compound. His earlier behavior was fueled by anger and rage, but that changed into lust which changed into nothing more than a few highly combustible compounds.
It's like nuclear fusion, that's what this is like.
He implodes from within like Little Man or Fat Boy, and he's so big and strong and his rage is moving so fast that it quickly overtakes him and Scarlett. Rhett was nothing but collateral damage in the last chapter, but now he's a bomb in his own right and the fall out from his explosion eventually shakes Scarlett's foundation to the core and the aftershocks are so powerful and unpredictable Scarlett doesn't understand the full extent of the blast until the final chapter of the novel.
But for all his power and all his passion, I think Rhett's words in this chapter also reveal the fatal flaws in his thinking:
"We are both scoundrels, Scarlett," he says, in those wonderfully tense moments before he carries her up the stairs "...we could have been happy, for I loved you and I know you..."
But he's wrong. I don't think he and Scarlett could have ever really been happy together. Plus, isn't it interesting that Rhett still guards his heart by using the past tense here? His words and actions seem to point to a present tense love but he hides behind loved instead of being honest, because he's still too afraid that Scarlett will reject him outright. He's pretending to be past it all. He's pretending he's over it. He's pretending she can no longer hurt him, he's pretending he's walled off and closed-off and too cool for school, and I don't blame him for trying to protect himself because Scarlett can be vicious. And I don't think that his honesty in this moment would have changed Scarlett's mind because Scarlett doesn't give a shit about any of this. He's confessing his past feelings for his own benefit and MM is throwing it all out there for the reader's benefit, but none of this is for Scarlett's benefit because she's not ready to listen. As they say in Rhett Butler's New Testament, "if any man have ears to hear, let him hear,"
Scarlett is a smart lady and a wonderful protagonist, but she is not a good listener. She has very low emotional intelligence and things that other women might notice based on intuition and understanding seem to go right over her head. As a matter of fact, even after Rhett begins his sexual onslaught on the stairs, Scarlett's mind seems to resist comprehension. He comes at her so fast and with so much force her mind begins to blur at the edges, and I think it's telling that Scarlett's mind seems to go blank with darkness at this moment. We expect clarity. We expect illumination. We expect that Scarlett will finally be able to translate Rhett's desires into something we can understand, but instead "she was darkness and he was darkness and there had never been anything before this time, only darkness and his lips upon her."
Scarlett tries to speak, but he kisses her to stop her from speaking because even drunk Rhett Butler is smart enough to realize that words will only ruin the moment. So instead of more jibes and crazy talk, MM provides us with a list of Scarlett's internal feelings as they rush by:
* Joy
* Fear
*Madness
*Excitement
*Surrender
And what does it all mean?
****************************
I don't know, guys.
I don't know what happened once they reached Scarlett's bedroom. I don't think there was much more talking between the two of them, that's for sure. I don't think Rhett took a break and asked Scarlett's permission before he had sex with her, and we know for sure that they had sex because Scarlett winds up pregnant from this very night. And at any rate, in later parts of the novel Rhett himself looks back on this night as something shameful, and it certainly is easy to assume that he took her by force at least once.
But I'm not certain about any of this. I'm not sure. And I would also argue that Rhett's disgust with his behavior on this night might hinge more on his regrettable loss of control than on anything unlawful. And yet on the next morning when Scarlett wakes up, she says that "he had humbled her, hurt her, used her brutally through a wild mad night and she had gloried in it." But while I might think I know what that means, I think it's important to remember that the things that women of my generation find boring and run-of-the-mill were totally scandalous to MM and were outrageous and unacceptable to women of Scarlett's generation. Sex in the time of Beyonce and Kim Kardashian means one thing, but sex in the 1930's meant something different, and sex in the Victoria era meant...Jesus, I don't even know what. But I know that we've got so many (too many?) items on the sex buffett menu these days, and most of those dishes were too spicy and outlandish for the women who came before us. Like....I had chicken tikka masala and Taj Mahal beer for dinner last night, but those dishes didn't come to the US until the 1970s and Scarlett would have flipped out if she'd ever seen anything like that on her plate, if you know what I mean and I think you do.
So...I mean, I don't know. Rhett and Scarlett had sex and Scarlett certainly seems to enjoy some part of it, but I don't know if she explicitly consented to any of what went down. For all I know he locked her to the bedpost and spanked her 50 Shades style, but I don't know that Scarlett would go in for that sort of thing, honestly. So what did happen? Well, let's look at our options:
1.) Scarlett continues to protest vocally and Rhett continues to force himself on her over the course of the night. This is the ickiest option, to be sure.
2.) Scarlett eventually gives up her protest, and decides to surrender when he overpowers her because she knows there's no point to fighting him. In the end she enjoys it, but maybe she didn't enjoy it while it was happening.
3.) Something along the lines of what the wonderful Submit Guess casually tossed out in her fanfiction chapter back in 2009. Have I mentioned that this scene set my world on fire when I read it the first time? It was like I'd died and gone to lust heaven. This is my favorite take on what happened once Scarlett and Rhett got up stairs that night. He might have carried her upstairs and he might have slammed the door shut when they got to her bedroom, but once they got inside they were equals. They were partners in mutual sexual destruction, an idea that makes my toes curl with delight.
4.) What if they got upstairs and they brutalized each other? And what if Scarlett eventually gets the upper hand? Yes, Rhett is a very powerful man and he's dominating and intimidating, but Scarlett is just as formidable, isn't she? She's a force to be reckoned with and I think it's possible that our girl found a way to turn the tables on him. Even if she didn't realize she was doing it at the time.
That's probably my favorite idea of their bedroom adventure. If Rhett had been there in the morning or if he'd materialized sometime that day, being normal and cool I would assume that Scarlett simply lay there while he did his dirty work. But not only isn't Rhett cool with whatever went down, he stays out of their house for two whole days. And yes, you could argue that he stayed away from Scarlett because he was ashamed of what he'd done, because he was afraid to face-up to his own conduct, but when he does come back you get the distinct feeling that he's afraid of her.
He shows up in her bedroom looking good ("freshly barbered, shaved and massaged (?), and he was sober, but his eyes were bloodshot and his face puffy from drink."), but he greets her in a weirdly formal manner. He's trying to keep it all cool and casual so he can pretend the other night was just one of those things (*cough cough*), and Scarlett is so surprised by his suddenly aloof behavior she doesn't even notice how strangely he's acting. "And now he was back," Scarlett tells us, "insulting, sardonic, out of reach." He's cool and distant and apologetic because he feels guilty about what he forced her to do (*ahem*), but also because he doesn't know what she's going to do or say now that he's in her room once again. He's revisiting the scene of his crime, but he's not being honest about what really went down. This whole thing pisses Scarlett off (of course), but when she looks up at him it's still clear to everybody in the world except Scarlett herself that this man would die to hear her say something nice right here and right now.
For all of Rhett's masculine power, there are moments when he's nothing but a scared little boy and this is one of them. Scarlett looks up at him and his eyes are glittering with "that old, puzzling, watchful glint...keen, eager, a though he hung on her next words, hoping they would be--what was he hoping?"
He's hoping for love, Scarlett. That's all he's hoping for. That's all any of us are hoping for in this big, bad world.
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