Chapter 6, ya'll....

Chapter 6 (Part 1):Scarlett Makes Plans--God Laughs....

Chapter 6 of GWTW picks up right where Chapter 5 left off.  It's been close to two years since I've written in this blog, so I'm clearly not as good at consistency as Margaret Mitchell is, but at least I'm trying....

Anyway, as chapter 6 begins, Scarlett, her sisters, and her father are pulling up to the Wilkes Plantation and are greeted by a "haze of smoke hanging lazily in the tops of the tall trees," and she "smelled the mingled savory odors of burning hickory logs and roasting pork and mutton." These sentences seem merely descriptive at first blush, but Mitchell then takes the time to contrast John Wilkes hospitality (his bbq that morning will be held "on the gentle slope leading down to the rose garden, a pleasant, shady place") with the Northern/Yankee rudeness of Mrs. Calvert who hates the smell of bbq and makes her guests sit far away from the house whenever she has parties. GWTW is a sprawling book and it can be very difficult to keep track of the tertiary folks with walk-on parts like Mrs. Calvert and John Wilkes, but it is clear that Mitchell herself always had a clear idea about the story arcs of even the smallest bit players in her book.  It's a minor detail at this point for Mrs. Calvert to dislike bbq, but that little idea does highlight the difference between Mrs. Calvert and the rest of her neighbors--a difference that will become more important later in the book.

Anyway, the food at this bbq is absolutely delicious.  One thing I've always loved about books in the South is that the characters always know how to cook and eat, and GWTW is no exception to this rule: bbq sauce, Brunswick stew, hoecakes and yams (for the servants)...yummers!

But--forget the food!

Mitchell has set a beautiful scene of Scarlett going on the attack at the Wilkes house.  She is frantically searching for Ashley (and for Melanie and Charles), and she's flirting with every man she sees in her ultimately misguided (I was going to say unsuccessful, but that would have been going too far) attempt at making Ashley jealous.  But none of that matters because, ladies and gentleman, A Stranger From Charleston has now entered the story.
   
     "....her eyes fell on a stranger, standing alone in the hall, staring at her in a cool impertinent way that brought her up sharply with a mingled feeling of feminine pleasure...and an embarrassed sensation that her dress was too low in the bosom. He looked quite old, at least thirty-five. He was a tall man and powerfully built...[and he had] wide shoulders, so heavy with muscles, almost too heavy for gentility. When her eye caught his, he smiled, showing animal-white teeth below a close-clipped black mustache.  He was dark of face, swarthy as a pirate, and his eyes were as bold and black as any pirate's appraising...a maiden to be ravished..."

Oh my!

It has taken five and a half chapters, but Mitchell has finally introduced the man who would ultimately become Scarlett's 3rd husband and bitterest foe.  The first time I read GWTW I had absolutely no idea how the story was going to play out in the end. I'd heard Rhett Butler's name a million times and Clark Gable and Vivian Leigh were on the cover of my paperback copy, but I certainly didn't know what role he would play in the story.  And to Mitchell's credit, she doesn't tip her hand in the slightest in this initial description.  Scarlett herself does not have a particular reaction to Rhett Butler's appearance.  In the movie Leigh and Gable give each other a fairly flirtatious going over in the hall at Twelve Oaks, but in the book it's not clear if Rhett is going to be a major character or a minor character, friend or foe.

Hell, he doesn't even speak a word of dialogue for another several hundred words.

He just looks at Scarlett, she looks at him, and then he's called away to another room.

That's pretty doggone amazing, isn't it?

We do learn more about Rhett Butler when Scarlett meets up with  Cathleen Calvert (Mrs. Calvert's step-daughter!) and begins gossiping.  We learn that Rhett is a scamp with a bad reputation, that he isn't received (Oh Dear!), that he was expelled from West Point, and that Rhett took a Charleston girl out buggy riding, got her into a compromising situation when their buggy broke down, came home and refused to marry her, and then shot the girl's angry brother in a duel....

And then Mitchell closes this description with a little internal dialogue from Scarlett. It seems that instead of being horrified by Rhett Butler's actions in Cathleen's story, Scarlett respects Rhett for not marrying a fool and wishes that she had somehow thought of a way to get Ashley to compromise her.  Which is amazingly progressive and hugely funny, and also wonderful foreshadowing for all the tricky things Scarlett will do during the rest of the book.

In addition to Rhett Butler's grand entrance, chapter 6 also includes the (much less grand) entrance of Miss Melanie Hamilton, Ashley's future wife and Scarlett's nemesis.  Melanie is Scarlett's foe in this section of the story, so she gets quite a bit more description than Rhett--although not much more, to tell the truth.  She has "too large brown eyes" and a "cloud of curly dark hair" and a sweet, timid, plain face.  Her body is childishly undeveloped (FORESHADOWING!), and she's having a quiet chat with her fiance in a corner of the yard, much to Scarlett's chagrin.

GWTW is a story about the South during and after the Civil War, and it succeeds on many levels. But I think chapter 6--and, indeed, most of the first part of the book--are amazing because they mimic the way life feels when you are a teenager.  The characters Scarlett encounters in this book remind me of the people you meet during your first year of college. They are all strangers and it's impossible to tell straight away which ones will be in your life for the long haul and which ones will disappear after a year or two.  It's impossible to know which ones will be friends, which will be foes, and which will exist forever in the murky gray areas between those two extremes.

Chapter 1: To Scarlett on our 16th Birthday

I read Gone With the Wind for the first time during the summer of 1995. I was sixteen that July and bored out of my mind, too young to drive, too lazy to work, and too broke to do anything much besides obsessively watch Cary Grant films on AMC and wear out my library card. I've always been a bit of a history nerd, so I spent that June reading random American history books. And romance novels. Lots and lots of romance novels.

By the time Independence Day rolled around, I'd exhausted our local supply of bodice rippers and was looking for something new. Something different. Something classic, but sexy. I considered Pride and Prejudice and a few other similar books crowding the assignment shelf, but then I found Gone With the Wind. GWTW is the most famous movie of all time, but I'd never sat through it. Consequently, I knew very little about Scarlett beyond a few "Fiddle-Dee-Dees" and I knew nothing about Rhett besides his mustache and the fact that he "didn't give a damn." I went into the book with an open mind, but it was long and I was sure it was antiquated. And I was sure I wouldn't enjoy it. In fact, as I glanced at the 1048 pages in my borrowed copy, I doubted that I would get much further than 200 or so pages.

But, of course, I was wrong.

I was hooked by the end of the first paragraph. Scarlett O'Hara and I have nothing in common on the surface, but we were both 16, both sassy and both smart, and out of all the books I'd read and the movies I'd seen she was the character who reminded me most of myself. Over the course of 1048 pages and 12 years of Civil War drama I gained a friend. A homegirl. An ally who I instantly knew would be my bfff(best female fictional friend) for life. I cheered with her, cried with her, celebrated her triumphs, and had my little teenaged heart broken into a million little pieces by the wild finish and great tragedy of her marriage to Rhett. I've read GWTW cover-to-cover at least 10 times over the past 16 years, but it never gets old for me. And since this is the 16th anniversary of a meeting that happened when I was 16, I've decided this is as good a time as ever to blog the book chapter by chapter. To do an in-depth analysis of Mitchell's style, to evaluate the characters, to figure out precisely how a book that shouldn't be any good at all wound up being the Great American Novel (yeah, I said it). So, without further ado, let's begin at the beginning and take a look at Chapter 1.

Action: Chapter 1 of GWTW begins with Scarlett O'Hara having a conversation. Now, if this had been a lesser book and a lesser author and a lesser character, Scarlett would have probably been talking to just one person. But she's not.

Instead, she's talking to the Tarleton Twins, two super hot idiots who've just been expelled from school (again), and are hiding from their angry mother at Tara. Brent and Stewart are the 19th century versions of Prince Harry: silly and stupid and brash and tall, quick to anger, charming and ginger. What girl wouldn't love them?

Oh yeah. Scarlett. Because she's in love with Ashley. But we don't even find out much about Scarlett and Ashely until Chapter 2, because Mitchell is too busy using the Tarleton Twins to tell us about the County. It's a splendid little device because the Twins are hilarious and crazy but solid and safe, and as such they're the perfect representations of Mitchell's Antebellum south. Even more than Ashley (who is not in this chapter), more than Ellen, and more than Scarlett herself. They're honest and hardy, wild and free, rich and totally, totally, totally fucking insane. They're so close they're both trying to date Scarlett at the same time. And so crazy they've been expelled from every southern university this side of Tuskegee (yeah, I said it). But that's okay, because book learnin' isn't really important for men in that part of the world. The only things southern gentlemen need to know are how to drink whiskey, how to shoot straight, how to play cards, and how to properly curse, and the Twins have those things all figured out, thank you very much.

So Brent and Stuart and Scarlett sit on the porch and gossip. And it's awesome because, despite the fact that it's a 1930's author essentially transcribing a conversation between young adults in 1861, it's vibrant. The characters bounce along, wonderfully ignorant of life beyond their own simple, beautiful world, convinced that Yankees are cowards, utterly sure that their lives will continue on just as it is, certain that nothing will ever change their world (jai guru deva om, etc). Interestingly enough, Mitchell doesn't use any foreshadowing in this chapter.

She doesn't have to. The reader knows the War is coming, and the reader knows it's going to destroy everything the three of them can see. We don't know precisely how Scarlett, Brent, and Stewart will experience the War of Northern Aggression (mmmm hmmmm), but we do know it will change them. Thusly, this entire first chapter challenges the reader emotionally because the characters are blissfully unaware of the freight train racing down the tracks, but the reader can already here the whistle and see the smoke and is just waiting patiently for the coming destruction. It's like that part in an 80's horror movie when the super cool, super rich, super beautiful high school seniors get in their car and head up to summer camp. You watch and shake your head, and wait on tenterhooks for the fallout you know is coming.