Chapter 23 (Part 1): "It looked and sounded like the end of the world."

Chapter 23 picks up moments after chapter 22 closes, and we find our girl Scarlett wearily lighting lamps and eating "half a pone of hard corn bread in the skillet" while she waits for Prissy (and Rhett).  It's "steamingly hot" in the house and...isn't it amazing how MM uses little moments of sensory awareness in this chapter to drive home Scarlett's thoughts and feelings in this section of the book? I'm sitting in air-conditioned comfort at the moment, but I'm fully engaged in Scarlett's experiences because MM takes the time to describe tiny details that add veracity to the scene.  I've never had a "pone" of corn bread in my life, but I swear I can taste the greasy, buttery, crumbly starchy mess in my mouth even as I type on this computer.  She also finds some hominy and....

Is hominy the same thing as regular grits? Anybody know?  Weirdly enough, I had grits for breakfast this morning (instant and delicious!), but somehow I doubt MM is describing the bacon-flavored, (over) processed packet of calorie-laden goodness I digested along with my regular daily ration of turkey bacon and CBS News at 7AM, but I could be wrong.  Wikipedia seems to think that the difference lies in treatment of the corn meal, but I don't know.  Anyway, I tend to think of myself as a yankee most of the time, but most true Yankees I've met in life (New Englanders and people who went to private liberal arts colleges in small towns because they liked the "setting") are scared to death of grits and cornbread.  So maybe I'm not such a dyed-in-the-wool Yankee after all.

Okay, that's enough about grits and breakfast food. Although if you have any good recipes for red eye gravy please pass them along in the comments section.  I've been reading about red eye gravy for my whole life, but I've never tasted it!

Now that the situation is no longer hot and Melanie has had her baby, Scarlett can relax a little bit.  And  because she's Scarlett "relaxation" basically just means "it's time to be mean to Melly." Scarlett keeps most of her frustration with Melly locked inside and almost everybody misunderstands her relationships to Ashley's wife, but the reader knows the truth.  Scarlett hates Melly and can barely tolerate her sister-in-law most of the time, but fate and circumstances keep bringing them together and isn't that always the way? The co-worker you hate the most will always be assigned to your projects, you'll run into your arch enemy every day on the train platform, the guy who dumped you will always pop up as a possible friend connection on your social network.  That's life, and while it's kind of funny that Scarlett can never get away from Melanie I don't think the coincidences that keep bringing them together are all that contrived, really.

Anyway, Scarlett knows she should go back upstairs to help Melly and look after her, "but the idea of returning to that room where she had spent so any nightmare hours was repulsive to her."  So she stays downstairs instead, finishing her grits and cornbread, regaining her strength, and waiting for Prissy and Rhett to emerge from the darkness.  And then--

There's a roar and Scarlett sees a fire somewhere and "her brain swirled with confusion and panic so overpowering she clung to the window sill for support." And that's a wonderful sentence, a real gem that I haven't really appreciated until just now.  MM has been throwing new experiences at Scarlett for a long while now, and at this moment Scarlett's senses become over-whelemed and over-stimulated.  But instead of merely stopping at the "swirl" and "confusion and panic" MM has Scarlett physically explode in a way that mirrors the explosion in the center of town.  The poor girl is so overcome and exhausted by the day's events and surprised by the roar that she almost falls out the window!

And then Prissy finally returns.

Scarlett assumes that the Yankees are burning the town, but Prissy exposits that the explosions are actually the result of the CSA burning ammo as they retreat out of town.   MM is masterful here because Scarlett's disinterest in the events of the broader war or military strategy have kept all the actions of the grays and blues almost totally away from the focus of the novel.  Therefore, the reader assumes the same things that Scarlett assumes, and we are just as surprised as Scarlett to learn that the inferno was caused by the confederates.  Of course, most people living in Atlanta in the 1930's were probably very familiar with the history of the Battle of Atlanta and Sherman's March to the Sea, but I certainly wasn't too intimate with the details the first time I read GWTW.  I'm a Civil War buff, but I certainly assumed that Sherman burned Atlanta to the ground as soon as he took control of the city.  But I was wrong. And so is Scarlett.

Anyway, Prissy finds Rhett "in a bahroom" on Decatur street, one of the bars that Scarlett probably passed earlier on her way back from the hospital no doubt.

Hang on a second, though.  I get that Rhett is a non-combatant, but how in the hell is he able to just hang around drinking shots at a bar when the town is in the process of being invaded? He's explained a little earlier in the book that he's staying in Atlanta because he wants to experience a siege and won't be harmed because he's not in the military, but why is he so sure about his safety? Rhett might not have considered himself a threat to the North, but that doesn't necessarily mean the North doesn't consider him a threat to them, does it? Bottom line, Rhett Butler is an able-bodied southern man between the ages of 16 and 60, and the Billy Sherman I've read about would have locked him away almost instantly.

But anyway, although Prissy's recollection of her conversation with Rhett is basically one long, hilarious excited utterance, she does a great job of painting a picture of the scene as it unfolded.  And the most striking image that emerges is that Rhett Butler thinks everything Prissy tells him is hi-la-ri-ous.  He laughs when he tells Prissy the army took his horse and carriage, and he laughs when he tells Prissy to run home, after he explains that he will steal a horse for Scarlett because he's got lots of experience doing it, apparently ("Ah done stole hawses befo' dis night," Prissy relates).

After I finished GWTW the first time I decided that laughter was Rhett's "tell." He's normally pretty good at keeping his face frozen and keeping his emotions hidden, but he laughs during the strangest times, and I initially assumed this was MM's way of showing us how emotionally affected he actually was deep down in his soul.  But now that I'm a little older, I'm not really so sure.

Maybe he really does think all of this is funny?  Maybe he's not really jeering or being sarcastic or cynical.  Maybe he really does think all of this is amusing.  And it kind of is, come to think of it.  The fall of the south is heartbreaking for many of the characters, but Rhett is the ultimate realist so perhaps he's giggling with delight at the demise of his homeland.

Or maybe he's got some sort of inappropriate laughter mania syndrome?

Anyway, Rhett eventually pulls up in a "small wagon." And:

He came into view and the light of the lamp showed him plainly." 

• His clothing: "debonair as if he were going to a ball." Like, why in the world is he wearing a white suit at a time like this? It's not even summer, Rhett! It's hot and we get that, but the fashion police should arrest him for his crimes! But then again, the fashion police probably retreated along with the army...
• His hat:  a "wide Panama hat was set dashingly on one side of his head..." 
• His weapons:  "in the belt of his trousers were thrust two ivory-handled, long-barreled dueling pistols." And "the pockets of his coat sagged heavily with ammunition." 

All of which...I mean, what the hell was he planning? I get that Southern men like to be armed at all times (2nd amendment and everything), but if the Yankees are absolutely nothing to worry about and this is all so hilarious, why in the hell did he roll over to Scarlett's house armed to the teeth like that? The easy explanation is that Rhett was planning on protecting Scarlett and the gang from the looters and not Yankees, but--maybe we're supposed to think he was already planning on joining the CSA by the time he arrives at Aunt Pitty's house?  He's not exactly dressed for a military enlistment, but perhaps the idea was already at the back of his mind at this point?  

Anyway, Rhett is totally excited by everything that's happening. As a matter of fact, "there was a carefully restrained ferocity in his dark face, a ruthlessness which would have frightened [Scarlett] had she the wits to see it." 

Rhett jokes around with Scarlett and tells her he made the trip out there just to see where she was planning on going, but the reader knows he's lying--even if Scarlett is too frantic to see through his words.  He went through a lot of trouble to steal a horse, and he's grabbed two pistols and stuffed his pockets full of ammunition, so I don't really buy his explanation of coming out there on a curiosity jaunt.  

Scarlett wants to go home, but Rhett ain't having it.  He's all: "You can't go to Tara. Even if you got there, you'd probably find it burned down. I won't let you go home. It's insanity." And Scarlett is all: "I will go home! I'll kill you if you try and stop me!" 

They did a great job with this scene in the movie, I think.  VL does a great job of being hysterical, and CG does a wonderful job of being amused and comforting.  No kidding, the Planet Hollywood restaurant on Peachtree Street in downtown Atlanta used to have one of the white suits CG used during the filming of the burning of Atlanta scenes right in the front foyer of the restaurant. I used to go in there and eat terrible chocolate cake for like $12 per slice, just so I could stare at Rhett Butler's clothes. I hated the food, but a week's worth of allowance seemed like a small price to pay for the experience.  

What time is it? (BUY MY BOOK!)

It's noon on a Monday, so that must mean it's book buying time!

If you like history and you like good stories filled with interesting characters and steamy love scenes, then you should hop on over to Amazon right now and buy my book Darkest Hour .  It's only $0.99! 

Just imagine: for less than the price of a cup of Starbucks coffee, you can own an entire novel written by your favorite blogger.  If you've enjoyed my commentary on GWTW and/or my Rhett Butler CSA fanfiction, then you'll surely enjoy Darkest Hour.  

Thanks for your support! 

--Sarah St. James 

Chapter 22: What to expect when your sister-in-law is expecting....and the Yankees are coming

As I said before, I don't know anything about childbirth.

But I know something about hot weather, long afternoons, and "lazy insolent flies." I don't like animals or insects as a rule and I hate being hot, so MM's description of the interior of Melly's room at the beginning of chapter 22 really drives home the horror of that sticky day when Atlanta fell and Scarlett was forced to stay there and help her "frenemy" deliver her baby.

Scarlett is sweating, Melly is sweating, Prissy is sweating, the Yankees are coming, and nobody can leave the room until the baby is born.  I like to think of myself as pretty brave, and I think I have a great deal of physical courage.  But I haven't had kids yet, and I'm frankly terrified about the process of having a baby. As a matter of fact, a relative of mine recently had a baby and I visited her in the hospital not too long after the delivery.  I tried to keep a stiff upper lip, but I was terrified just listening to her discuss the whole process.  I realize that Scarlett has already been a mother for some time by this point in the story and is therefore not as freaked out by childbirth as I am at the current time, but labor was dangerous back then. Dangerous and messy and Melly had a very difficult time pushing little Beau out. I probably would have abandoned Melly and rushed out to Decatur street to get drunk right away, and it/s a testament to Scarlett's strength--and some latent goodness in her character--that she stays at her post like a good little soldier and helps Melly.

Scarlett is usually described as a selfish character, but during the middle of the novel she certainly displays a great deal of strength and reliability, doesn't she? Melly Wilkes is one of the most popular women in Atlanta, but every other woman in the town has abandoned these two young girls at the time when they need help the most.  All those friends and neighbors have taken flight to safer pastures, but Scarlett stayed and now Scarlett is the one who is required to sit there and suffer along with Melly because they don't know where else to turn for help and "every friend had failed her."

Incredibly, eventually "it was all over.  Melanie was not dead and the small baby boy who made noises like a young kitten," is getting his first bath by nightfall.  According to the interweb, sunrise in Atlanta on September 1st is at 7:12AM and sunset occurs on that date at 8:03PM. Melly Wilkes has been in labor since before dawn and Scarlett emerges into black darkness when it's all over, and I think it's safe to assume that Melly was therefore in labor for 13 or 14 hours.  NPR says the average first-time mother takes about 6.5 hours to deliver her first child, so through the magic of lazy research we see that Melly was in labor for about twice the average amount of time.  Mix in the heat and the Yankee approach, plus the fact that Scarlett and Prissy have absolutely no idea what in the hell they are doing and...

Yeah, Melly's a real trooper, isn't she?

But incredibly, MM doesn't actually recount every single detail of Melly's labor.  I personally would have chosen to describe this all in a linear fashion, going hour-by-hour in order to bleed out every last bit of emotion from this pathetic circumstance, but MM decides to skip the event itself and gives us a recap of everything that happened while also using it as an opportunity for Scarlett to grouse about Prissy some more.  And this is one of my all-time favorite paragraphs in the book, and one of the funniest collection of sentences I've ever read:

"From the shadows, Scarlett glared at her, too tired to rail, too tired to upbraid, too tired to enumerate Prissy's offenses--her boastful assumption of experience she didn't possess, her fright, her blundering awkwardness, her utter inefficiency when the emergency was hot, the misplacing of the scissors, the spilling of the basin of water on the bed, the dropping of the new born baby." 

All of which paints an outrageous, incredible, and hilarious picture of what actually transpired.  Melly didn't die and the baby appears healthy, so the end result was a success, but it sounds like it was all touch-and-go doesn't it?  MM isn't really given enough credit for her droll humor, and it's hard not to crack a smile whenever Scarlett suffers a fool, isn't it? Scarlett hates many things, but "blundering," "fright," and "inefficiency" would have to be in the top three of things she actively despises.  Charles Hamilton was described in almost the exact same way as Prissy is in this section, wasn't he?

Anyway, Scarlett eventually comes to her senses and remembers that there is one person left in Atlanta for her to call on: Rhett Butler! She tells Prissy to search for him in the following places in the following order--

1. The Atlanta Hotel  (Where he lives, apparently.  This is interesting to me now on this re-read because--isn't this the first time that we hear of Rhett living anywhere?  I mean, it's not like his residency is any sort of a secret, but it's pretty interesting that Scarlett has never once mentioned anything about where he lives, isn't it? Again, she knows a lot about him but since she doesn't love him or obsess about him the way she loves and obsesses about Ashley Wilkes. Rhett hardly ever features in Scarlett's internal musings). 
2. The Decatur Street barrooms (LOL) 
3. Belle Watling's house (Double LOL!) 

Prissy puts up a fight (of course), but eventually she agrees to run off to find Rhett and "tell him to come quickly and bring his horse and carriage or an ambulance if he can get one." 

And at this point in the novel I had absolutely no idea what to expect.  MM leaves a bunch of unanswered questions and loose threads over the course of these few chapters, and I had absolutely no idea what was going to happen next.  Was Prissy going to be able to find Rhett? And if she did find him (which is absolutely no guarantee considering Atlanta's a big city and the world is ending) would he be drunk? Would he actually agree to come help Scarlett, or was he just as mad at her as she was at him?  And if he did make it to Scarlett in time, would they all be able to leave town before Atlanta burned to the ground?  What about Melly? She's just had a baby and...surely it wouldn't be safe for her to go back to Tara in a wagon after everything she'd just experienced?  

Chapter 21: "Spec dey's at the horsepittle..."

Oh Prissy.  

I never know exactly what to make of Prissy--or, in fact, what to make of any of MM's black characters in GWTW.  Some of MM's characterizations and political views are outside the bounds of my modern sensibilities, particularly in the later chapters that cover the events of Reconstruction and the rise of the ku klux klan.  However, although I'm disappointed in some of her opinions, I don't take much offense anymore because I sincerely believe that MM was an equal opportunity offender.  She grew up--and was dead and buried--long before the hey-days of Civil Rights and politically correctness, and while that's no excuse it's...an explanation for much of her behavior anyway.  She was a whole generation or two before Harper Lee (Mockingbird was written in the early 1960's, but takes place in the 1930's when Lee was a child), and whatever wincing I do at some of her descriptions and word choices is tempered by an appreciation for MM's almost even handed approach toward everyone and everything Scarlett encounters in GWTW.  

Because Scarlett hates everybody. 

And she hates awesomely, doesn't she? 

For all the talk about Scarlett's hysterical behavior and selfishness and single-minded-focus on money and Ashley,  she really is a pretty reliable narrator.  And she's remarkably even-handed and detailed in her analysis of other people, and totally, hilariously, outrageously mean.  She loves her parents, but everybody else (except Ashley in the early part of the novel) is just an annoyance for her. She hates upper class men and women, she hates the Yankees, she hates kids, she hates cows, she hates horses, she hates "crackers", she hates hill-folk (Archie, etc), she hates the folks of Charleston and Savannah, and she hates most of the black people she encounters, too.  She's just a hater. And a Mean Girl, to boot. So when MM's narrator/Scarlett's derision of Prissy in this section of the novel flares up I can't complain.  At least Prissy is given a definite personality in this chapter, which is more than I can say for some of the under developed people who pass through the novel.  Plus, hilariously and amazingly enough, Scarlett's increasing frustration with Prissy stems from Scarlett's own irritation with her own personal shortcomings--she's mad at Prissy because Prissy is just as scared, stupid and inept as Scarlett is when Sherman finally hits town and Melly needs help having her baby.  

I'm not in love with MM's attempt at AA dialect here either, but I can't very well complain much about her depiction of Prissy's english when she's already run Gerald's Irish accent through the ringer so many times.  Scarlett even hates the accents of Charleston and Savannah, and the narrator even gives Rhett a drawl--although his "cultured" accent is never actually given the same treatment as the Irish, the Yankee, and the black accent. I have family living in Augusta and Atlanta, and I've noticed that they speak much quicker than the slow, syrupy accents I usually mentally associate with Southern American English.  

I've even been occasionally accused of having a southern accent myself, mostly by East-Coasters who wouldn't know a Southern Illinois accent if it smacked them upside the head.  All four of my grandparents were born south of Interstate-70, and I've heard echoes of many of Prissy's pronunciations in the speech patterns of my relatives, some of my friends who have Mississippi origins, and in my own mouth sometimes, so I can't really, truly take great offense at MM's depictions throughout GWTW.  

Anyway...

The Wilkes baby is coming and Scarlett sends Prissy off to go find the Meades.  But Dr. Meade is busy at the hospital tending to the soldiers, and Mrs. Meade is off looking for her young son Phil who has been killed in battle.  Eventually Scarlett decides to head into Five Points and search for Dr. Meade herself, since Prissy hasn't successfully located the doctor.  She runs past the Leyden House and heads down Peachtree toward the depot and the hospital. I still haven't satisfactorily figured out precisely where Aunt Pitty's house is supposed to be located, but the Leyden House (124 Peachtree) is about a half-mile from Five Points, and if Aunt Pitty's was on the north side of the old town, then I figure the distance between Melly and Dr. Meade to be little further than a half-mile.  Not very far. 

But incredibly far if you're a terrified young girl, racing around the dusty town in broken down slippers and stays and that big floppy hat Scarlett rocks in the film.  

Halfway to the hospital Scarlett finds out from a passing Confederate officer that the battle of Jonesboro has been lost, the blues are victorious, and the grays are in full retreat.  And then we get this marvelous bit of internal dialogue from our girl: 

"The Yankees were coming.  The army was leaving.  The Yankees are coming." 

She's grounding and pounding her point like an MMA fighter here, isn't she?  She's being repetitive, but not unduly so, particularly since the reader is probably just as frantic as our protagonist by now.  Particularly when she turns a corner and runs into a whole bunch of looters/refugees carrying sacks of corn and potatoes and barrels of flour and greasy sides of bacon and bags of peas and everything else they can carry away from the now wide-open commissary warehouses down by the railroad tracks.  

It looks, smells, and sounds like the end of the world.  

There is no order now, now rhyme or reason or logic to anything that's going to happen to Scarlett and the rest of the characters we know so well.  Atlanta is now an open city, and chaos has broken out, although it takes Scarlett quite some time to realize what is happening and prioritize her survival.  If she'd been thinking clearly and aware of everything that is actually happening, Scarlett probably would have gone to the commissary and grabbed some of the foodstuffs for her family, but she has no idea how totally insane things are going to get in a short while.  She's never been hungry before despite the rationing and shortages of the last few years, so she has absolutely no reason to expect that she'll be practically starving by the end of that week.  

There's a "packed, hysterical mob surging in the open space of Five Points," and Scarlett is racing around looking for the doctors.  By my estimate I've visited Atlanta at least 40 times in my life, but the streets are confusing and have weird names and I still don't really know my Buckheads from my Mechanicsvilles.  But I do know the Central Business district fairly well, including the area around Five Points, mostly because I visited the city quite a lot during the post-Olympic period of the late 1990's.  Peachtree Street is still the central artery of the city of course, but in my day we used to do a lot of shopping at the Atlanta Underground and all the stores they used to have down on Decatur street.  Either way, I had my fun in those days, but even now when the whole area is experiencing a down swing I still stop by Five Points and take a picture in front of the statue every time I pass through the city.  

By the time Scarlett finds Dr. Meade the old gentleman is hysterical and "his face was the face of a man drunk with fatigue and impotent rage and burning pity." It soon becomes painfully clear that Dr. Meade isn't going to help Scarlett.  

As a matter of fact, there's nobody around to help Scarlett deliver Melly's baby since Prissy is helpless and kind of dumb (or smartly avoiding responsibility for the entire situation). Child birth was insanely dangerous during the 19th century, and Melly is going to have a terrible time delivering Beau, but with the town being overrun by Yankees and men dying left and right labor is of low priority.  

Scarlett heads home, and the earlier frantic crowd that she saw on the way into Five Points has now turned into something else.  "There were women in the mob near Decatur Street, garishly dressed women whose bright finery and painted faces gave a discordant note of holiday." They are all drunk on cheap corn whiskey (the best kind!), and Scarlett even spots Belle Watling clinging "for support to a one-armed soldier who reeled and staggered." So now all the crazed civilians Scarlett saw a few moments ago have been replaced by prostitutes and one-armed soldiers and public inebriation and a bunch of other stuff Scarlett shouldn't even know about.  

Scarlett is a southern belle and she's not supposed to interact with bad women and slaves and drunk strangers, but she's sharing the sidewalk with them now.  The home-world that MM has constructed in the first third of the novel--the society of cotton fields and knights and ladies and rules and expectations and peace--has crumbled. And it has, for now anyway, been replaced by a crazy place where up is down, black-and-white boundaries have given way to blue-and-gray terrors, and Scarlett O'Hara is going to have to fend for herself.  

Chapter 20: Oh Gawd

According to my Kindle, chapter 20 of GWTW is the official 1/3 mark of the novel.  GWTW is so long and is so sweeping, I think it's easy to think of the novel as a meandering, almost random collection of events that almost seem to drag on the plot in places.  The story takes 12 years to unwind (1861 to 1873), but the majority of the INSANELY DRAMATIC events of the novel occur during the last 300 pages of the novel (i.e. the final 3rd). And the first time you read the book or watch the movie it's pretty easy to forget almost everything that happens before (Spoiler??) Scarlett and Rhett get married.  One of the main complaints critics have about GWTW is that they don't believe that it is as tightly/expertly plotted as a modern novel should be.  

But looking at the crafting of MM's story from the standpoint of proportion, I think she does a wonderful job of dividing up the events of Scarlett's life into different sections that drive the plot.  I'll come back to this idea in the future, but I thought this was a good point to drive home just how carefully MM must have planned out GWTW while she was writing, writing, and re-writing the events of the story.  I've never seen a first draft or an original outline of GWTW, but I'll bet she had to move entire plots and stories and strike out characters and events before GWTW became the sizzling story we know and love today. 

Anyway, Chapter 20 begins with almost the same sort of exposition and explanations of Civil War battles that has dotted the entire story ever since Sherman has officially "invaded" Georgia.  Initially, MM gives absolutely no indication that this chapter is going to be any different from those we've just read--yes the battles are closer, and yes we now know the Confederates are losing men at an alarming pace, but they've been doing that for quite a while, haven't they? However, while MM leads off by describing the events of the war and other "manly" issues, she brings things into a tight focus almost immediately in this chapter by emphasizing--first of all--that the latest battle is being fought at Jonesboro, right around the corner from Tara.  Jonesboro is a familiar location for us now--we know it's the location of the nearest train station to Scarlett's home neighborhood, we know it's where the court and tax collectors are, etc.  And now they're fighting right there up the street from her house! 

So now there's an amazingly tense extra layer to the novel that we didn't experience before, because the reader is almost as concerned about the folks at Tara as Scarlett.  And then MM also drops the added stress of a courier materializing out of nowhere to give Scarlett a note informing her that her mother and and everybody else at Tara is sick with typhoid fever and that Gerald doesn't want her to try to come home because he believes she will get sick, too! 

I don't know much about typhoid fever now, and I knew even less about it the first time I read GWTW.  I think I knew that Anne Frank (and countless others, of course) died from it by the time I picked up this novel, but other than that...I certainly didn't really connect that there had been an outbreak of the disease in America during the final stages of the Civil War.  Apparently typhoid fever is different from typhus, although I guess the main difference between the two is in the cause and the severity of the symptoms I suppose.  I don't know, really.  

But I knew it was bad.  Marvelously, deliciously bad for the purposes of drama since it's an unknown disease that comes and goes for what seems to be no reason, and which can either kill people outright or leave them alive (albeit in a weakened state).  A lesser novelist might have gotten silly and gone full bore and given Ellen O'Hara something like cancer or whatever, but typhoid was excellent because it could also almost kill off Suellen and Carreen, too--and then leave them alive but totally annoying.  

Alright, so everybody at Tara is sick, they're fighting at Jonesboro, Atlanta is hot and horrible and filled with wounded people and all of Scarlett's friends are gone and...what was the other thing we were supposed to be worried about? 

Oh yeah: 

Melanie is about to have her baby.  

Gawd almighty.  

Interestingly enough, when Scarlett wakes up on September 1st there's a lull in all the chaos and confusion of the battles.  There's nothing but blue sky, and red dust, and "the road outside lay silent." The frenzied excitement of the past few chapters has gone.  All the explosions are over.  She's clearly in the calm of the storm, but the first time I read this I assumed that Scarlett had gotten a lucky break somehow. I started running through scenarios in my head: maybe her father would come save her? Or perhaps the war had passed Atlanta by and maybe Dr. Meade would come help Melanie through the delivery? Or....something? Maybe Prissy would turn out to be competent and efficient and Scarlett would just be a bystander to the birth?  

But then the cannons begin again, coming from the south (Jonesboro and Tara) and Scarlett gets heartsick.  As does the reader.  Because it is now clear that Scarlett isn't going to be able to get home without going straight through the armies, and that seems like an impossible task at this point considering she's going to be attempting to flee with Prissy, pregnant Melly, and Wade Hampton who can't be older than three at this point.  

So what is she going to do? 

What. Is. She. Going. To. Do?

Scarlett breaks into Melly's bedroom, essentially terrified, and then she runs into an even more terrifying sight: Melly is all sunken and waxy and deathly ill, and she's been having labor pains since dawn.  I know almost as little about childbirth as I know about typhoid, but even as a teenager I realized this wasn't going to be an easy birth.  

Chapter 19: "The seige went on..."

The first portion of Chapter 19 of GWTW consists almost entirely of exposition.  Writers are taught to abhor exposition--we're supposed to "show" instead of "telling"--but Margaret Mitchell does a superb job of relating events exclusively through text over the course of the novel.  She usually uses exposition to describe broad shifts in the Confederacy's fortunes, particularly when these changes happen outside of Scarlett's experience and far away from Atlanta. The Battle of Atlanta/Siege is still happening in Chapter 19 of course, but Scarlett's awareness of the outside world does not really increase simply because the war has finally come to Georgia. Scarlett is a young widow living in the only big southern city that hadn't been occupied by the Yankees by the summer of 1864, and she is close enough to the battle to hear cannons and observe the wounded first-hand, but she is not a soldier and she's not particularly interested in the war.  Scarlett is not concerned with men and munition and the state of the Confederacy, but "she was so frightened by the bursting shells she could only cower helplessly," and I believe that MM's pages describing Scarlett's terror emphasize the impact of war on civilian populations much more than a list of battle orders or weapons used or any of those other things people usually talk about when they talk about the Civil War.

Uncle Henry Hamilton comes back from the war about halfway through the chapter, and he has changed a lot since he marched away with the Home Guard in the last chapter.  He's one of Joe Brown's Pets I suppose, but Uncle Henry seems to be enjoying the war and I think MM uses him to provide us with an example of what happens to soldiers once they leave the safety of their homes/civilization.  Uncle Henry is spirited and he's skinny now, but while "he was barefoot, crawling with lice, and...hungry," his "irascible spirit was unimpaired." Interestingly enough, Uncle Henry tells the girls that he only came by to make sure that Scarlett is still with the (by now very, very) pregnant Melly, which makes me wonder precisely why Uncle Henry thinks Scarlett would have abandoned Melly at all.  Of course Scarlett has considered leaving Melly behind in Atlanta while she flees to the relative safety of Tara, but she still hasn't gone through with those plans.  And she certainly hasn't told anyone about her desire to leave Atlanta on the next train south.  So why doesn't Uncle Henry trust Scarlett here?

Uncle Henry also moves the plot along by telling Scarlett that John Wilkes is dead (a shell landed on top of him) and that Mrs. Tarleton's horse was killed in the same incident. So MM uses old Uncle Henry's seemingly random re-appearance to show us exactly how the Civil War is killing or maiming or changing everyone we've met throughout the course of the novel. It was one thing when Charles Hamilton died of disease because Charles was an almost comically weak character, but Mr. Wilkes was a solid, old school guy and it's rather shocking that even he can be destroyed by the events of the war.  I felt the same way the first time I read the novel when I found out that the Tarleton boys had been killed, since I sort of assumed that Brent or Stuart would eventually come back and that Scarlett would eventually marry one or the other of them.  They seemed so vibrant and fun that it was shocking to me that MM would kill them off when they clearly had a lot of life left to live, and their deaths also made it quite possible that Ashley himself would die before the end of the novel. 

We are now about 1/3 of the way through GWTW and the first time I read it I was flummoxed by how much of the novel I still had left to read. I'd never seen the movie the first time I read GWTW, but I'd read hundreds of Civil War textbooks and novels before I ever considered picking up MM's masterpiece, and most of them are winding down by the time they get to the summer of 1864.  The Civil War itself was ending by this time, and most biographies of Lincoln or Seward (or even Lee or Grant) are nearly finished by the the time they begin discussing Sherman's March to the Sea.  When I reached this point in the novel I finally started to understand that GWTW was as much about reconstruction as it was about the Civil War.  Which meant that everything I'd ever heard about the book--that it was chiefly about slavery, that it romanticized the ante-bellum south, etc--was inaccurate and untrue.  Which begged the question: if GWTW wasn't actually about the adventures of a young, beautiful woman during the Civil War then what was it really about?

I didn't get an answer to that question until I finished the book the first time, of course.  But I do believe that MM puts her answer/resolution to my question right there in plain sight in the final third of Chapter 19, when Rhett pays Scarlett a visit on a dark, quiet night in the middle of the siege. 

Scarlett hasn't seen Rhett since they argued outside of the hospital a few chapters ago (a scene that was also done very well in the movie as I mentioned in a previous post) and she's still a bit pissed at him.  But she's also lonely since most of her friends have left town because of the siege and she's actually kind of glad to see Rhett for the first time since the start of the story. Until now he's been little more than an irritating, Big Brotherly presence who comes and goes for what seems like no reason, but now we begin to see that Scarlett enjoys talking to him almost as much as we enjoy reading about their chats. 

But of course, their polite engagement doesn't last very long.  Rhett makes fun of Scarlett because he thinks it's amusing that she (of all people!) is stuck in Atlanta, looking out for Ashley's pregnant wife.  Interestingly enough the two of them begin discussing rape (Scarlett is afraid that the invading Yankees will rape her--and how is that for foreshadowing? MM is really something, isn't she?), but Rhett tells her frankly that the Yankees aren't really into that kind of thing.  But then the conversation turns into something much less amusing, even though MM's plays it for laughs at this point in the novel. 

In short, Rhett proposes that Scarlett become his....I don't want to say mistress since that isn't quite what he's describing. Or maybe it is. I don't know much about mistresses and even less about sexual relationships between unmarried persons during the Victorian era.  But I always think of mistresses as kept women/concubines, the sort of woman who lived in a well-appointed house and had kids out of wedlock with a rich man who already had a wife.  Sort of like Thomas Jefferson (*cough cough*) or Henry VIII and one of the women who bore him a son.  But the men in those relationships had to keep a mistress because they had an (essentially) arranged marriage with a woman from their "class", and back then certain kinds of men (Tudors, Stuarts and Wilkes, apparently) couldn't just marry the women they actually wanted to marry and instead had to fall into matrimony with women like Melly or Catherine of Aragon. 

But Rhett Butler isn't married.

And indeed, he goes out of his way to say in this section that he isn't "a marrying man."

Scarlett is rightfully confused therefore by his proposal.  In her mind--in all of our minds--a mistress is a woman who everyone knows to be in love (or at least in *like*) with an already married man, but Rhett isn't married. So....what does he want, exactly?  He wants to sleep with Scarlett of course, but...why doesn't he just flat out ask her to marry him? 

Because he knows she'll say no? Because he knows she's still in love with Ashley Wilkes?  A lot of sources and literary criticism indicate that Rhett is being disingenuous here and they flat out say that he actually does want to marry Scarlett because he loves her, but I'm not so certain that he actually wants to be married at this point in the novel. I do think that Rhett's outlook on this subject changes totally by the end of the story, of course, but I don't think that's the source of the tension we find here at the end of Chapter 19.  He actually does want to have sex with Scarlett, but he has given no indication that he actually wants to be legally and publicly tied to her for the rest of his life at this point.

Anyway, I think that if you boil GWTW down to one particular idea, that idea would have to be the tragedy of misunderstanding and miscommunication.  Because Rhett probably honestly (and outrageously!) believed Scarlett would consider his proposal with a level head, but after Scarlett hears what he's offering her response is out-and-out rage. 

As a matter of fact:

"...She did not feel insulted.  She only felt a furious surge of indignation that he should think her such a fool." 

And there you have it, gentle reader.  Rhett misunderstands Scarlett's desires (he thinks she's too mature and level-headed to be insulted by the notion of becoming his mistress) and Scarlett is moved to anger by his words.  But she's not angry because he said those words to her. Instead, she's angry because she believes his proposal means that he thinks she's a fool--and Scarlett O'Hara refuses to be anybody's fool.  

Which is why she's one of my favorite characters in all of literature.  Other women I love would have dropped dead from shock after Rhett's proposal, but Scarlett is just pissed that Rhett thought she was dumb enough to go for such an offer.  And I think that's the underlying theme behind GWTW. Scarlett O'Hara is nobody's fool, and she refuses to be played or bested by anybody including Ashley, Melly, Rhett, Wade, Mammy, Archie, India, Honey, Frank Kennedy, Suellen and anybody else who tries to get the upper hand.

"Paperback writer...." (Buy my book!)

I'll be posting more GWTW recaps/commentary later this week (and Chapter 2 of The Autobiography of Rhett Butler, CSA just went live), but in the meantime I thought I'd log on to shamelessly plug my book:

It's summer! If you enjoy romantic historical fiction and you're in the market for a great vacation read, I seriously think you should consider buying a copy of Darkest Hour. It's only $0.99 cents on Amazon.com!

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She is married to Laird, a sickly, stubborn, highly decorated former Royal Air Force pilot who still harbors nightmares about the war and who has consequently never spoken publicly or privately about his experiences to anyone, choosing instead to spend the past six decades enjoying a life of well-earned peace and anonymity. Their marriage has endured two monarchs, thirteen Prime Ministers, and the rise and fall of the Spice Girls, but their heretofore unbreakable bond is tested when Victoria signs them both up to participate in an upcoming museum piece on World War II. Now the two of them are forced to remember, forced to recount, and forced to reevaluate the nascent days of their love affair, and their story is a struggle between memory, hope, self-recrimination, and forgiveness that leads them both to unexpected places.

I wrote Darkest Hour a few years ago, and I lived in London for 6 weeks one winter to research every detail I put into my story.  As a matter of fact, I traveled all the way up to the Royal Air Force Museum in Travelcard Zone 4 on the rainiest, dreariest day of the year just to climb into the cockpit of a few old planes. The people at the museum thought I was nuts. And looking back, I sort of agree with them.

But I still think you should buy my book anyway.

--SS