(Sorry about the delay, ya'll. But between two bouts with strep-throat/laryngitis, 70-hour work weeks, a lengthy vacation to France, and an excessive amount of jet-lag, I've been too busy/sick to keep pace in this blog. But let's be patient: GWTW isn't going anywhere, and MM's great novel is sometimes easier to appreciate and digest after you take a pause to breathe a bit between chapters.)
Chapter 57 picks up not too long after Chapter 56 ends, but somehow things between the Scarlett and Rhett have gotten even worse. The vivacious, unstoppable Scarlett O'Hare we've all come to know and love is now "pale" and "thin," and exhausted. And the tension between our two main characters is so high that even Wade and Ella, two heretofore nearly oblivious bystanders to the dramas playing out in Atlanta, are clinging to Prissy because "there was something frightening in the cold, impersonal atmosphere between their mother and their stepfather." And as for Rhett....
Well, although we've finally gotten a good glimpse of the terrified, self-hating, self-blaming outcast at the core of his being, the Rhett in this chapter is more pensive than anything. MM could have jumped straight from Scarlett's miscarriage directly to [SPOILER REMOVED], but that would have been overdoing it, right? I mean not necessarily for the veracity of the novel since MM is good enough to overcome the sin of poor pacing, but Rhett is already mentally worn out after the miscarriage. If the other tragedy had occurred right after Scarlett's tumble down the stairs, I don't see how he could have avoided completely losing his mind by the end of the novel.
Anyway, Scarlett is weak, Wade and Ella are suddenly hyper-aware of their surroundings, Rhett is pensive and depressed, and even the normally confidant and pleasant Melly begins this chapter filled with "confusion and dismay" when she spies Rhett coming up her walk. The world of our four main characters has been turned asunder and each of them undergoes major personality changes after Scarlett's miscarriage. They're shocked I think, but more than that I think they're all suddenly quite aware that more terrible events could be lurking just beyond the horizon.
And that's what makes Rhett ride up to Melly's house, of course. They've all just barely survived the fallout from the Scarlet--Rhett--Ashley triangle, and Rhett in all his wonderful wisdom is trying to nip the remaining potential trouble spots in the bud.
Sigh.
Anyway, Melly "rose to meet him, noting with surprise, as always, how lightly he walked for a big man." And I've always adored the way MM describes Rhett as moving so quickly, but I'm never quite sure about what she's attempting to convey. He's built like an SEC linebacker, but he's got the grace of Neymar Jr. , and I think she means that although physics dictates that Rhett should be lumbering and plodding, his spirit/will/personality keeps him walking lightly. But then again, in Scarlett's eyes his quiet, light walk is a left-over from his Wild West/gambling days, a call-back to the time when his life depended on him being able to sneak around undetected by his enemies.
Or, you know, something like that.
Anyway, bottom line is that Rhett is sad and tired and the reader is sad and tired and Melly is sad and tired and gawd, isn't this whole conversation wonderful?
Rhett and Melly have probably spoken one-on-one before, but we've never been privy to such an interaction before. It's a refreshing comparison to Scarlett and Ashley's awkward conversations, isn't it? Scarlett and Ashley have lust in common but little else, which means that their words are always a little stilted and their conversations rarely stray from safe ground. On the other hand, Rhett and Melly respect and love each other and they both genuinely have the others best interest at heart. So even while preserving the proprieties of the day, there's still something simple and pure and honest about the way they talk to each other.
Do ya'll watch Mad Men?
Because there was a moment in the finale episode when Don calls Peggy Olson on the telephone and confesses all his sins in a tumble of words that Peggy barely understands. Peggy is totally confused by the whole thing, but she loves Don so much that she forgives him all his trespasses (real and imagined) and tells him to return to New York ASAP. He doesn't of course (or does he?), but their fundamental ability to understand each other reminded me so much of Rhett and Melly that I couldn't help but be moved by the whole thing.
Anyway, Rhett might have alighted from his horse like Neymar, but he sits down "heavily" as he and Melly begin to chat and we get the sense that the weight of the whole world is on his broad shoulders. The other characters might have a sense that something is going to go (even more) wrong down the road, but Rhett the championship poker player has evidently already identified precisely what is going to happen and is apparently determined to make sure that he helps the four of them avoid disaster. It's as though they're riding on a train and he can see a dangerous s-curve bend in the tracks miles ahead of the rest of the passengers. And, as Jacob Clifton always used to say, the thing that makes you awesome is also the thing that makes you suck. Rhett's ability to read minds and anticipate the future has kept him alive and prosperous for his entire adult-life, but prescience is a blessing and a curse. And besides, perhaps it could be argued that because Rhett has become so good at reading the tea leaves and predicting the future he begins to lean on his 6th sense as something of a crutch. He's an excellent poker player and good at investing, but even the trickiest card game can be defeated by skill and a little bit of good luck. But life isn't a poker game.
You do hear that metaphor from time to time, of course. Everybody from Kenny Rogers("You gotta know when to hold 'em, know when to fold 'em,") to the Streets ("you've gotta organize your twos and threes into a run and then you'll have f**ked him some") tells us all the time that life is a poker game, but life is not a card game at all. Life is random. It's not a hand of cards and it's not a roulette wheel: it's a lottery. There are 311,875,200 possible hands in a game of stud poker, but you can over come a poor shuffle by out-witting your opponent. But in the lottery you only get one shot and there's absolutely no way to increase your odds of winning.
As a matter of fact, most smart people would agree that you can't win the lottery. Other people might win the Powerball jackpot, but you will not.
Let's ruminate on that reality as we go through the rest of GWTW.
**********************************
Alright, so as Melly comes to terms with the little deception Rhett is asking her to help him perform, she begins to ruminate about the mean things other people always said about Rhett. "People had said he was brutal and sneering and bad mannered and even dishonest" and Melly is silently pleased that she never believed the worst about Rhett. Except, you know what? I wouldn't normally ascribe these adjectives to Rhett Butler, but we've certainly seen that side of his personality, haven't we? The night after Ashley's party he was all of these things (and so much more!), and Scarlett even called him out on it while she was plotting her escape. The Rhett we met during that crazy night was brutal (some would even call him a rapist), he was sneering, he was bad mannered, and he was definitely dishonest. Although of course his dishonesty is less about deceit and more about self-preservation, it was certainly dishonest of him to return to Scarlett's room three days after their big night and try to casually write the whole thing off as a forgettable drunken episode. And so, although the reader likes Rhett as much as Melly does, we can't help but wonder if Mrs, Wilkes would love him so much if she actually got to witness his crazy-side first hand. Melly knows Rhett is an alpha-male, but I think she'd be afraid of him if she ever actually saw how alpha he can be when he's pushed too far.
After all, look at how the fearless Scarlett behaves around Rhett now. She can't quite figure out her own feelings, but she knows for a fact that she doesn't want to be alone with him. And she doesn't dare stop chattering when he picks her up from the train station, because she's afraid of letting silence fall between the two of them.
What is she afraid of?
Scarlett says "she did not know how he felt toward her," but that's been the status quo between the two of them for a long time, so why is the present situation so different? What has changed? Of course Rhett has confessed his love for Scarlett, but he took it back almost as quickly as he admitted it, and in the grander scheme of things....
I don't know.
Scarlett is irritated and confused by the fact that Rhett hasn't apologized for the whole sorry episode, but what in the world does she expect him to say? Interestingly enough, movie Rhett does come right out and apologize to Scarlett for all the havoc and all the crazy arguments and the fighting, but then again movie Rhett is not nearly as complex or as troubled as book Rhett. Movie Rhett would make a better husband than book Rhett, but book Rhett is infinitely more fascinating, isn't he? Movie Rhett is a sweetheart, but book Rhett is...well, we're 94% into GWTW and I'm still not certain about what makes Rhett K. Butler tick.
We know what makes Scarlett tick: money and common sense. For instance, Scarlett sells the mills to Ashley at the end of this chapter, and Scarlett is depressed about it but she's too confused by the sudden alliance between Rhett, Melly and Ashley to successfully protest this turn of events. Scarlett has been sort of hoodwinked into this sale, but she also finds herself defending her business ethics and the use of convict labor and explaining the relationship between low-overhead and high-profits to Melly and Ashley. And Scarlett is right, you guys. She's wrong, of course, since modern business ethics and public policy and public opinion tells us that low-cost labor is wrong, but surely we can't expect the daughter of a Georgia plantation owner to do a 180 and suddenly decide to value the worker and give her employees a fair shake? Scarlett grew up on a huge plantation and she loved every moment of her childhood and she's smart enough to at least recognize that her family wealth was built on low-cost slave labor. There are laws protecting workers now, but in Scarlett's world there was only the law of the jungle, and I find it hilarious that Melly and Ashley are so scandalized by the whole situation. Slavery is wrong and convict labor is wrong, but nobody likes a hypocrite, ya'll.
But if Scarlett is all about logic and money and common sense and survival, what is Rhett really about? What does he want? Why did he come back to Atlanta in the first place? And why has he stayed for so long? What's his long term plan? Scarlett has sold the mills to Ashley and Melly, so...what's next? Did he really plan on simply existing, on simply riding everything out until Bonnie grows up and gets married? Or did he anticipate that Scarlett would one day wake up madly in love with him? What is he doing?
*********
I'll be back soon. I promise.
Monday, May 18, 2015
Sunday, March 29, 2015
Chapter 56: "But soon, even this rage passed into apathy..."/ The Curious Case of the Enigmatic Captain Butler
"Rhett was gone for three month and during that time Scarlett had no word from him."
(And I've been gone for even longer than that! Apologies to all, and thanks for sticking with me. You guys are amazing.)
Gone With the Wind is largely a straightforward, linear story. It's deceptively plain, a basic story about a woman living in Georgia before, during and after the Civil War, and the story and the setting are so dramatic Mitchell didn't need to rely on literary tricks to build tension or suspense. I've been reading a lot of Shakespeare lately, and I'm always surprised by how much The Bard depends on dreams and mystics and foreshadowing and fate and other ballyhoo to pull his stories toward their conclusions. But MM forgoes most of those devices in GWTW. But here, very late in the game, she begins a chapter with some very nice, understated foreshadowing.
Rhett is gone in Chapter 55.
He has taken Bonnie with him and he has essentially disappeared off the face of the earth, and his absence is felt very keenly by all interested parties--and especially by the reader, I think. Rhett has been a mystery-man since he married Scarlett, but he's been present in Atlanta nonetheless. Scarlett hasn't interacted with him much over the past several chapters, but he's there. He's always there. Jocular and jealous and laughing and rude most of the time, but he's there. Dependably--almost pathetically--inhabiting the background of the novel, as real and necessary as Peachtree Street (and perhaps twice as marginalized in Scarlett's eyes).
But he's gone now.
Shockingly.
The first time I read GWTW I was frightened by the distinct possibility that Rhett would never return, for one reason or another. Rhett is the mainstay of the novel (along with Melly, of course), but GWTW is littered with the graves of characters we always assumed would play a permanent part in Scarlett's life, isn't it? Ellen, Gerald, the Tarleton boys, Charles Hamilton, Frank Kennedy.....each of them were important to the plot and each of them could have existed until the final page of the novel if circumstances and MM's plotting had decided otherwise. As written, GWTW forms a nice square of four essential characters with everyone else dropping off as so very much window dressing during the last ten percent of the novel, but there's no real reason (barring literary themes and other ideals I'll address once my journey through the story comes to a conclusion) that Rhett and Ashley have survived while everyone else is dead and buried. That's the beauty of GWTW I think, that's the appeal of the darker elements in the story: the seemingly random ways in which MM introduces characters--and then kills them off--is reminiscent of the ways in which people live and die in real life. I still like to believe that people and things come in and out of our lives for a reason, but I'm becoming a bit nihilistic in my old age. The order of my American, Mid-western youth has given way to chaos, and I'm afraid I'm a bit like Ashley and I'm not cut out for these times. I saw The Second Best Marigold Exotic Marigold Hotel this afternoon and I despised it, the same way I despise all novels and movies filled with cliche and obviousness and easily anticipated plot twists. And yet...
They certainly make life easier, don't they?
Most novels (my own included!) plod toward an easy ending, but GWTW veers off into unprecedented territory in this final act, doesn't it? This is a story full of tragedy and odd little twists of fate, but the shifts that occur during these final pages are quite astonishing in my humble. I think that's because all of the things that happen happen internally. The events that have impacted or killed off the characters thus far have all been things that happened far outside of almost anyone's control: the assault on Fort Sumter, the failure of the Army of Northern Virginia, the Siege of Atlanta, the Blockcade, Sherman, Reconstruction, the KKK...all of these are huge historical events that swept up Scarlett and the rest of the gang and rearranged their lives even though none of the four major characters in the novel had much of anything to do with anything that occurred. The County Boys might have supported the agitators in Charleston back in 1861 and the entire Wilkes BBQ whoops it up with excitement when they learn that the Civil War has started and that they're finally going to get the chance to whip some Yankees, but it's not as though Ashley and Charles Hamilton and the Tarleton boys played an essential part in it.
But now....
Now that everybody in GWTW is (relatively) rich and (relatively) safe, they can use all their time and energy worrying about their internal lives and sorting out their feelings. It's sort of like the Wars of the Roses. Or the Real Housewives of Atlanta. Or the Season 2 premiere of Southern Charm where everybody got drunk and started complaining about what everybody else was doing.
Like that.
So we open with Rhett Butler and Bonnie having gone MIA, leaving Scarlett alone with only Melly and Ashley, her two children from her previous marriages, and her millions of dollars. And so, in true Scarlett form, she starts picking on people as an outlet for her manifold frustration. She picks on Ashley ("his helplessness in the face of the present situation irked her...") she picks on Ella ("a silly child...") and Wade ("he looked at her with Charles' soft brown eyes and squirmed and twisted his feet in embarrassment..."). Of course it's important to note that Melly alone escapes Scarlett's cutting analysis in this section, but Scarlett has been so scornful and sarcastic about Melly throughout the novel you barely notice the absence of Melly hate here.
*********************************
By contrast, the reader can't help but notice Scarlett's confusion about Rhett. She doesn't know how he feels about her, and she therefore doesn't know how she feels about him, which...the two things are related, of course. But Scarlett has spent the past thousand pages pining after Ashley who is married to another woman and who denies any attraction to her at every turn, so it's not as though she is exactly a realist in this regard. So why is she waiting to know Rhett's feelings for her before she resolves and defines her feelings for him?
Yet perhaps you could argue that Scarlett's ambivalence about Rhett in this section is a reflection of her increased maturity? After all, Scarlett begins the novel with a childish, idealized perspective on Ashley Wilkes. To steal one of Al Franken's best comedic bits, Scarlett loves Ashley in GWTW the way a three year old loves her mommy: She loves him absolutely, she loves everything about him, she thinks he's the best, the most handsome, the most daring, the most courageous, the most wonderful, etc. But now that she's maturing, she begins to see that there's more to life than bright line rules, and she's learning to understand that hardly anybody is all good or all bad and that almost everybody is somewhere in the middle. Ashley hasn't changed much given all that that happened around him and to him over the course of GWTW, but the bloom is coming off the rose now. The cracks are beginning to show. And even Scarlett is starting to notice his incompetence.
But because Scarlett is Scarlett, Ashley gets a raw deal in this chapter because Scarlett starts comparing him to Rhett and....well, everybody on earth pales compared to Rhett Butler. It's not fair, really. Scarlett is mad at Ashley for not taking control of the situation, but it's not realistic to expect that Ashley would be able to solve any of these problems all by himself. He's not quick witted, he's not clever, he's not experienced, and he knows very little about the world; that's what makes him Ashley.
********************************************
I re-watched The Lion In Winter (1968) on Friday night. It's a great movie, filled with amazing performances and amazing dialogue and it's got Anthony Hopkins and Kate Hepburn and Timothy Dalton and Peter O'Toole and...you should watch it, is what I'm saying. It's different from GWTW, but it's very similar on a lot of levels. Like, for instance, it features a husband and wife duo that hates each other almost as much as they love each other, a couple that won't stop poking and prodding until they leave us all in a puddle of despair and tears.
Tears!
There are parts of GWTW that make me roar with laughter, but the last 10% of the book is one long weep-a-thon for me. I've read GWTW hundreds of times, but all the cruel words and horrible threats and slights and hidden emotions in these last parts still make me blubber. They still make me sad. I wouldn't trade the twists and turns in these final chapters for anything in the world, but there's still part of me that always hopes it won't all go so sour so quickly.
And yet, here we are. Chugging toward the unbearably heavy ending. As a matter of fact, MM uses gravity to great effect in the scene where Rhett and Bonnie return from their wonderful trip abroad and encounter Scarlett who has "hurried from her room to the top of the stairs," while Bonnie is "stretching her short plump legs in an effort to climb the steps." So Scarlett is at the top, Bonnie is climbing upward, and Rhett is at the bottom of the stairs. Lurking. Like a panther. Or the devil. Or something.
*Sigh*
Why can't they just be nice here, y'all? Why does this all have to end this way? Why can't they just be blandly civil and save us all a lot of heartache?
But they can't, of course. They are who they are, and we are who we are, and none of us can change no matter what. And so, instead of disengaging and peeling away from the situation, they both fly straight into danger with guns blazing like Hans Solo flying into the Death Star.
Interestingly enough, Rhett shoots first. Let's rate their insults on a scale of 1 to 10, shall we?
The two of them keep trying to best each other, but to no avail. What did he hope to accomplish by saying something mean like that? Rhett Butler is usually so strategic and calm, but he's unraveling now and it's shocking to see. Scarlett is pushing him and goading him, but we don't expect him to push her right back, do we? And when he does it's....ugly. It's an ugly mess.
We've seen him be base and mean before, on the fateful night of Ashley party. But you know what? He was drunk that night. So that was our excuse and our explanation. But he doesn't seem to be drunk now. He's sober as a judge there on the stairs, but he can't control himself anymore. She's humiliating him and insulting him, but it still hurts to see him sink so low in this chapter. And then---
Scarlett falls down the stairs and miscarries.
And again, consider the positioning of the two of them there on the stairs. The movie does a great job of spacing and pacing in this scene, and there's so much drama in this moment. Scarlett is on top of the stairs when they begin arguing and Rhett comes up to her level, but then she takes a swing at him. But instead of connecting she falls.
All.
The.
Way.
To.
The.
Bottom.
She tumbles so quickly even the all powerful, all wonderful Rhett Butler can't break her fall. He lunges backward to protect himself from her claws, and then Scarlett breaks a rib "and, too dazed to catch herself, she rolled over and over to the bottom of the flight."
All.
The.
Way.
To.
The.
Bottom.
******************************************
And then the characters begin to float in space.
GWTW is a hardcore realist book, but everything becomes unglued in the latter half of this chapter, mostly as a reflection of Scarlett's delirium. These pages are filled with heavy, heavy material and ideas and things that are pulling Scarlett and Rhett apart at the seams. It's like...well, you know how black holes are the heaviest things in the universe? Black holes are heavy gravity and their trying to pull us all into their orbit and they look scary, but you know what will happen to you if you actually do find yourself at the edge of a singularity like the one at the center of the Milkyway Galaxy?
You'll float.
The person inside of a blackhole believes they pass through the blackhole instantaneously, but to an outside observer it would look like you'd just stopped. As though you were just floating there at the edge of a blackhole for all of eternity.
And this is kind of what happens here in this part of chapter 56. Scarlett and Rhett have reached their own black holes individually and alone. There's no day, there's no night, there's no before, there's no after. There's only this grotesquely massive, outrageously dangerous thing they'll both have to circle around until the end of time. And, what's much worse, black holes grow. They get larger. They eat more stuff. The accumulate mass. And they swallow everyone and everything and every thought and every idea and they are so big and black and dense that not even light can escape from their grasp.
This miscarriage is their black hole. Scarlett is cold and confused and Rhett is jealous and confused and neither of them is big enough or confident enough or courageous enough to admit that they are very sorry and that they have no idea what in the hell they're doing. And so Scarlett doesn't call for Rhett even though she wants him. And instead of barging into Scarlett's room and sitting with her, Rhett stays in his room across the hall. Alone.
This breaks my heart every time, you guys.
Seriously.
That's why it has taken me so long to write this blog post. How in the world am I supposed to analyze my feelings on what I consider to be the most wonderfully devastating pages in all the literature that's ever been written in the English speaking world? You can have your Mr. Darcy's, your Kilgore Trout's, your Sam Starret's, your Rick Blaine's, your Cross Sugarman's, your TeaCakes, your Henry's IV, V, and VI's. But I say to you here and now, that nothing holds a candle to Rhett Butler on his knees, weeping, with his head in Melly's lap.
Isn't it interesting that Melly's kindness is the thing that actually breaks him?
Rhett has been sitting across the hall from Scarlett's room, watching the door and smoking cigars and not asking questions because the events have shocked him into silence. Rhett has had a silver tongue for a thousand pages, but Scarlett's miscarriage has rendered him a deaf mute.
But while he's being oh so quiet, MM gives us enough clues to let us know that it's loud as hell inside his brain. This is a classic study in show don't tell, isn't it? Up to this point Rhett has always been smooth and polished but now? He's a mess:
Anyway, so...Rhett starts drinking whiskey. We don't know how long Scarlett has been teetering between life and death, but surely days have gone by. But as I said earlier, our characters are floating in space and it's not clear if it's been 48 hours or five days or whatever else. But we know Rhett hasn't slept or ate or drank anything but whiskey over the past few days, and we can tell that he's about to melt down. I once stayed up 72 hours straight during finals back at college and I was damn near hysterical by the end of it all. But I was eating and drinking normally all the time, so I can't imagine Rhett's state of mind in this section.
But it can't be good.
Melly tells him that Scarlett is better. But Rhett either doesn't hear her or doesn't understand her or has just been pushed so far past his breaking point that nothing Melly said was going to make any sense to him anyway. So instead of reacting calmly or with happiness, he starts to really melt down.
He cries, but because he's Rhett Butler and he's larger than life, he doesn't simply weep. No, our beloved goes into a full-body, shoulder shaking, desperately choking sob that scares the daylights out of Melly. Rhett carries himself so lightly most of the time, that we never suspect that he's ever felt guilty or miserable about anything he's done. But now we see that we've been wrong. He's full of sorrows.
And he's vulnerable.
Very, very vulnerable.
Scarlett believes that Rhett doesn't display his emotions because he doesn't have any emotions, but now we see that she's wrong. Now we learn that Rhett has a lot of feelings about everything, and it's been eating away at him for God knows how long; and we begin to wonder about how hard he's had to work to keep all of this so deep below his surface. And, more to the point, now that he's had this explosion, how in the world will he be able to reel himself back from the abyss?
Even Melly is shocked when she hears Rhett's snide remarks about Scarlett's miscarriage. And you'll notice that at no time during their conversation does Melly even attempt to give Rhett advice. She simply sits there and listens to him, but she never tells him what to do to get back in Scarlett's good graces. She never tells him how to fix what has gone so horribly wrong.
Because it can't be fixed.
*Sigh*
(And I've been gone for even longer than that! Apologies to all, and thanks for sticking with me. You guys are amazing.)
Gone With the Wind is largely a straightforward, linear story. It's deceptively plain, a basic story about a woman living in Georgia before, during and after the Civil War, and the story and the setting are so dramatic Mitchell didn't need to rely on literary tricks to build tension or suspense. I've been reading a lot of Shakespeare lately, and I'm always surprised by how much The Bard depends on dreams and mystics and foreshadowing and fate and other ballyhoo to pull his stories toward their conclusions. But MM forgoes most of those devices in GWTW. But here, very late in the game, she begins a chapter with some very nice, understated foreshadowing.
Rhett is gone in Chapter 55.
He has taken Bonnie with him and he has essentially disappeared off the face of the earth, and his absence is felt very keenly by all interested parties--and especially by the reader, I think. Rhett has been a mystery-man since he married Scarlett, but he's been present in Atlanta nonetheless. Scarlett hasn't interacted with him much over the past several chapters, but he's there. He's always there. Jocular and jealous and laughing and rude most of the time, but he's there. Dependably--almost pathetically--inhabiting the background of the novel, as real and necessary as Peachtree Street (and perhaps twice as marginalized in Scarlett's eyes).
But he's gone now.
Shockingly.
The first time I read GWTW I was frightened by the distinct possibility that Rhett would never return, for one reason or another. Rhett is the mainstay of the novel (along with Melly, of course), but GWTW is littered with the graves of characters we always assumed would play a permanent part in Scarlett's life, isn't it? Ellen, Gerald, the Tarleton boys, Charles Hamilton, Frank Kennedy.....each of them were important to the plot and each of them could have existed until the final page of the novel if circumstances and MM's plotting had decided otherwise. As written, GWTW forms a nice square of four essential characters with everyone else dropping off as so very much window dressing during the last ten percent of the novel, but there's no real reason (barring literary themes and other ideals I'll address once my journey through the story comes to a conclusion) that Rhett and Ashley have survived while everyone else is dead and buried. That's the beauty of GWTW I think, that's the appeal of the darker elements in the story: the seemingly random ways in which MM introduces characters--and then kills them off--is reminiscent of the ways in which people live and die in real life. I still like to believe that people and things come in and out of our lives for a reason, but I'm becoming a bit nihilistic in my old age. The order of my American, Mid-western youth has given way to chaos, and I'm afraid I'm a bit like Ashley and I'm not cut out for these times. I saw The Second Best Marigold Exotic Marigold Hotel this afternoon and I despised it, the same way I despise all novels and movies filled with cliche and obviousness and easily anticipated plot twists. And yet...
They certainly make life easier, don't they?
Most novels (my own included!) plod toward an easy ending, but GWTW veers off into unprecedented territory in this final act, doesn't it? This is a story full of tragedy and odd little twists of fate, but the shifts that occur during these final pages are quite astonishing in my humble. I think that's because all of the things that happen happen internally. The events that have impacted or killed off the characters thus far have all been things that happened far outside of almost anyone's control: the assault on Fort Sumter, the failure of the Army of Northern Virginia, the Siege of Atlanta, the Blockcade, Sherman, Reconstruction, the KKK...all of these are huge historical events that swept up Scarlett and the rest of the gang and rearranged their lives even though none of the four major characters in the novel had much of anything to do with anything that occurred. The County Boys might have supported the agitators in Charleston back in 1861 and the entire Wilkes BBQ whoops it up with excitement when they learn that the Civil War has started and that they're finally going to get the chance to whip some Yankees, but it's not as though Ashley and Charles Hamilton and the Tarleton boys played an essential part in it.
But now....
Now that everybody in GWTW is (relatively) rich and (relatively) safe, they can use all their time and energy worrying about their internal lives and sorting out their feelings. It's sort of like the Wars of the Roses. Or the Real Housewives of Atlanta. Or the Season 2 premiere of Southern Charm where everybody got drunk and started complaining about what everybody else was doing.
Like that.
So we open with Rhett Butler and Bonnie having gone MIA, leaving Scarlett alone with only Melly and Ashley, her two children from her previous marriages, and her millions of dollars. And so, in true Scarlett form, she starts picking on people as an outlet for her manifold frustration. She picks on Ashley ("his helplessness in the face of the present situation irked her...") she picks on Ella ("a silly child...") and Wade ("he looked at her with Charles' soft brown eyes and squirmed and twisted his feet in embarrassment..."). Of course it's important to note that Melly alone escapes Scarlett's cutting analysis in this section, but Scarlett has been so scornful and sarcastic about Melly throughout the novel you barely notice the absence of Melly hate here.
*********************************
By contrast, the reader can't help but notice Scarlett's confusion about Rhett. She doesn't know how he feels about her, and she therefore doesn't know how she feels about him, which...the two things are related, of course. But Scarlett has spent the past thousand pages pining after Ashley who is married to another woman and who denies any attraction to her at every turn, so it's not as though she is exactly a realist in this regard. So why is she waiting to know Rhett's feelings for her before she resolves and defines her feelings for him?
Yet perhaps you could argue that Scarlett's ambivalence about Rhett in this section is a reflection of her increased maturity? After all, Scarlett begins the novel with a childish, idealized perspective on Ashley Wilkes. To steal one of Al Franken's best comedic bits, Scarlett loves Ashley in GWTW the way a three year old loves her mommy: She loves him absolutely, she loves everything about him, she thinks he's the best, the most handsome, the most daring, the most courageous, the most wonderful, etc. But now that she's maturing, she begins to see that there's more to life than bright line rules, and she's learning to understand that hardly anybody is all good or all bad and that almost everybody is somewhere in the middle. Ashley hasn't changed much given all that that happened around him and to him over the course of GWTW, but the bloom is coming off the rose now. The cracks are beginning to show. And even Scarlett is starting to notice his incompetence.
But because Scarlett is Scarlett, Ashley gets a raw deal in this chapter because Scarlett starts comparing him to Rhett and....well, everybody on earth pales compared to Rhett Butler. It's not fair, really. Scarlett is mad at Ashley for not taking control of the situation, but it's not realistic to expect that Ashley would be able to solve any of these problems all by himself. He's not quick witted, he's not clever, he's not experienced, and he knows very little about the world; that's what makes him Ashley.
********************************************
I re-watched The Lion In Winter (1968) on Friday night. It's a great movie, filled with amazing performances and amazing dialogue and it's got Anthony Hopkins and Kate Hepburn and Timothy Dalton and Peter O'Toole and...you should watch it, is what I'm saying. It's different from GWTW, but it's very similar on a lot of levels. Like, for instance, it features a husband and wife duo that hates each other almost as much as they love each other, a couple that won't stop poking and prodding until they leave us all in a puddle of despair and tears.
Tears!
There are parts of GWTW that make me roar with laughter, but the last 10% of the book is one long weep-a-thon for me. I've read GWTW hundreds of times, but all the cruel words and horrible threats and slights and hidden emotions in these last parts still make me blubber. They still make me sad. I wouldn't trade the twists and turns in these final chapters for anything in the world, but there's still part of me that always hopes it won't all go so sour so quickly.
And yet, here we are. Chugging toward the unbearably heavy ending. As a matter of fact, MM uses gravity to great effect in the scene where Rhett and Bonnie return from their wonderful trip abroad and encounter Scarlett who has "hurried from her room to the top of the stairs," while Bonnie is "stretching her short plump legs in an effort to climb the steps." So Scarlett is at the top, Bonnie is climbing upward, and Rhett is at the bottom of the stairs. Lurking. Like a panther. Or the devil. Or something.
*Sigh*
Why can't they just be nice here, y'all? Why does this all have to end this way? Why can't they just be blandly civil and save us all a lot of heartache?
But they can't, of course. They are who they are, and we are who we are, and none of us can change no matter what. And so, instead of disengaging and peeling away from the situation, they both fly straight into danger with guns blazing like Hans Solo flying into the Death Star.
Interestingly enough, Rhett shoots first. Let's rate their insults on a scale of 1 to 10, shall we?
- "You are looking pale, Mrs. Butler. Is there a rouge shortage?" 3/10. This isn't the worst thing he could have said, but it's not great either. You haven't seen her in three months and you can't think of one nice thing to say?
- "Can this wanness mean that you've been missing me?" 4/10. Same insult, but I'm going to give it an extra point because he repeated his dig a second time. So now he's mean and annoying. C'mon, Rhett. I love you, but come on.
- "If I'm pale it's your fault and not because I've missed you, you conceited thing." 1/10. Scarlett's momma raised her better than that, but he's definitely asking for it. Besides, Rhett is conceited. So it's not like she's exaggerating here.
- "Indeed! Well, who' the happy father? Ashley?" 8/10. This is cold, you guys. Especially given everything that happened before he left town. He's only telling the truth, but not every truth needs to be told.
- "Damn you....no woman would want the children of a cad like you....I wish it was anybody's baby but yours!" 9/10. Burn, burn, burn. She got him good, didn't she?
- "Cheer up...maybe you'll have a miscarriage." 10/10. Congratulations, Rhett. You won!
The two of them keep trying to best each other, but to no avail. What did he hope to accomplish by saying something mean like that? Rhett Butler is usually so strategic and calm, but he's unraveling now and it's shocking to see. Scarlett is pushing him and goading him, but we don't expect him to push her right back, do we? And when he does it's....ugly. It's an ugly mess.
We've seen him be base and mean before, on the fateful night of Ashley party. But you know what? He was drunk that night. So that was our excuse and our explanation. But he doesn't seem to be drunk now. He's sober as a judge there on the stairs, but he can't control himself anymore. She's humiliating him and insulting him, but it still hurts to see him sink so low in this chapter. And then---
Scarlett falls down the stairs and miscarries.
And again, consider the positioning of the two of them there on the stairs. The movie does a great job of spacing and pacing in this scene, and there's so much drama in this moment. Scarlett is on top of the stairs when they begin arguing and Rhett comes up to her level, but then she takes a swing at him. But instead of connecting she falls.
All.
The.
Way.
To.
The.
Bottom.
She tumbles so quickly even the all powerful, all wonderful Rhett Butler can't break her fall. He lunges backward to protect himself from her claws, and then Scarlett breaks a rib "and, too dazed to catch herself, she rolled over and over to the bottom of the flight."
All.
The.
Way.
To.
The.
Bottom.
******************************************
And then the characters begin to float in space.
GWTW is a hardcore realist book, but everything becomes unglued in the latter half of this chapter, mostly as a reflection of Scarlett's delirium. These pages are filled with heavy, heavy material and ideas and things that are pulling Scarlett and Rhett apart at the seams. It's like...well, you know how black holes are the heaviest things in the universe? Black holes are heavy gravity and their trying to pull us all into their orbit and they look scary, but you know what will happen to you if you actually do find yourself at the edge of a singularity like the one at the center of the Milkyway Galaxy?
You'll float.
The person inside of a blackhole believes they pass through the blackhole instantaneously, but to an outside observer it would look like you'd just stopped. As though you were just floating there at the edge of a blackhole for all of eternity.
And this is kind of what happens here in this part of chapter 56. Scarlett and Rhett have reached their own black holes individually and alone. There's no day, there's no night, there's no before, there's no after. There's only this grotesquely massive, outrageously dangerous thing they'll both have to circle around until the end of time. And, what's much worse, black holes grow. They get larger. They eat more stuff. The accumulate mass. And they swallow everyone and everything and every thought and every idea and they are so big and black and dense that not even light can escape from their grasp.
This miscarriage is their black hole. Scarlett is cold and confused and Rhett is jealous and confused and neither of them is big enough or confident enough or courageous enough to admit that they are very sorry and that they have no idea what in the hell they're doing. And so Scarlett doesn't call for Rhett even though she wants him. And instead of barging into Scarlett's room and sitting with her, Rhett stays in his room across the hall. Alone.
This breaks my heart every time, you guys.
Seriously.
That's why it has taken me so long to write this blog post. How in the world am I supposed to analyze my feelings on what I consider to be the most wonderfully devastating pages in all the literature that's ever been written in the English speaking world? You can have your Mr. Darcy's, your Kilgore Trout's, your Sam Starret's, your Rick Blaine's, your Cross Sugarman's, your TeaCakes, your Henry's IV, V, and VI's. But I say to you here and now, that nothing holds a candle to Rhett Butler on his knees, weeping, with his head in Melly's lap.
Isn't it interesting that Melly's kindness is the thing that actually breaks him?
Rhett has been sitting across the hall from Scarlett's room, watching the door and smoking cigars and not asking questions because the events have shocked him into silence. Rhett has had a silver tongue for a thousand pages, but Scarlett's miscarriage has rendered him a deaf mute.
But while he's being oh so quiet, MM gives us enough clues to let us know that it's loud as hell inside his brain. This is a classic study in show don't tell, isn't it? Up to this point Rhett has always been smooth and polished but now? He's a mess:
- "The room was untidy, littered with cigar butts and dishes of untouched food." Not eating.
- "The bed was tumbled and unmade and he sat on it." Not sleeping.
- He was "unhsaven and suddenly gaunt." Filthy.
- "He looked so like a damned soul waiting judgment--so like a child in a suddenly hostile world." Scared.
Anyway, so...Rhett starts drinking whiskey. We don't know how long Scarlett has been teetering between life and death, but surely days have gone by. But as I said earlier, our characters are floating in space and it's not clear if it's been 48 hours or five days or whatever else. But we know Rhett hasn't slept or ate or drank anything but whiskey over the past few days, and we can tell that he's about to melt down. I once stayed up 72 hours straight during finals back at college and I was damn near hysterical by the end of it all. But I was eating and drinking normally all the time, so I can't imagine Rhett's state of mind in this section.
But it can't be good.
Melly tells him that Scarlett is better. But Rhett either doesn't hear her or doesn't understand her or has just been pushed so far past his breaking point that nothing Melly said was going to make any sense to him anyway. So instead of reacting calmly or with happiness, he starts to really melt down.
He cries, but because he's Rhett Butler and he's larger than life, he doesn't simply weep. No, our beloved goes into a full-body, shoulder shaking, desperately choking sob that scares the daylights out of Melly. Rhett carries himself so lightly most of the time, that we never suspect that he's ever felt guilty or miserable about anything he's done. But now we see that we've been wrong. He's full of sorrows.
And he's vulnerable.
Very, very vulnerable.
Scarlett believes that Rhett doesn't display his emotions because he doesn't have any emotions, but now we see that she's wrong. Now we learn that Rhett has a lot of feelings about everything, and it's been eating away at him for God knows how long; and we begin to wonder about how hard he's had to work to keep all of this so deep below his surface. And, more to the point, now that he's had this explosion, how in the world will he be able to reel himself back from the abyss?
Even Melly is shocked when she hears Rhett's snide remarks about Scarlett's miscarriage. And you'll notice that at no time during their conversation does Melly even attempt to give Rhett advice. She simply sits there and listens to him, but she never tells him what to do to get back in Scarlett's good graces. She never tells him how to fix what has gone so horribly wrong.
Because it can't be fixed.
*Sigh*
Sunday, January 4, 2015
Chapter 55: "....Let that be your cross"/"Uncomforted Tears"
I hate when things are over.
Not boring things, not everyday things like work projects or bad television shows or whatever. But I hate when good things are over. I didn't mourn the end of the year during the month of December because 2014 was rather run-of-the-mill as a year when all is said and done. But I have been in a funk lately because I can now see the light at the end of this blog tunnel. I've been working my way through Gone With the Wind for ages, but there are only eight chapters left for me to chew on now. We're 91% through Scarlett's tale and I'm totally bummed about methodically blogging my theories and opinions about everything that happens in the tragic end of the novel.
It's so sad, isn't it?
It's so sad I had to take a break for a moment, to let my words and thoughts breathe. But we're talking about GWTW here. And I'm clearly obsessed with Margaret Mitchell's masterpiece. So when I say I took a break to get away from the book, I actually mean I took a break to immerse myself even more fully in the story and the characters and the historical era in general and the South in particular. In other words: I headed to Atlanta for a long weekend.
The South is a cheap holiday during the month of December. The hotels are empty and the planes from Chicago are flying half-full and we had no trouble getting a deal on transportation that did Scarlett and Rhett quite proud. We stayed at the Marriott Marquis and ate at Waffle House every morning, and we enjoyed ourselves immensely. But when I got back from all of that fun in the sun, I was still sort of sad.
Because this blog is still ending, no matter what I do. I mean that's not strictly true, since I could abandon it and therefore not actually finish it at all, but I'm sure you know what I mean.
I mean that things are over.
Things are changing for Scarlett and Rhett and Melly and Ashley. The bulk of their adventures are behind us now, and there's nothing left but uncertainty. This is one of those bits of GWTW where nothing feels certain and everything feels weird and we fear the worst but hope for the very best.
Except--and this is the wonderful thing about GWTW and the wonderful thing about life itself--we don't know what the best actually looks like.
What is Scarlett's best case scenario at this point?
I don't know.
And Scarlett doesn't know, either.
Nobody knows what they want by this juncture in the novel, actually.
Scarlett has loved Ashley with all her heart for the entire novel, but lately her love for Melly's husband has started to fade. So much so, in fact, that Scarlett starts to wonder "if indeed Ashley had played the manly part in this mess." Which...I'm not sure if I agree with Scarlett that Ashley should have shot Archie and admitted everything, but I do agree that Ashley shouldn't be so content to hide behind Melly's skirts. The mature reader realizes that Ashley is maddeningly weak of course, but what should he have done here? Killing Archie and shouting about his love affair from the top of his lungs wouldn't have accomplished much of anything. But at some point you have to take a stand, don't you?
After all, every character in this novel is a Confederate or an ex-Confederate or a Confederate widow, and Confederates are all about taking a stand, aren't they?
But where did that get them?
And I suppose that's MM's point in all of this, isn't it? MM may or may not be dewy-eyed and nostalgic for the Old South, but I don't think any serious reader could ever accuse her or her characters of being full-fledged supporters of the CSA. Violence is everywhere in GWTW, but MM only seems to approve of it when it's in the case of self-defense (i.e. Scarlett shooting that guy at Tara). Any other violence or loss of life is presented as a foolish waste of time and resources, which is a remarkable stance considering that GWTW was written between the World Wars. Or maybe it isn't all that remarkable after all. I think that more than anything MM presents the Civil War from the perspective of the exhausted, impoverished southerner, which is to say that MM's Civil War has more in common with the outrageous futility and ineptitude of World War I than with the glories of World War II. So while I think MM and her characters could be as easily moved to rage or violence as any other southerner, I believe she thinks that shootings and wars are terrible solutions to the world's problems.
****************
Speaking of wars, here's the funniest thing I found at the Margaret Mitchell museum in Atlanta, GA. There's a big wall featuring the covers of GWTW in dozens of different languages, and for me this one was the most memorable because it's hilarious and totally weird and wrong in almost every way. Is this Greek? Why is Scarlett's hair red? Or is that supposed to be Belle? Shit, maybe that is supposed to be Belle? And okay, are Rhett's eye's blue? And forgetting the cosmetics of the image, I suppose this is supposed to be a cartoon depiction of their little showdown the night Atlanta fell? Right before Rhett leaves Scarlett to join the army? And if so, why are they embracing in such a weird and totally uncharacteristic pose? And why--
Oh, never mind. I would like to get a blown-up version of this for my office, although I doubt it would be well-received given that I work at a law firm. And no, I don't do divorce law anymore.
*************************************************
And speaking of wars a little more, isn't it a shame that Melly has no choice but to wage social war on India about all of this dirty Scarlett/Ashley business? We've never learned to like India, but she's been part of the background noise of the novel for so long that it seems utterly ridiculous to believe that she could simply be cut out of the story at this juncture. And yet, that's precisely what Melly does. She cuts India dead because she realizes that the only way to save Ashley and Scarlett is to throw shade at India and pretend that her sister-in-law is a liar. The first third of GWTW was all about coming together. The war made the most peculiar widows and friends and bedfellows and all that, but the important thing I took away from all of that was that you don't have time to hold a grudge during an emergency. And so during the war and the early reconstruction period, Scarlett had no choice but to befriend Melly, India, Honey, Rhett, Aunt Pitty, Archie, Will Benteen and an entire host of other characters she hated, because she needed them to survive.
But now, all those bonds are breaking bit by bit.
Things are unraveling.
Everybody is food secure now. And now that reconstruction is basically over and they're all safely back in the upper class again, our characters have plenty of time for drama. They've climbed Maslow's hierarchy of needs to the third and fourth level, which mean they have plenty of time for sniping and gossiping and meddling. So while Melly served as the social glue that kept everything together through the first 2/3 of the novel, even Melly starts engaging in social sabotage. I'm not saying I disagree with her reasons, but wasn't it surprising to see Melly Mean Girl her way through this chapter? I didn't know she had it in her. I'm proud of Melly for taking a stand when Ashley can't and Scarlett won't and Rhett has left town, but I honestly didn't know she could ostracize India so quickly.
That takes talent, is what I'm saying.
And then there's poor, hilarious, utterly correct Aunt Pitty. My Aunt Shelia was sort of similar to Aunt Pittypat, and I think of her every time the POV shifts and we're given some insight into Pitty's inner thoughts. She reminds me of my Aunt Shelia because....well, Aunt Pitty might be a little silly, a little flighty, a little sheltered, but she's also very perceptive and she's always on time with her observations, isn't she? How about these gems:
The same kind of tears that are welling up behind my eyes now that GWTW is coming to a close.
Next up: Rhett returns, gravity shows up and everybody and everything that's not nailed down starts falling.
Not boring things, not everyday things like work projects or bad television shows or whatever. But I hate when good things are over. I didn't mourn the end of the year during the month of December because 2014 was rather run-of-the-mill as a year when all is said and done. But I have been in a funk lately because I can now see the light at the end of this blog tunnel. I've been working my way through Gone With the Wind for ages, but there are only eight chapters left for me to chew on now. We're 91% through Scarlett's tale and I'm totally bummed about methodically blogging my theories and opinions about everything that happens in the tragic end of the novel.
It's so sad, isn't it?
It's so sad I had to take a break for a moment, to let my words and thoughts breathe. But we're talking about GWTW here. And I'm clearly obsessed with Margaret Mitchell's masterpiece. So when I say I took a break to get away from the book, I actually mean I took a break to immerse myself even more fully in the story and the characters and the historical era in general and the South in particular. In other words: I headed to Atlanta for a long weekend.
The South is a cheap holiday during the month of December. The hotels are empty and the planes from Chicago are flying half-full and we had no trouble getting a deal on transportation that did Scarlett and Rhett quite proud. We stayed at the Marriott Marquis and ate at Waffle House every morning, and we enjoyed ourselves immensely. But when I got back from all of that fun in the sun, I was still sort of sad.
Because this blog is still ending, no matter what I do. I mean that's not strictly true, since I could abandon it and therefore not actually finish it at all, but I'm sure you know what I mean.
I mean that things are over.
Things are changing for Scarlett and Rhett and Melly and Ashley. The bulk of their adventures are behind us now, and there's nothing left but uncertainty. This is one of those bits of GWTW where nothing feels certain and everything feels weird and we fear the worst but hope for the very best.
Except--and this is the wonderful thing about GWTW and the wonderful thing about life itself--we don't know what the best actually looks like.
What is Scarlett's best case scenario at this point?
I don't know.
And Scarlett doesn't know, either.
Nobody knows what they want by this juncture in the novel, actually.
Scarlett has loved Ashley with all her heart for the entire novel, but lately her love for Melly's husband has started to fade. So much so, in fact, that Scarlett starts to wonder "if indeed Ashley had played the manly part in this mess." Which...I'm not sure if I agree with Scarlett that Ashley should have shot Archie and admitted everything, but I do agree that Ashley shouldn't be so content to hide behind Melly's skirts. The mature reader realizes that Ashley is maddeningly weak of course, but what should he have done here? Killing Archie and shouting about his love affair from the top of his lungs wouldn't have accomplished much of anything. But at some point you have to take a stand, don't you?
After all, every character in this novel is a Confederate or an ex-Confederate or a Confederate widow, and Confederates are all about taking a stand, aren't they?
But where did that get them?
And I suppose that's MM's point in all of this, isn't it? MM may or may not be dewy-eyed and nostalgic for the Old South, but I don't think any serious reader could ever accuse her or her characters of being full-fledged supporters of the CSA. Violence is everywhere in GWTW, but MM only seems to approve of it when it's in the case of self-defense (i.e. Scarlett shooting that guy at Tara). Any other violence or loss of life is presented as a foolish waste of time and resources, which is a remarkable stance considering that GWTW was written between the World Wars. Or maybe it isn't all that remarkable after all. I think that more than anything MM presents the Civil War from the perspective of the exhausted, impoverished southerner, which is to say that MM's Civil War has more in common with the outrageous futility and ineptitude of World War I than with the glories of World War II. So while I think MM and her characters could be as easily moved to rage or violence as any other southerner, I believe she thinks that shootings and wars are terrible solutions to the world's problems.
****************
Speaking of wars, here's the funniest thing I found at the Margaret Mitchell museum in Atlanta, GA. There's a big wall featuring the covers of GWTW in dozens of different languages, and for me this one was the most memorable because it's hilarious and totally weird and wrong in almost every way. Is this Greek? Why is Scarlett's hair red? Or is that supposed to be Belle? Shit, maybe that is supposed to be Belle? And okay, are Rhett's eye's blue? And forgetting the cosmetics of the image, I suppose this is supposed to be a cartoon depiction of their little showdown the night Atlanta fell? Right before Rhett leaves Scarlett to join the army? And if so, why are they embracing in such a weird and totally uncharacteristic pose? And why--
Oh, never mind. I would like to get a blown-up version of this for my office, although I doubt it would be well-received given that I work at a law firm. And no, I don't do divorce law anymore.
*************************************************
And speaking of wars a little more, isn't it a shame that Melly has no choice but to wage social war on India about all of this dirty Scarlett/Ashley business? We've never learned to like India, but she's been part of the background noise of the novel for so long that it seems utterly ridiculous to believe that she could simply be cut out of the story at this juncture. And yet, that's precisely what Melly does. She cuts India dead because she realizes that the only way to save Ashley and Scarlett is to throw shade at India and pretend that her sister-in-law is a liar. The first third of GWTW was all about coming together. The war made the most peculiar widows and friends and bedfellows and all that, but the important thing I took away from all of that was that you don't have time to hold a grudge during an emergency. And so during the war and the early reconstruction period, Scarlett had no choice but to befriend Melly, India, Honey, Rhett, Aunt Pitty, Archie, Will Benteen and an entire host of other characters she hated, because she needed them to survive.
But now, all those bonds are breaking bit by bit.
Things are unraveling.
Everybody is food secure now. And now that reconstruction is basically over and they're all safely back in the upper class again, our characters have plenty of time for drama. They've climbed Maslow's hierarchy of needs to the third and fourth level, which mean they have plenty of time for sniping and gossiping and meddling. So while Melly served as the social glue that kept everything together through the first 2/3 of the novel, even Melly starts engaging in social sabotage. I'm not saying I disagree with her reasons, but wasn't it surprising to see Melly Mean Girl her way through this chapter? I didn't know she had it in her. I'm proud of Melly for taking a stand when Ashley can't and Scarlett won't and Rhett has left town, but I honestly didn't know she could ostracize India so quickly.
That takes talent, is what I'm saying.
And then there's poor, hilarious, utterly correct Aunt Pitty. My Aunt Shelia was sort of similar to Aunt Pittypat, and I think of her every time the POV shifts and we're given some insight into Pitty's inner thoughts. She reminds me of my Aunt Shelia because....well, Aunt Pitty might be a little silly, a little flighty, a little sheltered, but she's also very perceptive and she's always on time with her observations, isn't she? How about these gems:
- "Ashley sent India money every week and every week India proudly and silently returned it, much to the old lady's alarm and regret." Every week? She's alarmed and regretful every week? Poor Pitty!
- "Pitty was not overly fond of India, for India intimidated her with her dry, stiff-necked ways and her passionate convictions." The war is over, India! Passionate convictions aren't in style anymore!
- "She could not live alone. She would have to get a stranger to live with her or she would have to close up her house and go and live with Scarlett." That's a false dichotomy, but a hilarious one!
- "And that frightening, fascinating Captain Butler--" There are a lot of descriptions of Rhett in this novel, but I think this is pretty much the best in the entire novel. Mostly because it's so simple. But also because it's so accurate. Scarlett has been married to Rhett for a million years and even with all her day-to-day knowledge of the man she hasn't yet advanced beyond frightening and fascinating. Rhett is many things to many people (and all things to me, of course), but more than anything he's a scary puzzle, isn't he? He's unpredictable and intriguing and endlessly interesting and even Pitty isn't immune to his charms.
The same kind of tears that are welling up behind my eyes now that GWTW is coming to a close.
Next up: Rhett returns, gravity shows up and everybody and everything that's not nailed down starts falling.
Sunday, November 23, 2014
Chapter 54 : "Man bites dog!" (Scarlett, Rhett, the "rape scene" and marital bliss)
"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.
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.
Chapter 53: "Ashley hasn't had a birthday party since--"
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.
****************
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.
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.
****************
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.
Sunday, November 16, 2014
Chapter 52: "You're too anxious to make money and too fond of bullying people":Denouements, climaxes, and falling actions in GWTW.
Let's go back to high school tonight, shall we?
According to Merriam-Webster online, the denouement is the "final outcome of the main dramatic complication in a literary work," with the classic example included in the online definition being from Romeo and Juliet ("In the play's denouement, the two lovers kill themselves.."). I've tried over the years to put my hands on precisely what I think the true denouement is in GWTW, but each and every effort has heretofore come up empty and deeply unsatisfying. Mostly because I've never been able to decide on which of Scarlett's dramatic complications is the actual main complication.
I love Casablanca almost as much as I love GWTW, but for all the mysteries and chaos and action that occurs during Casablanca even a first-time viewer of the movie has no trouble correctly identifying the airport scene (i.e. "here's looking at you kid") as the denouement.
Same with Romeo and Juliet, Richard III, The Lion in Winter, Forrest Gump, and any given episode of The Young and the Restless. Every reasonably well-edited reality show has a readily discernible plot, and even a teenager could probably correctly locate the moment when the momentum of the narrative shifts and the end result becomes inevitable. But GWTW is not only about one thing. The movie focuses on the Scarlett/Rhett relationship and their sticky, mutually destructive marriage is the main complication in Scarlett's life, but I don't think this depiction is accurate for MM's book. GWTW isn't like Romeo and Juliet. It isn't about one big thing, and it certainly isn't only about the Scarlett/Rhett love story. Instead it's about several major things. And, more to the point, it's about Scarlett's relationships with the other three main characters. As we saw in Chapter 51, every aspect of Scarlett's life is connected to every other thing that happens in a manner that is more cosmic and less practical than even MM would probably care to admit. The Butlers and the Wilkes' are bound together because they all live in Atlanta and have known each other for a very long time and Ashley works at the mills and all of that, but they're also connected on a different plane (although I'm not sure if it's higher or lower, to tell you the truth). So for all that Ashley has tried to keep his distance from Scarlett, the mere mention of his hatred of Rhett is enough to send Scarlett off into a vow of celibacy, which is enough to make Rhett go ape with insecurity, which is enough to cause him to try to forget all about Scarlett and focus all his attention on Bonnie which....
Anyway, we'll get to all of that soon enough. But for now, let's just focus on the way MM set the scene that opens Chapter 52, the scene that I would argue could very well be the true denouement of GWTW. MM usually doesn't spend too much time setting down the details of her scenes, and she definitely doesn't linger on descriptions, but in my mind's eye there's something almost charmingly Valazquez-esque about the way she's placed the Butler clan around the sitting room on this rainy afternoon.
Wade: lonely, moping, bored, picking up books (instruments of learning that are misplaced here, since this scene does not take place in a library) and letting them bang to the ground. Poor lil Wade, ya'll.
Ella: busy in the corner with her dolls. So while Wade is bored, Ella is boring. Does Ella have a speaking anywhere in GWTW? I don't think she does. Even Beau gets a few lines, doesn't he?
Scarlett: sitting at her secretary adding up a long column of figures.
Rhett: lying on the floor(!), swinging his watch by it chain (!), just out of Bonnie's reach (!).
And that's....okay, so I know a lot of people don't think GWTW is a great work of literature, but isn't that a wonderfully subtle piece of foreshadowing? Bonnie Butler will be blessed with every gift except length of years and, of course, a watch is the universal symbol of time in Western art, and isn't it so poignant that this is Rhett's watch and it is being swung by Rhett himself?And over the course of the novel we have seen Rhett say and do a million different things in a million different places, but this is the first time we've heard of him lying down. Scarlett and Rhett are married, but in the few scenes MM has given us that take place inside the Butler bedroom Rhett is never sleeping or lying down. But here he's prone, which is also foreshadowing since he'll eventually be knocked down/laid low by Bonnie's death. Everything we need to know about the end of GWTW is here in this room, and everything that happens throughout the rest of the book simply confirms what we already know about Scarlett, Rhett, Ashley, and Melly, doesn't it?
Lovely.
Anyway, moving on quickly, isn't it fun how Wade, Rhett and Scarlett have such very definitions of bravery/courage in this scene? Wade Hampton is a product of post-Civil War Atlanta and he lost his father in the War. Therefore, in his opinion true courage means being severely wounded in battle while fighting against the feds for the CSA. All the bravest men are dead on the alter of their country ("dulce et decorum est..." after all), but I guess Wade thinks that the only heroes are those who actually died while fighting against the Yankees. By contrast, Scarlett is a tough woman who was forged through the fiery crucible of the Reconstruction South, so she has very little patience for Wade's definition of bravery. She always did think Charles Hamilton was a fool, and the reader knows that Wade wasn't anybody's definition of a brave soldier, plus Scarlett instinctively seems to believe that only survivors like Scarlett are truly courageous. After all, everybody can die and will die, but not everybody has the gumption to live.
And as for Rhett....
Well, true to form, Rhett doesn't tip his hand and give us his definition of bravery. Instead he gets in a dig at Scarlett ("He married your mother, didn't he? Well, that's proof enough of heroism."), and then turns his attention elsewhere. I'd argue that Rhett Butler has more physical courage than anybody else in GWTW (except maybe the young Gerald), but he also seems to understand that a willingness to fight isn't really worth much. He doesn't spend much time debating heroism because he's too mature and complex to give much thought to boyish fantasies about courage and fighting. Duels and fighting and gun play and all that other stuff has been a part of his life for so long that you get the sense that he's almost annoyed to think about it.
Anyway, Rhett decides then and there that he's going to start using all his charm and smarm to get back in the good graces of Southern Society. Rhett Butler is a reliable character that we can count on to make the right choices for the right reasons most of the time, so even though I'm pro-Yankee and anti-Confederate and a Northerner and living in Chicago in the 21st century, Rhett's desire to have his children included in Southern Society carries a lot of weight with me. After all, unlike Scarlett and Melly and the rest of our gang, Rhett has spent a lot of time in a lot of different places around the world. He's spent time in California, New York, Paris, and London, and he still seems to believe deep down that Southern Society is the best. Or anyway, he seems to truly believe that Southern Society is the best fit for his family, and who am I to argue with such logic? Besides, Rhett is what the kids today call a boss. He's a guy who understands the world and his place in it, and he always seems to know just what to do to come out ahead, and I think it's incredibly pleasurable to watch him try to concoct a plan to shoehorn Bonnie, Wade, and Ella back into genteel Atlanta's good graces.
Up next....Ashley's birthday party. Laissez le bon temps rouler?
According to Merriam-Webster online, the denouement is the "final outcome of the main dramatic complication in a literary work," with the classic example included in the online definition being from Romeo and Juliet ("In the play's denouement, the two lovers kill themselves.."). I've tried over the years to put my hands on precisely what I think the true denouement is in GWTW, but each and every effort has heretofore come up empty and deeply unsatisfying. Mostly because I've never been able to decide on which of Scarlett's dramatic complications is the actual main complication.
I love Casablanca almost as much as I love GWTW, but for all the mysteries and chaos and action that occurs during Casablanca even a first-time viewer of the movie has no trouble correctly identifying the airport scene (i.e. "here's looking at you kid") as the denouement.
Same with Romeo and Juliet, Richard III, The Lion in Winter, Forrest Gump, and any given episode of The Young and the Restless. Every reasonably well-edited reality show has a readily discernible plot, and even a teenager could probably correctly locate the moment when the momentum of the narrative shifts and the end result becomes inevitable. But GWTW is not only about one thing. The movie focuses on the Scarlett/Rhett relationship and their sticky, mutually destructive marriage is the main complication in Scarlett's life, but I don't think this depiction is accurate for MM's book. GWTW isn't like Romeo and Juliet. It isn't about one big thing, and it certainly isn't only about the Scarlett/Rhett love story. Instead it's about several major things. And, more to the point, it's about Scarlett's relationships with the other three main characters. As we saw in Chapter 51, every aspect of Scarlett's life is connected to every other thing that happens in a manner that is more cosmic and less practical than even MM would probably care to admit. The Butlers and the Wilkes' are bound together because they all live in Atlanta and have known each other for a very long time and Ashley works at the mills and all of that, but they're also connected on a different plane (although I'm not sure if it's higher or lower, to tell you the truth). So for all that Ashley has tried to keep his distance from Scarlett, the mere mention of his hatred of Rhett is enough to send Scarlett off into a vow of celibacy, which is enough to make Rhett go ape with insecurity, which is enough to cause him to try to forget all about Scarlett and focus all his attention on Bonnie which....
Anyway, we'll get to all of that soon enough. But for now, let's just focus on the way MM set the scene that opens Chapter 52, the scene that I would argue could very well be the true denouement of GWTW. MM usually doesn't spend too much time setting down the details of her scenes, and she definitely doesn't linger on descriptions, but in my mind's eye there's something almost charmingly Valazquez-esque about the way she's placed the Butler clan around the sitting room on this rainy afternoon.
Wade: lonely, moping, bored, picking up books (instruments of learning that are misplaced here, since this scene does not take place in a library) and letting them bang to the ground. Poor lil Wade, ya'll.
Ella: busy in the corner with her dolls. So while Wade is bored, Ella is boring. Does Ella have a speaking anywhere in GWTW? I don't think she does. Even Beau gets a few lines, doesn't he?
Scarlett: sitting at her secretary adding up a long column of figures.
Rhett: lying on the floor(!), swinging his watch by it chain (!), just out of Bonnie's reach (!).
And that's....okay, so I know a lot of people don't think GWTW is a great work of literature, but isn't that a wonderfully subtle piece of foreshadowing? Bonnie Butler will be blessed with every gift except length of years and, of course, a watch is the universal symbol of time in Western art, and isn't it so poignant that this is Rhett's watch and it is being swung by Rhett himself?And over the course of the novel we have seen Rhett say and do a million different things in a million different places, but this is the first time we've heard of him lying down. Scarlett and Rhett are married, but in the few scenes MM has given us that take place inside the Butler bedroom Rhett is never sleeping or lying down. But here he's prone, which is also foreshadowing since he'll eventually be knocked down/laid low by Bonnie's death. Everything we need to know about the end of GWTW is here in this room, and everything that happens throughout the rest of the book simply confirms what we already know about Scarlett, Rhett, Ashley, and Melly, doesn't it?
Lovely.
Anyway, moving on quickly, isn't it fun how Wade, Rhett and Scarlett have such very definitions of bravery/courage in this scene? Wade Hampton is a product of post-Civil War Atlanta and he lost his father in the War. Therefore, in his opinion true courage means being severely wounded in battle while fighting against the feds for the CSA. All the bravest men are dead on the alter of their country ("dulce et decorum est..." after all), but I guess Wade thinks that the only heroes are those who actually died while fighting against the Yankees. By contrast, Scarlett is a tough woman who was forged through the fiery crucible of the Reconstruction South, so she has very little patience for Wade's definition of bravery. She always did think Charles Hamilton was a fool, and the reader knows that Wade wasn't anybody's definition of a brave soldier, plus Scarlett instinctively seems to believe that only survivors like Scarlett are truly courageous. After all, everybody can die and will die, but not everybody has the gumption to live.
And as for Rhett....
Well, true to form, Rhett doesn't tip his hand and give us his definition of bravery. Instead he gets in a dig at Scarlett ("He married your mother, didn't he? Well, that's proof enough of heroism."), and then turns his attention elsewhere. I'd argue that Rhett Butler has more physical courage than anybody else in GWTW (except maybe the young Gerald), but he also seems to understand that a willingness to fight isn't really worth much. He doesn't spend much time debating heroism because he's too mature and complex to give much thought to boyish fantasies about courage and fighting. Duels and fighting and gun play and all that other stuff has been a part of his life for so long that you get the sense that he's almost annoyed to think about it.
Anyway, Rhett decides then and there that he's going to start using all his charm and smarm to get back in the good graces of Southern Society. Rhett Butler is a reliable character that we can count on to make the right choices for the right reasons most of the time, so even though I'm pro-Yankee and anti-Confederate and a Northerner and living in Chicago in the 21st century, Rhett's desire to have his children included in Southern Society carries a lot of weight with me. After all, unlike Scarlett and Melly and the rest of our gang, Rhett has spent a lot of time in a lot of different places around the world. He's spent time in California, New York, Paris, and London, and he still seems to believe deep down that Southern Society is the best. Or anyway, he seems to truly believe that Southern Society is the best fit for his family, and who am I to argue with such logic? Besides, Rhett is what the kids today call a boss. He's a guy who understands the world and his place in it, and he always seems to know just what to do to come out ahead, and I think it's incredibly pleasurable to watch him try to concoct a plan to shoehorn Bonnie, Wade, and Ella back into genteel Atlanta's good graces.
Up next....Ashley's birthday party. Laissez le bon temps rouler?
Saturday, November 8, 2014
Chapter 51: "You like dogs, don't you, Scarlett?"
Happy National Novel Writing Month, Everybody!
Chapter 51 is an awfully short chapter, isn't it?
And yet, so much happens. It's a linchpin chapter, one that is replicated almost verbatim in one of the more memorable scenes in the movie, but it's nothing more than a few quick conversations and a couple paragraphs of Scarlett's internal dialogue.
But it's so scandalous, isn't it?
Scarlett doesn't want to get any fatter, so Scarlett doesn't want to give birth to anymore kids. Which means Scarlett has decided that she doesn't want to have sex with Rhett anymore. Or does it? I know absolutely nothing about Victorian era birth control and sex education, but Rhett is the chief investor for Atlanta's most profitable brothel so surely he was well-versed in these matters? He's anti-abortion because old school abortion was so hazardous, but I'm absolutely certain he knows at least a few ways to avoid pregnancy? And if people in 1870s Atlanta didn't know anything about birth control, then how come there's such a huge time gap between Melly's first pregnancy and Melly's final pregnancy?
Unless....
You're not honestly suggesting to me that Melly and Ashley have been faithfully celibate this entire time, are you? Its true that Dr. Meade specifically told Melly she shouldn't have any more children. And it's also true that Ashley and Melly are notoriously straight-laced vanilla folks who never met a rule they didn't adore, but come on. And yes, it's also true that Melly nearly died while she was in child birth with Beau, but are you seriously going to try to convince me that they never slipped up and....
Actually, I don't know anymore. MM gives Melly a little internal dialogue back in Chapter 50 wherein Melly expresses her desire to have a girl. As a matter of fact, Melly "was quite willing to risk her life for another child," but "Ashley would not hear of it." Scarlett knows about Dr. Meade's medical opinion and Scarlett therefore seems to reasonably conclude that Ashley and Melly are abstaining from all sexual relations because of Melly's precarious health, but I'm not so sure about that.
Because you can have sexual relations without having actual sex, can't you?
Rhett is Scarlett's third husband, so she has to know something about sex and what happens in the bedroom and about what does and does not lead to pregnancy. But it's interesting to realize that for all her smarts and wild experiences, Scarlett has a childlike grasp on the realities of sharing a bed with a man. She thinks sex is black-and-white: you're either not having sex at all or you're having sex and are therefore in danger of getting pregnant. Sex is not like that and there's a huge gray area out there of course, but Scarlett doesn't seem to grasp the concept of being physically close to her husband without risking having another child.
I think that's why the conversations with Ashley and Rhett go so poorly. None of these characters have any idea what the others are talking about or why they're talking about it. It reads as high drama, but in fact it's also pure comedy: a series of misunderstandings that ends with every single person unhappy despite their best efforts.
And anyway, what in the hell is going on with Ashley in this chapter? Ashley is usually so cool and calm and detached about everything, but all of a sudden he starts calling Rhett out after Scarlett starts advising him on how best to deal with sick workers ("a couple of licks will cure most any sickness short of a broken leg,"she says in what has to be one of her most carelessly cruel throwaway lines). And Scarlett lets him talk all that trash about Rhett, even though Rhett doesn't have anything to do with her "penny-pinching ways," and then---
Oh, the things Ashley says in this chapter!
What is going on here? Let's lay out Ashley's transgressions here, because this is some real BS.
Mmmmm mmmm mmm!
When did Ashley turn into such a hater? And doesn't he know none of this is true? And, and, and...
I'm not an Ashley Wilkes hater, but I'm not an apologist either. I'm surprised the notoriously dilly-dallying Ashley Wilkes has picked this particular moment--and this particular subject--to assert an opinion. I suppose we're supposed to assume that Ashley is somewhat jealous of Rhett/Scarlett? Ashley has seemed largely content with the trajectory of his life since the opening pages of GWTW, but perhaps he is not quite as happy with his life as we'd previously been led to assume. After all, Ashley has played by all the rules and he's done exactly what society has expected of him, but where has all that obedience gotten him? On the other hand, Rhett Butler has bucked that same society, but somehow he's still a virile millionaire who's living in the biggest house in town and who's shacking up with the very fertile Scarlett. It's simply not fair.
But fair is for children.
And MM knows that. And so does Scarlett. And so does Ashley in his finer moments. GWTW is about a lot of things, but fairness and equality and opportunity are not the morals of this particular story. I would also argue that GWTW is not in the tradition of Survival of the Fittest like Ayn Rand or something similar to that. More than anything, I think MM preaches the twin gospels of flexibility and self-reliance, so in the grand scheme of the novel the "woolen-headed Mr. Wilkes" is always, always, always destined to fail.
C'est la vie, Mr. Wilkes.
But of course, Ashley doesn't know he's in a novel.
And neither does Scarlett, come to think of it.
I don't know where Scarlett thinks she is in this chapter, come to think of it. She has already realized that Rhett isn't like Charles and Frank. He isn't afraid of her. As a matter of fact, there have been more than a few times in this novel when the fearless Scarlett is afraid of him. But she apparently forgets about all of that now that Ashley's meddling bs has revived her spirit. She rushes home to tell Rhett that she's not going to be sleeping with him anymore, and Rhett goes ape.
Oh wait, no he doesn't.
In the movie Rhett goes ape and throws his glass of whiskey against Scarlett's portrait on the wall, but novel Rhett doesn't do any of that. Instead "his eyes began to gleam oddly," and he starts to interrogate Scarlett while wearing his usual cool, pretending as though none of this matters to him except as an academic exercise.
This isn't the first time Rhett's eyes "gleam" but I think his eyes almost perpetually gleam from this chapter until after Bonnie's demise. Interestingly enough, although Rhett Butler is presented to us as an inscrutable poker player, but he does have tells, doesn't he. That's why he's intriguing, even long after you've put down GWTW for the first time. If Rhett really were as blank and empty as Phil Ivey or David Benefield or your average American prep school graduate, he'd be boring as hell. But Rhett does alter his expressions. It's just that it's impossible to decode what the changes in his face actually mean. His eyes gleam oddly. His eyebrows raise. His mouth turns down. He smiles. But it's very hard to put together the puzzle most of the time. I don't blame Scarlett for not understanding Rhett's moods most of the time, actually.
But then again, Scarlett, how do you think your husband is going to react when he realizes you don't want to sleep with him anymore? Particularly since said husband knows this whole situation was prompted by a conversation with your dream man?
Rhett reacts coolly to Scarlett's decision, but we can tell he's pretty pissed about this whole thing. Particularly since he leaves in a huff, threatening and vaguely dangerous as he walks out the door, reminding Scarlett and the reader that:
"If I wanted you, no lock would keep me out."
Oh boy.
Chapter 51 is an awfully short chapter, isn't it?
And yet, so much happens. It's a linchpin chapter, one that is replicated almost verbatim in one of the more memorable scenes in the movie, but it's nothing more than a few quick conversations and a couple paragraphs of Scarlett's internal dialogue.
But it's so scandalous, isn't it?
Scarlett doesn't want to get any fatter, so Scarlett doesn't want to give birth to anymore kids. Which means Scarlett has decided that she doesn't want to have sex with Rhett anymore. Or does it? I know absolutely nothing about Victorian era birth control and sex education, but Rhett is the chief investor for Atlanta's most profitable brothel so surely he was well-versed in these matters? He's anti-abortion because old school abortion was so hazardous, but I'm absolutely certain he knows at least a few ways to avoid pregnancy? And if people in 1870s Atlanta didn't know anything about birth control, then how come there's such a huge time gap between Melly's first pregnancy and Melly's final pregnancy?
Unless....
You're not honestly suggesting to me that Melly and Ashley have been faithfully celibate this entire time, are you? Its true that Dr. Meade specifically told Melly she shouldn't have any more children. And it's also true that Ashley and Melly are notoriously straight-laced vanilla folks who never met a rule they didn't adore, but come on. And yes, it's also true that Melly nearly died while she was in child birth with Beau, but are you seriously going to try to convince me that they never slipped up and....
Actually, I don't know anymore. MM gives Melly a little internal dialogue back in Chapter 50 wherein Melly expresses her desire to have a girl. As a matter of fact, Melly "was quite willing to risk her life for another child," but "Ashley would not hear of it." Scarlett knows about Dr. Meade's medical opinion and Scarlett therefore seems to reasonably conclude that Ashley and Melly are abstaining from all sexual relations because of Melly's precarious health, but I'm not so sure about that.
Because you can have sexual relations without having actual sex, can't you?
Rhett is Scarlett's third husband, so she has to know something about sex and what happens in the bedroom and about what does and does not lead to pregnancy. But it's interesting to realize that for all her smarts and wild experiences, Scarlett has a childlike grasp on the realities of sharing a bed with a man. She thinks sex is black-and-white: you're either not having sex at all or you're having sex and are therefore in danger of getting pregnant. Sex is not like that and there's a huge gray area out there of course, but Scarlett doesn't seem to grasp the concept of being physically close to her husband without risking having another child.
I think that's why the conversations with Ashley and Rhett go so poorly. None of these characters have any idea what the others are talking about or why they're talking about it. It reads as high drama, but in fact it's also pure comedy: a series of misunderstandings that ends with every single person unhappy despite their best efforts.
And anyway, what in the hell is going on with Ashley in this chapter? Ashley is usually so cool and calm and detached about everything, but all of a sudden he starts calling Rhett out after Scarlett starts advising him on how best to deal with sick workers ("a couple of licks will cure most any sickness short of a broken leg,"she says in what has to be one of her most carelessly cruel throwaway lines). And Scarlett lets him talk all that trash about Rhett, even though Rhett doesn't have anything to do with her "penny-pinching ways," and then---
Oh, the things Ashley says in this chapter!
What is going on here? Let's lay out Ashley's transgressions here, because this is some real BS.
- Ashley blames Rhett for...brutalizing Scarlett by his contact.(Whaaat?)
- "Everything he touches he poisons." (Look who's talking, ya'll!
- "He's twisted your thoughts into the same hard path his own run in."
- "Knowing your beauty and your charm are in the keeping of a man who--"
Mmmmm mmmm mmm!
When did Ashley turn into such a hater? And doesn't he know none of this is true? And, and, and...
I'm not an Ashley Wilkes hater, but I'm not an apologist either. I'm surprised the notoriously dilly-dallying Ashley Wilkes has picked this particular moment--and this particular subject--to assert an opinion. I suppose we're supposed to assume that Ashley is somewhat jealous of Rhett/Scarlett? Ashley has seemed largely content with the trajectory of his life since the opening pages of GWTW, but perhaps he is not quite as happy with his life as we'd previously been led to assume. After all, Ashley has played by all the rules and he's done exactly what society has expected of him, but where has all that obedience gotten him? On the other hand, Rhett Butler has bucked that same society, but somehow he's still a virile millionaire who's living in the biggest house in town and who's shacking up with the very fertile Scarlett. It's simply not fair.
But fair is for children.
And MM knows that. And so does Scarlett. And so does Ashley in his finer moments. GWTW is about a lot of things, but fairness and equality and opportunity are not the morals of this particular story. I would also argue that GWTW is not in the tradition of Survival of the Fittest like Ayn Rand or something similar to that. More than anything, I think MM preaches the twin gospels of flexibility and self-reliance, so in the grand scheme of the novel the "woolen-headed Mr. Wilkes" is always, always, always destined to fail.
C'est la vie, Mr. Wilkes.
But of course, Ashley doesn't know he's in a novel.
And neither does Scarlett, come to think of it.
I don't know where Scarlett thinks she is in this chapter, come to think of it. She has already realized that Rhett isn't like Charles and Frank. He isn't afraid of her. As a matter of fact, there have been more than a few times in this novel when the fearless Scarlett is afraid of him. But she apparently forgets about all of that now that Ashley's meddling bs has revived her spirit. She rushes home to tell Rhett that she's not going to be sleeping with him anymore, and Rhett goes ape.
Oh wait, no he doesn't.
In the movie Rhett goes ape and throws his glass of whiskey against Scarlett's portrait on the wall, but novel Rhett doesn't do any of that. Instead "his eyes began to gleam oddly," and he starts to interrogate Scarlett while wearing his usual cool, pretending as though none of this matters to him except as an academic exercise.
This isn't the first time Rhett's eyes "gleam" but I think his eyes almost perpetually gleam from this chapter until after Bonnie's demise. Interestingly enough, although Rhett Butler is presented to us as an inscrutable poker player, but he does have tells, doesn't he. That's why he's intriguing, even long after you've put down GWTW for the first time. If Rhett really were as blank and empty as Phil Ivey or David Benefield or your average American prep school graduate, he'd be boring as hell. But Rhett does alter his expressions. It's just that it's impossible to decode what the changes in his face actually mean. His eyes gleam oddly. His eyebrows raise. His mouth turns down. He smiles. But it's very hard to put together the puzzle most of the time. I don't blame Scarlett for not understanding Rhett's moods most of the time, actually.
But then again, Scarlett, how do you think your husband is going to react when he realizes you don't want to sleep with him anymore? Particularly since said husband knows this whole situation was prompted by a conversation with your dream man?
Rhett reacts coolly to Scarlett's decision, but we can tell he's pretty pissed about this whole thing. Particularly since he leaves in a huff, threatening and vaguely dangerous as he walks out the door, reminding Scarlett and the reader that:
"If I wanted you, no lock would keep me out."
Oh boy.
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