So I started reading, thinking it would be like most of the books I'd read up to that point: the lead would be the hero, or in this case, the heroine.
By the end of the book, I just hated Scarlet, and I hated the book, and I just wanted to chuck it across the room. But it was for school, and I had to write that paper, so I did actually finish the thing. And put it down, and never looked at it again, just thankful to be done.
So, it came up in a book group I'm a member of, and people have been reading it, and it made me remember how much I'd wanted to just slap Scarlet silly last time around. But I also know that I am not who I was: I was right around 16 or 17 myself when I read it, and had never considered learning from books rather than just enjoying stories, no concept of how important supporting characters can be, or a host of other things I've learned about literature since I started homeschooling, and I was curious: would I still hate it as much I did previously? I don't know. I'm not the same person that I was back then; I've grown.
So I called up the used bookshop and they had it. For $3.50. So I grabbed it. And started it.
Oh my goodness, such beautiful descriptions!
Margaret Mitchel must love Georgia. She makes me want to love Georgia, and I've never been there.
Spring had come early that year, with warm quick rains, and a frothing of pink peach blossoms and dogwood dappling with white stars the dark river swamp and far-off hills.Already the plowing was nearly finished, and the bloody glory of the sunset colored the fresh-cut furrows of red Georgia clay to even redder hues. The moist hungry earth, waiting upturned for the cotton seeds, showed pinkish on the sandy tops of furrows, vermilion and scarlet and maroon where shadows lay along the sides of the trenches. The whitewashed brick plantation house seemed an island set in a wild red sea, a sea of spiraling, curving, crescent billows petrified suddenly at the moment when the pink-tipped waves were breaking into surf. For here were no long, straight furrows, such as could be seen in the yellow clay fields of the flat middle country or in the lush blasck earth of north Georgia was plowed in a million curves to keep the rich earth from washing down into the river bottoms.
It was a savagely red land, blood-colored after rains, brick dust in droughts, the best cotton land in the world. It was a pleasant land of white houses, peaceful plowed fields and sluggish yellow rivers, but a land of contrasts, of brightest sun glare and densest shade. The plantation clearings and miles of cotton fields smiled up to a warm sun, placid, complacent. At their edges rose the virgin forests, dark and cool even in the hottest noons, mysterious, a little sinister, the slouching pines seeming to wait with an age-old patience, to threaten with soft sighs: "Be careful! Be careful! We had you once. We can take you back again."
The people are also fascinating. There's the Tarleton twins:
I recently discovered that one of my ancestors was a planter's son who left his family and wealth to join the Church and move to Utah. From the stories that I've read about him recently, it sounds like he was a lovely person, remaining a Southern gentleman and continued to "squire ladies with elegance" long after he left the South. I don't know much about his family, or what kind of people they were -were they like these north Georgia planters, or more along the lines of the classically educated folks from Savannah? I know that their family had been Virginians for generations, arriving in Jamestown very early on. When I read this last time, I had no idea that some of my own people were from the South, and might have known a Scarlet or one of the other characters, or been among the ones looking down their noses at such up-country shenanigans as this book describes.
On either side of her, the twins lounged easily in their chairs, squinting at the sunlight through the tall mint-garnished glasses as the laughed and talked, their long legs, booted to the knee and thick with saddle muscle, crossed negligently. Nineteen years old, six feet two inches tall, long of bone and hard of muscle, with sunburned faces and deep auburn hair, their eyes merry and arrogant, their bodies clothed in identical blue coats and mustard-colored breeches, they were as much alike as two bolls of cotton. ...
Although born to the ease of plantation life, waited on hand and foot since infancy, the faces of the three [Scarlet and the twins] on the porch were neither slack nor soft. They had the vigor and alertness of country people who have spent all their lives in the open and troubled their heads very little with dull things in books. Life in the north Georgia county of Clayton was still new and, according to the standards of Augusta, Savannah, and Charleston, a little crude.The more sedate and older sections of the South looked down their noses at the up-country Georgians, but here in north Georgia, a lack of the niceties of classical education carried no shame, provided a man was smart in the things that mattered. And raising good cotton, riding well, shooting straight, dancing lightly, squiring ladies with elegance and carrying one's liquor like a gentleman were the things that mattered.
In these accomplishments the twins excelled, and they were equally outstanding in their notorious inability to learn anything contained between the covers of books. Their family had more money, more horses, more slaves than anyone else in the County, but the boys had less grammar than most of their poor Cracker neighbors.
I wonder, though, how real the picture Mitchell paints so vividly is. According to Wikipedia, though she lived after the Civil War, she grew up listening to stories about it. Apparently, she was ten years old before she knew they had lost. It sounds like she grew up in a time and place out of touch with reality, in denial about the outcome of the war, and terrified of violence from their black neighbors, to the point of 10,000 people rioting over mere allegations of a handful of black-on-white rapes.
Still, her characterization of every person she introduces is exquisite, and way she paints the slaves in these first chapters is fascinating. On the one hand, the twins call their groom and ask him if he'd observed (while "spying," as the twins describe it) anything that would have upset Scarlet, and take his observations seriously when he says he thinks not. Moments later, they casually announce their intent to beat him for calling an acquaintance of theirs "po' w'ite trash" because "Dry ain' never owned mo'n fo' at de mostes." And the fact that the twins' family owns many slaves apparently ensures Jeem's status among his peers. Blows my mind. I want to be astounded, but then I remember that the Israelites wanted to go back to Egypt. Slavery does terrible, terrible things to men, both to the captives and to the captors.
I do love the way that Mitchel makes the different accents sing. I read once that it's a cheap trick, "real" authors don't do that, don't mutilate spellings to suggest accents. But I love it when people write the way that people really talk.
Then there's Miss Scarlet herself. A selfish brat: Mrs. Tarleton says, "It will serve you right if that sly piece does accept one of you. Or maybe she'll accept both of you, and then you'll have to move to Utah, if the Mormons'll have you --which I doubt..." -that made me chuckle- and I love the description of her as a "sly piece". It's perfect.
The green eyes in the carefully sweet face were turbulent, willful, lusty with life, distinctly at variance with her decorous demeanor. Her manners had been imposed upon her by her mother's gentle admonitions and the sterner discipline of her mammy; her eyes were her own.
She's a brat, and she thinks only of what she wants in the moment. --But I wonder how she's supposed to be anything else, given the upbringing she's had.
Can't wait to read the next bit.
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