Gone With The Wind

Will Benteen meets Scarlett at the Jonesboro train station. As they travel to Tara, he tells her about some unexpected developments. Even though he has always been sweet on Scarlett’s youngest sister, Carreen, she intends to enter a convent, having lost the love of her life in the war. Now, Will wants to marry Scarlett’s middle sister, Suellen. This is because he loves Tara and wants to remain, but it wouldn’t look right for him to live there alone with Suellen if they weren’t married.

The planter class looks down on Will’s social class of yeoman farmers known as “Crackers,” but Scarlett approves of the marriage. She has found Will to be a valuable ally. He says that marriage is necessary because Ashley intends to move his family away and take a job as a banker in the North. Scarlett is alarmed at the thought of Ashley’s departure and wants to find him work locally if he won’t take charity from her anymore.

Will reserves his worst news for last. Apparently, Suellen was indirectly responsible for Gerald’s death. She’d learned that planters who had been Union sympathizers were receiving $150,000 in compensation for Yankee destruction to their properties during the war. All Gerald needed to do was sign a piece of paper called the Ironclad Oath, and the money would have been his. Even in his addled state, Gerald resisted until Suellen plied him with brandy and got him drunk. He was about to sign when she mentioned that their poorer white neighbors also took the oath. Gerald despised these turncoats and vowed never to sign. He then galloped off on a horse toward Tara. As in his younger days, he tried jumping a fence, but the horse balked and threw Gerald, breaking his neck. Everyone in the county now blames Suellen for her father’s death.

The next day is Gerald’s funeral. He is to be buried at Tara, and all the county families turn out to pay their respects. Ashley conducts the service while Will delivers a eulogy and cuts off anybody else’s comments for fear that they will castigate Suellen publicly for her role in the family tragedy:

I say he had our good points. There ain’t nothin’ FROM THE OUTSIDE can lick any of us. But he had our failin’s too, ‘cause he could be licked from the inside. I mean to say that what the whole world couldn’t do, his own heart could (912).

Having tactfully shifted the blame away from Suellen and prevented public accusations, Will then suggests that Scarlett, in her delicate condition, would be better off out of the hot sun. Her absence will also help to defuse any remaining tension among the mourners that might lead to a fistfight. Scarlett goes off with the mother of the Tarleton twins and an elderly widow named Grandma Fontaine. The old woman gives Scarlett some advice about resilience in the face of tragedy. She says the upper class will always come out on top if they bend to circumstance and await better times:

When trouble comes, we bow to the inevitable without any mouthing, and we work, and we smile, and we bide our time. And we play along with lesser folks, and we take what we can get from them. And when we’re strong enough, we kick the folks whose necks we’ve climbed over. That, my child, is the secret of survival (921).

Before leaving Tara, Scarlett tries to persuade Ashley to manage her mill. She even offers him half interest in the business. At first, he refuses because he would still regard it as charity, and proximity to Scarlett is too tempting for him. When Melanie later learns of the offer, she also wants Ashley to work in Atlanta because she misses her family and friends there. Overruled by both women, Ashley capitulates.

The Wilkes family rents a house right behind Aunt Pittypat’s, and the Old Guard is delighted to receive Melanie back among them because she “had in her all the qualities this embattled remnant prized, poverty and pride in poverty, uncomplaining courage, gaiety, hospitality, kindness and, above all, loyalty to all the old traditions” (942). Although Melanie is gaunt and thin from childbirth and hard work at Tara, she revives once back in town. The Wilkes home becomes the nucleus for all manner of social and charity events, with Melanie at the center of everything.

Scarlett is frustrated because Ashley proves to be just as bad a manager as Hugh Elsing. Now that she can’t run the mill personally, the business is losing money. She thinks about all the former Confederate soldiers in town who are now engaged in trade: “They were too busy building their own fortunes to help her build hers. […] What a mess it was to try to run a business and have a baby too!” (957). Scarlett vows that after the baby is born, she will never have another child.