Sure…slaves were ridiculously expensive, especially ones with any sort of useful skills. Most of the “rich” plantation owners didn’t really have anything other than their slaves and their land, and the land was worthless without the slaves to plant it, and when they sold their crop, they used the profits to buy more slaves and more land. That’s a large reason as to why the war happened, and why, after the war was over and emancipation happened, so many of the plantation families were wiped out. That might have happened anyway, without the war. Crop yields were declining due to overfarming, especially along the east coast, and the price of slaves was going up. There were some plantations in Virginia and along the Georgia coast that were relying on the sale of slaves to places like Texas (where slave prices were really high) to stay solvent.
Interestingly, one of the reasons John Horry Dent (the diarist I recommended) was able to do so well after the war was because he did his best to opt out of the system. Dent was a South Carolinian who took advantage of cheap land in Alabama to buy a plantation near Eufaula. He was always morally ambiguous about slavery, and not sure it was sustainable, so he put most of his money in New York banks. When the war was over, he therefore had access to capital that a lot of his contemporaries didn’t. He had still ost most of his money, but he was comparatively better off. (Another interesting bit of trivia was that his first name was originally “Jonah”. When his older brother John died when he was young, his parents just changed his name. Guy also had 13 kids, so if he were alive today, he’d probably have his own show on The Learning Channel. Of course, he’d also be 194, so I doubt he would be that telegenic at this point).
A couple of questions I’ve had for a while: is the boy that Rhett’s a legal guardian for the same as Belle’s son? And does Ella have Fetal Alcohol Syndrome, since Scarlett drank while she was pregnant with her?
Never read the book. Just saw the movie a couple times because Wife’s a fan of the book, thus my prior name confusion.
However, It was obvious watching the movie that Rhett respected Mammy far more than he did Scarlett, and seemed to be more than a bit attracted to her. (Er, not that Hattie McDaniel was into it.) I get the impression that Mammy, as a proper, and Catholic, Creole from the darker side of the spectrum, was Scarlett’s moral compass. Is that accurate?
ETA: And, to paraphrase Wife, the only person in the book with an ounce of class.
It’s implied but never outright said. They could well be two separate boys.
I don’t think she drank that much. She drank heavily after Frank’s death, but Ella was born by then. The main thing it mentions about Ella is that not even Melanie could think of much nice to say about her looks, though to Frank she was beautiful. And Scarlett never bonds with her, considering her a monumental inconvenience. Not without reason:
She probably associated being powerless and penniless (something she had an understandable terror of) with the baby.
Ella’s appearance is mentioned several times. This is when Rhett runs into Scarlett after a long absence and is surprised to see her with a new baby.
Then there’s the issue of guilt. Ella reminds her of Frank and her sins. This is after Frank’s death:
Certainly he wasn’t attracted to her physically. She was old enough to be his mother in addition to being obese and nowhere is she described as pretty (regal, dignified, haughty, intelligent, but not pretty even for a fat old woman). She can definitely be seen as the moral compass, but like Grandma Fontaine’s quote, she’s ripe buckwheat and not wheat; she bends with the wind.
I’d say that Melanie is the classiest character in the book. She also is more pragmatic than the surface may let on. One of my favorite scenes in both the book and the movie is when Scarlett shoots the deserter at Tara… and Melanie comes to the stairs with the sword (her father’s sword, later used by Charles- the house is later set on fire because she won’t surrender it to a Yankee squad). It’s also Melanie, not Scarlett, who suggests going through the dead deserters knapsack and pockets before burying him, and while she receives Belle Watling graciously and even asks to call on her she absolutely knows what Belle does for a living and that Rhett Butler is involved as a partner if not financier, but she doesn’t care: Rhett and Belle acted together to save Ashley’s life and the lives of other men by giving them an alibi (and even an alibi to the dead), and like Belle herself says “I don’t forget a kindness”.
Also, Scarlett’s the ultimate anti-heroine, a hard cold bitch in many ways, but she also risks her life to stay with Melanie (Pittypat would have left her to die in childbirth) and works herself half to death to feed and provide for Melanie and Beau back at Tara. While even Scarlett may think she’s doing it because Beau is Ashley’s and she made a promise, she’s really doing it because she can’t not do it. Scarlett’s morality is very plastic but she’s far from amoral, and she has an almost overdeveloped sense of duty to family and Melanie is her family both by marriage and by closeness. Like with Rhett I don’t think she ever realizes just how much she does love Melanie until the end of the book, but she’s far closer to her than to anyone other than perhaps Mammy.
Mammy is never given the back story she deserves, a surprising omission. You assume she once had a name that wasn’t Mammy, you know she grew up in the Robillard mansion in Savannah as a maid to the old woman and nurse to the children (apparently not a wet nurse as if she ever had children [or sex] it’s not mentioned), but you know nothing about her own mother, her love life if any, even her name.*
Perhaps this is intentional rather than omission- it’s because her entire life (not unlike many European servants who are born and live and die in the employ of an estate) her entire life and identity is inseparable from the family she serves, and of course the family keeps her hopping to the point she doesn’t have time to do anything else. (From before dawn to after dark is quite literal in the workday of a slave- of many free white mothers of the time for that matter.) However, there are times when you’re allowed a quick insights that imply an even wiser old lioness than you realized was there before. These may even have been unintentional on Mitchell’s part, but they’re great nonetheless.
One is above where she helps Frank find Scarlett’s money stash. She put the first pair of diapers on Scarlett, and the first pair on Scarlett’s mother, and she knows what the starving time was like (excellently realized in the book) and how important that money is to Scarlett, so why does she stab her in the back? It’s not because Frank orders her you can be sure, for among other things she could go back to Tara (and was in fact ordered to at one time but refused). It’s because, in my take, she knows that Scarlett needs to spend time with that baby and that it’s horribly dangerous for her to be riding about like she is. (I think by this time she’s at the “you need to act like a lady… when it’s POSSIBLE” point of pragmatism so she’s not as worried about appearances as before.)
Another time is her response when she refuses to go back to Tara a second time, this being when Scarlett announces her engagement to Rhett. Mammy is furious. Edited for concision:
(I particularly love that last sentence incidentally.)
This speaks volumes about the character. For one thing, as much as she loves Scarlett and as devoted since conception as she has been to this mitochondrial line, it absolutely is not lost on her what happened when the Confederacy surrendered. She is free, she knows it, and on some level, though she was never in any danger of being sold and was very much a member of the family to Scarlett (far more than Suellen and Careen), she knows there’s a paradigm change now. For the first time in her life perhaps she is here completely by choice.
Also, the “see dis ting thoo” line: taking care of this family is Mammy’s life’s purpose. It’s not being a domestic to white people- it’s THIS family. She sees it as her sacred mission. She doesn’t even particularly want to at times, but even if Rhett gave her a stack of cash she wouldn’t leave because this is her existence. She’s no longer bound to them legally but she will not be unbound in any other sense. Hard to describe… to borrow a line from SLUMDOG, “it’s written”. Leaving Scarlett would not be like Rosario leaving Karen Walker, but more like Chang leaving Eng; they’d hemorrhage and die. Scarlett knows this as well; this is the one time when she’s mad enough and hurt enough that she’d consider slapping Mammy if there was still slavery, but she doesn’t, nor will she ever make her leave, and it’s not just because of obligation or even love but because there again, there would be blood. They cannot be separated so long as both are living. (It’s not even that Scarlett doesn’t love her in the conventional sense- she’s really not like a mother to Scarlett, she’s Mammy, by which I don’t mean she’s an employee but that she’s her own thing.)
Would you believe I hit reply to make a two line comment? Now you see why I didn’t do well in American Lit; apologies. But the point is I like Mammy.
*(I fix this in my version of course; you learn among other things her birth name was Maude Ynes St. Expedite, that her mother came with Solange Robillard [Ellen’s mother] from Haiti, and a whooooooole lot more but unfortunately you’ll have to wait until 2031 to read it;). I will say that Mammy is not Scarlett’s biological grandmother or any other relationship in my take as I think that would be too Dan Brown cliche, but she is a griot of Scarlett’s matriarchal line.)
Feh. Melanie’s role was as someone straight guys with standards could like. Having the hots for Scarlett, though she was EVER so much hotter, was tempered by her trampiness. Er, that and how most of us figured out she was more ruthless than most of us, which many straight guys don’t find attractive.
As a teen, I thought Melanie was noble. As an adult, Melanie was a doormat. A BORING doormat. And no, Clark Gable’s Rhett found Mammy completely hawt, age, race, and size being irrelevant. She was a kindred spirit, and that is more important to a relationship than the presumed externals of sex. After the sex, you still need to talk and laugh.
But yeah, Mammy, a woman from a New Orleans built more upon class and family than race, saw herself as a member of the O’Hara family. Especially considering what ofay the O’Haras were. Dragging them up from being White Trash With Money was a holy mission.
I don’t think Belle’s son was Rhett’s. Rhett adored children…he was kind to Wade, patient with Ella, and adored Bonnie to distraction. I can’t see him shipping off his own son to New Orleans because his mother was a madam. Keep in mind, Rhett didn’t really care about the social niceties anyway. He’d been shut out of Charleston society because he took a girl buggy riding, they didn’t get back until after dark, and then he refused to marry her. Now, to my 12-year-old self reading this for the first time, I didn’t get it. Then as I got older I realized that the implication was he kept this nice girl out late enough to make people think they’d been indiscreet.
I think Rhett saw Scarlett as his kindred spirit, not Mammy. He told Scarlet they were both scoundrels, willing to tell the world to go to hell if it suit them. He respected Mammy and I think went a long way in gaining her respect and trust over his reaction to Bonnie. But it was Scarlett he loved, and she didn’t realize it until it was too late.
Actually, Ella have mild fetal alcohol syndrome is a good call. Scarlett does drink while pregnant under the strain of trying to get her affairs in order before the birth. When she tries to befriend Ella later on, she describes a child who is flighty, can’t keep her mind on one subject for two minutes, who asks her questions and then forgets them before Scarlett can answer them.
Another irony in the book is twice Scarlett wishes to have a child and be a good mother, and immediately remarks on how she cannot stand the children she already has–when she finds out she is pregnant, and after Bonnie dies. She goes so far as to wish God had taken flighty Ella if he had to have one of the children.
I think part of that might have to do with Margaret Mitchell never having any children of her own. She may not have been able to relate to giving birth and falling in love with your child. That’s not to say all mothers adore their children, but Wade and Ella don’t make much of an appearance after their births (Scarlett may have had PPD after Wade was born, when she went to Atlanta she often woke up to a crying baby without realizing it was hers, and she went for long stretches forgetting she had a son.) There wasn’t any mention of a wet nurse…did Scarlett breast-feed?
Scarlett wanted to be a Great Lady, but she didn’t have the compassion that went along with it. I still think she’s a very strong woman, fighting tooth and nail to keep Tara, building up the mills at the expense of her own reputation with the Old Guard, doing what she needed to do to survive.
Pretty sure Scarlett did breast-feed–I think I remember a scene when she first arrives in Atlanta during the war with Prissy and Wade in tow, and as they’re getting off the train Prissy complains that Wade is hungry. Scarlett tells her she can’t do anything about it now, so give him the sugar-tit. Which I always read as “Prissy, you idiot, I can’t exactly whip my boob out here on the train platform so hold him off for me, would you?”
And it was implied that Melanie would have breast-fed Beau if she had been capable but since she was so sick and weak after the birth and journey to Tara that Dilcey had to do it for her. Of course, that was during the worst of the war so it wasn’t exactly normal circumstances.
Sampiro, any input on that? Wouldn’t women of Scarlett and Melanie’s class have had wet-nurses during “normal” times?
The issue of Belle’s son/Rhett’s ward is a tricky one. The only time the child(ren) is/are mentioned is when Scarlett asks Rhett why does he go to New Orleans so often and he replies to visit his ward, and when Belle tells Melanie about her son after she saves Ashley and the rest of the guys’ from the Yankees. No mention is made of Rhett’s ward during Rhett & Scarlett’s honeymoon in New Orleans. The child(ren) is/are never heard of again.
ETA: One of the biggest discrepencies in that goddamn sequel Scarlett is that Scarlett insists on nursing Cat, saying she’s had her breasts bound three times and doesn’t intend to go through it again. Yet Scarlett clearly references breastfeeding Wade in the scene at the Atlanta railway station.
Probably a personal decision. There was an old wives tale that lasted for centuries and was completely erroneous that the more a woman nursed the less her odds of getting pregnant, which is why
1- royalty handed over the babies to wet nurses right away (so mom could get pregnant again)
2- some poor folk didn’t wean the baby until it was a lot older than normal (or until they got pregnant again and said “screw it”)
3- Hi Scarlett
You’re right though. Prissy certainly couldn’t have wet nursed and she’s the only female slave mentioned in the Atlanta household.
Where do you begin on that “sequel”? While I don’t think any sequel written by a different author can be more than a bastard heir, some bastards at least have the same eyes and are beloved. This one doesn’t have the same DNA at all- it’s a con job pretending to be a bastard to GWTW. A few things I remember just from skimming it:
1- Mammy dies right at the start. (Not unlikely perhaps- she is old and tired and grieving- but it’s clear that the author just doesn’t want her around.) Wade and Ella don’t die but may as well since basically Scarlett puts some food and water on the back porch for them and leaves them for the rest of the book.
2- Scarlett leaves Georgia for Ireland… excuse me? That’s like writing a sequel to LORD OF THE RINGS and setting it in Ohio. The post-war South is every bit as much a character as Rhett or Scarlett. (There was actually an interview with the author at the time who defended doing this saying “America in the 1870s wasn’t interesting enough”— yeah, other than the Reconstruction, incredibly volatile markets for speculators [and both Rhett and Scarlett were speculators], an ongoing complete paradigm shift, the rise of the robber baron class, the railroad scandals, the most corrupt presidential administration to that point, etc., nothing much happened.)
3- Scarlett goes to visit her Grandfather Robillard, a very rich old miser in Savannah.
This was what made me wonder if Ripley had ever read the book or hell, had she ever even seen the movie?! Tara was devastated, Scarlett and family (white and black) were starving- literally starving, as in no food. She and her sisters and the house servants were chopping cotton to stay alive. They were in danger of dispossession, she snared a man she didn’t love away from her sister to raise tax money.
Do you think for one second that if she had a rich grandfather she’d not have gone to see him? Even if he’s a miser who wouldn’t send her money I somehow doubt Scarlett would have said “Well, never hurts to ask” and walked the several hundred miles back to Tara". HELL NO, she’d have waterboarded the old man before she’d have left empty handed.
4- I may be wrong, but I believe Scarlett remarries, or at very least considers remarriage. Again, hell no. Scarlett is a very devout Catholic- not devout in the sense it keeps her from doing pretty much anything that needs doing as a means to an end, but devout in that she very much believes in heaven, hell, purgatory, and the rites and sacraments. Scarlett is already afraid for her soul- she says so several times. There are no grounds for annulling her marriage to Rhett (it was consummated, both entered freely and free to marry, plus Bonnie would be bastardized if it was annulled) and while she might divorce or be divorced by Rhett there’s no way she’s going to remarry while he is still alive. Even to Protestants divorce and remarriage had huge stigma at the time, but to Catholics it was forbidden and Scarlett most certainly would have known this.
Many others of course. I can’t believe the Mitchell Estate gave it their blessing and acknowledged it.
I can go look it up if need be, but I’m sure there’s a passage prior to Ella’s birth about Dr. Meade not thinking of warning Scarlett against drinking during pregnancy, since a lady wouldn’t normally drink very much anyway–while Scarlett is drinking more than a lady should, perhaps enough to be dangerous to her baby.
I think Scarlett breast-feeding was one of the errors Mitchell made. A woman who is breast feeding is very much aware of her child, as she has to be around him at least every three-four hours. Since Prissy was not a wet nurse, and Aunt Pitty had no young women around to wet nurse, that would have left Scarlett. But Scarlett forgot for long stretches that she had a child, so unless they put Wade on cow or goat’s milk shortly after birth I don’t see how she could have not nursed him. It’s a discrepancy in the book.
Regarding Scarlett’s drinking…she was drinking whiskey, which I don’t think any proper Southern lady would have touched. A glass of wine or a hot toddy, but the hard stuff? No.
I did have a question about the married couples. Gerald and Ellen refer to each other as Mr. and Mrs. O’Hara. The Meades refer to each other as Dr. and Mrs. Meade. Yet the very next generation (Melanie and Ashley, Scarlett and Charles/Frank/Rhett) refer to their spouse by their given name. What was the transition for that?
The relationship between Rhett and Melanie always make me all misty-eyed. She is so sweet and noble, and he is completely, despite his cad & bounder ways, won over.
But all he feels for Mammy is respect.
And don’t over-estimate Fetal Alcohol Syndrome; all our mothers’ drank (a bit of hyprebole, granted) and most of us turned out just fine.
Well, 16 year old Scarlett was hoping for some good gossip. Whether or not Rhett slept with the girl, I don’t know, I kind of doubt it, if she was from a nice family. In the Mitchell universe (at least) good girls were virgins until marriage. But staying out overnight unchaperoned would have raised some eyebrows.
It occurs to me, Scarlett respects Rhett for not marrying the girl “because she was a fool.” How, exactly, was she a fool? By “trapping” Rhett into compromising her reputation, hoping he’d marry her?
A movie scene that I’ve always wanted to ask about:
In the scene where Scarlett shoots the Yankee soldier…she asks Melanie to throw her her nightgown to wrap the body in; Melanie hesitates, then complies, but hides around a corner. Scarlett comments “thank goodness I’m not *that *modest.”
Olivia deHavilland is obviously wearing a flesh-colored slip. Was this bad costume design – Melanie is supposed to be nude, and we weren’t meant to see the slip? Or is Melanie really that psychotically modest that she can’t be seen in a slip by another woman?
I think it was shoddy design, but not terribly shoddy. Remember that the movie premiered in 1939 and it was almost 50 years before anybody could freeze frame, so if you just see her disrobing you’ll catch a fleeting glimpse of something flesh colored. (I wonder if it got letters at the time.)
ETA: One of the 7 Great Horrors of deleted scene fans is that there’s over an hour of deleted scenes from GWTW (not just re-takes and original takes but actual scenes) that have not been seen for 70 years. It’s presumed they were long ago destroyed (again, who knew there’d be a market one day). There are still pics from a few: Belle nursing soldiers at the depot, Gerald O’Hara drinking with the Tarleton twins, Scarlett in a gown that’s nowhere in the movie, etc., but no actual footage. (I wonder if the original script remains.)