Gone With the Wind: Chapter 25

Summary:

Waking up with the first hangover of her life, Scarlett goes to join her father for breakfast only to find that his mind is far more gone than she had suspected.  He is, in fact, waiting for the deceased Mrs. O'Hara to joing them at the table and won't allow anyone to start without her.  Mammy discourges Scarlett from correcting him and it's then that she realizes the full responsibility waiting for her at Tara.  Unable to express her distress, Scarlett is too abrupt with the remaning servants and orders them to scavenge from the neighboring farms.  When they protest, she declares that anyone at Tara, the O'Hara's included, not willing to work can leave.

Scarlett finds her way to Twelve Oaks only to find that it, too, has been burned to the ground.  She start to think of Ashley and how he will feel about this turn of events but pushes away her feelings to focus on foraging.   She finds a small vegatable patch in the slave quaters where she is suddenly overcome with hunger and attacks a radish.  The introduction of food into her hungover and mostly empty stomache is too much and causes her to wretch.  It's only then, alone in the field, that she allows herself to mourn everything that's been lost.  Then she makes the choice to move forward and utters the vow that she'll "never be hungry again."

In the subsequent months we learn just how isolated Tara has become and how the war seems like a horrible memory or someone else's problem.  Everyone complains and begs to Scarlett for more to eat.  Everyone that is except Melanie.  She is willing to give up her share so that others won't starve.  Melanie is kind and sympathetic while Scarlett is hard and uncaring.  People gravitate to Melanie for comfort and Scarlett finds Melly's kindness more annoying than all the begging and complaining from the others.

Scarlett begins to feel that everything is completely changed and that everything her mother tried to teach her was useless.  She is irritated with her family, her child, and most of all Melanie.  But her feelings for Tara are still strong and she finally realizes what he father meant all those years ago when he told her the O'Hara's have a tie to the land.  She recognizes that she is willing to fight or do anything to hold onto this piece of land.

Katiebug's Response:

I think it's interesting that Scarlett and Melanie have taken up the Caregiver and Caretaker roles in Tara.  Scarlett is focused on keeping everyone alive at any cost, even at the expense of kindness, while Melanie is focused on making sure everyone is able to remain in positive spirits despite the ruins around them.  It's almost as if Scarlett is immitating her Father's role and Melanie her Mother's.  Though Scarlett is far more effective than Gerald and Melanie isn't really running everything behind Scarlett's back.

I can't imagine the stress that Scarlett must be experiencing right now.  She has her mother's nature to care for everyone even at the detriment of herself, but she has her father's stubbornness interwoven with it. So she has the capacity to want to care for everyone but not the kindness to explain her actions.  Everything that she has known is gone and she has to figure out how to survive in this new world.  And it's not just her survival that's depending on this learning curve, it's her entire family and Ashley's.  Had Rhett come back with her, she would have made it his problem and probably fought him every step of the way. 

One of Our Thursdays is Missing by Jasper Fforde

Budgetary overruns almost buried the remaking before the planning stage, until relief came from an unexpected quarter. A spate of dodgy accounting practices in the Outland necessitated a new genre in Fiction: Creative Accountancy. Shunned by many as `not a proper genre at all,' the members' skills at turning thin air into billion-dollar profits were suddenly of huge use, and the remaking went ahead as planned. Enron may have been a pit of vipers in the Outland, but they quite literally saved the BookWorld.

Bradshaw's BookWorld Companion (16th edition)



from http://www.jasperfforde.com/



When I first received this book in the mail, from Amazon of course, I was excited to see a map drawn on the first few pages.  Every since I read the Lord of the Rings Trilogy, it's been one of my favorite things to see in a book.  I love to compare the location of things as I am reading through the story.  I have to admit I was somewhat confused by the map in this novel since readers of the series know that the layout of bookworld isn't entirely known to the reader or its inhabitants.  After reading the first few chapters I discovered the reason:  Bookworld was being reorganized to more closely resemble the Outland, or Real World.

Told from the point of view of the Written Thursday, what I really like about this novel is that Fforde is not afraid to completely change what we know about this world he's created.  He starts out with a different Thursday as his main character then reshapes the Bookworld.  It really keeps a reader on his or her toes and challenges what we have come to expect from this series.  I feel like I should have gone back and read First Among Sequels before diving into One of Our Thursdays is Missing as a few plot points from the previous novel were fuzzy and I was looking for answers in the new one.  This is clearly my own memory fault and not that of the author's.

Undoubtedly, this is still one of my favorite series and I highly recommend it to anyone.  The basic premise of the series is a character who lives in an alternate-reality Swindon, UK and has the ability to jump into novels and interact with the characters as if they were actors in a play.  Using Written Thursday as the POV on this one allows the reader to learn a little bit more about what it means to be a book character in the Nextian Universe.  Fforde pulls in a lot of our current events into this narrative and even touches on what the invention of e-readers has done to their environment. 

My other favorite quote from the book:

This was the annoying side of the feedback loop; irrespective of how she had once looked or even wanted to look, [the lady of shallot] was now a pre-raphaelite beauty... She wasn't the only one to be physically morphed by reader expectation....Harry Potter was seriously pissed off that he'd have to spend the rest of his life looking like Daniel Radcliffe.