she have to oversee the upkeep of a large house for her father and brother, two men unused to any kind of tumult, but she had to tackle a social landscape fraught with suspicious matrons, gossiping “friends,” and plenty of men. The latter were a battle she rushed to fight and conquer, prevailing again and again. She was quick to assemble her own army of slobbering suitors, men who hung around her house dejectedly, called constantly, barraged her with unwanted correspondence, even crowded around her sickbed when she was in the hospital. These were men who hung on her every breathless, flattering word. And juggling their affections was just about the easiest thing she faced in the years that followed.
Already an outsider due to religion (her mother was a devout Catholic), a Northern education at Smith College, and a socially inept grandmother who didn’t care about her powerful enemies, Peggy struggled for acceptance in Atlanta. It would have helped if she’d actually cared what anyone thought of her, but that was one part of playing along she just couldn’t fake. Small in stature but long on personality, she struggled to embrace her role as sweet little debutante. Women had won the vote, but they weren’t encouraged to express their own opinions, of which Peggy had many. Bored by her constant battles to fit in, she began to act out.
The Roaring Twenties suited Peggy perfectly. She took her newfound flapper role to heart, scandalizing her elders and getting the papers talking along the way. That in and of itself was a novelty: women were supposed to shy away from overt publicity as they would a leering rapist or a muddy gutter. But Peggy embraced, even encouraged, the newspapers’ interest in her dubious relationships and wild habits. 1921 may have marked Peggy’s uncertain debut into society, but she did far more than attend balls and appear at community service events. The exclamation point to the new debutante’s hell-raising year was a performance of the violently sexual Apache dance at a ball. Soon, she had added “banned from the Junior League” to her flapper résumé. Next stop: marrying against her father’s will. Red Upshaw was dangerous, erratic, and, as it later turned out, violent. He was also handsome and rakish, just the kind of man Peggy was attracted to, and just the person to save her from the oppressive boredom she already associated with Atlanta high society.
Her new marriage was far from boring, but that wasn’t a good thing. Red couldn’t hold down a job, and his violence and provocation prompted constant arguments. To top it off, he was a bootlegger and rum-runner, a fact that mortified Peggy. She had married to escape; now she was as trapped as she had been at the head of the table in her father’s home, where the miserable couple had been encouraged to set up housekeeping. Sick of appeasing her inconsistent husband, she opted for full-out warfare, and writing was her first offensive. She landed her first freelance newspaper writing gig at a local newspaper, her flamboyant byline of “Peggy Mitchell” deliberately making no mention of her married name.
This flagrant provocation hit its mark. After revelations of the extent of Red’s illegal activities, it became clear that the marriage was over. Now separated, Peggy moved to her next battle: becoming a woman journalist in a town that banned women from most newspaper offices. Somehow, she fast-talked her way into a job at the
That she held her own was no small feat. That she did so while under constant physical threat from her ex- husband, who at one point beat her so severely she was hospitalized, was even more impressive. She slept with a gun at her side through those years and put on a brave front. But inside, the constant danger was taking its toll. She started to have medical problems and accidents that were exacerbated by her nervous temperament and her propensity toward hardship and struggle. She tried to ward off her failing health and spirits by marrying Red’s former best man,
Never a model patient, Peggy was a wretched, cranky invalid. Her irritability inevitably got her into trouble. First she read all of the books adoring John could provide her, exhausting the riches of the local library and then the surrounding colleges and universities before reaching an impasse that could not be filled by medical tomes, pornography, or popular literature. Annoyed, she took her husband’s advice and propped herself up with a ream of paper and a typewriter to draft the last chapter of a novel about the Civil War. She’d later insist that the decision to start with the end and work back to the beginning was just an old ambulance-chasing journalist’s habit. But what Peggy had begun to envision couldn’t fit into a newspaper. She was already embroiled in a book that could only be called “epic.”
Nobody will ever know how long it took Peggy to draft and edit
Inside, though, she was occupied with much more than the creation of a really long book.
Scarlett O’Hara is more than painfully self-serving. She’s a heroine who gets under the skin like that seductive splinter you can’t quite remove. Where perfect heroines are brave, she is weak; where they act with decision, she is fickle and mercurial. She wastes a lifetime of love on a harebrained obsession with a man of inaction, brutalizes her offspring, and throws away the affection of everyone who counts. And still we read and reread
Peggy’s exhaustive depiction of Civil War battles is nothing next to Scarlett’s smaller war on her own behalf. Unsuited for anything but luxury, Scarlett is the last person we’d expect to hike up her skirts and deliver a baby or schlep her hated sister-in-law, Melanie Wilkes, over miles of gutted terrain. But Scarlett is a warrior, if not always a particularly likable one. When backed into a corner, she fights for her life, dragging anyone and everyone along with her to epic effect.
Rumor has it that Margaret Mitchell wrote the scenes in which Scarlett survives the siege of Atlanta in one marathon sitting, and I for one have never been able to put them down, preferring instead to let myself be pulled along by Scarlett’s terror-fueled flight to Tara at the peril of my own appointments, meals, and bedtimes. I’ve inhaled the book again and again, from my first stint as a sixth-grader pressed up against a musty bus seat to my days as a relatively cosmopolitan woman cramped into commercial flights and solo lunches, but time and experience haven’t dulled the impact of Peggy’s ragged, unstoppable narrative. There’s something so cruel and vital about Scarlett’s fight that I can’t help but watch it, jaw ajar with the same awe inspired by an erupting volcano or a mudslide that threatens to take down Malibu.
But train-wreck voyeurism isn’t the only thing that makes Scarlett an unforgettable heroine. It’s easy to identify with her brief battle against the teachings of childhood, values that just don’t fit into a world full of maggots and starvation and $300 mortgages. As we watch Scarlett change from a girl who idolizes her gentle mother’s every action to a hard woman who would sell her body to save the farm, there’s an icky sense of identification. Who among us hasn’t had to reexamine something she thought was important when the stakes were high enough? And who among us hasn’t hurt someone else in the pursuit of her own goals?
Rhett Butler has it right when he points out that Scarlett’s never as appealing as when she’s backed into a corner. We can’t help but cheer her on, even as she steals her sister’s fiancé, shoots a Yankee in the face, and underestimates the love that surrounds her despite all odds. And we can’t help but envy her knack for dismissing risk when it is inconvenient to her, looking instead to a fictitious tomorrow that we know will never come:
