On the Steps of Wesley Chapel

"When she reached Wesley Chapel, she was breathless and dizzy and sick at her stomach. Her stays were cutting her ribs in two. She sank down on the steps of the church and buried her head in her hands until she could breathe more easily." -- Gone with the Wind, Chapter XXI

Today's post should be called "How Research Spoiled Bugsie's Childhood Dreams: Part 1." You see, every time I read Gone with the Wind without bothering to google for Wesley Chapel (which is really every time I've read Gone with the Wind), the image I had in mind  reading that scene was that of an imposing structure with wide stone steps leading to it. Something like, well, this: 

The Church of the Immaculate Conception

Wesley Chapel, though? Looks like this:

Wesley Chapel

Sometimes historical accuracy quite plainly sucks. But leaving my lost naivete about historical buildings aside, this type of (more than just a little) unglamorous construction makes sense, considering that this was Atlanta's first and oldest church. Some of you might remember the post in which we talked about Marthasville's/soon-to-be-Atlanta's first religious establishment, a plain clapboard structure where the city's five religious groups held their services alternatively. The Methodists were the first to move out. With much difficulty, some $700 were raised in 1847, out of which $150 were used to buy a lot a few hundred feet south from the original building. 

The funds were barely enough to cover the costs of the simple frame structure you see above and little was left for the inside, but the members were determined to have their own church, so they furnished the interior by collective effort/improvisation. Benches were made from rough slabs obtained from a local mill, a druggist prescription table upon a crudely built platform became the pulpit, while a homemade tin chandelier provided the illumination. The chapel was named Wesley in the honor of John Wesley, the founder of Methodism, and dedicated in March of 1848. 

In 1850, money was raised again, this time to buy a bell for the church. The $300 bronze piece, with the silver of 100 Mexican dollars mixed into alloy for better resonance, proved too heavy for the chapel's frame, so it was installed into a separate bell tower. The sounds of the new bell soon proved a nuisance for an invalid woman living on Peachtree Street, so her caring and resourceful husband paid some boys to steal the clapper. In a moment of inspiration worthy of their colleague fictional prankster Tow Sawyer, the boys dumped the clapper into a well... the Baptist preacher's well, to be precise. The Methodist pastor had to publicly declare he wouldn't suspect his Baptist brothers of such a low trick to avoid an interdenominational crisis. 

Wesley Chapel's bell was the only bell spared during the Civil War, when every available piece of metal was melted, and it's still in use today. In 1870, it was moved into the new Gothic design church that was erected on the site, keeping in line with the penchant for monumental and richly-decorated structures in Atlanta's architecture at that time. (See? 6 years later,  Scarlett could have rested on the steps of my dream church!)

Finally, in 1903, the First Methodist Church moved to a different location altogether: a granite building at the northwest corner of Peachtree and Porter Place. On its old location a brand new Atlanta hallmark would rise: the Candler Building, home of the Coca Cola Company.

Candler Building

As a last interesting tidbit: Margaret Mitchell herself was well acquainted with the history of Wesley Chapel, for she wrote an article on this topic for The Atlanta Journal.

Poster of the Week

This lovely poster captures a charming little moment between Rhett and Scarlett. Although this version from the 1941 (identifiable by the specific ad lingo used that year), the image itself dates to the film's very first day--an oval version, seen here, was suspended above the Loew's Grand Theater at the Atlanta premiere of Gone with the Wind on December 15, 1939. 

Image from moviegoods.com. Poster information cited from Herb Bridges' "Frankly My Dear..."

Save Miss Ellen's Curtains!

Today we're joining a good cause. The long-suffering velvet curtains of Tara are in dire need of a restoration. If you want to save the iconic portieres along with four other costumes from Gone with the Wind (among which, the famous red dress Scarlett wears to Ashley's birthday party), follow this link to donate:

http://www.hrc.utexas.edu/contribute/endowments/opportunities/costumes/

Read more about this over at Kendra's blog: 

http://blog.vivandlarry.com/?p=1311#more-1311

Father Abram Joseph Ryan, Poet-Priest

"Until Scarlett was able to furnish Aunt Pitty’s house as it had been before the war…she had no intention of having guests in her home—especially prominent guests, such as Melly had.

General John B. Gordon, Georgia's great hero, was frequently there with his family. Father Ryan, the poet-priest of the Confederacy, never failed to call when passing through Atlanta. He charmed gatherings there with his wit and seldom needed much urging to recite his 'Sword of Lee' or his deathless 'Conquered Banner,' which never failed to make the ladies cry."

--Gone with the Wind, Chapter XLI 

Father Abram Joseph Ryan

To list the things that make Margaret Mitchell a great writer is a pretty futile endeavor as it's best just to say "Everything" and move on to more mysterious matters... like do Rhett and Scarlett reconcile, what's so special about Marietta anyway, or just how much gaudy jewelry can you fit in one jewelry box?  But as I never let reason get in the way of a chance to talk about GWTW or praise its author, I have an item to add to the "What makes MM so gifted?" list.

And here it is: as we've seen in her references to the Leyden House, the Governor's Mansion, and elsewhere, MM was especially adept at blending historical reality into the fictional narrative of Gone with the Wind, embedding her characters firmly and  convincingly within a very unique moment in American history.  Yet another nice example of this lies in the quote above, where the quite real Father Ryan attends the gatherings of the charming (but of course fictional) Melanie Wilkes.  And thus today we're naturally looking into this Father Ryan character because a) he actually was a rather important figure in the Reconstruction-era South, b) he has a pretty sweet title going on with his Poet-Priest moniker and c) anyone who knowingly sports a hairstyle like this has got to have led an interesting life, right?

Born in 1838 to Irish immigrants, Abram Joseph Ryan spent his early years in Hagerstown, Maryland before moving with his family to Norfolk, Virginia and then St. Louis, Missouri. After completing his religious studies, he was ordained a Roman Catholic priest on September 12, 1860. Yet the decision to dedicate his life to the service of God was not without heartache for young Abram, as he had fallen in love with a devout Catholic girl, mysteriously known  to the history books only as "Ethel." Despite their affection for each other, Abram and Ethel felt called to different paths and went their separate ways--he became a priest, she a nun. Yet Father Ryan would never forget her and references to Ethel, sometimes mournful, sometimes idealistic, appeared regularly in his later poetry.

Father Ryan then began his career in ministry, serving a number of short stints between 1861 and 1863 in Perryville, Missouri, Lewiston, New York and LaSalle, Illinois. Why the short stays? Some scholars believe Ryan, a Southerner by background and personal sympathy, had started to sneak off from his clerical duties to provide chaplain services on the sly to the Confederacy as early as 1862, hence causing the Catholic Church to reassign him multiple times in retribution.

Ryan was reassigned (yet again) to religious service in Tennessee in late 1863 or early 1864--an arrangement that at last seemed to suit him just fine, as he continued to provide chaplain services to the Confederate army at battles nearby, including at the Battle of Franklin (oh yes- Father Ryan could have met Rhett Butler too!). 

Yet Father Ryan's fame and literary significance would only came after the war. Following the surrender of General Lee at Appomattox, he wrote what would become his most famous poem, "The Conquered Banner": 

“I wrote 'The Conquered Banner' at Nashville, Tennessee one evening soon after Lee’s surrender, when my mind was engrossed with the thought of our dead soldiers and our dead Cause. It was first published in the New York Freeman’s Journal. I never had any idea that the poem, written in less than an hour, would attain celebrity status. No doubt the circumstances of its appearance lent it much of its fame. In expressing my own emotions at the time, I echoed the unuttered feelings of the Southern people; and so 'The Conquered Banner' became the requiem of the Lost Cause."

--Father Ryan's recollections, excerpted from  Furl That Banner: The life of Abram J. Ryan, Poet-Priest of the South

"The Conquered Banner" was published on June 24th 1865 and Father Ryan does not exaggerate when he speaks of its (and his, it should be added) instantaneous popularity. The poem was immediately embraced as, well, the banner of the fallen Southern war effort and catapulted him into prominence in the Southern post-war society.

In fact, Father Ryan is often credited with a significant role in establishing the cult of the Lost Cause, through his prolific outpouring of poetry filled with passionate and elegiac descriptions of the Confederacy and the South.  He was one of the earliest adopters of the "Lost Cause" phrase, first using it in an address (ironically and probably intentionally) on July 4 in Nashville, Tennessee. Known for his charisma, his deep mysticism, and his white-hot fervor for all things Southern, he was (no surprise) a passionate opponent of Reconstruction--a theme he explored in depth through his journal The Banner of the South, first published in 1868 from his new home in Augusta, Georgia, where he had relocated after a relatively long stay (for him, anyway) in Tennessee between 1864-1867. 

The journal was ostensibly a Church periodical, but it operated with a strong pro-Southern, anti-Reconstruction stance, typical of Father Ryan's sensibilities. Yet it never pays to pigeonhole someone. For although Father Ryan was one of the fiercest critics of Reconstruction and the North, he eventually put aside his sectional bias (long before, it should be added, many of his equally fervent Southerner compatriots did) and welcomed reconciliation with the North. The turning point for Father Ryan was the epidemic of yellow fever in 1878, when he was moved by the North's spirit of generosity in assisting the South with the sick. His changed opinions are on display in his poem "Reunited":  

Purer than thy own white snow,
   Nobler than thy mountains' height;
Deeper than the ocean's flow,
   Stronger than thy own proud might;
O Northland! to thy sister's land
Was late thy mercy's generous deed and grand.

We close our discussion of Father Ryan where we began it--in the context of MM's reference to him in GWTW. Following the jump, you'll find complete lyrics for his two poems mentioned in the book, "The Conquered Banner" and "The Sword of Robert Lee."  Of course, it must be noted that MM's allusion to Father Ryan attending Melanie Wilkes' gatherings does more than just offer a hint of historical accuracy--it works as yet another way to tie Melanie Wilkes to the values of the Old South. For if "The Conquered Banner" was the South's emblem of its lost way of life, Melanie herself is that very emblem within Gone with the Wind. Perhaps it's no surprise, then, that Mitchell, in her final reference to Melanie and all she stood for employs a mournful nostalgic tone that would be right at home in the writings of Father Ryan:

"She could not wholly understand or analyze what he was feeling, but it seemed almost as if she too had been brushed by whispering skirts, touching her softly in a last caress.  She was seeing through Rhett's eyes the passing, not of a woman but of a legend—the gentle, self-effacing but steel-spined women on whom the South had builded its house in war and to whose proud and loving arms it had returned in defeat."

--Gone with the Wind, Chapter LXII

Late Update: Be sure to check out the comments to find some additional insights on Father Ryan from Donald Beagle, author of Poet of the Lost Cause: A Life of Father Ryan. 

The Quotable Rhett Butler: Not Settee

Another week is upon us and with it one of Rhett's more famous lines. Uttered during the equally celebrated Atlanta bazaar, this line serves to once again set Rhett Butler apart among his fellow Southerners and anticipate one of the major currents in his relationship with Scarlett prior to their marriage. Here it is:

"I have always thought," he said reflectively, "that the system of mourning, of immuring women in crepe for the rest of their lives and forbidding them normal enjoyment is just as barbarous as the Hindu suttee."

--Gone with the Wind, Chapter IX

As a rule we try to explain the characters' lines ourselves. In this particular case, however, we were spared the trouble, for Captain Butler courteously expanded on the topic himself for the enlightenment of his very charming albeit ignorant companion. So, "in India, when a man dies he is burned, instead of buried, and his wife always climbs on the funeral pyre and is burned with him." That is suttee, and now that its basic definition is out of the way, we can focus on what I have to say more interesting aspects.

First of all, as it is our custom basically every day of the week, we have to praise Margaret Mitchell for historical accuracy. You see, the suttee, as this Hindu custom was referred to at the time, was indeed a topic of interest in the 19th century. It had been officially abolished  by the British authorities in Bengal in 1829, with the others provinces of British India swiftly following, but the custom took time to die down. And by time I mean a century. The ban was enforced under the threat of severe punishment, and of course Hindu locals objected against the unfairness of a law that prohibited what for them was sacred tradition. One general, Charles James Napier, became famous with his reply to such a complaint:

“Be it so. This burning of widows is your custom: prepare the funeral pile. But my nation has also a custom. When men burn women alive, we hang them, and confiscate all their property. My carpenters shall therefore erect gibbets on which to hang all concerned, when the widow is consumed. Let us all act according to national customs.” 

--excerpted from The Daughters of India: Their Social Condition, Religion, Literature, Obligations, and Prospects (1860) by E.J. Robinson

What can I say? The cultural relativism, it burns. Or hangs. (Will.Refrain.From.Jokes.Now.) 

So the suttee was well known to the European and American world. First, because it was a great way of morally justifying the British rule in its colonies, and colonialism in general. Like in the book mentioned above, the abolition of the suttee and of other violent customs, and implicitly the saving of innocent women were presented as “the purposes of Providence in planting Englishmen in India.” And then it was such a splendid example of how the fate of women could be worse. It didn't call for reflection on the place of women in general, but served to present the place of women in Western societies as civilized and desirable.

This is where Margaret Mitchell makes Rhett depart from his contemporaries. For, unlike them, he doesn't use the suttee as a counterpoint against which the mores of the Southern/Occidental society can shine. He uses it to create an analogy for the world they are living in. Scarlett, born and raised in the culture surrounding her, is blind to the faults in its customs, but when she's exposed to  what Rhett presents as an intensified version of those customs in a different culture, her mind instinctively tells her how wrong they are and as a result she promptly and naively asks why the police doesn't step in. (Of course, the cultural relativism? Just took a second tumble.)

What Rhett is trying to achieve here is basically what travel literature of the centuries before him sought by using the motif of the stranger, the outsider that can judge a society with alien  and presumably impartial eyes. His game is more subtle than that, though, and almost brings to mind Montesquieu's Persian Letters in the way it manages to satirize two societies at once. He doesn't want Scarlett to only acknowledge the unfairness of the Hindu custom, but also to translate that judgment in the terms of her own world and see that the mourning customs imposed upon her are in no way better : 

"How closely women crutch the very chains that bind them! You think the Hindu custom barbarous--but would you have had the courage to appear here tonight if the Confederacy hadn't needed you?" 

--Gone with the Wind, Chapter IX

Like Rhett himself, this reference is a fascinating mixture of the new and the old. On one hand, its natural place is in the 19th century. It is something that a man of Rhett's stand and education could have actually used in a conversation. But on the other hand, it is new with something that rings of the century to come. I remember reading a negative 1936 review of Gone with the Wind once, saying that Rhett's lines smell of historical hindsight. While I don't agree with the spirit in which that assessment was made, I do believe that a part of Rhett (the best part, I am tempted to say) is quite strikingly modern.

Oh, and randomly? This line: "... precisely as those worthy matrons in the corner would talk about you, should you appear tonight in a red dress and lead a reel." always makes me think of the movie Jezebel.

The Years Creep Slowly By, Lorena...

*Warning: vile mood blogging ahead* 

Internets, three things stand at the forefront: 

1. Blogger should have something like those mood icons on LiveJournal. (If it already does, don't tell me. I enjoy being wrong.)
2. This is a crappy melancholy Sunday.
3. It is generally unwise to tackle depressing Civil War songs on crappy melancholy Sundays, but that's precisely what I am going to do. 

So, if this is your shiny happy day, wait till the Monday blues hit to read. If not, join me for a blog post discussing Lorena, one of Civil War's saddest and most popular songs. I'll try to keep it reasonably short (famous last words).

Lorena was an antebellum song, but there is not much to say about its history before the war. The lyrics were written in 1857 by a Northern reverend for a real sweetheart who chose to marry another. She was nicknamed Lorena in the poem, presumably as an allusion to Edgar Allan Poe's much quoted The Raven ("sorrow for the lost Lenore" vs. "a hundred months have passed, Lorena, since last I held your hand in mine." It's pretty obvious which one was written by a literary genius, but other than that, the connection is not that far-fetched, I guess). The music was written by Joseph Philbrick Webster, a songwriter and composer famous at the time.

During the war, the ballad became wildly popular in both the Confederate and the Union camps. What's more interesting, and a testament to its popularity, is that a few years after its publication a version with altered lyrics, known as Lorena's Answer, A Sequel to Lorena or Paul Vane, became available. In this new version, written by the same reverend, now happily married himself, Lorena pledged she hadn't forgotten her lover. (Someone call Andrew Cohen! We just found the perfect idea for his next passive-aggressive rant article.) You can read those lyrics as well as a nice though somewhat poetically  embellished history of the song on the Ohio Historical Society site. 

Joseph Webster

Lorena was perhaps the best-known love-song of its time, and as such, a reference to it couldn't be missing from Gone with the Wind. Besides being the inspiration behind Ella's middle name, the ballad is mentioned directly in the bazaar scene: 

"Then the fiddles, bull fiddles, accordions, banjos and knuckle-bones broke into a slow rendition of 'Lorena'--too slow for dancing, the dancing would come later when the booths were emptied of their wares. Scarlett felt her heart beat faster as the sweet melancholy of the waltz came to her: 

'The years creep slowly by, Lorena! 

The snow is on the grass again. 

The sun's far down the sky, Lorena . . .'

One-two-three, one-two-three, dip-sway--three, turn--two-three. What a beautiful waltz! She extended her hands slightly, closed her eyes and swayed with the sad haunting rhythm. There was something about the tragic melody and Lorena's lost love that mingled with her own excitement and brought a lump into her throat." 

--excerpted from Gone with the Wind, Chapter IX

When I was little and openly inclined to cheesiness, I was convinced that the only reason Margaret Mitchell chose this song was because its lyrics, melodramatic as they are, bear some resemblance to lines from Rhett's final speech. Now that I am older and only secretly inclined to cheesiness, I still think it could have been one of the reasons for her using it, besides how well it spoke for the period of course. It just works so well within the theme of lost love and missed chances. What do you think?

You'll find the lyrics after the jump if you're interested in making that comparison. Now if you'll excuse me, I'll go fix myself up with some chocolate and Jane Austen (Crappy Sundays Remedy™). I am your typical girl, what do you know?

Rue de la Paix

In a week that featured guest blogger Shaninalux's wonderful post on Margaret Mitchell and the conclusion to GWTW, this collage seemed like the obvious choice for our Rue de la Paix feature.  Enjoy!

Margaret Mitchell House by carol@themovies featuring Carven shoes