Читать книгу Rehabilitating Bodies - Lisa A. Long - Страница 6
ОглавлениеIntroduction
Year That Trembled and Reel’d beneath Me
But in silence, in dreams’ projections,While the world of gain and appearance and mirth goes on,So soon what is over forgotten, and waves wash the imprints off the sand,With hinged knees returning I enter the doors (while for you up there,Whoever you are, follow without noise and be of strong heart).
—Walt Whitman, “The Wound-Dresser”
On July 21, 1861, hundreds of Washington, D.C., residents packed picnic lunches and headed to a country hillside to watch the first large-scale battle of the Civil War. Able to see little but smoke, spectators soon panicked as the performance on the field threatened those in the audience; shells began to explode around them, and in the hazy stampede of equally frightened, inexperienced Union forces retreating to Washington, soldiers became indistinguishable from civilians. As one agitated Harper’s Weekly observer later explained to shaken Northern readers:
It is impossible yet to tell the story of the day. The newspapers have teemed with differing accounts. Apparently there was victory at hand, if not in possession, when a sudden order to retreat dismayed the triumphant line. The soldiers, who from exhaustion or whatever cause had been sent to the rear, and the teamsters and civilians who hovered along the base of our active line, were struck with terror by a sudden dash of cavalry from the flank. They fled, panic-stricken, in a promiscuous crowd: while the soldiers who were really engaged fell back quietly and in good order. It was the crowd of disengaged soldiers, teamsters, and civilians in the rear who rushed, a panting rabble, to Washington, and who told the disheartening story that flashed over the country at noon on Monday.1
This relatively brief but telling account of the first battle of the Civil War reveals much about the war, though it conveys little information about the details of the military engagement—conventionally thought to be the stuff of Civil War narrative. Rather, the anonymous author introduces the concern that I argue compels subsequent rewritings of the Civil War and that motivates this study: the violently aroused, disordered condition of those who both populate and attempt to tell the “story of the day.” The Harper’s Weekly correspondent (writing under the nom de plume “The Lounger”) insists that it is “impossible” to determine what happened at Bull Run, even as he or she remarks upon the many stories carried in newspapers across the country. Thus, authoritative Civil War narratives are revealed as relative and elusive objects, both engendered and imperiled by the outbreak of hostilities. The qualifier “yet” implies that Civil War writers would eventually recover from the shock of battle and agree upon an accurate outline of the day’s events. However, the journalistic community’s initial inability to agree upon the facts and, then, the distant observer’s difficulty in discerning the “real” story signal the narrative predicament realized in successive tellings of the Civil War. Walt Whitman would later reflect that this battle was lost by “a fiction, or series of fictions” rather than by cowardice or military weakness. It is Whitman’s insistence on the crucial role of the imaginative in propagating Civil War histories, as well as his realization that “battles, and their results, are far more matters of accident than is generally thought,” that makes the Civil War shockingly unreal, unpredictable, and ultimately untellable.2
As much a matter of concern to the Harper’s Weekly observer as fellow journalists’ inability to get their stories straight is the “panting rabble” of impassioned amateurs who scooped the professionals with their “disheartening” tales of the battle. The stories originating in such a throng would surely be as “promiscuous” as the population that produced them: indiscriminate, idiosyncratic, and confused. The proliferation of these personal and supposedly limited experiences of the war would serve only to fragment and muddle, not standardize, war narratives. “The Lounger” promotes the notion that these Civil War stories are unreliable by implying that the tellers clearly are not in their right minds: they are “panic-stricken” and “panting” with “terror” and excitement. This scene of war reveals not only soldiers “disengaged” from the battle at hand but also a whole array of elusive bodies cut loose from the strictures of social convention and good sense. It is no coincidence that, despite the article’s focus on the panting rabble, the illustration accompanying this story, titled “Retreat of Our Troops from Bull Run by Moonlight, Colonel Blenker’s Brigade Covering,” depicts uniform rows of identical, faceless men stretching endlessly under a placid, moonlit sky (Fig. 1). In this way, the magazine rehabilitates the horrifying scene, reestablishing the good name of the Union forces on the seemingly firm foundation of disciplined bodies. Civil War writers increasingly relied on the realignment of promiscuous, fleeing bodies to straighten out their stories and to eradicate the “panic” that propelled Civil War writers and their narratives beyond the bounds of propriety, beyond the limits of knowledge.
Figure 1. “Retreat of Our Troops from Bull Run by Moonlight, Colonel Blenker’s Brigade Covering.” Harper’s Weekly, August 10, 1861. Courtesy of the Rare Book and Special Collections Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
In order to dramatize the incoherence of individual and social bodies, Civil War writers turn again and again to the conflict’s appalling carnage. In this way, Civil War texts keep readers continuously and painfully alert to the vexed nature of the corporeal knowledge so soon embodied in the trope of the war. In yet another version of the fallout from the First Battle of Bull Run, Harper’s Weekly correspondent Henry J. Raymond encounters one retreating soldier, Quartermaster Stetson, a member “of the Fire Zouaves, who told [him], bursting into tears, that his regiment had been utterly cut to pieces, that the Colonel and Lieutenant-Colonel were both killed, and that our troops had actually been repulsed.”3 Although Stetson does not relate the details of the battle, he does bear witness to its aftermath, most notably the dismembered corps of his regimental body. The image of the butchered corps, like the promiscuous, fleeing rabble, allies the business of Civil War with an essential lack of corporeal integrity: both social bodies are volatile and discontinuous, always in the process of vanishing before the viewer’s eyes. Significantly, Raymond turns his reader’s attention toward Stetson’s individual body, solidifying a connection between emotional and corporeal pain. The Zouave’s surprising storm of tears is meant to register the incommunicable trauma of his corps’ physical destruction. Yet Stetson’s overpowering, wordless emotion does not make his or his fellows’ pain communicable; rather, it makes the teller’s body and his narrative as unreliable as the dead bodies his tears are meant to indicate.
Subsequent Civil War writers affirmed that physical and emotional explosions of the sort that overwhelmed this one soldier and galvanized the fleeing crowd of which he was a member produced aftershocks that reverberated through representations of the war. Much like these Harper’s Weekly correspondents, many who wrote about the Civil War strove above all to understand and convey the material changes the war wrought in individual and national lives, to simply state “what happened.” Indeed, Civil War writers repeatedly employ a meticulous and scientific accounting of those changes in efforts to make sense of the broken bodies and emotional outbursts that defy reason. In this way the Civil War has emerged as a powerful cultural hermeneutic that expresses not only altered social, political, and economic relationships but also an emergent self-consciousness, an impression of metaphysical distortion that lingers long after the war. Writers have attempted to convey the era’s essence through complex and ultimately indeterminate investigations of the proximities and distances between disciplined troops and panting rabble, between the Zouave’s butchered corps and his emotional outburst—between stolid corporeality and unnerving incorporeality.
The texts I have gathered in this project insist on the intimate relationship between the Civil War and a variety of invisible wounds, illnesses, and infirmities that beset modern Americans throughout the nineteenth century: nerve injury, neurasthenia, hysteria, hyperaesthesia, phantom limb pain, and degeneracy are just a few. Twentieth-century additions to this list would include post-traumatic stress disorder, depression, chronic fatigue syndrome, and stress. Such disorders strained, and continue to strain, the boundaries between organic and environmental illness, and physical and mental well-being. They are inextricable from the social diseases—malignant racism and sexism, for example—which, most scholars agree, constituted nineteenth-century medical discourse and infected the culture-at-large. Because whites and African Americans, both men and women, were situated in drastically different ways in biological, historical, and medical discourses of health before the war, their relationships to the already existing corporeal rifts the Civil War magnified were not the same. For example, although African American writers were as enmeshed in the discourses of health and history as their white counterparts, their texts rarely explore battlefield injuries in much depth. Instead, they focus on the war’s power to both express and mitigate the racial “degeneracy” that supposedly made African Americans fractions of men and women. Yet in all cases the Civil War has been written as a cataclysmic event felt in, displayed by, and accounted for with mysteriously ailing bodies. As the Harper’s Weekly articles exemplify, narrative anxiety stems from consistent unease with writers’ and protagonists’ bodies, demonstrating how neither the modern protocols of health nor history are able to capture the constantly moving and multiple dimensions of aberrant forms. To be human and hurting is, nominally, to be diseased in these texts. And diseased, unstable bodies—bodies traumatized not only by postwar injury, illness, and grief but also by newly racialized and gendered political and biological truisms—provided at best a shifting foundation for American history and identity.
In efforts to materialize and communicate the illusory and idiosyncratic nature of a reality founded on the perceptions of diseased human bodies, many writers analogized the war as a volcano or earthquake. As my subtitle from Walt Whitman’s 1865 paean to the war, Drum Taps, implies, the Civil War was a time that “trembled and reel’d beneath” many Americans.4 Whitman was not the only writer to employ tectonic imagery to convey the instability the war experience epitomized. In perhaps the nineteenth century’s best-known Civil War novel, Miss Ravenel’s Conversion from Secession to Loyalty (1867), John William De Forest writes, “No volcanic eruption rends a mountain without stirring the existence of the mountain’s mice.” Writing in 1904, Rebecca Harding Davis still noted that “to the easy-going millions, busied with their farms or shops, the onrushing disaster was as inexplicable as an earthquake.”5 Tectonic imagery was useful because volcanoes and earthquakes were foreign to most Americans’ experiences during the war era.6 At the same time, these representations made the cataclysm of the war a natural, enduring phenomenon. The trauma of war revealed the fault lines that always lay beneath the substratum of American culture and identity. Thus the quaking imagery usefully absolved individuals of responsibility for the slaughters of the Civil War, for such seismic events are beyond anyone’s control. Most important, volcanoes and earthquakes kept readers ever mindful of the fully physical disorientation of the war. No one near the site of a quake or eruption is exempt from feeling its effects. Even those quite far off from the event feel the ground shake or find their view obscured by smoke and ash.
Yet volcanic eruptions do not merely shake the ground, but they also force fissures in Earth’s crust. The Civil War is not only the trembling terra firma beneath our feet, but also the gap left behind; it is the silent space between health and disease, freedom and slavery, past and future, reality and perception. The long-standing belief that the “real” war remains untold, first penned by Whitman in 1882 and reiterated in Daniel Aaron’s influential The Unwritten War (1973), reflects the fact that the regional conflict was surreal for so many.7 Mountains made up of volcanic detritus may form over the site of such bewildering eruptions; indeed, this book argues that the asserted coherence of the Civil War and the mountain of scholarly and artistic attention it has elicited have made the war into a remarkably stable and powerful cultural trope. But I am also compelled by the bizarre chasms beneath the volcano, the hollow chambers that we have worked so hard to habile—to clothe, to cover over. These hollowed spaces have become hallowed ground, venerated and protected because of their supposedly sacred nature. And the timeless “abysms of New World humanity” beneath (to borrow Whitman’s language) hold not only a calamitous past but also the promise of an equally earth-shattering future.8 These past, present, and future moments exist beyond the temporal boundaries of the Civil War, but the attention the war elicits suggests that such corporeal traumas may best be expressed through the trope of the Civil War. Thus I posit a war-era and postbellum corporeal ideology that is not simply the effect of a material cause; for example, Civil War deaths and dismemberments caused cultural and individual instability. Rather, our continued processing of Civil War diseases and disabilities expresses an ontological and epistemological phenomenon that continues to lend unstable shape and meaning to the inner lives and social realities of many Americans. The war is not unwritten—nothing so finite—but, rather, it is rewritten and rewritten and rewritten. Like an inactive volcano, the Civil War seems to sleep, yet its rumble remains palpable; it will not let us rest easy.
Rehabilitating the Civil War
Unable to still the shaking ground or subsequently to reverse the damage done by the cataclysmic event, Civil War writers increasingly turned their attentions toward the unbalanced bodies that occupied this martial landscape. Indeed, upon closer inspection, tectonic imagery is disturbingly equivocal, for the difference between the foundational reformations of the war (evident in my study in evolving medical, historical, and psychological notions of selfhood and citizenship) and individual diseases became confused: Did the natural calamity of the Civil War produce diseased individuals, or did inherently diseased individuals produce the Civil War? Unwilling to address this chicken and egg conundrum—insisting in their volcanic imagery that the former was true, even as their texts subtly suggested that the latter was the case—writers and thinkers set their sights on the seemingly possible task of fixing bodies.
I use the term rehabilitate in this study because it suggests the many ways that Civil War writers attempt to fix the unnerving changes of the Civil War. In modern parlance, we use the term rehabilitate most often to connote a physical or psychological return to good health. Following the lead of medical writers, novelists, historians, journalists, and memoirists sought not only to stabilize a martial citizenry disturbingly out of kilter but also to sustain the revolutionary changes (i.e., emancipation) that filled the breach. Rehabilitate also means “to reestablish on a firm or solid basis.” Thus Civil War writers and thinkers sought to secure bodies by making individuals and the events in which they participated predictable, unalterable, and static. As coverage of the First Battle of Bull Run postulated, fixed bodies could ensure definite stories, and rehabilitative Civil War texts offered the promise of the converse as well: fixed stories might produce definite bodies.
It is on this front that the disciplines of medicine and history—both emerging as discrete, scientific professions in the war-era and postbellum periods—colluded, as their practitioners developed strategies to narrate and organize radically particular bodily experiences. Disciplining the bodies and behaviors of both the professionals and the subjects of their study, history and medicine offered the possibility of Civil War rehabilitation. Let me clarify that although I invoke medicine and history here, I do not intend to chart their disciplinary developments per se. Rather, I contend that the basic questions of corporeality, narratability, and knowledge that generally troubled nineteenth-century representations of the Civil War simultaneously dictated the evolving disciplinary practices and narrative strategies of historians and doctors. Both history and medicine are premised on the existence of a corporeal and often critical reality that their practitioners cannot know fully. Yet the professional’s disciplinary mission remains to access what he or she can and to contribute to totalizing, restorative narratives of human experience crafted from fragmentary knowledge of individual bodies and behaviors. History and medicine gained power in the war-era and postbellum periods precisely because they were compelled by the epistemological limits of unstable bodies.
War writers precede Michel Foucault in their keen awareness of the volcanic nature of the epistemes that serve to stabilize modern Western disciplinary culture.9 At the heart of the scientific method crucial to both professions is a pose of stability and objectivity gained through adherence to regulated protocols of study. Both physical bodies and historical artifacts became objects to be scrutinized, tested, and then interpreted by the trained professional. Indeed, this project charts how physical bodies became historical artifacts for writers of the Civil War, making healing narratives contingent on stable, rehabilitated bodies and vice versa. However, investigations of the Civil War reveal not only how bodies are bound by disciplines such as medicine and history but also how the internal features and forces of bodies and psyches might be theorized.10 Civil War texts so thoroughly enmeshed in the politics of these emerging disciplines assume that although knowledge of bodies, historical or not, cannot be comprehensive, those bodies are comprehensible.
The practice of professional historians in the postbellum era speaks to the correspondence between the two disciplines and their essential connection to matters of the Civil War. As one Gilded Age historian contended, historical seminars functioned like “laborator[ies] of scientific truth” where specimens were passed about to be examined. Another scholar of the era hoped that the scientific historian of the future would work “like the anatomist, who cuts through this sensual beauty to find beyond, in the secrets of its interior organization, beauty a thousand times superior.”11 Here the male historian believes in the existence of conventionally feminized, sublime knowledge; after all, the ultimate end of scientific pursuit is complete knowledge and, consequently, complete stability. It is not surprising that Civil War writers and thinkers would exploit this emerging scientific rhetoric in hopes of settling unsettled historical bodies. If one followed strict rules regarding the handling and interpretation of specimens (whether material remnants of people’s lives or bodies themselves), these new scientists believed one would be able to reproduce results, and it is that reproducability that ensured accurate history, healed bodies, and secure self-knowledge.
Yet as I’ve begun to suggest, Civil War bodies seemed adamantly diseased, that is, unreceptive to disciplinary regimes of soma or text. Given that medical discourse revealed the pathologies of the bodies producing historical and medical narratives, Civil War texts concomitantly promote and undermine the scientific basis of such textual productions. Concern with fixing biological origins became the bailiwick of both professions, as identifying a more rational and dispassionate—in short, a healthier—race of historians and doctors seemed the most expedient means of ensuring the validity of both history and medicine. Just as scientific method galvanized the modern historical profession, history was crucial to the development of biological and medical sciences in that it provided a narrative template that chronologically organized human bodies, actions, and responses that were so spectacularly disordered.12 In medical science, postbellum doctors transformed evolutionary history into genetic immutability: for example, white women were forever weak because of their wombs; African American men and women were perpetually childlike because of their small skulls and brains.13 Scientific historians of the nineteenth century were similarly obsessed with national origins, a preoccupation that led to racist and nativist efforts to imagine the most eugenically fit American pedigree. It is widely accepted that white postbellum Civil War historians, Northern and Southern, predicated national reconciliation on the regions’ shared acceptance of new evolutionary theories of racism.14 Thus, for many, historical rehabilitation of the Civil War was founded on the unchanging degeneracy of African American bodies.15
Given the primacy of war-era and postbellum corporeal scientific praxis, it is no surprise that the discourse of bodies proves foundational in renderings of the Civil War. After all, bodies matter in that real people lived and died during the Civil War, and their bodies bore the wounds of the sectional conflict. As Elaine Scarry explains, “What matters (what signifies, what has standing, what counts) has substance: mattering is the impingement of a thing’s substance on whatever surrounds it.” 16 Though the trauma may be incommunicable, the matter of those bodies makes the war real on some basic level. This insistence on the legibility of bodily matters is at the core of Civil War rehabilitation. At the same time, Civil War writers insist that bodies don’t matter, although such a claim may seem counterintuitive. After all, their texts are full of bodies: nervous bodies, hungry bodies, enslaved bodies, grief-riven bodies, mutilated bodies, dead bodies. The writers I treat here are obsessed with the matter of bodies, minutely detailing their physical afflictions and their emotional responses to the conflict. And yet they despair of ever being able to firmly fix how others or even they themselves feel or to determine what really happened during the war. Here, bodies are constantly in the process of falling apart, subject to perception-skewing attack or disease.
That specific diseases emerged in specific ways according to the gendered or racial identification of the sufferer is a basic premise of this book. We have become used to Civil War books that focus on a particular group through the lens of contemporary identity politics: we are familiar with the so-called woman’s response to the war; slowly, we are getting works that treat the “African American response” to the war. The “white man’s response” to the war is the invisible default, of course. Ultimately, however, I have found these configurations untenable for my purposes. Though gender and race are salient categories in this project—as they were for the writers I treat—my goal is to foreground the theoretical connection between corporeality and history as a field of discourse that many different writers entered in particular ways. All of the pliant Civil War bodies I examine exist outside of the mythical norms of health and history, for they are unable to feel right, unable to impress themselves upon the world, and, ultimately, unable to gauge what really matters. Notably, in this latter case they are unable to legitimate invisible ills or to credibly narrate what happened.
I work under the assumption that bodies matter to the Civil War—they just matter differently from what is traditionally thought to be the case. As Judith Butler suggests in her exploration of the discursive limits of “sex,” such “unsettling of ‘matter’ can be understood as initiating new possibilities, new ways for bodies to matter.” As I will explain at length, the unsettling of bodily matters during the Civil War created a liberatory climate for many. However, to “problematize the matter of bodies may entail an initial loss of epistemological certainty.”17 And the rehabilitative disciplines of history and medicine emerged precisely to comfort in the face of such loss. The prefix re in rehabilitation presumes an originary state of bodily habiliment that marks the epistemological solidity of health and of history. That crucial re ensures a preceding authenticity, promising that we can get back to an essential wholeness. Thus the disciplines of health and history assume that the bodies/documents that mark the existence of a disordering event are incontrovertible, entities merely awaiting retrieval. As one recent defender of history against the encroachment of postmodern theory insists, historians have always known that they can “see the past only ‘through a glass, darkly.’” However, such accessions do not challenge the basic notion of scientific discovery, which relies upon the belief that knowledge is preexisting, that historical bodies are “entirely independent of the historian,” waiting for him or her to simply stumble upon them.18 I find that those who write of the Civil War during the nineteenth century—indeed, those transcribing their reactions even as they stand in its midst and suffer its pains—find the Civil War just as elusive as those who still seek to know it now. These Civil War writers have no sure sense of the real that seemingly materializes before them or of the accuracy of the documents they produce while the war is raging. A history founded on the expressions of bodies is by some definitions an “ambulant form,” for “the body is at best like something, but it never is that something.”19 Complete recoveries of health or history seem impossible in such Civil War texts—even to those who believe they are fully engaged in acts of recovery.
To illustrate, let me briefly turn to two rehabilitative texts: one historical, the other imaginative, but both intent upon the Civil War’s fundamental relationship to invisible ills and dead bodies. Attempting to document regimental losses three decades after the cessation of hostilities in his military history, Regimental Losses in the American Civil War (1889), Civil War veteran William F. Fox writes, “The bloody laurels for which a regiment contends will always be awarded to the one with the longest role honor. Scars are the true evidence of wounds and the regimental scars can be seen only in the records of its casualties.”20 Here Fox links the number of dead sustained in battle to the “bloody laurels” of victory. Thus, intangible characteristics such as “honor” are made perceptible through the list of dead bodies. But bodies are integral not only to the Civil War’s accountability—its status as a verifiable event—but also to the war’s basic knowability: the distinction between wounds and scars. In this passage, the “regimental scars” attest to the invisible wounds. As this book will demonstrate, Civil War doctors were stymied by the number and variety of invisible wounds suffered by their patients. Yet even if initially visible, physical wounds are a transitory phenomenon. With the passage of time they usually heal enough, or kill. It is significant that Fox is careful to differentiate scars from wounds, electing the former to stand in for the unrecoverable individual pains and historical reality of the Civil War. He enacts his own form of rehabilitation, as the scars cover over the wounds that persist metaphorically beneath the surface in many bodies and minds. In a well-known passage, Scarry writes of pain that it is “at once something that cannot be denied and something that cannot be confirmed … to have pain is to have certainty; to hear about pain is to have doubt.”21 Thus the “regimental scars,” that is, the number of dead bodies, foreclose any efforts to revivify or authenticate the pain of individual wounds. Indeed, Fox insists that those scars are sufficient evidence for the sacrifices of the living and the dead and for the bloody laurels deserved by badly decimated regiments. But of course others’ pain is always unknowable, though its effects cannot be ignored. Fox demonstrates that although postbellum Americans knew that bodies mattered, they also knew that their comrades’ pain could not be resurrected, that surviving bodies didn’t feel the same after the war, and that such feeling could not be conveyed. I contend contra Scarry that Civil War pain provided no certainty, even to those in its grips.
Fox’s rhetorical strategies were typical in the postbellum period, and they shaped the parameters of subsequent study of the Civil War and of American history more generally. Fox asserts, for example, that it is only through accurately recovering the number of dead in each battle that scholars of the Civil War can know “where the points of contact really were; where the pressure was the greatest; where the scenes of valor and heroism occurred” (574). Here he uses terms such as contact and pressure to insist that the Civil War matters; his sensory language suggests that we must somehow feel its reality in our individual and national bodies. And yet those bodies are unreliable. He concludes his meticulous tally of the thousands killed during the war:
In a conversation with the late Col. Robert N. Scott, USA concerning [counting the dead and wounded] that officer remarked “We will do these things better in the next war.” The question arises, will the “we” of the future do these things any better? In the turmoil and excitement will not “these things” be again overlooked?, and gallant regiments be again disbanded without leaving scarcely a trace to show how well they fought? Will not History be again neglected and despoiled? (574)
Interestingly, Fox and his contemporaries were not concerned with better war-making or with avoiding such deadly military engagements altogether. Rather, they were interested in better representational strategies. Without bodies, there is no proof of wartime activities and feelings. More important, Fox suggests that there is no history without bodies. History is personified and done a grave wrong by the military’s inability to provide the statistics it needs to substantiate its raison d’être. Yet Fox’s forceful and questioning tone suggests that he is aware that those bodies and the intangible states he argues they represent will continue to elude him. Without history, bodies leave “scarcely a trace.” Just as Whitman darkly predicts, the Civil War will produce “no history ever—no poem sings, no music sounds, those bravest men of all” for their bodies “crumble [] in mother earth, unburied and unknown.”22 Bodies become universal signifiers, their mere existence needed to guarantee nineteenth-century Americans the possibility of knowledge. Thus the inability to (ac) count for bodies—and the subsequent dissolution of history—signal more than lack of knowledge about the Civil War. The impossibility of bodies means the impossibility of knowledge itself.
Whitman’s poem “The Wound-Dresser” (1865), excerpted at the outset of this chapter, plumbs the depths of the instability Fox delineates. Whitman invokes the Civil War as the imaginative repository of inner life, a surreal yet bounded place whose “doors” writers will traverse again and again, bringing their readers with them. He abandons the notion that the Civil War is an accountable, verifiable event and asserts instead that war experiences are “dreams’ projections,” an iteration of the American subconscious writ large. In Whitman’s poem, the Civil War is still a space filled with the mangled bodies produced by the self-destructive war of a diseased society. But it is also the home of the wound-dresser; though his actions are ultimately ineffective in healing those who perish around him, the wound-dresser is validated by the crucial work he has undertaken. Consequently, a defining characteristic of Civil War literature is that the war accrues therapeutic value. Though physical and mental health were so often ruined in the volcanic cataclysm, the war also became the metaphoric site of rehabilitation, where socially stigmatized Americans presumably were able to refashion themselves by assuming practically powerful roles. Like the wound-dresser, many postbellum writers were compelled to return to the Civil War in order to reclaim the promise of cultural authority and subjectivity that their contemporaneous culture of anomie, even antimodernism, vehemently denied.
But this lesson in history is achieved only when the wound-dresser imagines his body literally walking into the cataclysmic past. When asked by young men and maidens to “be witness again” to the Civil War, Whitman’s aged wound-dresser must lead his listeners into the Civil War hospital (3, 9). “With hinged knees returning I enter the doors,” he tells us, traversing the threshold of time to become a Civil War nurse once again (23). His sensual imagery evokes the physical dimensions of this psychic journey. The wound-dresser faces a pair of “appealing eyes,” moves on to the next bed to dress a “crush’d head,” examines “the neck of a cavalry-man with the bullet through and through” (31, 40, 41). The poem progresses through the fragmented body parts of different, anonymous men, moving down to the “stump of the arm, the amputated hand,” “a wound in the side,” and “the perforated shoulder, the foot with the bullet-wound” (45, 50, 53). In disregarding an individual soldier in favor of the many parts of many anonymous men, the wound-dresser depicts a national body and tells a national story. However, although his listeners clamor for him to “paint the mightiest armies of earth,” to depict “hard-fought engagements or sieges tremendous,” these silent bodies are the “deepest remains” of the war for him (9, 12, 11). I argue that the wound-dresser represents the Civil War doctor-historian as he attempts to re-member the national body through his ministrations. The wound-dresser’s archive is the Civil War hospital, his documents the dismembered bodies of the patients.23
Even the undeniable, gut-wrenching force of infected, suffering, dying bodies cannot substantiate this history. Though his own body is unwounded, his memories remain mediated and surreal, “dreams’ projections” suggesting his double distance from the events: this poem is not even a dream, but a projection of a dream. The anonymity of the dying soldiers who people the wound-dresser’s memory distance him and us from the events. In looking into the eyes of a dying boy he claims, “I think I could not refuse this moment to die for you, if that would save you” (38). But of course he cannot die for the boy; and though he may be powerfully empathic, his clinical description of the soldiers’ wounds do not provide access to how they feel. Interestingly, Whitman published “The Wound-Dresser” the year the war ended. Yet he already imagines the war through the distance of age and time and memory loss, as an “old man bending” toward the past that he imagines as obscured, as “imprints” in “sand” that the “waves” continually “wash … off” (1, 22). Whitman suggests that the war is an experience alien and transient even to those living through it.
The Rewritten Civil War
And yet the war experience continues to grip his psyche as Whitman’s wound-dresser revisits the Civil War hospital again and again. It is not just Civil War writings themselves that interest me here, but also the dynamics of this incessant rewriting. Scholars have produced tens of thousands of books on the war, the vast majority concerned with “the quest to understand.”24 Dominated still by military and political history, this body of scholarship is largely interested in causes and effects: What caused the Civil War? Why did it take place when it did? Why did the North win and the South lose? What were the decisive military engagements of the conflict? Which men were heroes, and which were cowards? New social histories have expanded the set of questions and the narratives that answer, looking beyond the great men to examine how civilians in general, white women, African Americans, and others experienced the Civil War.25 Although such work questions the presumed objectivity of historical praxis, it does not challenge the premise that historical experience is a verifiable, knowable place, though we may not be able to get to it.
In their assessment of Civil War historiography, James McPherson and William J. Cooper Jr. liken their profession’s progress to “several blind men who tried to describe an elephant—each historian seems to have run his hands over a different part of the evidence … so each one has described a different animal.”26 This story (common in scientific circles) acknowledges the particularity of perspective; moreover, it suggests how one’s proximity to the Civil War evokes bodily disability, or at least forces one to reconsider the nature of one’s sensory relationship to the objects of study, to the bodies of the past. However, the story also relies on the material reality of the elephant—one could not choose a larger and more weighty body to stand in for the presumed coherence and undeniable knowability of the Civil War. It is not the elephant’s fault that no one gets it right. Yet in endowing this historical project with life, McPherson and Cooper suggest that the past is not dead and insentient. Elephant bodies—just as human bodies—are mutable and mortal; perhaps each historian has described a different animal.
We are a culture obsessed with rehabilitating the Civil War, trying to embody it and make it comprehensible. The piecework recovery of the Civil War is not left to only the professionals, but also a hobbyist industry.27 This is a national community invested also in minutiae, helping to gauge the elephant through an infinite series of small observations. Unit files strive to account for every single individual who fought in the conflict. The descendants of Civil War veterans lovingly edit their family members’ diaries. Civil War sabers, guns, paper ephemera, and so forth fetch top dollar on the collectibles market. Reenactors painstakingly reconstruct uniforms and weaponry, as well as mimic the actions of their national ancestors, in efforts to conjure the elusive bodies of the Civil War. There are Civil War magazines and e-mail groups, Civil War Round-tables and Lincoln Associations, and even children’s toys such as Civil War Barbie. Hobbyists attempt to access the war’s reality through a variety of means, but these means are most often geared toward capturing the war’s materiality, whether through (re)collecting material traces of the era or tying one’s own body to the event through genealogy or reenactment. Like trained scholars, Civil War hobbyists seek to fix the Civil War and the bodily states it still grounds. They want to know how those who lived through the Civil War really felt.
Yet a century and a half of hobbyist, scholarly, and artistic activity leaves us no closer to articulating the war, or to definitively answering impossible questions, than the writers who people my study, individuals who lived during the war and into the next generation. This book turns to the Civil War’s diseased bodies to address the following questions: Why is the Civil War so important to us still? How does the depth of its grip on the national psyche reflect the larger, structural role it plays in postbellum society even today? Essentially, how did this nasty, bloody, four-year series of skirmishes and battles become “The Civil War,” an event accorded almost religious reverence by subsequent generations? George M. Frederickson has recently suggested that the Civil War compels us because it “provides a persuasive argument for the uniqueness of American history” in the nineteenth century.28 Although I find such national exceptionalism too sweeping, I do argue that in its incessant movement and in its reliance upon the power of bodily vagaries, the Civil War authorizes modern American history. Our consistent desire to claim the Civil War as historical truth, as national proving ground, is also our need to resist its shifting, representational nature and the profound consequences such instability has for national, disciplinary, and individual identities. The constant, intense attention given to the Civil War attests not only to its stability and coherence, but also to its essential slipperiness and, consequently, the instability of the identities founded upon its volcanic grounds.
Yet treatments of the Civil War do not founder on such uncertainties, but thrive despite—or rather, because of—them. I want to suggest briefly here that the incessant rewriting the Civil War elicits derives from its power as a historicizing trope. The deference we accord it, the concomitant breadth and detail we pursue in our study of it, and the comprehensiveness it seemingly requires of its devotees are what lends it its weight. Ironically, it is not only in the details that we ground the Civil War, but also in the volume of its effects. For example, in his introduction to James M. McPherson’s best-selling, Pulitzer Prize-winning Civil War contribution to the “Oxford History of the United States,” general editor C. Vann Woodward is compelled to address the 904-page length of The Battle Cry of Freedom: “That it should, despite its size, cover the shortest period assigned calls for some comment.”29 First, Woodward points us to McPherson’s belief that “time and consciousness took on new dimensions” during the war years (xvii). Because time seemed to last longer during the Civil War, he reasons, there is more to be written. The Civil War is denser with history than any other American historical event. Indeed, Woodward, via McPherson, suggests that history adheres to the Civil War, that there is an undeniable magnetism between the two that effects a historical compression of sorts. Allusions to such Civil War congestion might seem at odds with an historical project that seeks to mete out the past so precisely. However, Woodward attributes this augmented sense of time to the notion that Civil War history is a scrupulous, self-perpetuating industry: “the more written, the more disclosed, and the more questions and controversies to be coped with” (xviii). By this logic, the war remains only rewritable, for any effort to address the event proliferates questions and the literature on the period rather than offering an endpoint to debate. Finally, none of these reasons seems to suffice, and Woodward concludes that the length of the volume is related to bodies: “one simple and eloquent measurement [of the magnitude of war] is the numbers of casualties sustained” (xviii). Written in 1987, Woodward’s bodily reckoning of the length of McPherson’s Civil War echoes Fox’s 1889 efforts on similar fronts. Though neither of these historians deliberately ascribes the war’s rewritability to bodily and psychic ills, focusing on numbers rather than natures, they represent the many nineteenth- and twentieth-century scholars who sense that the unwieldy shape and length of the Civil War project is tied to the problematics of corporeality. “This is hardly a normal period,” Woodward notes.
Like General Fox, many literary historians and critics also continue to search for the “missing bodies,” for the perfect and whole consolidation of texts that will complete the puzzle of the meaning of the Civil War. For example, though noting regional differences, early Civil War literary scholars tended to craft composite Civil War narratives, consolidating Northern and Southern accounts, war-era and historical fictions, in their ambitious reviews of the era’s literature. Heroic efforts such as Robert Lively’s Fiction Fights the Civil War (1957), Edmund Wilson’s Patriotic Gore (1962), and Aaron’s The Unwritten War (1973) treat the literature in toto. To a certain extent, the bulk of these studies derives from Americanists’ anxiety about the lackluster quality of the literature inspired by our greatest historical event.30 Their historicizing narratives fill up the space where emotional and historical truth are supposed to reside.
Recent literary critics have noticed the unstable bodies that undergird Civil War literature, and they focus on what I would call the rehabilitative strategies of many Civil War texts. Timothy Sweet, Kathleen Diffley, Elizabeth Young, and Gregory Eiselein, in particular, are attuned to wounded and improper bodies and the “disruptive Civil War moments” they engender. Read through the hermeneutic I lay out, they all engage in projects of rehabilitation, showing how the wounds of Civil War were purposefully exploited and/or recuperated through the rhetoric of the Civil War. These new critics fruitfully revise traditional literary genealogy; the addition of the narratives of women and African Americans, of commercial and magazine fiction, of photography and other media to the Civil War story has transformed the field.31 Yet most Civil War scholars still subscribe to the gap theory that motivates the historical project at large. The urge toward material accountability permeates scholarly study of the period, as we concentrate on amassing Civil War writings themselves, expanding the body of the Civil War, but not essentially altering the parameters by which we define its potency. Neither does recent historical scholarship substantially challenge the basic premises of (ac)countability and (un)writability that both energize and vex Civil War studies.
I argue that such has been the case because the Civil War emerges as both a content and a mode of signification, an organizing topic that entails the theoretical underpinnings of postbellum American history. The content of the Civil War has produced its own narrative practice, a form premised on a preference for conveyances of the real founded on bodily experiences that resist such form. As I have begun to demonstrate, transcriptions of physical and psychological traumas are neither verifiable nor wholly imagined—to return to Scarry, they reside in the realm of the mutable body. Firmly grounded in this corporeal (il) logic, the Civil War narratives I examine overwhelm traditional generic distinctions, particularly between fiction and history. Any contact with the Civil War can conveniently collapse the already tenuous distinctions between the two; the war’s sheer weight, the magnitude of its suffering, and the heft of its dead bodies press, condensing all representation into compact nuggets of history. Thus any text that treats the Civil War can become American history, even when it explicitly purports no such generic intention.32 For example, Louisa May Alcott’s Hospital Sketches has been praised by medical and Civil War historians as “perhaps the best account of what hospital life during at least one year of the war was really like,” despite the fact that she clearly fictionalizes her experience.33 In even more curious claims, many critics have dubbed Stephen Crane’s The Red Badge of Courage as best able to represent Civil War combat experience, even as they acknowledge that Crane was not alive during the sectional conflict. This last example seems most significant, for I would argue that it is Crane’s treatment of the Civil War—particularly, as I argue in Chapter 5, his delineation of war-era disease—that lends his fiction its semblance of truth. By the turn of the century, the war was firmly established as a grounding content, inviting considerations of textual facticity whether or not the text was determined to aspire to such standards.
Given this tendency, it is no surprise that Civil War writers themselves insist that their romanticized histories and autobiographical fictions deny quick categorization. Authors treated in this study, such as Alcott, De Forest, and Dr. S. Weir Mitchell, clearly fictionalize real-life experiences in their work; in her fictional Hospital Sketches, Alcott pleads that we believe “such a being as Nurse Periwinkle does exist … that these Sketches are not romance.”34 Yet the novella is derived from her avowedly nonfictional letters, and whole passages are transferred verbatim. Charlotte Forten, on the other hand, chose to publish her private writings—excerpts from her journals—in a public forum. Yet she too edited and shaped that version of real life when it appeared as “Life on the Sea Islands.” The late-century historians and memoirists also treated in this study surely employed similar strategies in their efforts to fashion coherent narratives from their thirty-year-old memories. In addition, the serials in which many of these accounts first became available to nineteenth-century readers did not distinguish among the genres, publishing them side by side without generic labels. Such circumstances led Mitchell’s anonymous short story “The Case of George Dedlow” to be read as fact by Atlantic Monthly subscribers. Sending money to the fictional “Stump Hospital” named in the story, Mitchell’s readers insisted that the trauma of war was literally unimaginable, even as those who struggled to articulate the conflict suggested that it was only imaginable.
The historicizing force of the Civil War, finally, registers the assumed opposition between theoretical and materialist enterprises. As Scarry notes, “The turn to history and the body [is] the attempt to restore the material world to literature.”35 I add that it is not just literature to which this stabilizing weight must be returned; the obsessive reiteration of the Civil War suggests materiality is required on a much larger scale. Thus it is not surprising that George Frederickson notes quickly and intriguingly in a footnote to his historiographical review of the scholarship of nineteenth-century American history, “The explicit use of postmodernist theory is still rare in Civil War historiography.”36 His comment subtly implies that there is an opposition between the material realities of the war—the details that engross most Civil War scholars—and theoretical entanglements with the event and its representation, which many argue diminishes the horrifying and heroic. Wars are, indeed, sobering events, and civil wars particularly so, for they reveal the self-destructive, illogical impulses inherent in national and individual bodies.
The appalling circumstances of the Civil War inform American histories and identities, producing a national morality forbidding any cavalier treatment of “the glorious dead.” Even before Abraham Lincoln consecrated the ground of warfare at Gettysburg Cemetery, the Civil War had become a sacred event. As Hayden White and other scholars have perceptively noted, there appears to be a “special class of events” that “must be viewed as manifesting only one story, as being emplottable in one way only, and as signifying one kind of meaning,”37 The practice of making unimaginable slaughters such as the Civil War solely historical—merely factual—forecloses the possibility that those deaths had no definitive meaning or that meaning more generally is relative. I do not find the American Civil War any less representable than any other event in human history. However, events whose apocalyptic natures are limned by the sheer magnitude of dead and brutalized bodies are nothing to be theorized for some. In the case of the Civil War, such seemingly frivolous and ancillary explorations entail a turning away from the monumental and meticulous accounting project that has preoccupied scholars for decades, and in the breach, those facts and figures—those bodies—may slip out of our grasp. And so too will go the carefully maintained sense of stability, coherence, and knowledge built upon the foundation of the Civil War. Again, heightened patriotism is not unique to the Civil War. However, the Civil War is unique in the way in which its representations embody the tensions between simple morality and endless inquiry, between fact and fiction, between the known and the speculative that inform subsequent study of American health and history.
The Civil War’s Bodies
In embarking on this academic project, I find myself as subject to Civil War historicism as anyone else. However, my goal here is not necessarily to generate new knowledge about the Civil War, but rather to explore how the Civil War has become a lasting trope and to chart how that becoming is dictated by the vagaries of the human body. The three areas of interest I have delineated in this introduction do not lend themselves easily to linear arcs but are, rather, simultaneously at play in the texts I consider. Consequently, rather than mapping how one of the phenomena I have identified ended and the next began, I will explore how each of the following manifests itself in particular Civil War texts: the invisible ills that rock protagonists’ and writers’ worlds, the bodily rehabilitations that inform the production of disciplinary and cultural practices, and the incessant rewriting that seems to express the essential inexpressibility of those invisible ills.
Arguably, these complexities make the American Civil War our most cherished cultural palimpsest; each resuscitation adds to its signifying power. Although I eschew cause-and-effect logic, I do believe that the way in which the war has been claimed and represented at particular historical moments (even as the war was still being fought) has much to say about the culture that produced the representation and about the staying power of the sectional conflict. Recent historians such as Jim Cullen notice also that the Civil War has been “rewritten (or refilmed, re-recorded, etc.) to reflect the concerns of different constituencies in U.S. society.”38 Yet this process of historical revision has not been quite as arbitrary as such claims might suggest. The Civil War embodies a pliable, quintessentially American idiom of cultural disease; concurrently, it offers an imaginative space where Americans attempt to form rehabilitative strategies specific to contemporary needs.
That the writers whose texts I have chosen to focus on are more often than not Northern in their sympathies is not the result of geographic design. Rather, it follows from the bodily rehabilitations I seek to delineate. Within the corporeal rhetoric of the national body deployed before and during the war era, Southern aggression and the way of life that had prompted it was a diseased part that needed to be cured or excised. Thus the South was figured as an infected appendage, whereas the North maintained the original national identity. As Abraham Lincoln wrote of his approach to the war, “I have sometimes used the illustration … of a man with a diseased limb, and his surgeon. So long as there is a chance of the patient’s restoration, the surgeon is solemnly bound to try to save both life and limb; but when the crisis comes, and the limb must be sacrificed as the only chance of saving the life, no honest man will hesitate.”39 Thus, texts produced by Northern writers are more likely to register their disease as loss, though many Southern writers depicted their own pain at the violent dissolution of the American body politic.
Ultimately, however, the South was restored to the North (a feat of reattachment unimaginable to doctors of the time) and by this logic the bodily integrity of the nation, though scarred, remained intact. In his renowned work on Northern intellectuals during the war, Frederickson reasons that because the North won the war, Northerners’ cultural remembrances of it, and subsequent historical events, take national precedence.40 Yet the notion of “America” as a unified identity is always fictional, a figment of our geographical imaginations; “North” and “South” are equally vexed designations. This is not to discount the reality that regional affiliations held for individuals; after all, Southerners were willing to die to establish the idea of an autonomous South. However, even though most of the authors who appear in this book identify themselves as Unionists, the people who populate this project—and the concerns that absorb them—traverse and transcend regional boundaries, just as their bodies did.
Similarly, the trope of the Civil War extends far beyond 1865. Though the war provides a convenient breaking point for literary and historical study of the nineteenth century, the bodily and textual diseases I identify should not be seen as transcending the times that preceded and followed them. Rather, the issues that crystallized most forcefully during the Civil War were undercurrents to nineteenth- and twentieth-century life that have come into focus at various historical moments. For example, Joan Burbick has argued cogently that as the American nation-state developed early in the nineteenth century, the “body of the individual citizen became the test case for the republic … the symbol of the very possibility of free human agency and human governance.”41 In the twentieth century, the 1929 stock market crash and subsequent deprivations of the Great Depression in the 1930s launched a renaissance of Civil War literature and scholarship, represented most notably by the craze for Gone with the Wind (1936) in both its novelistic and cinematic incarnations. This study is part of the most recent reclamation evidenced in the relatively recent popularity of texts such as Ken Burns’s PBS series The Civil War (1990) and Charles Frazier’s novel, Cold Mountain (1997). Though a comprehensive consideration of emergent postbellum representations of the war is far beyond the scope of one text, one need only recall the dead bodies strewn across the fields of Matthew Brady’s groundbreaking photographs or the artificially blackened rapist who leers out at us from D. W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation to see how the Civil War immediately insinuated itself into the fiber of modern American modes of representation.
Although I remain grounded in war-era texts, I also aim more modestly to extend my explorations to the twentieth century. The bodily ills the Civil War expressed were most obviously troubling from 1861 to 1905, when the rehabilitative strategies that emerged were still unformed but also most vehement. Writers were especially prolific during two periods: the 1860s and a twenty-year period around the turn of the century (1885–1905). I have organized my chapters around these two periods—as distinct yet connected entities.42 The turn of the century also marks the senescence and deaths of the Civil War survivors who were adults during the conflict, depleting the actual bodies that marked the disturbing reality of the war. It is during this time that remaining Civil War veterans and their children returned unerringly to the Civil War. In their medical texts, fictions, histories, and memoirs, writers again and again used the trope of the Civil War to articulate their sense of the modern world taking root—a world, I contend, marked by the bodily ills, psychological drama, and civil discontent that had alternately plagued and energized Civil War America.
Not surprisingly, the Civil War appealed to a wide variety of writers during this period. For example, the war continued to preoccupy wartime veterans such as S. Weir Mitchell and Susie King Taylor. Nonetheless, young, celebrated authors such as Stephen Crane and Paul Laurence Dunbar, who were born after the sectional conflict, also found in it a historical canvas conducive to the bodily dramas they wished to delineate. In some respects, the version of the Civil War that has occupied many twentieth-century writers and thinkers attributes the corporeal instabilities of the era to gender and racial confusion, consequently obfuscating the diversity of the Civil War of the previous century. In part, that is why students study The Red Badge of Courage in our literary classes instead of Dunbar’s The Fanatics; why Taylor’s memoir has disappeared in the shadow of U. S. Grant’s; and why Mitchell is known only as the staid, sexist “rest cure doctor” and not as the experimental investigator of Civil War nerve injury. White, male authority—even that as ambiguous as Henry Fleming’s knowledge of combat, as undistinguished as Grant’s presidency, or as misguided as Mitchell’s rest cures—offered the illusion of certainty premised on the universal health of white male bodies and minds.
Chapter 1 begins with one man’s vexed efforts to establish authority through the Civil War. S. Weir Mitchell has become a pivotal figure in this study because his oeuvre so clearly illustrates the amorphous interstices that emerged as he attempted to firmly fix individual and professional meanings in rehabilitated bodies. A Civil War surgeon and later a famous neurologist, Mitchell was also a prolific novelist and poet consistently attentive to diseases that straddled physical and psychological realms—precisely the territory my project maps. Mitchell’s medical texts theorize the concept of Civil War “nerve injury”—a diagnosis that linked a variety of physical and emotional ills that defied organic detection. Mitchell saw such ailments as indivisible from the Civil War; as he wrote in his 1885 novel about the national crisis, In War Time, “What is true of disease, is true of war.”43 The Civil War remained an abiding area of literary and medical interest for Mitchell, providing the historical foundation and psychological tension for his fiction during the 1860s and again in the 1880s and 1890s. Its nerve-injured victims launched his medical career as the “rest cure” doctor and remained the subject of follow-up studies decades after the war. Finally, it was the persistence of “malingering”—the notion that patients might feign their invisible ills and that doctors may not be able to tell the difference—that challenged Mitchell’s faith in the coherence and stability of the body and in the scientific basis of his professional identity. At heart, Mitchell’s texts contend with his inability to know the ways of others’ diseases, and serve as the lens through which later chapters should be read.
Caused by a gunshot wound or an emotional blow, nerve injury was a pathological condition with outward causes but primarily interior consequences. Elizabeth Stuart Phelps’s best-seller, The Gates Ajar (1868), served a rehabilitative function for Americans dangerously debilitated by such war-time diseases. The alarming magnitude of illness, mutilation, and death sustained by the American citizenry during the war and the physical and psychological deprivations required even of those who did not serve on the front lines were partly responsible for the body consciousness ushered in during the war. Phelps’s novel works in tandem with Mitchell’s short story “The Case of George Dedlow,” demonstrating how Civil War survivors made sense of living bodies literally and figuratively decimated by the war. Phelps’s corporeal heaven promises the reconstitution of families and of selves dismembered by the carnage of war through the rehabilitation of mutilated, dead bodies. Such a solution acknowledges the surreality of earthly existence and the insufficiency of available rehabilitations by deferring stable embodiment to the afterlife.
Phelps’s heaven not only repairs bodies but also restores the personal idiosyncrasies of the dead. Thus her work marks the coalescence of a corporate-historical culture that required the repression of individual biases, attachments, and passions—the topic of Chapter 3. The powerful United States Sanitary Commission (USSC) was a government-sanctioned, philanthropic organization dedicated to monitoring and improving the public health of the army. In practice it wielded sanitary science, which posited that self-discipline—enforced by military law—would ensure the continued production of sound “material,” that is, soldiers for the army machine. Unsanitary disease was also described by the USSC as “soul-sickness,” or an illicit, pathological display of self. As Joel Pfister claims in his work on anthropologists and psychologists of emotional life, “Social regulations of self (which promote the idea of self as naturally in need of regulation) are social fabrications of self.”44 The Civil War is a critical moment during which this inveterate notion of American selfhood emerged. De Forest’s Miss Ravenel’s Conversion from Secession to Loyalty (1867) dramatizes the costs of this brand of self-surveillance, along with the sanitized citizen soldiers—what one USSC operative labels “unconscious missionaries”—the war produced. Rebecca Harding Davis’s novel of romance and war, Waiting for Verdict (1867), similarly charts the self-surveillance required of American citizens. Although many critics argue that romance plots such as those featured in De Forest’s and Davis’s fiction are ancillary to matters of war, I contend that they firmly focus our attentions on individual desire, self-formation, and sacrifice, those issues central to the rhetoric of soldiering. Finally, Davis’s extended treatment of African American characters—one, a nerve doctor practicing in Mitchell’s native Philadelphia—converges with the USSC’s postwar belief in the impossibility of ever curing the presumably unsanitary taint inherent in the bloodlines of the national family.
At the same time, ontological uncertainty and the perception of bodies in flux unmoored the physical bases of difference that were used to justify racism and sexism, or at least diverted national attention from them. Civil War texts portray not only the thousands of white soldiers who sustained life-altering injuries and the grief-stricken who survived them, but also African Americans who were property one day, citizens and soldiers the next, and single women whose severely circumscribed lives now extended to military hospitals and battlefields. These radical experiences convinced many of the possibility of future change. As social constructs that are always reliant upon embodied discourse—located, according to Robyn Wiegman, in a “pre-cultural realm where corporeal significations supposedly speak a truth which the body inherently means”—the strictures of gender and race were loosened by the prevalence of nerve injury, grief, and unsanitary disease, which compromised the stability of corporeal foundations.45 The preoccupation with essential, psychological matters produced a leveling effect that not only forced Americans to examine how they felt but also allowed many to explore cultural roles from which they were prohibited during the antebellum era.
For example, Civil War service was perceived by many whites and African Americans as the antidote to African Americans’ cultural disease—the presumed inferiority that marked and incapacitated the race. In Chapter 4 I turn to the diaries of Charlotte Forten and the newspaper correspondence of James Henry Gooding, two free African Americans who served the Union during the Civil War. Gooding embraced his service in the famous 54th Massachusetts Negro regiment, while Forten eagerly became a teacher in the South Carolina Sea Islands experiment. Both wrote at the pivotal moment of emancipation, when those who were considered constitutionally deficient legally became whole personages. As Americans adjusted to the transformation of African American bodies from capital to laborers in pursuit of capital, Forten and Gooding register their physical and mental well-being in economic terms. In both texts, racist commonplaces inform the meaning of Civil War rehabilitation. Gooding and Forten write that African Americans suffered the same injuries and losses as their white counterparts. However, they seldom dwell on the individual sufferings caused by the war, instead exploring the psychological wounds of racism as they were magnified by war service. White Civil War writers began with the premise of their racial integrity—a myth subsequently disproved by their experiences in the war. However, African American writers of the era related quite differently to dominant discourses of corporeality and disease. Civil War wounds could thus become the means of rehabilitation for Gooding’s regiment; in agitating for the same clothing, weapons, pay, and battlefield experiences as white troops, African American soldiers worked for the habiliments and injuries that would signal their “manhood” to the nation. In Forten’s case, her dangerous Civil War service initially ameliorates her persistent illnesses, which express her racial hurts and financial worries. Yet Gooding and Forten realized that the complicated web of biological and social sciences emerging at the moment of emancipation worked to reinscribe Civil War illnesses and deaths in familiar racist paradigms. African American Civil War service placed new emphasis on the meanings of African American corporeality, for Civil War-inflected wounds allowed for both discursive and political rehabilitation and for insistent belief in the disabilities of the race.
In particular, the reconciliationist literature of white historians across the nation that emerged during the Reconstruction era sought to rehabilitate postbellum bodies to seemingly inexorable antebellum racial and gender hierarchies. However, Chapter 5 reveals how a generation after hostilities had ceased, some writers returned to the Civil War for what it had revealed about the inherently unstable nature of white masculinity. During the Civil War, white men had unleashed their murderous passions upon each other, producing not only the national unity that consensual histories emphasized, but also the brutal deaths of hundreds of thousands of white Americans—a death toll that evoked the specter of race suicide. Crane and Dunbar recognized this fact and used battlefield experience to explore the “sickness of battle” which increasingly constituted white masculinity. The Red Badge of Courage (1895) and Dunbar’s Civil War novel The Fanatics (1901) depict how the mindless, self-destructive violence that characterized the white men of their own generation—racial violence especially—emanated from their Civil War heritage. Many scholars, most notably T. J. Jackson Lears, have written about the resurgence of martial culture during the Progressive Era as a therapeutic prescription for enervated modern Americans.46 I argue that the Civil War is reclaimed as the site of the modern senselessness that turn-of-the-century men were ostensibly trying to escape. Thus the “new” white masculinity of the Progressive period was not so very new; these works suggest that turn-of-the-century nervousness was only the most recent manifestation of a racial trait recovered through the Civil War.
Whereas Crane and Dunbar turned their attentions to the invisible ills that constituted postbellum white masculinity, many marginalized Americans reclaimed the rehabilitative power of the Civil War as their own. White women and African Americans were initially hopeful following the war’s revolutionary political pronouncements. However, though the war remained an exciting, emancipatory moment for many Americans, its promise of equality and enlarged opportunity remained unfulfilled. Few achieved the full citizenship, financial viability, and physical autonomy that they hoped would follow close on the heels of this propitious national upheaval. As one postbellum Republican senator recognized, “There are many social disorders which it is very difficult to cure by laws.”47 The escalating racial violence and hardening of gender roles that occurred as the nineteenth century drew to a close were in some part a reaction against the Civil War and its unrehabilitated bodies. Yet many writers returned to the Civil War precisely because of the change those stubbornly unrehabilitated bodies promised.
I argue in Chapter 6 that Civil War nursing was remembered not only as a heroic way for women to participate in the war effort but also as a powerful cultural trope that both exploited and transformed the gender proscriptions inherent in the nursing role. The nursing bodies of these Civil War narratives evoke women’s generative powers, rather than the weakness thought to emanate from their female reproductive organs. Although Alcott’s initially empowered Tribulation Periwinkle succumbs to disease by the end of Hospital Sketches (1863), a generation later Mary Gardner Holland and Mary Livermore claimed that the Civil War did not reveal the disease of unfit mothers (the focus of contemporaneous eugenical theories) but that of impotent white men. Frances Ellen Watkins Harper’s Iola Leroy, or Shadows Uplifted (1892) and Taylor’s 1902 memoirs invoke female nursing as a legacy of the Civil War and of slavery which is useful to contemporaneous uplift movements focused on countering degenerate stereotypes of African Americans. Prohibited from the domestic realms of true womanhood, their nursing takes a more holistic and activist cast, for only by claiming the regenerative powers of their presumably unstable bodies could African American women assume their proper place in the national family.
In Chapter 7, Negro Civil War historians (as they were called at the time) George Washington Williams and Joseph Wilson use Civil War service to negotiate dangerous stereotypes about male, African American licentiousness in their respective texts, The Negro Troops in the War of Rebellion, 1861–1865 (1888) and The Black Phalanx (1890). Historical method was increasingly ascribed permanence and stability by the emerging professional class of white historians, whereas the Civil War was reclaimed as the proving ground of individual fortitude and of a firm national identity. Thus, in writing themselves into Civil War history, African American writers were also able to delineate legitimate, rehabilitated selves. Historical visibility proved crucial in efforts to solidify the integrity of bodies that were perceived still as inherently diminished or underdeveloped. At the same time, the discipline of history-writing, embedded as it was in scientific notions of objectivity and verifiable human truths, placed impossible demands upon African American writers who wished to make scientific history serve their own ends. The racial identity of African American historians dictated the textual strategies they employed as they sought to write history and also highlighted the fact that all Civil War texts were founded on particularized bodily experiences and were impossible to verify.
The exciting and bewildering plurality of the war, as well as the instabilities such plurality evoked, have persisted into our own time. I end this project by briefly examining how the Civil War is still constituted through corporeal and historical discourse in late twentieth-century juvenile Civil War fictions and histories and in reenactments. The awkward, volatile, naïve protagonists of contemporary juvenile Civil War texts aptly dramatize Civil War rehabilitation: the movement from immaturity to full fitness, from plurality to consensus. For these white boy-soldiers the war becomes not only the seriously disturbing site of cultural and personal crisis but also an imaginative space where callow youths learn to become reliable men through the bloodless gauntlet of the Civil War. By the end of the twentieth century, a full-fledged reenacting culture had recast the Civil War as the mythic site of corporeal and social authenticity and of the racial integrity of white folks. “Living historians,” the majority of whom are white, seek to claim the rehabilitative power of the Civil War by conjuring historical experience in their own bodies. Divested of its deadly consequences and the divisiveness that proved so disturbing to many Americans, the trope of the Civil War gained heroic proportions in twentieth-century national symbology. Yet the yearning for real suffering and for actual time travel to the Civil War that characterizes both fictional and reenacting odysseys points both to the reality of Civil War bodies in daily lives and to the unrecoverable nature of Civil War experience. The reliability of Civil War bodies and the authenticity of the stories that account for them can only remain a matter of faith.
We are still drawn to the Civil War for the cogency with which it encompasses issues demanding our current national attention: race relations, equal opportunity between the sexes, crises in masculinity, and general epistemological skepticism. Historically, the Civil War has provided images that are deeply wrought into the framework of our national identity. As the nineteenth century drew to a close, Northern veterans and their Southern brothers marched side by side in commemorative parades; African American veterans proudly recounted their exploits; former nurses congratulated themselves in print. In an age of economic turmoil, ethnic and racial divisiveness, and corrupt political leaders, the war became a cherished memory of self-sacrifice and cooperation, citizenship and patriotism, and meaningful political action. These are ideals to which the United States, as a culture, continues to aspire.
And so regional reconciliation, a solidified national identity, and notions of modern selfhood covered the very shaky ground on which they were founded. Like the hastily buried bodies left behind at the Battle of Gettysburg—decaying, half-buried bodies that made perceptible rises on the field of battle—the invisible ills of the Civil War, though renamed as they have been rewritten, continue to dot the American landscape. A reassessment of the modern basis of these diseases in the Civil War literature of the 1860s and the turn of the century is long overdue, for we are still engaged in the great project of bodily rehabilitation.
