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Chapter 2

Dead Bodies: Mourning Fictions and the Corporeity of Heaven

’Tis not that Dying hurts us so—’Til Living—hurts us more—But Dying—is a different way—A Kind behind the Door—

The Southern Custom—of the Bird—That ere the Frosts are due—Accepts a better Latitude—We—are the Birds—that stay.

The Shiverers round Farmers’ doors—For whose reluctant Crumb—We stipulate—till pitying SnowsPersuade our Feathers Home.

—Emily Dickinson, #335

“A man would seem to be out of his senses deliberately to doubt what the world thinks to be simple truths,” wrote C. F. Sprague in an 1867 Atlantic Monthly article entitled “What We Feel.”¹ Yet as the Civil War drew to a close, more and more Americans not only began to question “simple truths,” but they also discovered that they were, indeed, “out of [their] senses.” Sprague reveals to his audience that even “greenness, the sweetness, the fragrance, the music, are not inherent qualities of the objects themselves, but are cerebral sensations, whose existence is limited to the senses” (“We Feel” 740). In doing so, he charts an alarming crisis of self-consciousness that had emerged during the previous half-decade of fighting. During the Civil War a fissure became perceptible between “what we feel”—what average Americans had taken to be the commonly experienced physical realities of their daily lives—and “cerebral sensations”—the way individuals experienced and intellectualized increasingly unfamiliar realities. Sprague writes that postbellum Americans are “deceived” by the limitations of their perceptions and the duplicity of even the most pleasant sensations for, he claims, “many appearances in nature are only simulations which we have no means of detecting” (“We Feel” 741). Sprague follows Mitchell’s lead, outlining a world without locatable physical boundaries, one in which treacherous bodies have lost the ability to indicate reliably the nature of an equally deceptive universe.

Most disturbing is that Sprague’s observations indicate that sensory stability had never existed in the first place, only that people had been unaware of the multiple realities that existed beyond the grasp of human sense. As this chapter demonstrates, mourning fiction novelist Elizabeth Stuart Phelps was just one of many writers who similarly imagined a world beyond sense, a reality outside the reach of human perception that would hold the promise of individual coherence and of stable knowledge broadly conceived. Sprague’s scientific text serves as an apt introduction to Phelps’s The Gates Ajar (1868), which, because it treats Civil War mourners rather than soldiers, traditionally has not been read as a Civil War novel. Though Sprague does not write about the Civil War at all, his essay illustrates a ubiquitous postbellum concern with the nature of reality and the body’s ability to discern it, a concern that war writing such as Phelps’s epitomized. According to Sprague, the physical sciences are based on the belief in a realm that dispels any apprehensions, a stable “Nature” of certainty and truth. In pursuing knowledge about the nature of the world around them, Sprague and other scientists merely seek to recover accurate feeling. It is fallible bodies that limit one’s ability to discern the fullness of the world. For example, Sprague contends that a rose “exists in nature as a physical structure, and its existence is evident to us through the various sensations it creates in different nerves of our bodies, and through them alone” (“We Feel” 744). He reveals thus the unnerving interstices between the outer world and inner perception, the insubstantial meeting of the “ethereal wavelets” emanating from the natural object and the “nervous sensation” of bodies through which solid Nature is mediated and (mis) translated.

Of course, such debates about the nature of reality and perception are not unique to the Civil War. Indeed, Sprague himself writes that he is intrigued by “one of the ancient philosophies [that] maintained that all Nature is but the phantasm of our senses” (“We Feel” 744). However, although he finds the spirit of this old dictum compelling, he does not find the specifics suited to his postwar world. Nature is not the “phantasm” for him; on the contrary, Sprague has faith that Nature is the reality. Rather, it is phantasmic bodies that make inaccurate seemingly stable perceptions of the world. Sprague translates the words of the old philosophy into the new science, maintaining, “We frequently make the mistake of endowing matter with attributes which it does not possess, and which are resident only in the impression communicated to us by forces emanating from it. And we can understand that there may be forces in nature as powerful as those which we perceive by our senses, but which are utterly unrecognized by them” (“We Feel” 744). Sprague explains that human bodies and minds conspire to create comforting corporeal fictions to account for a physical world that must always remain just out of reach. At best, we perceive the world as an “impression” on our bodies. In using this term, Sprague seems to invoke a sort of accuracy, for an impression can be a copy of the original. At the same time, he could be seen as auguring impressionism, which values the associative and evocative over the presumably realistic. Regardless of how (in) accurately the perceptible world is felt, Sprague maintains that there is a world of sensation that might be all around but which limited and mortal bodies are unable to discern.

Though published more than two years after the Southern surrender at Appomattox—and apparently situated many worlds away from war—Sprague’s article contends with the epistemological erosion ushered in by the long, demoralizing Civil War. Both soldiers and civilians had been asked to subsume individual, material, and bodily needs in the service of victory. And yet they were constantly faced with the grisly realities of dead, wounded, and suffering bodies; those who survived the war seem besieged by vulnerable, disruptive flesh (whether their own or loved ones’) and unnerving psychological deprivations. The insensibility that Sprague reports was associated as much with emotional traumas suffered far from the frontlines as it was with sensory impairment, pathological or not. Clearly the material realities of daily life had changed during the war, but so apparently had bodies themselves. Rather than fault the world around them for its inadequacies, writers and thinkers of the era sited disillusionment and sorrow in the already illusory human body. As we have seen, amputations and other serious injuries complicated the sufferers’ abilities to ground themselves in physical reality. This chapter explores how the emotional scars born by veterans and mourners alike similarly blunted their faculties. Unable to “feel” themselves, Civil War-era Americans lost the experiential boundaries of their individual identities. The end result was a country full of diseased individuals who were uneasy in their own skins.

Enter popular author and sometime correspondent of Dr. S. Weir Mitchell, Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, whose corporeal heaven was devised to rehabilitate disabled earthly bodies. Phelps, like Mitchell, has not been fully embraced by the American canon—indeed, each has been dismissed at one time or another as prosaic or conservative. Still, I believe that Phelps produced one of the most comprehensive and germane texts of the Civil War era in her attention to the profound and manifold sense of loss that the war evoked in those who survived. As I will explain, Phelps, like Mitchell, addresses the dissolution of human bodies, but she also focuses attention on those who were prostrated by the destruction of loved ones in the war. The Gates Ajar was phenomenally popular during the nineteenth century, remaining a best-seller for decades. In it Phelps traces the emotional sufferings of a woman who experiences the loss of her beloved brother as both corporeal and psychological disease. Phelps’s protagonist, Mary Cabot, feels as if the physical loss she has sustained during the war has caused her to lose her sense of individuality and selfhood; her psychological wounds are expressed through the deterioration and distortion of her own physical senses.

Indeed, Phelps’s imagery evokes nerve disease, extending the ailment’s reach beyond the confines of the Civil War hospital. Civil War survivors, both veterans and noncombatants, could thus be likened to Mitchell’s wartime patients, one of whom “walked sideways; there was one who could not smell; another was dumb from an explosion. In fact, every one had his own grotesquely painful peculiarity” (“Dedlow” 7). Mitchell describes patients who apparently suffer from neurological disorders, but their illnesses are also metaphoric for the distorted ways in which many postbellum Americans perceived their worlds. As Mitchell’s work demonstrated, the source of such pain was unlocatable, but Phelps’s novel insists that the disease’s origin is irrelevant. Whether one was disabled by shells or shock the symptoms of insensibility persisted and required ministration. Such sentiments clearly struck a chord with Phelps’s readers: The Gates Ajar garnered Phelps record sales and hundreds of grateful letters. Ultimately, Phelps’s work suggests that the staggering death toll and the number of critically injured prompted a reappraisal of the meaning of embodied existence for both the dead and the wounded survivors of the Civil War. Personal loss, religious disillusionment, and a growing skepticism about the national mission are experienced as and expressed not only through the amputated bodies of soldiers such as George Dedlow but also through the jangled nerves of Phelps’s grieving protagonist. Mary’s physical afflictions resist national efforts to heal the bodies that bear the psychosocial wounds of war.

Yet even as she reclaims Mary’s pain, Phelps demonstrates that the repression of individual desire and the self-sacrifice required by soldiers and civilians during the war produced a “vacant place” that could be recuperated only through the spiritual rehabilitation of distinctive bodies. Like Mitchell, Phelps recognizes that psychic healing is contingent upon physical integrity—though Phelps suggests that the rehabilitation of a dead loved one’s body may effect the living’s cure. Whereas Mitchell designs scientific remedies for his patients, Phelps offers a spiritual solution: the promise of a corporeal heaven. Thus Phelps discloses a new world to her readers, one where the ontological instability of her protagonist is defunct. Heavenly bodies are perfect versions of earthly forms, completely under the control of the individuals who inhabit them; in keeping with the logic of nerve injury, they also symbolize emotional well-being.

Although Phelps’s corporeal heaven provides some comfort for those left behind, it does not completely ease Civil War survivors’ distress—after all, those who had not died during the war needed to continue on earth. Comparatively, Mitchell’s treatments did not offer a definitive cure for the crippling ailments that plagued his patients. Even Sprague, a scientist, acknowledges that the newfound inadequacies of the human senses signaled pessimism about the possibility of knowing ourselves on earth. Though not properly a mourning fiction, Sprague’s text is elegiac as he realizes the loss of sensual security. He staunchly maintains the sufficiency of the natural world, but he does not offer any solutions for the deficiency of the human form. Indeed, individual perceptions of one’s own seemingly solid body are as specious as one’s understanding of the world outside the self: “A looking-glass does not possess, as a constituent part, the image of a human face; but that face, when put before it, appears to be a part of the glass; and if no looking-glass had ever existed except with a certain face before it, that face would be just as much a part of the glass as the color green is of grass. They both reflect” (“We Feel” 741). Like the color green, one’s sense of self is a mirage, a simulation of the “real” and original face that exists outside the reflection of the glass. However, limited faculties do not allow one to perceive one’s self originally, but only a reflection. Efforts to know selves fully and authentically are thus doomed to failure. Though Civil War survivors are not dead, Sprague’s theory of a wholly reflective Nature does suggest that postwar Americans are unconscious of the marvelous world outside of reflection.

Science and spirituality are oddly linked in the immediate postbellum period, for Phelps’s corporeal heaven fleshes out Sprague’s theories. Her text grapples not only with the self in the glass but also with those who are no longer sensible to postbellum survivors—the many dead of the Civil War. Like Sprague, Phelps imagines a parallel, contemporaneously existing world where full sensation and, consequently, full knowledge reside. Whereas Sprague argues for a plane of invisible but omnipresent sensations to which humans must remain insensible, Phelps imagines a postwar world populated by the ghostly presence of the dead who speak to her living characters who cannot hear. Her life on earth is reflected by a perfected, earthly heaven where loved ones await the living. Jean Baudrillard’s recent work on simulation and reality echoes the earlier thinking of Civil War-era writers such as Sprague and Phelps, for the correspondence the latter two imagine between life on earth and its uncanny perfection initially seems, as Baudrillard puts it, “Natural, naturalist, founded on the image, on imitation and counterfeit, that are harmonious, optimist, and that aim for the restitution or the ideal institution of nature made in God’s image.”² Sprague’s Nature and Phelps’s heaven are figured as utopic realities; presumably, bodily and spiritual imperfections make life on earth only a simulation of the mourned-for perfection of God’s heavenly realm. However, the power of such utopias are maintained only when the “dissociation from the real world is maximized.” The difference between the limitations of cerebral sensations and the full range of sensations is nearly inarticulable for Sprague. On the contrary, Phelps makes life on earth and life in heaven commensurate, the latter being merely an unbounded projection of the possibilities of the former. Though life on earth presumably is the reality, Phelps suggests that heaven is the idealized model for earthly existence. One might argue that heaven imagines earth into existence, and so mortal life becomes a reflection of the “real” afterlife. Yet the existence of heaven, corporeal or not, is unproven. In confusing the real and the simulation, and in turning the presumed real—life on earth—into an imperfect version of the unattainable original—heavenly afterlife—Phelps has made the real into a “utopia that is no longer in the realm of the possible … that can only be dreamt of as one would dream of a lost object.”³ Earthly rehabilitation is unrealizable and heavenly perfection, perhaps, an impossible dream. The suffering of the Civil War is attached to the deficiencies of corporeality, and through those deficiencies, to an epistemological uncertainty that persists beyond the war and beyond the grave.

The Corporeity of Heaven

Mitchell’s last, ambiguous image of George Dedlow deserves one more look, given the way that he too relies on the imagined corporeity of the afterlife to heal afflicted bodies and minds. After sustaining treatment at the Stump Hospital for a year, the still despondent George is brought to a spiritual medium by a man who belongs to the “New Church.” George’s companion assures him that nothing ever dies, that “in space, no doubt, exist all forms of matter, merely in finer, more ethereal being.” “You can’t suppose a naked soul moving about without bodily garment,” George responds, “The thing should be susceptible of some form of proof to our present senses” (“Dedlow” 9). Suffering from a waning sense of selfhood, George experiences the return of his legs at a seance, achieving a spiritual embodiment that allows him to feel like himself again. “Suddenly I felt a strange return of my self-consciousness. I was re-individuated, so to speak” (“Dedlow” 11). Though the moment of rehabilitation is short-lived, the story ends with George feeling hopeful that he will be rejoined with his “corporeal family” in “another and a happier world” (“Dedlow” 11).

Phelps produced a seemingly disparate, but surprisingly resonant response to the unprecedented carnage of the Civil War in The Gates Ajar. Phelps’s and Mitchell’s thematic convergence is providential. Though unacquainted in the 1860s, twenty years later the two struck up a lively, albeit short-lived, correspondence revolving around their common efforts to write the “Great Medical Novel” (Mitchell’s In War Time [1884] and Phelps’s Doctor Zay [1882]), the intricacies of treating “the human body and soul,” and nerve disease—in Phelps’s case, chronic illness.⁴ These common interests had already appeared in The Gates Ajar. Searching for comfort at a sermon on the nature of heaven, the protagonist of The Gates Ajar, Mary Cabot, who has lost her beloved brother only days before his release from four years in the Union army, finds only “glittering generalities, cold commonplaces, vagueness, unreality, a God and a future at which [she] sat and shivered.”⁵ She longs for the tangible and specific, for a heavenly future that reflects and validates earthly lives rather than repudiates them.⁶ The specter of a bodiless existence is horrifying to Mary, just as it is to George Dedlow and the patients on whom Mitchell patterned him. Luckily, Mary’s Aunt Winifred Forceythe arrives to draw vivid and comforting pictures of Mary’s brother Royal going about his business in heaven in an earthly, physical manner. Winifred audaciously suggests that the material wishes and the idiosyncratic potential of each individual are fully realized in what has traditionally been taken to be the most spiritual of places. Although Winifred acknowledges that Roy will be an angel, she adds, “He is not any less Roy for that,—not any less your own real Roy, who will love you and wait for you and be very glad to see you, as he used to love and wait and be glad when you came home from a journey on a cold winter’s night” (Gates 53).

The Civil War’s significance to Mitchell is unmistakable: he is heralded as the preeminent Civil War doctor, and his war fiction deals unambiguously with military men. The war that raged as she composed The Gates Ajar also had a lasting impact on Phelps; her final short story, “Comrades” (1911), dramatizes the Memorial Day observances of an aged Civil War veteran and his truest and strongest “comrade,” his wife, “Peter.”⁷ And yet The Gates Ajar has not been read as a novel of and about the Civil War. Traditionally, Civil War scholarship has been concerned largely with the physical actions of male combatants, the material minutae of warfare. Virtually all Gates scholarship reinforces this view of the Civil War. Many critics find that instead of dealing explicitly with war, Phelps deflects “military into social history.” Ann Douglas contends that Mary is able to accept the consequences of war only by denying its reality. Phelps’s own admission that she wrote the novel to comfort “the bereaved wife, mother, sister, and widowed girl … whom the war trampled down” apparently substantiates such claims.⁸ Phelps’s critical disassociation from the Civil War signals a more general, ahistorical response to the work of nineteenth-century American women writers, a problem of which writing during the war era is a particular example. As Jane E. Schultz suggests, the perception that “only men make, fight, and matter in wars” has resulted in the invisibility of those women who did participate in the war. I would add that it has also masked women writers’ dialogue in Civil War-era debates, leaving those aspects of their texts invisible to subsequent critics. Until recently, those who had recognized or anthologized Civil War-era literature by women had clustered women’s works together, limiting them to home-front concerns and labeling their diverse responses as the “women’s view” of the war. Elizabeth Young’s recent work begins to rectify matters, relocating an impressive variety of women’s writing in their Civil War context.⁹ Yet the essential difficulty of examining “women’s” Civil War writing is that the gendered qualifier brackets women’s writing from the mainstream of the Civil War.

Both the interest in Phelps as a prototypical feminist and the damaging consensus that The Gates Ajar is largely a religious tract have also stripped the novel of its historical context. The relatively few extended treatments of Gates situate it within the dominant religious trends of her time or within female-dominated consolation literature, largely circumventing the historical context in which she wrote. As Lori Duin Kelly reminds us, “It was as a religious writer that Phelps was best known to her contemporaries, and it is largely for her religious writing that Phelps is remembered at all today.”¹⁰ Some critics, perhaps viewing Phelps’s attention to religious orthodoxy as conservative and hoping to give her image a critical makeover, have steered clear of her theological entanglements or given only cursory treatment to The Gates Ajar, opting instead to study (and reprint) books in which she reveals herself as a “writer of books for women.”¹¹ Phelps would consider such pronouncements surprising; in an often-quoted section of Chapters from a Life, an autobiography written in old age, she recalls how “religious papers waged war across that girl’s notions of the life to come, as if she had been an evil spirit let loose upon accepted theology for the destruction of the world” (118). Certainly the novel’s clear debt to the Spiritualist practices and beliefs sweeping midcentury middle-class homes did not set well with sanctioned theologians. I argue that Phelps’s novel shows that the “destruction of the world” was fait accompli; it was her creation of a rehabilitated heaven that was her most radical act.

To this end, The Gates Ajar offers not only sentimental consolation but also a rigorous exploration of the ontological systems stirred by the Civil War and its aftermath. Steeped in, as Barton Levy St. Armand phrases it, an “American Protestant ethic at its most neurasthenic,” Phelps responds to a lifeless, enervated faith with a visceral, re-embodied alternative.¹² St. Armand’s reference to contemporary theology as neurasthenic is apt, for it allies Phelps’s grieving protagonist with Mitchell’s nerve-injured soldiers. It is not surprising that the symptoms of Mary’s grief mirror those of nerve-injured patients: Phelps’s mother and father apparently suffered from nervous conditions, and she describes herself to Mitchell on January 25, 1887, as “a ‘professional invalid’ in ‘good and regular standing for about half [of her] life.’” Read alongside Mitchell’s ground-breaking medical texts and fiction, Phelps’s work takes on new significance as part of a philosophical debate on the relation between the body and the individual at war. In her depiction of grief Phelps speaks to the difficult issues confronting Civil War doctors and their patients: locating the source of amorphous pain, assigning truth value to the invisible suffering, generating the authority to articulate one’s experience of these invisible phenomena, and devising effective treatments for the crippling ailments.

In her concentration on suffering, mourning, and the afterlife, Phelps is not, as one critic has suggested, conducting “exercises in necrophilia,” nor is she morbidly fixated upon the deaths of her relatives, as many of her biographers insist.¹³ The Gates Ajar is no more and no less macabre than Mitchell’s story, with its grisly amputations and tortured protagonist. Phelps uses the afterlife as a transitional state suited to her explorations of a culture in perpetual flux. The gates to heaven are not wide open but “ajar,” suggesting the unsettled situation of the period. Contemporary clergy too recognized the unrest, accusing Phelps of instigating the “overthrow” of “church and state and family” (Chapters 118). This charge notwithstanding, I contend that she is both responding to the cultural crisis precipitated by the war and creating one with her novel. Although The Gates Ajar may indeed have consoled a generation of believers who were devastated by the effects of the Civil War and unable to find comfort in traditional religion, its phenomenal popularity, not only in the United States, but also worldwide, attests to its larger therapeutic value. Some critics—most notably Nancy Schnog—have already assigned therapeutic significance to Phelps’s fictional ethos. Others have read its curative potential in narrowly personal terms—as “therapeutic self-indulgence” for Phelps as she struggled to come to grips with her mother’s death.¹⁴ Phelps and Mitchell are the first in a long line of American writers and thinkers who found that rehabilitating Civil War bodies was a means of expressing both the personal transformations and social revolutions of their changing culture.

The nature of wartime death is central to the Civil War’s signifying power. The massive casualty rates, previously unimaginable injury and dismemberment, and, ultimately, the lack of corpses to bury and mourn disrupted mourning rituals and prompted a reappraisal of the afterlife. The Gates Ajar clearly attends to a society in mourning. A staggering 623,000 Americans died in the Civil War (slightly fewer deaths than in all subsequent American wars combined). A half-million soldiers returned home physically wounded. At least 30,000 amputations were performed, generating grisly tales of the piles of arms and legs left outside hospitals and making amputees who remained dramatic reminders of the war’s physical carnage. Many of the corpses never made it home. Thousands of unknown soldiers were buried in the South, and the War Department estimated that at least 25,000 were never buried at all.¹⁵ All of these conditions disrupted a culture of death that emphasized the importance of tending the dying body, witnessing the moment of death, gathering keepsakes, and finally envisioning loved ones in heaven as they had appeared in life.

In many antebellum novels such as that other midcentury best-seller, Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852), the expiring body is celebrated and beautified by its death; family members gather around the angelic child, Little Eva, in order to glimpse the glories of heaven through her dying body. Material keepsakes gathered from the body were often an important part of mourning rituals; for example, hair that might be woven into watch-fobs, flower arrangements, and jewelry. There was also a midcentury vogue for memorializing the dead in photographs and paintings, as well as for displaying the dead body in glass-topped caskets. The embalming techniques perfected during the Civil War and the increasing skill of the newly appointed funeral directors, who would attend to the corpse cosmetically and compose its limbs in the most lifelike poses, allowed the corpse to “enact its own final genteel performance with bourgeois propriety,” as Karen Halttunen has observed. Finally, as Martha Pike points out, the hexagonal wooden coffins of antebellum America became ornately decorated rectangular caskets, lined with silk and customized with brass nameplates; such vessels were in keeping with the original meaning of casket as a repository of jewels and other valuables to be preserved.¹⁶ Thus, by midcentury Americans apparently found the dead body valuable in and of itself. What had once been an integral part of the individual—the mortal coil—came to represent the whole individual economy it had once housed. The dead body and/or its constituent parts became a synecdoche for the person in his/her former totality.

Yet Phelps’s novel studiously avoids the corpse, which is the silent, motivating center of the novel. Instead, her heroine Mary focuses on the sights and sounds that surround her only contact with Roy’s body: “He came back, and they brought him up the steps, and I listened to their feet,—so many feet; he used to come bounding in. They let me see him for a minute, and there was a funeral…. I did not notice nor think till we had left him out there in the cold and had come back” (Gates 4). Neither Roy’s death nor the status of his corpse is described. Roy’s body is perceived by Mary as a physical sensation in her own—the sound of feet on her stairwell. It is striking that the most popular consolation fiction of the nineteenth century displays none of the usual accoutrements of the contemporaneous death culture. For obvious reasons, postmortem images of soldiers would not have been comforting or, in many cases, even possible. The belief that death was “a sweet deliverance from life” served well the bereavement typology of suffering, angelic children gently fading away in illness. There was little sweetness or comfort to be found in the startlingly quick, violent deaths of grown men at war. Gary Wills’s brief but explicitly grotesque description of the “thousands of fermenting bodies, with gas-distended bellies, deliquescing in the July heat” or poking out from shallow graves after the Battle of Gettysburg dispels the carefully maintained mourning fictions of middle-class culture.¹⁷

Yet Phelps does not simply deny the physical difficulties of wartime death. She writes circumspectly of the dead, attempting to assuage the anguish of readers who might be doubly afflicted with a dead body that is mangled, diseased, or simply missing. Consolation rhetoric suggested that dying loved ones—though thin or pale—remained essentially the same as when they were healthy. There was comfort in the thought that God had taken them and that they would enter whole into heaven. But in a time when tens of thousands of family members, friends, and lovers had disappeared—had been absent for months and even years before their deaths—many mourners found no comfort in the thought of a disembodied soul floating about in heaven. In memorializing Roy’s physical being, Phelps attempts to achieve what Daniel Aaron has called “fictive solidity.”¹⁸ Mary remembers “the flash in his eyes,” his “pretty soft hair that [she] used to curl and kiss about [her] finger, his bounding step, his strong arms that folded [her] in and cared for [her]” (Gates 9). Phelps builds an “altar of the dead,” a rhetorical monument to Royal as she felt him in life. Yet she must still contend with the actual disintegration of dead soldiers’ bodies. Consequently, Aunt Winifred insists that “something of this body is preserved for the completion of another,” enough at least “to preserve identity as strictly as body can ever be said to preserve it” (Gates 116).

Many of Phelps’s contemporaries were very literal-minded about the necessity of the body for the afterlife. In Louisa May Alcott’s 1863 Hospital Sketches, a young amputee humorously muses upon the “scramble for … arms and legs” on Judgment Day; he supposes, “my leg will have to tramp from Fredericksburg, my arm from here, and meet my body, wherever it may be.”¹⁹ Phelps, too, resorts to humor in her oblique acknowledgment of the difficulties of dismemberment. However, she displaces anxieties about the possibility of a Christian afterlife onto what was certainly considered in her time a foreign, barbaric Other. In admitting the difficulty of transferring one’s body to heaven after it has been mutilated, Phelps writes, “imagine for instance, the resurrection of two Hottentots, one of whom has happened to make a dinner of the other some fine day. A little complication there! Or picture the touching scene, when the devoted husband, King Mausolas, whose widow had him burned and ate the ashes, should feel moved to institute a search for his body!” (Gates 115). It is perhaps not too great a leap to read Phelps’s Hottentots as warring countrymen. Significantly, in the second scenario King Mausolas’s dead body has been consumed as part of his culture’s mourning rituals. It is his grieving widow who is compelled both to ingest his physical remains and then to relocate them. Such “barbaric” practices are not so different, Phelps subtly suggests, from those of her own culture, which required women to sacrifice their loved ones to a national cause; like Mausolas’s widow, Mary “feels moved” to search for her brother’s body.²⁰

It is thus extremely important for Mary to be able to imagine her brother as embodied in heaven; otherwise he would become savage, unrecognizable, and unlocatable. Dead bodies are rehabilitated in The Gates Ajar in the sense that they are reclothed in heaven with ideal earthly forms. Winifred assures Mary and Phelps’s army of readers, “For ought we know, some invisible compound of an annihilated body may hover, by a divine decree, around the site of death till it is wanted,” thus ensuring the heavenly reconstitution of the earthly self (Gates 115). Bodily rehabilitation is even more necessary during times of war when precious human bodies are so vulnerable, so cheap. Yet Mary must not only imaginatively reconstitute Roy’s body, but she must also situate it in her geographic imagination. She supposes all of the people wandering around heaven must have “local habitations” and live “under the conditions of an organized society” (Gates 140).²¹ It is impossible, Phelps insists, to transcend the limits of the human imagination; even existence as a soul—the faith in some essential self that survives life on earth—needs the physical boundaries of the body in order for it to be articulated and have resonance in human minds.

Phelps’s preoccupation with heavenly embodiment inevitably leads her to confront contemporaneous theological debates on heavenly existence. The Christian concept of the afterlife endlessly complicates the relationship between physical and spiritual existence.²² The idea of resurrection—the soul that does not die, the body that must—especially confounds many Christians, even the clergy, Phelps argues. Mary is devastated by her local minister’s account of heaven in an eagerly awaited sermon on the topic. According to Mr. Bland, “Heaven is an eternal state. Heaven is a state of holiness. Heaven is a state of happiness.” Bland goes on to list the “employments” of heaven, among them glorifying God and studying God’s infinite mind. Finally, he concludes, “I expect to be so overwhelmed by the glory of the presence of God, that I may be thousands of years before I shall think of my wife” (Gates 69–70). Although this is meant to be a comic moment, it also shows that the minister’s notions of heaven are just as constrained by the limits of human knowledge as the middle-class, embodied heaven Phelps eventually posits. Phelps helps her readers to see traditional notions of heaven anew: “Vague visions of floating about in the clouds, of balancing—with a white robe on, perhaps—in stiff rows about a throne, like the angels in the old pictures” are no more ridiculous than Winifred’s tidy cottages (Gates 117).

Winifred argues that we will not live a “vague, lazy, half-alive disembodied existence,” as Mary had supposed (Gates 113). She uses the Resurrection as proof that the tendency of Revelation is to show that an embodied state is superior to a disembodied one. At one point she tallies the number of times the word “body” appears in descriptions of our heavenly state: “‘There are celestial bodies.’ ‘It is raised a spiritual body.’ ‘There is a spiritual body.’ ‘It is raised in incorruption.’ ‘It is raised in glory.’ ‘It is raised in power.’ Moses, too, when he came to the transfigured mount in glory, had as real a body as when he went into the lonely mount to die” (Gates 119). More than anything else, Christ’s ascension whole into heaven convinces Winifred of an embodied afterlife: “His death and resurrection stand forever the great prototype of ours,” she insists (Gates 121). Her references to Christ carry added weight in a culture that consistently figured fallen war heroes as Christ-figures sacrificing their lives in a holy cause. In an 1862 sermon, for example, Octavius Frothingham, a Boston minister, likened dying soldiers to Christ because their deaths, too, would regenerate society. In one of Walt Whitman’s best-known war poems, the speaker uncovers the face of a dead soldier, proclaiming, “Young man I think I know you—I think this face is the face of the Christ himself, / Dead and divine and brother of all, and here again he lies.”²³ It is no coincidence that the dead brother is “Royal,” and the grieving woman is named Mary—at once the mother and lover of Christ and the archetypal figure of female mourning. Yet it is not Christ as God that Winifred invokes, but Christ as man. In response to the concern that we shall “lose our personality in a vague ocean of ether” after death, Winifred explains: “He with his own wounded body, rose and ate and walked and talked. Is all memory of this life to be swept away?—He, arisen, has forgotten nothing. He waits to meet his disciples at the old, familiar places; as naturally as if he had never parted from them” (Gates 203). Winifred privileges Christ’s humanity and his earthly connections over his divinity. Thus Phelps challenges those patriotic Transcendentalists who, George Frederickson has shown, eagerly adapted their contemplative theories to the war effort. Whereas influential thinkers such as Ralph Waldo Emerson were heralding the divinity within all people, Phelps concentrates on the humanity that had been sorely tested during the war.²⁴

Phelps goes still further in her indictment of these powerful cultural convictions. The Gates Ajar demonstrates that received socioreligious doctrine provided an utterly inadequate worldview in this time of war. Ultimately Phelps’s novel evolves into a carefully crafted theological argument for an interpretive strategy of the Bible that makes the afterlife material and, consequently, knowable. There is a pointed acknowledgment of the subjectivity of language and, more specifically, of biblical exegesis. Winifred complains, “No sooner do I find a pretty verse that is exactly what I want, than up hops a commentator, and says, this is n’t according to text, and means something entirely different” (Gates 90). Phelps strives to prevent such dialogue from degenerating into spiritual meaninglessness and to find something comforting and tangible in Christianity.²⁵ Aunt Winifred becomes the novel’s theological mouthpiece: her marriage to a minister and her own role as a missionary in Kansas give her theological authority, whereas her first-hand experience of the death of her husband makes her a credible representative of mourning. And her own battle with physical frailty—the breast cancer that takes her life—gives her the conventional apprehension of heaven that was so often bestowed upon the ill and dying. Winifred’s vision of the afterlife is infinitely more comforting to all of the characters in the book. When his wife is fatally burned, even the misguided Mr. Bland is faced with the inadequacies of his faith and turns to Winifred for guidance.

Winifred locates “the mystery of the Bible … not so much in what it says, as in what it does not say” (Gates 93). In the gaps and silences, in the “dark corners” of theological sophistry lies the hope for reintegration and rehabilitation. Heaven is initially represented as the supreme abstraction; it is a blankness or silence to Mary. She lies in bed at night longing “for a touch, a sign, only something to break the silence into which he [Royal] has gone.” “Has everything stopped just here?” she wonders (Gates 21). Mary relies on corporeal sensation as proof of Roy’s existence beyond the gates; in a twist on traditional empiricism, accurate sensation becomes the means of assuring knowledge of invisible truths. Winifred is able not only to identify ideological and emotional vacuums but also to embody them, articulate them and fill them with the sensation for which Mary yearns. She creates what she calls “synonomes,” that is to say, heavenly experiences and items that are similar or equivalent to earthly pleasures. Though earthly and heavenly existences are not the same, the former signifies the latter, making it comprehensible. Winifred explains that she treats her young child Faith just as “the Bible treats us, by dealing in pictures of truth that she can understand.” She makes Mary’s neighbors “comprehend that [in heaven] their pianos and machinery may not be made of literal rosewood and steel … [but] whatever enjoyment any or all of them represent now, something will represent them” (Gates 186). Aunt Winifred thus boldly builds a material argument with no empirical evidence, insisting that in the Bible God has not given us “empty symbols,” but instead “a little fact” (Gates 78). Phelps’s corporeal heaven is not an empty promise, as the Civil War had proved to be for many grieving Americans, but a factual reality, a material reward befitting the material sacrifices required by those remaining on earth. Her heavenly “pictures” combat the photographs of Matthew Brady and Alexander Gardner, which were simultaneously circulating images of blasted landscapes and decomposing bodies throughout the country. As Alan Trachtenberg explains, photography allowed the culture to create “a collective image of the war as a sensible event,” “felt” even by those who remained far from the battlefield.²⁶ The Civil War was the first modern occasion for such imagery. Phelps merely responds in kind with her palpable heaven.

Literal, tangible interpretation of abstract concepts is the hermeneutic program forwarded by Aunt Winifred throughout the book. Even the act of naming her child Faith, which Mary claims is an inappropriate moniker for such a “solid-bodied, twinkling little bairn .. with her pretty red cheeks, and such an appetite for supper,” heroically assigns physical being to an abstraction. In Winifred’s corporeal theology, conversion is achieved through physical contact. Her “little soft touch”—not her words—preaches most convincingly against Reverend Bland’s inchoate sermon and converts Mary to her way of thinking (Gates 71). When Winifred chides the local clergy for their inability to “tell picture from substance, a metaphor from its meaning,” she insists upon the material and historical base of knowledge, resisting the psychological and experiential restraints of religious orthodoxy (Gates 77). Winifred’s theology fosters individual authority, empowering the uneducated and disenfranchised to find spiritual answers in their lived experiences, rather than demanding their submission to incomprehensible, abstract explanations. Anne C. Rose argues that midcentury Victorian Americans still identified the Bible as an “essential point of reference,” finding not firm meaning there but “consoling allusions and personal uplift.” Phelps’s novel supports Rose’s contention, suggesting that postbellum Americans had necessarily become skilled readers not only of the Bible but of the texts of their own lives. The war seemingly enabled Phelps—and her whole generation—to make such claims to authority, to approach “reading” as a “strenuous, self-productive experience.”²⁷ It was their proving ground.

Phelps’s insistence on Winifred as an “interpreter” of the afterlife, Winifred’s insistence that “the absent dead are very present with us,” and her usurpation of masculine authority, ally Phelps with the Spiritualist movement, which Anne Braude argues was ubiquitous during the middle of the nineteenth century. Not surprisingly, Spiritualism flourished during the Civil War period: planchettes (the triangular pieces that moved over Ouija boards) began to be mass-produced in the United States during the war, the first national convention of this eminently antiauthoritarian movement finally occurred in 1864, and women Spiritualists began to speak more frequently in public forums in the early 1860s. Mary’s spiritual crisis mirrors exactly those that Braude contends often provoked an interest in Spiritualism: “the desire for empirical evidence of the immortality of the soul; the rejection of Calvinism or evangelicalism in favor of a more liberal theology; and the desire to overcome bereavement through communication with departed loved ones.”²⁸ Braude explains that, before the Civil War, few found science and religion incompatible. After all, the invisible mechanisms of electricity were as unbelievable to many as the invisible spirits that supposedly communicated to Spiritualist mediums. It is thus perfectly plausible that Mitchell, a trained scientist and man of medicine, can only imagine full therapeutic relief for his suffering protagonist in “The Case of George Dedlow.”

Most important, Spiritualist beliefs literalize the implicit foundation of both midcentury spiritual and medical therapeutics: healed bodies represent healed souls. As Braude writes, “While orthodox clergy portrayed the human soul as inevitably prone to sin, orthodox physicians portrayed the human body … as inherently prone to disease.”²⁹ Leading Spiritualist Andrew Jackson Davis believed that bodily affliction reflected spiritual discord; healing bodies would restore spiritual health. Both Phelps and Mitchell speculate on this Spiritualist truism. George’s belief in his self-healing power and Winifred’s faith in a reconstituted heaven put bodies back together again, undiseased, unbroken; in doing so they ease distressed minds. Winifred’s spiritual and psychological ministrations “heal” Mary, Dr. Bland, and other sufferers in the novel, whereas George’s Spiritualist encounter enables him to continue living in his ravaged body. All find “comfort” in their “fancying,” as Schnog has shown; yet spiritual healing is located very particularly in bodily rehabilitation. In The Gates Ajar, Winifred’s Spiritualist-inflected rehabilitation “cures the rift between the living and the dead” felt both in Mary’s psyche and in her body.³⁰

In part, such spiritual solutions combated the rhetoric used to marshal Northern enthusiasm for the war effort, a rhetoric that buried individual grief and denied the particularity of the slain soldiers. As many Civil War scholars have argued, religious and political leaders used “jingoistic Christianity” to drum up support for the Holy National Cause: “The onset of battle was God’s judgment on men who abandoned the Christian Sparta to feast on the fatted calf.”³¹ Leaders reverted to the rhetoric of the Puritan enterprise, in which New England was the “City on the Hill.” To endanger the nation that God had ordained with a special mission was to obstruct God’s purpose. Julia Ward Howe’s “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” is the most famous example of this rhetorical conjunction. Such sentiments were disseminated by everyone from local ministers to journalists to justify the soldiers’ self-sacrifice to the national project. One minister, presiding over a regimental farewell ceremony, assured listeners that “your country has called for your service and you are ready…. It is a holy and righteous cause in which you enlist.… God is with us.”³² Gail Hamilton’s 1863 essay “A Call to My Country-Women” clearly focuses such claims toward women. She exhorts her readers to “consecrate to a holy cause not only the incidentals of life, but life itself. Father, husband, child,—I do not say, Give them up to toil exposure, suffering, death, without a murmur;—that implies reluctance. I rather say, Urge them to the offering; fill them with sacred fury; fire them with irresistible desire; strengthen them to heroic will.”³³

Certainly Mary could find no comfort in a sermon such as eminent theologian Horace Bushnell’s “Obligations to the Dead,” which absorbed the individual suffering of soldiers into a great “hecatomb offered for their and our great nation’s life.” The soldiers’ dead bodies strewn across the fields of battle are metaphorized by Bushnell as the “spent ammunition of war,” “the price and purchase-money of our triumph.”³⁴ Lincoln’s widely publicized Gettysburg Address is perhaps the most egregious example of the obfuscation of Civil War bodies. Gary Wills argues that in this speech, trumpeted by most scholars as the pinnacle of rhetorical delicacy, Lincoln transfigures the “tragedy of macerated bodies” into the “product” of the democratic experiment. Gary Laderman adds that Lincoln “succeeded in incorporating the Union dead in the shared history, destiny, and physical landscape of the nation” by making them into a “monolithic totality.” Whether individual bodies were incorporated into economic profit, the national soil, or the foundation of history, as Timothy Sweet has pointed out, “the system of the body politic recuperates wounding and death in war by omitting any description of [the individual body] and focusing on ideology.”³⁵ The impersonal and disembodied national narrative of wartime death provided no consolation.

And, Phelps insists, the well-meaning condolences of personal acquaintances were equally injurious. In Chapters from a Life, she writes of spending between two and three years preparing for the novel by reading everything that had been written on mourning.³⁶ Denying traditional rituals, she uses her knowledge to mount an explicit assault against them. In refusing to accept callers or to attend church, Mary shreds the delicate social scripts of consolation and bereavement to which antebellum culture subscribed. What is more, she aggressively denies the religio-national truths that existed to help the bereaved make sense of death. Immediately after Roy’s death, she is a self-described “Pagan” telling the church deacon who offers her the usual comfort, “God does not seem to me just now what he used to be.” Deacon Quirk replies that he is sorry to see her in such a “rebellious state of mind” (Gates 14–15). Yet Phelps’s imagery suggests that Mary’s resistance to contemporary consolation is much deeper than the passing rebellion of grief. Mary describes how Deacon Quirk looks at her “very much [as he would] a Mormon or a Hottentot, and I wondered whether he were going to excommunicate me on the spot” (Gates 16). The racial and cultural privilege assumed by “civilized,” white Christians such as Quirk, who condemn so-called Hottentots is clearly endangered by the barbaric war and by responses such as Mary’s. Mary is therefore figured as exotic and debased, separated from her community by her insolence and the public nature of her spiritual battles. Phelps’s only other reference to Hottentots occurs when Mary comments upon the difficulty of resurrection for people who make dinners of each other. The novel thus implies that the mourning rituals and religious orthodoxy forced upon Mary by her community threaten to devour her.

Mary’s allusion to herself as a Hottentot also allies her with disorderly bodies. Her illicit grief resurrects the dead soldiers, incorporating their silent pain and suffering. Her emotional anguish is spatialized and felt in the body: the telegram announcing Roy’s death “shut me up and walled me in,” Mary claims (Gates 4). The consolation system is then figured as a physical assault upon Mary’s person; it is not experienced as similar to the attacks Roy sustained in battle, where a solid blow provides the “relief of combat,” but as feminine, as “a hundred little needles piercing at us” (Gates 6). Ironically, this is exactly the sensation described by Mitchell’s neurasthenic soldiers, who complain of “prickling pain” along with “jagging, shooting, and darting pain.” Taken together, Phelps’s and Mitchell’s texts suggest that all who suffered doing the war were similarly afflicted. Just as Mitchell’s soldiers and Mitchell himself feel the world differently during and after the war, Mary’s visceral understanding of the familiar is altered. Like Mitchell’s hyperaesthetic patients, for whom touch is felt or interpreted as pain, Mary experiences the world as too much, as sensory overload.³⁷ As she describes it, “The lazy winds are choking me. Their faint sweetness makes me sick.… I wish that little cricket, just waked from his winter’s nap, would not sit there on the sill and chirp at me” (Gates 30). The children’s voices outside “hurt [her] like knives,” conjuring up the instruments of amputation (Gates 2). Condolences are figured as probing and invasive, as surgery; Mary’s callers violently penetrate her being, reaching in to “turn her heart around and cut into it at pleasure” (Gates 7). Her inconsolable grief is not expressed appropriately through gentle weeping and lamentation; it threatens to obliterate and destroy her.

All that is left, Mary says, is the “vacant place” in her home—and in her psyche—where Roy used to be. As we saw, George Dedlow’s amputations symbolized this loss of individuality and integrity. Royal’s death prompts a similar crisis for Mary and results in a psychic amputation: a part of her has been metaphorically cut off and must be reconstituted in order for her to rediscover herself. In framing their losses as the decimation of their “corporeal families” (as George calls his limbs), both Mary and George indicate that their connection to community and self is disrupted by the war. Mary’s tenuous position as a self-described “old maid” makes her reliance upon Roy for identity even more acute. In a culture that valued women mainly as caregivers, Mary has lost one aspect of her existence in losing her brother. As Schnog observes, she is now “the sole inhabitant of a depopulated domestic realm.”³⁸ Yet Mary’s connection to Roy is much deeper than is usual between siblings—so intense that she describes him as a double, as part of herself: “Why Roy was so much more to me than many brothers are to many sisters.… We have lived together so long, we two alone, since father died, that he had grown to me, heart of my heart, life of my life. It did not seem as if he could be taken, and I be left” (Gates 8). Thus Mary mourns not only Royal’s loss but also the loss of her self.

Essentially, Civil War-era protagonists yearn for a sense of authentic selfhood that would combat their mounting anxiety over their inability to feel and thereby define themselves. Three years after the publication of The Gates Ajar, Phelps wrote that religion consistently required of women a sacrifice that paralleled that required of soldiers: “to live for others; to make complete abnegation of themselves and to have no life but in their affect.” Such a notion of Christian duty, Phelps insists, is “the most insidious and most hopeless injury which society worked upon women … [a] perversion of the great Christian theory of self-sacrifice.”³⁹ St. Armand, among others, argues that Roy’s death precipitates the loss of Mary’s religious faith and perhaps signals Phelps’s own doubts.⁴⁰ I would counter, however, that Christianity is recuperated by the end of the novel. The Gates Ajar dramatizes not precisely a religious crisis but an ontological one; Americans understood themselves and their places in the world differently after the Civil War. Roy’s death removes all claims upon Mary’s continued self-abnegation and conveniently serves as a metaphor for the material and psychological changes of the war. Like George, Mary initially has very little self-consciousness, for she is flattered that Aunt Winifred “seems to love me, not in a proper kind of way because I happen to be her niece, but for my own sake. It surprises me to find how pleased I am that she should” (Gates 58). During the course of the novel Mary must discover her own self-worth; it is her own individual idiosyncrasies, and not just her capacity to fulfill feminine stereotypes, that confer value.

Aunt Winifred’s heaven is crucial in this effort. To Mary, its most appealing feature is that there will be no “fearful looking-for of separation” (Gates 81). Mary’s concern with separation signifies not only physical separation from her brother but a sort of self-alienation precipitated by the all-out ontological assault of the war. Mary Louise Kete’s notion of “sentimental collaboration” nuances Mary’s dissolution. Kete argues that the sentimental mode of midcentury mourning literature is “not interested in autonomy or liberation but in the restoration of constitutive bonds, which make subjectivity possible.”⁴¹ Thus Winifred’s heaven returns Mary to herself, so to speak, by returning Roy. What is most comforting is that Roy will be Mary’s “own again,—not only to look at standing up among the singers,—but close to me; somehow or other to be as near as—to be nearer than—he was here, really mine again!” (Gates 54). Mary’s intimacy with the heavenly Roy, her ownership of him, will enable her to become completely self-possessed. I don’t think that, in emphasizing Mary’s desire for possession, Phelps meant to invoke an exaggerated capitalism of the sort so caustically attacked by Mark Twain in his Extract from Captain Stormfield’s Visit to Heaven.⁴² Yet there is a sense that all of the things that people used to define themselves—possessions, relationships, desires, even fears—had been sacrificed or repressed in furtherance of the war effort.

Most alarming, Phelps argues, was the loss of privacy. Deacon Quirk preaches that in heaven “disguise and even concealment, will be unknown. The soul will have no interest to conceal, no thoughts to disguise. A window will be opened in every breast, and show to every eye the rich and beautiful furniture within!” (Gates 71). The most frightening part of traditional heaven is its nakedness, or as Mary phrases it, its “blankness” and formlessness. The exposure of an ethereal heaven is equated in Phelps’s ethos with raw nerves exposed to harsh winds. Again, her psychic pain is figured in the language of nerve damage. Thus the embodiment of heaven also expresses a desire for enclosure, which can be read as privacy. Yet it is not the enclosure of mourning rituals and consolation visits for which Mary longs; recall that she feels the house transformed into a prison after she receives the news of Roy’s death (Gates 2). Mary longs for spiritual habiliment (as Winifred phrases it, the “‘garment by the soul laid by’”) for its ability to shelter her and define her (Gates 114). Aunt Winifred is quite adamant on this point, providing the imaginative protection Mary seeks: “I would rather be annihilated than to spend eternity with heart laid bare,—the inner temple thrown open to be trampled on by every passing stranger” (Gates 79). Heaven will shelter the interior spaces of the soul; more important, it will maintain the illusion of individuality and coherence that both Mary and George so desperately crave.

Mary is not completely passive in her journey toward self-discovery; it is not enough for her to merely await her passage to heaven. The Gates Ajar plumbs the “psychology” Phelps found so fascinating in her schoolgirl studies of theology (Chapters 69). Not only do readers learn to interpret the text of the Bible, but Phelps argues they must be able to interpret themselves within the psychosocial paradigms that emerged after the war. She insists on the need for self-analysis—a rigorous interrogation of authority and dissection of the religious and philosophical givens upon which midcentury Americans built their identities. Mary admires Winifred because she “has done what it takes a lifetime for some of us to do; what some of us go into eternity, leaving undone; what I am afraid I shall never do,—sounded her own nature. She knows the worst of herself, and faces it fairly” (Gates 95). Though this Calvinist-inflected self-examination is decidedly Puritanical, the alienation and self-denial practiced during the war create protomodern detachment from its spiritual implications. Phelps’s clinical protocol in examining the injured psyche is similar to that followed by Mitchell’s nerve-damaged patients. Like George, Mary too manufactures distance between herself and an alternate self, the youthful “Mamie.” “This poor, wicked little Mamie, why, I fall to pitying her as if she were some one else, and wish that some one would cry over her a little. I can’t cry” (Gates 20). Certainly Mary and George’s psychic fragmentation is a survival mechanism designed to excise unbearable pain. But Phelps also implies that the “sounding” of the dark depths of the soul that war and death forced will lead to self-knowledge.⁴³

And yet, both authors suggest that earthly bodies continually subvert such efforts. Mary’s desire for corporeal enclosure and integration directly combats the psychological fragmentation Phelps and Mitchell ultimately treat. As we saw in Chapter 1, Mitchell’s real and fictional hospitals were populated by such broken individuals; even Mitchell himself inhabits the wounded bodies he ordinarily treats. Phelps outlines the end result of this incoherence in her “promiscuous theory of refraction”:

We should be like a man walking down a room lined with mirrors, who sees himself reflected in all sizes, colors, shades, at all angles and in all proportions, according to the capacity of the mirror, till he seems no longer to belong to himself, but to be cut up into ellipses and octagons and prisms. How soon would he grow frantic in such companionship, and beg for a corner where he might hide and hush himself in the dark? (Gates 80)

Sprague’s mirror had reflected back a facsimile image of the individual self. Like Alcott’s joking amputee and Mitchell’s harried protagonist, Mary insists that postbellum bodies are felt so incompletely that they are unrecognizable. Bodies are refracted by the movement from original to reflection and become fragmented and unreliable. Both Mitchell and Phelps suggest that Civil War survivors suffered from some sort of post-bellum psychological trauma akin to shell shock and post-traumatic stress disorder. Civil War nerve injury, I contend, defined a generation just as powerfully as its twentieth-century counterparts, characterizing postbellum Americans’ ways of knowing. According to Eric T. Dean Jr., though post-traumatic stress disorder was not a recognized disease after the Civil War, many disturbed veterans were diagnosed as suffering from “War Excitement” or “Exposure in the Army”—terms that formed part of the lexicon of nerve injury. Others suffered from “Nostalgia,” a “stark terror” of combat so strong it induced the sufferer to demand immediate evacuation from the battlefield.⁴⁴ Like the characters in Phelps’s novel, Nostalgics suffered from a sickness for home—the illusion of an antebellum home that can only be recuperated in heaven.

In a culture that would soon find itself masterfully expanding through industrialization and imperialism, nerve injury represented the contemporaneous inward-turning of its citizens. Both Phelps and Mitchell dramatize how neurasthenic pain creates a narrow, self-involved world for its sufferers. As postwar America feverishly worked to temper the brutal reality of war, traumatized survivors turned inward, where the reality of war had been forced to reside. Phelps’s heaven publicly erases the traces of war from the soldiers’ reconstituted bodies; their wounds are borne instead by the bodies of survivors such as Mary and George. Thus Phelps insists that modern bodies express the displacement, alienation, and insensibility—the unstable subjectivities—of postbellum society.⁴⁵ Phelps and Mitchell do not seek to mend, obfuscate, or transform but rather to expose the “crisis of representation” Sweet feels characterizes postbellum depictions of war. War is not “unwritten” in these texts, as Daniel Aaron has notably argued; it is, rather, ubiquitous, inscribed on the nerve-injured bodies of the living waiting to be deciphered.