Beyond the Civil War Hospital: The Rhetoric of Healing and Democratization in Northern Reconstruction Writing, 1861-1882 9783839434659

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Kirsten Twelbeck Beyond the Civil War Hospital

Lettre

For Uwe, Olga, and Anuk

Kirsten Twelbeck (PhD) teaches American Studies at Augsburg University. Her scholarship engages with American literature and culture from the nineteenth through the twenty-first century. https://ktwelbeck.academia.edu

Kirsten Twelbeck

Beyond the Civil War Hospital The Rhetoric of Healing and Democratization in Northern Reconstruction Writing, 1861–1882

This book was printed with the support of the German Research Fund.

© 2018 transcript Verlag, Bielefeld Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available in the Internet at http://dnb.d-nb.de Cover design: Kordula Röckenhaus, Bielefeld Cover illustration: “My name is Simon Pure, Esq.: I am the greatest man that ever lived.” Ca. 1870. Retrieved from the Library of Congress, www.loc.gov/ item/93505760 Frontispiece: Thomas Nast. “Franchise. And not this man?” 1865. Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, LC-DIG-ds-07129. Printed by Majuskel Medienproduktion GmbH, Wetzlar Print-ISBN 978-3-8376-3465-5 PDF-ISBN 978-3-8394-3465-9

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1. Tracing the Rhetoric of Rehabilitation

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11 2. Constructing the Reconstruction Narrative

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18 3. Mazeways and Human Figurations

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1. Test Case for Democracy: The Nursing Narrative

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33 2. When Was Reconstruction?

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39 3. Unfolding of Disagreement: The Chapters

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1. A Female Doctor’s Multiple Exiles

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45 2. The Diary as Adaptation Process

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50 3. Approximating the Other

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57 4. Race, Ritual, and Reciprocity

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67 5. Conclusion

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1. A Soldier Writes Across the Line

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83 2. Letter Writing and Social Distinction

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92 3. Rethinking Gender Roles

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96 4. Building His Kingdom on Earth

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105 5. Religion, Romance, and National Salvation

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111

6. Shifting Views: The Freedmen’s Place in God’s Own Country

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119 7. Conclusion

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135









1. The Novel as Testing Ground

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135 2. Struggling Selves: Hospital Sketches

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143

3. White Nurse, Black Patient: Alcott’s “The Brothers / My Contraband”

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157 4. Imaginary Nation-Building: Edmonds’s Nurse and Spy

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175

5. Transcending the Civil War Hospital


188 6. Negotiating Race: From Hospital Sketches to Nurse and Spy


195 7. A Spiritual Awakening: Religion and Society in Nurse and Spy


205 8. Conclusion


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1. A Novel Form of Adjustment


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2. A Tragic Instance: Reframing the Civil War


237 3. Reading as Christian Nurture


247 4. Happy Renunciation: A New Type of Woman


255 5. Segregation in the Village


262 6. Conclusion


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273
 
  
  
 
1. Democracy as Work in Progress


273 2. Meaningful Moments: “The Dresser”


280

3. What Color? “Ethiopia Commenting” and the White Gaze


290 4. Democratic Vistas: Toward a New Economy of Love


306 5. Living with the Wound: The Memoranda


317 6. Blackness Incorporated: “Specimen Days”


329 7. Conclusion


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341
 
  
  

 
1. Utopia, Feminism, and Genocide


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2. Blondes on Display and the Lure of the Real


347 3. After Men: Reconstruction as Feminization


352 4. A Feminist’s Nightmare


357 5. Reconciling Health, Race, and Progress


368 6. Interventions: Immigration, Evolution, and Population Control


380 7. Conclusion


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In putting together this book about the equally progressive and prejudiced minds of Northern whites during Reconstruction, I have incurred many debts of gratitude to colleagues, organizations, friends, and family. My work depended greatly on the support and astute criticism of my advisor Ruth Mayer, who not only chairs the American Studies Department in Hanover but has also become a true friend. It was important to have a mentor like her: not for a moment did she seem to doubt the academic importance of this project that by mushrooming and taking unexpected turns repeatedly threatened to overwhelm me. It was Ruth who reminded me of the common thread, the central argument that holds this book together. Yet while calling me back when I had wandered too far, she also stood by me when I ventured for good reason off the beaten path, and she happily accepted and often encouraged me to scrutinize the painful ambiguities and embarrassing contradictions that are inherent to all cultures, but that were particularly striking during this phase that has pointedly been called a “second founding.” I also wish to express my collective thanks to my other colleagues in Hanover, and especially to our research colloquium, where we read and discussed each other’s work. I would like to acknowledge a special debt to Florian Groß, Shane Denson, Vanessa Künnemann, Christina Meyer, Anna-Lena Oldehus, Bettina Soller, and Jatin Wagle, whose unerring academic passion and perseverance contributed to and shaped this project. Thank you for the laughter and pasta we shared! And, Bettina, Anna, and Uta: thank you for providing the weary commuter with a home away from home, and lasting friendship. Special thanks are due to Heike Paul who stepped in at the very last minute to serve as a second, external advisor to the project when for technical and organizational reasons a transatlantic committee proved impossible to realize. I am grateful to her and all the other members of the committee who in the end of the complex process of what we Germans call “habilitation” decided that I had accumulated all the requirements needed to become a full professor in this country. Institutional financial backing was provided by the German Research Foundation (DFG), which freed me from other academic obligations for three years. Without the

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ongoing support that was provided by Thomas Wiemer (Program Director) and HansJoachim Schöneck (DFG Finance Department), this book would not have come into being. Spending those three years at the John F. Kennedy Institute in Berlin was only possible with the help of Winfried Fluck and the Department of Cultural Studies who kindly shared their facilities and supported me academically. While I am grateful to all of the JFK staff, there are five colleagues whom I wish to thank in particular: Brian Crawford, Andrew Gross, MaryAnn Snyder-Koerber, Hannah Spahn, and Johannes Völz have generously shared their time and thoughts on my project. During my research trips (that were also generously financed by the DFG) I was able to meet with scholars whose work has inspired my own—Edward Blum, Joy and John Kasson, Anthony Lee, Eliza Richards, Jane Thrailkill, Heather Williams—they all have been wonderfully supportive. I am especially grateful to Elizabeth Young, author of Disarming the Nation, whom I had the chance of meeting several times during my research trip to Mount Holyoke College. Not only has her work been tremendously inspirational for my own; it was also a pleasure and an honor to have her as an advisor on the other side of the Atlantic. A generous grant from the German Research Foundation enabled me to undertake research trips to the United States and to hire a research assistant in Chapel Hill who helped me access valuable sources and materials throughout the project. I wish to express my profound gratitude to Ashley Reed who not only dug up books, articles, and special editions that are complicated to obtain from Germany, but who also proved to be highly knowledgeable about nineteenth century culture, and generously shared her inspirational ideas about the Reconstruction era. In fact, aside from Ruth Mayer, she became my closest and most imperturbable reader, and her suggestions were gratefully taken into account when working on the final manuscript. As a research assistant, Ashley Reed was preceded by Elizabeth Stockton who also scoured library shelves at the University of Chapel Hill, and by Alison Bigelow who intermittently helped me out for a few weeks. Thanks also go to Stefanie John, Frederik Holme, Simon Rienäcker, and Angelika Schindler who assisted me in formatting and laying out the manuscript. Many other people have been generous and indispensable in their assistance, yet not all of them can be mentioned here individually. The Women’s Research Group at Hanover University has, over the course of its existence, offered generous support and interdisciplinary views. My students, who learned more about Reconstruction than the average student of American cultural studies, continuously forced me to explain why the rarely studied and often somewhat awkward literature of that period was both a symptom and a defining feature of the Second Founding. The librarians at Chapel Hill, Duke University, Penn Center, the Library of Congress, Mount Holyoke, Amherst, and UCLA saved me weeks of work by guiding me through their immense archives. And at the JFK, I was given special permission to borrow books for an extended period of several months.

   



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My husband, Uwe Knape, supported me through these many years of research, travel, and writing. Without his patience, endurance, and optimism at every stage of the project, this book would not have come into existence. It is dedicated to him and to our daughters, Olga and Anuk, who throughout these years gave me much joy and affection. Without them, as well as my parents and in-laws who traveled many hours to help us out, Petra Schwarzer, my sister-in-law, and Bernie Knape, my brother-inlaw, and my dear friends who lured me away from my desk, I would never have come to learn about that “mental adaptation process” commonly known as Reconstruction.









   
I was learning that one of the best methods of fitting oneself to be a nurse in a hospital, is to be a patient there, for then only can one wholly realize what the men suffer and sigh for; how acts of kindness touch and win; how much or little we are to those about us; and for the first time really see that in coming there we have taken our lives in our hands, and may have to pay dearly for a brief experience. ALCOTT, HOSPITAL SKETCHES 1863: 831


  

  

   
In Louisa May Alcott’s novella Hospital Sketches (1863), the American Civil War is both a national and a personal identity crisis that forces the author’s alter ego, one “Nurse Periwinkle,” to define her place in the changed reality of the nation at war. As Elizabeth Young has argued, Periwinkle’s struggle is part of Alcott’s larger project to “reimagine the relation between women and nationhood—or, more specifically, between the disorderly body of the woman author and the diseased body politics of a country at war” (1999: 71). Moving beyond a gendered analysis, scholars agree that the “injured body politic” (ibid: 17) is one of the most powerful metaphors for the conflicts that shaped American culture during the Civil War and Reconstruction, when Abraham Lincoln’s 1865 call to “bind up the nation’s wounds” became the credo of the day.2 In Rehabilitating Bodies, Lisa A. Long awards this metaphor 1

Except where noted, quotations from Hospital Sketches are from the 1863 edition published by James Redpath, to be found online. Page numbers for Hospital Sketches (HS) as well as for other often-quoted primary sources are cited parenthetically in the text.

2

Regarding the rhetoric of rehabilitation see, in particular, David W. Blight (2001); and Lisa A. Long (2004). Other texts that touch upon the use of healing as a metaphor during

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an almost mythical status by suggesting that “[t]he 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” (2004: 99). According to Long, the quasi-therapeutic promise of the Civil War wound inspired nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century American authors to time and again return to this scene of individual and collective suffering where the diseased, unstable bodies of the injured, the helping bodies of female nurses, and the presumably “organic insufficiencies of African Americans” (ibid.: 116) inspired much-needed visions of wholeness and renewal. On a metaphorical level the following chapters are about the status of the nation’s war-induced “wound” and the acknowledgement of, or ideological compensation for, that injured identity in the wake of the Second Founding. Instead of concentrating on the war itself this book focusses on Reconstruction. The key question is, simply put, how Americans from the former Union territory imagined the democratic future of the United States, and to what extent they linked their considerations to the discourse of national healing. Unlike much Reconstruction scholarship this study is thus not concerned with the former Confederacy and the rebuilding of the South but with a segment of the Northern population that opposed slavery when it was still in force. By analyzing the work of authors such as Louisa May Alcott, Sarah Emma Edmonds, Henry Ward Beecher, Walt Whitman and Mary Bradley Lane along with non-fictional texts by two early Reconstruction writers, Esther Hill Hawks and John Bennitt, it sheds light on how notions of racial and gender equality were negotiated in among whites in the North after emancipation. By emphasizing the emotional aspect of these negotiations the book hopes to contribute to an understanding of the cultural “climate,” the more general, societal “atmosphere” during the Second Founding. As will be shown, this climate led to and was shaped by a broad range of literary styles: in their effort to understand what it meant to be an American during a phase of ongoing sectional, racial, and gendered tensions, Reconstruction authors sought out new ways of expressing their views without necessarily suppressing their own ideological ambivalences, hesitations, and contradictions. This book, then, is about the representation of white postslavery hopes and fears, not about the actual political status quo. By discussing the texts in the chronology of their appearance these chapters trace a multifaceted process: unfolding before the backdrop of the Civil War and its rhetoric of healing these works have adapted that rhetoric to the changing circumstances of the post-abolition era. Thus although this book owes much to the work of those many, mostly female scholars of the Civil War who have claimed that the admission of thousands of female nurses as helpmates in military hospitals was a watershed

the Civil War include Timothy Sweet (1990); Kathleen Diffley (1992); Elizabeth Young (1999); and Gregory Eiselein (1996).


 

  


 

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moment in nineteenth-century gender relations,3 it takes this work as a mere starting point. To explore the discourse of nation-building and citizenship from a more inclusive perspective, this study connects the feminized code of healing to additional contexts. The chapters pair the works of female and male authors and link the struggle around race with an analysis of the much-lamented “crisis of gender” (Silber 2006: 13), tracing the evolution of these intersecting paradigms over time and within changing historical contexts. Yet before examining this development this introduction seeks to sketch out the discursive and theoretical framework that governs this book and explain the book’s choice of primary texts. This is what the introduction and the chapter “The Recovering Nation” hope to accomplish. They will elaborate the terms and conditions of this study and highlight the circumstances under which the texts themselves emerged and became culturally meaningful. Only then, by the end of the second chapter, will the outline of this book be introduced. The “recovering nation” is part of a postwar terminology that also included the metaphor of healing as an important subtext to the Second Founding. To read Reconstruction as synonymous with individual and national recovery, however, would be misleading: the former was largely a political and legal issue, the latter refers to a combination of war-induced trauma with the multifaceted, postbellum debate regarding “the substance of an industrializing, urbanizing, and, most important, interracial democracy” (Quigley 2004: x-xi). As David Blight has pointed out, “the imperative of healing and the imperative of justice could not, ultimately, cohabit the same house. The one was the prisoner of memory, the other a creature of the law” (2001: 60).4 What he talks about here is not what the former slaves remembered; it is what white Americans from both sides of the conflict tried to preserve while negotiating the rules of the white nation’s unified future. As we all know, the struggle over “whose definition of regeneration would prevail in the emerging political culture” (Blight 2001: 32) was decided in favor of sectional reconciliation: even those who had fought against slavery felt that “healing from the war was simply not the same proposition as doing justice to the four million emancipated slaves and their descendants” (ibid.: 9). The emerging debate had deep philosophical dimensions since “Americans faced an overwhelming task after the Civil War and emancipation: how to understand the tangled relationship between two profound ideas—healing and justice” (ibid.: 3). Re-

3

Exemplary works will be listed later in this chapter.

4

Focusing on New York City after the Civil War, David Quigley’s The Second Founding (2004) provides an insightful analysis of the political and legal debates surrounding the two issues.

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construction writing furthered this understanding; but in order to grasp its accomplishments we must consider the legal context of its production and appearance. During the first five years after the war three constitutional amendments were adopted, securing the most far-reaching personal rights ever written into the nation’s charter. Attached to each of these measures was powerful congressional enforcement legislation. The federal court system, which the victors in the Civil War had once regarded as a mere tool of the “Slave Power,” came to be regarded as a coequal branch of government. (Vorenberg 2006: 141)

Not one of the Reconstruction laws and decisions came through easily—not the 13th Amendment (1865: prohibition of slavery in the United States), the 14th Amendment (1868: citizenship extended to all persons born or naturalized in the United States), or the 15th amendment (1870: against the denial of suffrage on the grounds of race, color, or previous condition of servitude). Fierce congressional debates gave prominence to the deep ideological rifts that ran through American postwar politics and society and poisoned the cultural climate of the day.5 While in Congress, notions of racial justice and national reconciliation clashed and resulted in political horse-trading, romantic visions of personal and national union seem to have trumped in the field of literature—De Forest’s Miss Ravenel’s Conversion from Secession to Loyalty (1867) comes to mind almost immediately here (cf. Blight 2001: 9). Yet if one moves beyond the few canonized texts of that era, the two tropes seem to be far more closely intertwined than Blight suggests, leading to unresolved tensions within the works themselves. As I hope to show in these chapters, those writers who once shared the same abolitionist mindset were especially likely to struggle with the discrepancy between the democratic ideal and their personal prejudice. While social and ideological divisions along political, ideological, racial, ethnic, classed, and gendered lines applied to them just as much as to anyone else, much of their writing seeks to imaginatively integrate blacks and whites, the poor and the better-off, and men and women, into a future-oriented, presumably democratic order. Justice, in other words, was a major concern of Reconstruction writing—along with the rhetoric of sectional reconciliation. As was hinted at earlier, however, none of these texts envision a radical democratic state and society; on the contrary, they often display an awkward discrepancy between democratic ideals and a desire to legitimize marginalization, exclusion, or the delay of basic citizenship

5

Cf., for example, Stephen C. Neff, Justice in Blue and Gray (2010); and Christian G. Samito, ed. Changes in Law and Society during the Civil War and Reconstruction (2009). Regarding the reconciliatory mood of the era cf. Blight, and Wolfgang Hochbruck, Die Geschöpfe des Epimetheus (2011).


 

  


 

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rights. The strategies used to justify such limitations were often tentative and surprisingly diverse, and tell us much about the anxieties, ideological differences and tensions even among Northern writers with an anti-slavery legacy. This internal diversity is at the center of the book’s analysis, and sets this study apart from existing scholarship. By interpreting the changes and increasing complexity of the entire discourse as a reaction to the larger transformation processes taking place on the social, political, and ideological planes, this book traces the genesis of the wartime rhetoric of rehabilitation from the 1860s to the 1880s, when Reconstruction had officially come to an end. This study maintains a concept of the text as an expression of lived life, although the impact of personal experience on the text may vary. That the authors of these works were all between twenty and forty years old at the beginning of the war sets them off from the young generation during the 1880s that encountered history through the stories of others. While the generations of the 1860s had struggled to find a voice of their own in which to express their profound sense of crisis, the newcomers from 1880 onward posited the war at the center of an increasingly self-assured culture of public commemoration that assuaged the political and cultural needs of audiences in both the former Union and the so-called rebel states. During this time “poetry, fiction, and autobiographical reminiscences” in particular (James 2007: 58) were increasingly used to rewrite the war as a “shared sacrifice for reunion” (Kaplan 1991: 242). Most famously represented by De Forest’s Miss Ravenel’s Conversion, the novel of reunion relied on sectional difference to find new ways of expressing the relationship between language and the real. Interestingly, however, American realism as such is rarely thought of in connection with the Civil War; after all, its best-known representatives had no or very little soldiering experience: William Dean Howells had fled to Europe at the outbreak of the war, Mark Twain quit military service after two weeks, and Henry James was unfit for military service due to an earlier injury. This book will contribute to place their work in a continuum with those (often neglected) texts that emerged from a more immediate experience of the national crisis: by exploring potential strategies of making this experience meaningful, by grappling both with the recent past and with the social transformation processes in their surroundings, the private, sensationalist, or otherwise presumably minor texts of the Reconstruction era inspire a rethinking of those late-nineteenth-century developments in American culture that are usually explained by processes of modernization—processes which are themselves often discussed without reference to the war.6

6

As John Kasson and others have shown, the war was of course an important engine for these developments as well. Cf. Civilizing the Machine (1999).

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To emphasize continuities between the war, political Reconstruction, and the last decades of the long nineteenth century, this book has started with a quote from Louisa May Alcott’s Hospital Sketches. The best-known Civil War nursing narrative and the women’s novel of the Civil War period was published during the sectional conflict but remained highly popular throughout the nineteenth century. As a story about female independence and a forerunner to that other story about daughters during wartime, Little Women (1868), Hospital Sketches was an important literary step in the transformation of gender during the Gilded Age and Progressive Era. At the same time, the novella helped establish the metaphor of the hospital as a site of national healing from which a viable American identity emerges: as inspiration for many nursing narratives to come, Hospital Sketches was largely responsible for the fabrication of the hospital as a postwar cultural cipher. As a discursive frame and intertextual point of reference, this cipher (which includes the discourses of rehabilitation and humanitarianism) opened doors to those other, more provocative and risky topics and debates about nation-building, citizenship, and the limits of democratic participation that this book is centrally concerned with. This study seeks to untangle how the wartime hospital functioned as a privileged point of reference in Northern Reconstruction narrative, and how the changing discourse of national healing was connected to other important discourses that helped imagine a meaningful post-emancipation future. The coming pages highlight what may best be described as this flickering Reconstruction moment, this threshold situation where the violent clashes between North and South were, for the first time, put at the service of the future. Held together by the wartime hospital as privileged point of reference, and tracing the discourse of national healing, this study emphasizes that often-overlooked, common concern for the immediate future: it in other words nuances rather than contradicts the prevailing idea of Reconstruction as a phase of mourning and nostalgia.7 What comes into view is not an era of recovery and rebuilding, but of fierce negotiations that unfolded against the defining backdrop of America’s fundamental democratic promise. According to John W. Draper’s 1867 History of the American Civil War, it was now incumbent upon “thoughtful men” to seriously consider “whether it be in truth a democracy in which we are living, or whether we are only deluding ourselves with a name.” (1867: 3-669, qtd. in Duquette 2010: 6162). As the historian David Quigley reminded us in 2004, postwar Americans were very much aware that what they engaged in was a “second founding” in a very narrow sense:

7

Cf. Blight, Hochbruck, and (to some degree) Christine Gerhardt, Rituale des Scheiterns: Die Reconstruction-Periode im amerikanischen Roman (2002).


 

  


 

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Back in 1787, America’s first founding had produced a constitution profoundly skeptical of democracy. James Madison and his coauthors in Philadelphia left undecided fundamental questions of slavery and freedom. All that would change in the 1860s and 1870s. Decided at this second founding were the rules of the democratic game. Though lasting only a few short years, Reconstruction involved countless Americans fighting over who would be able to play in that game, and on whose terms. A century and a quarter later, the democracy that emerged at Reconstruction’s end remains our inheritance. (ibid.: ix)

This book builds on Quigley’s description of Reconstruction as an “unprecedented expansive conversation” along regional, racial, and gendered lines that set the course for further developments in American society and politics (ibid.: x). While a great deal of this conversation emerged in various forms of life-writing, we witness an increasing liberation from these somewhat limiting conventions. Letters and diaries had dominated the wartime era but early Reconstruction saw the publication of novels such as Edmonds’s aggressively sensationalist spy story Nurse and Spy in the Union Army (1864) and Beecher’s middlebrow domestic novel Norwood (1867). These clearly departed from the claim of truth that defined the more factual genres of the battlefield years, embraced a selective view of historical representation, and openly sought to imaginatively solve the contradictions of the present by taking refuge in fiction and poetry. Walt Whitman’s varied postwar writings and Mary Bradley Lane’s utopian novel Mizora (1881-82) suggest even more outspoken alternatives by promoting textual experimentation as a means to adequately express the changing needs of a new era. By analyzing these texts together with a wartime diary (by Esther Hill Hawks, a female doctor) and the Civil War letters of John Bennitt (a Union surgeon), the following chapters show how a concern for the future inspired what was, for the most part, a struggle for form. By reading this as a symptom of a more general crisis of orientation, this study goes beyond the political and legal reordering processes commonly associated with the Second Founding and instead traces what Leslie Butler describes as a key aspect of those difficult years: The Civil War and its aftermath elicited reconstructions in intellectual terms no less than in social, political, or economic ones. No matter how one defines “Reconstruction”—as the reentry of the former Confederate states into the Union, as the adjustment to the emancipation of some four million slaves, or as the integration of the national economy under a newly powerful centralized state—the process of moving from Civil War to a civil peace required mental adaptation. (2006: 173)8

8

Butler here relies on the work of Paul Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory (1975), reprint (2000); Robert B. Westbrook, “Fighting for the American Family: Private

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In keeping with what Blight has called the Reconstruction “struggle over ideas, interests, and memory” (2001: 51), this “mental adaptation” was experienced differently by individual people, some of who shared their thoughts and feelings in the literature of the day. Struggling to define both a nation in the making and one’s place within this imaginary construct, the writings of this period form a multi-vocal, often self-contradictory conversation about what it meant to be an American. It is this debate, this multifaceted “mental adaptation,” that will be unfolded in these chapters. By spotlighting six vastly different views of American society at different moments during this process, this book narrates one story of Reconstruction among others (hopefully) to come. The emerging narrative is neither straightforward nor simple: meandering, headed in many directions simultaneously, and interrupted by numerous setbacks, it traces a surprisingly complex and multi-centered development.


   
 
   
 

 
In writing about Reconstruction, the literary scholar is still very much a pioneer. Those politically decisive years are the least analyzed phase of nineteenth-century literary production, and yet they were as productive as they were chaotic. Criteria for choosing from such a large body of works are difficult to determine. Why select this author and not the other? What can be gained by moving from life-writing to fiction? Why discuss a broad spectrum of genres instead of concentrating on, say, autobiographies? The answer has much to do with the dynamics of that multifaceted conversation among whites from the Reconstruction North that was sketched out earlier. By covering a variety of genres reaching from personal letters to little known and more famous novels to canonized poetry, this publication wishes to emphasize that Reconstruction implied an aesthetic struggle as well as a political one: since genre is always also functional, the Second Founding fought to find an adequate way of expressing the adaptation processes of the American mind.9 The marked shift from private forms of life writing (diaries, journals, letters) to more imaginative, fictional, poetic modes, however, also suggests a development: American Reconstruction writers, it may be argued, quickly reached the generic limits of truth-bound, confessional writing and took to increasingly fictional modes to create individual visions of the nation to come.

Interests and Political Obligations in World War II,” (1993: 195); and Wilfred M. McClay, The Masterless: Self and Society in Modern America (1994). 9

As Eliza Richards reminds us, this struggle for adequacy began during the Civil War, when questions arose as to “[w]hat genres are best suited for the cultural tasks of making meaning and memory from chaotic events?” (2005: 349).


 

  


 

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Significantly, however, much of this writing authorizes its ideas by maintaining loose ties to that earlier claim of authenticity and to a past experience of the war. It is, then, this very specific, semi-fictional (or quasi-autobiographical) textual quality of Reconstruction writing that this book focuses on in order to analyze the postbellum adaptation process. This involves talking about different target audiences as well: Esther Hill Hawks’s journal was intended for publication (though it remained unpublished during her lifetime) but more private in scope than Louisa May Alcott’s fictionalized autobiography; John Bennitt’s wartime letters had one main addressee, his wife. Sarah Emma Edmonds’s sensationalist novella and Henry Ward Beecher’s religiously inflected domestic novel, by contrast, sought a large readership to which their social agendas might appeal. Walt Whitman’s Reconstruction oeuvre (which includes poems and published journal excerpts) was not only intended for a broad readership but actually reached a certain level of popularity. And there is little doubt that Mary Bradley Lane’s anti-male utopia reached a predominantly female audience. Thus while this study pairs texts to highlight the similarities of intention and the ideological disparities that existed during a given historical moment, it abstains from suggesting intertextual conversations in an immediate sense. Despite such qualifications my choice of authors is relatively homogeneous. This may disappoint readers who, like Eliza Richards, have criticized scholarship on the Civil War as one-sided:10 all the writers hail from the white Northern middle class. This segment of society expanded after the Civil War as its members engaged in new industrial enterprises, thereby securing its hegemonic position in a changing United States. Idealizing individual agency and deeply suspicious of government intervention, this newly expanding middle class clearly contributed to the demise of Reconstruction (cf. Richardson 2007). A shared economic and educational background, however, does not imply similar views of democracy, nor does it preclude multiple strategies for voicing one’s concerns and opinions. One of the challenges I faced while working on this study was to show just how ideologically diverse these textual voices actually were, and how the negotiations within the group ultimately contributed to the failure of the Second Founding. To create a more rounded analysis it would have been helpful to also include black voices. Unfortunately, during my initial research I found them to be scarce, if

10

In her review of Alice Fahs, The Imagined Civil War (2001) and Kathleen Diffley, To Live and Die (2002), Richards asks: “who has the authority to speak, both in terms of the capacity to transmit experience and in terms of moral sanction?” See “Print Culture and Popular Imagination (2005: 349).” Richards celebrates Fahs’ effort to identify a “set of shared rhetorics” in American popular culture, regardless of regional origin and ideology or of gender, class, or race. Ibid.

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not (especially during the early phase of Reconstruction) glaringly absent.11 This is partly due to the book’s focus on the hospital as an interracial contact zone: the few black doctors who served in so-called contraband12 hospitals and the many black nurses who volunteered for service left very little written material.13 Even Charlotte Forten’s diary, which mentions her brief service as a nurse among the 54th Massachusetts Colored Infantry, could not be matched with a black male account of that era.14

11

The best-known African-American authors who have experienced the Civil War and who also wrote about Reconstruction are listed in Richard A. Long’s Black Writers and the American Civil War (1988). The list does not contain Elizabeth Keckley, whose autobiography is an important contribution to black Reconstruction literature, from a decisively female viewpoint. Cf. Keckley, Behind the Scenes Or, Thirty Years a Slave and Four Years in the White House (1989). See Young’s Disarming the Nation (1999) for an indepth analysis of Keckley’s work. Young’s chapter on Frances Harper mentions additional African-American works about the Civil War, most of them, however, published during the last decade of the nineteenth century and later. (Ibid.: 194-95).

12

The term was first used by general Benjamin F. Butler, who declared that slaves could find refuge in Union camps as “contrabands of war.” The term was highly problematic since it did not settle the legal situation of these people: being a contraband did not imply freedom from bondage. When the practice was formalized in connection with the Second Confiscation Act of July 17, 1862, these contrabands were requested to offer their work in exchange for protection in such camps. For a discussion of the term see Barbara J. Fields, “Who Freed the Slaves?,” The Civil War, ed. Geoffrey Ward (1990).

13

Regarding the role of African-American hospital workers see Robert Slawson, Prologue to Change: African Americans in Medicine in the Civil War Era (2006). When I began this study I considered working on freedmen’s schools as another site of interracial contact. I still believe that this could be very fruitful, as it would include African Americans from both the South and the North and white teachers and school officials from both parts of the country. It would, however, be an entirely new and in large parts archival endeavor that would focus not so much on fiction but on letters, diaries, and shorter articles. For an introduction to the topic I recommend Heather A. Williams’ Self Taught: African American Education in Slavery and Freedom (2005). I thank Heather for taking her time discussing this option with me, back in 2006.

14

I briefly considered writing a joint chapter on Hawks and Forten, but that wouldn’t have solved the dilemma of assigning a somewhat marginal position to African-American voices in this project, as I have not been able to find an African-American text that fit my criteria, and that was authored during the years between 1865 and 1877. A “male source” that I considered at an early stage of this project were the letters that George E. Stephens published in the Weekly Anglo-American. Yet while the most famous black war correspondent of the era offers a unique African-American perspective of race relations and


 

  


 

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Susie King Taylor’s Reminiscences of My Life in Camp was the only extensive African-American nursing narrative that has found its way to the shelves, but it was not published until the early twentieth century. And while Francis Watkins Harper’s Iola Leroy features black and white hospital workers and patients and is set in a middleclass context, this novel was published long after the time period covered by this study: it could only have been included as an appendix, a positioning that would have subordinated Harper to the other authors that are treated here rather than making her an integral part of this book’s analysis.15 That Harper’s novel was one of the first by an African-American woman, and that Taylor published her diary very late and at her own expense, hints at a further reason for the dearth of African-American texts from the postbellum period: at a time when white veterans from both armies engaged in rituals of “purposeful forgetting” (like marching together to commemorate their dead), “[b]lack memories” were “fundamentally at odds” with “national reunion” (Blight 2001: 10)16 and there was simply no mainstream demand for an African-American nurse’s viewpoint. Particularly with regard to African Americans from the former Confederacy there were also economic and educational reasons for this void: slaves in the plantation South (many of whom came to serve in Civil War hospitals17) had been denied the chance to learn how to

politics during the Civil War the journalistic nature of his writing makes it ineligible in the context of my project, that seeks to examine the not so obvious fears and hopes of Reconstruction. Donald Yacavone, ed. A Voice of Thunder: The Civil War Letters of George E. Stephens (1997). An interesting southern black view of the era comes from William B. Gould, a contraband who escaped from slavery and served in the American navy during the Civil War. He wrote what is “(p)erhaps the best summary of what blacks fought for” during the wartime period. Cf. James M. McPherson, For Cause and Comrades: Why Men Fought in The Civil War (1998: 128). Apart from the regional category I decided against using Gould’s diary because as a sailor he was far removed from the actual events in the United States; and there is no connection to the Civil War hospital or the discourse of healing. William B. Gould IV, ed. Diary of a Contraband: The Civil War Passage of a Black Soldier (2002). 15

Regarding the relationship between Harper’s novel and Civil War / Reconstruction liter-

16

Regarding the politics of national memory after the Civil War see Kirk Savage, Standing

ature at large cf. James, Freedom Bought With Blood (2007: 63-102). Soldiers, Kneeling Slaves: Race, War, and Monument in Nineteenth-Century America (1997). 17

As the two examples mentioned show, African Americans’ experiences of the Civil War and Reconstruction differed immensely, (not only) depending on where they came from,

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read and write for generations: large-scale participation in the postwar public debate was therefore sadly limited. In 1870, that is five years after the installment of freedmen’s schools in the postbellum South, almost 80 percent of blacks were still reported to be illiterate compared to 11.5 percent of whites.18 (The perspectives of those uneducated whites, and of non-English-speaking immigrants, are equally missing from my retracing of the Reconstruction debate). Eliza Richards has pointed to another core problem in Civil War scholarship much of which focuses on narrative setting rather than publication date: “[q]uestions of chronology and temporality” (2005: 355). Extending this important remark to the Reconstruction years, the book follows the chronology of textual production, beginning with a diary that was started during the first year of the war and ending with a utopian novel that appeared during the early 1880s. Mary Bradley Lane, author of Mizora, was in her mid-forties when her novel was published, and while she was not immune to the new questions and challenges of the post-1877 era, her book insists on their connection to the Civil War experience. Middle-aged writers like Lane and older ones like Walt Whitman had personal memories of emancipation, the president’s assassination, the Reconstruction Acts, the three amendments to the Constitution, and the political muddle of the Johnson and Grant presidencies. These authors shared a first-hand experience of the ambivalence, shock, anger, and frustration that went along with these transformative processes, so it is no wonder that they tended to struggle more with constructing an ideologically coherent narrative than did authors of the next generation.19 That these struggles often show on the level of narrative construction, while perhaps lamentable aesthetically, is an asset for the purposes of this book, as these narrative fractures say much about the mental adaptation process with which the texts—and their authors—are centrally concerned. As an important phase in American political history, Reconstruction has been a major topic of historical research, much of which focuses on the rebuilding of Southern society20 and on the political, economic, legal, and social aspects of Southern

what their educational background was, etc. For an insight into African-American middle-class lives in 19th century New York City see Carla Peterson, Black Gotham: African American Family and Community in Nineteenth-Century New York (2012). 18

Cf. “National Assessment of Adult Literacy,” National Center of Education Statistics / U.S. Department of Education. See also Thomas L. Webber, Deep Like the Rivers: Education in the Slave Quarter Community, 1831-1865 (1978); and, for a short summary, Richard J. Altenbaugh, The American People and Their Education (2003: 88-95).

19

Regarding the “standard form” of the post-1880 war novel cf. Richard Schuster,

20

Eric Foner’s work must be mentioned here, especially his Reconstruction: America’s

American Civil War Novels to 1880 (1961: 2). Unfinished Revolution, 1863-1877 (1988); and (together with Olivia Mahoney)


 

  


 

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Reconstruction.21 Race relations are, of course, a major subject of this scholarship,22 but there has also been an increasing interest in how gender has shaped the postbellum South23 and on religion as a prominent factor in Southern social history.24 For this study, however, the focus remains on the North, and particularly on a segment of Northern society that may be categorized as “radical” by the era’s standards. By highlighting the ideological rifts that existed within this particular group, and by dwelling at length on the individual struggles of each author to define his or her concept of Reconstruction, this book wishes to emphasize what Hugh Davis (in a recent study regarding African-American organizing after emancipation) has stressed as well: it

America’s Reconstruction: People and Politics After the Civil War (1995). Another recent, and very useful, anthology is Thomas J. Brown, ed. Reconstructions: New Perspectives on the Postbellum United States (2006). It offers a valid overview of the previous scholarship on the subject and suggests additional directions for future research. See in particular Brown’s “Introduction,” which traces the development from the early 20th century “Dunning School” to the revisionist “school” of W.E.B. DuBois, and Eric Foner’s groundbreaking work. Paul A. Cimbala and Randall M. Miller, eds. The Great Task Remaining Before Us: Reconstruction as America’s Continuing Civil War (2010) focuses on a broad range of individual case studies of postbellum Southern society and indicates the latest developments in Reconstruction studies. Another book-length study that I have found particularly useful with regard to my own work is Carol Faulkner’s Women’s Radical Reconstruction: The Freedmen’s Aid Movement (2004). It offers important insights into the lives of black and white women during Reconstruction. 21

See Stephen A. West’s contribution to Thomas J. Brown’s Reconstructions for a very good overview of this scholarship (“A General Remodeling of Every Thing,” 10-39). The intellectual history of the South, however, remains understudied. See Butler (2006: 184). While a couple of scholars have started investigating the persistence of Southern conservatism “no work of equal ambition to The Inner Civil War has emerged from southern thinkers, though such a study would not only be valuable in its own right but also might allow for an intellectual history that could compare the impact of the war on northern and southern intellectuals, as Edmund Wilson and Daniel Aaron have done for literary figures” (ibid.).

22

Steven Hahn’s groundbreaking A Nation under Our Feet (2003) is still the standard textbook here. I also recommend John Hope Franklin’s Reconstruction after the Civil War (1994) as a valid introduction to the issue of race relations in the former Confederacy.

23

See, e.g. Heather Cox Richardson, The Death of Reconstruction: Race, Labor, and Politics in the Post-Civil War North, 1865-1901 (2004).

24

See Daniel W. Stowell, Rebuilding Zion: The Religious Reconstruction of the South, 1863-1877 (1998).

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was not only the South that needed reconstructing (2011). Following the call of scholars like Davis and Heather Cox Richardson (cf. 2004)25 to devote more attention to Reconstruction in the North, the next chapters argue that tensions and insecurities regarding the meaning of democracy within the North contributed to the demise of the Second Founding. These internal fissures of course go back to the antebellum period: Louis Menand refers to the relationship between prewar unionists and abolitionists as a “war within the North” (2001: 6). After the war not every abolitionist shared the radical Republican concept of racial integration: a brief glimpse at the primary texts that have been selected for this study here reveals strong disagreements among this group of former antislavery proponents. Their views of race, gender, and religion (to name but a few), and their strategies for substantiating their respective claims or legitimizing their viewpoints, diverged considerably depending on the author’s age, religious outlook, and, most of all, whether it was a man or a woman writing. By the end of the war (which led, among other things, to an anti-feminist backlash) this group that seemed, at first sight, to be least responsible for the lack of support for racial integration revealed itself to be ambivalent about its own racial convictions, insecure in its understanding of democracy, self-absorbed, and fractured. When the Civil War was over, former abolitionists could not easily return to antebellum ideals of community and racial harmony. In Loyal Subjects (2010), Elizabeth Duquette explains that Reconstruction-era Americans faced an emotional dilemma and a symbolic void: the “image of a happy (monogamous, consent-based) nuclear family” that had added emotional depth to the political concept of the American nation before the war was no longer easily accessible. This is why, on the plane of culture and political rhetoric, the idea of loyalty had, at least partially and temporarily, replaced sentiment (only to help re-establish “sympathy’s reconstruction later in the century”) (Duquette 2010: 4).26 John W. De Forest’s Miss Ravenel’s Conversion is the earliest instance of this replacement: merging emotional closeness, authoritative guidance, and “contract” relations, “romances of reunion” (cf. Silber 1997)27 helped envision sectional reconciliation as a matter of the head and the heart (cf.

25

Richardson points to Northern controversies over class (and class-related theories) as a

26

Jennifer C. James makes a similar point. She emphasizes, however, that sentimentality

crucial factor in the much-lamented failure of Reconstruction. never ceased to influence Civil War literature. Written “for popular audiences who had not yet lost their taste for sensation and sentimentality,” she argues, “the hundreds of Civil War novels of the nineteenth and twentieth century were decidedly unconcerned with realistic presentations of modern war.” J. C. James (2007: 54). I do not find the two views to be mutually exclusive. 27

Regarding the increasing number of such narratives from the 1880s onward see ibid. (58).


 

  


 

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Duquette 2010: 61-99). While this study is not about sectional reconciliation as such but about Northern views of race and gender, I too will discuss the appropriation of antebellum sentimental formulas and their limits. One should not expect this to be a study of Northern intellectual life. By stressing the tensions within and between certain fictional and non-fictional texts, and by emphasizing the individual struggle for post-emancipation narrative closure, this book views Reconstruction as an unfinished and highly dynamic process of cultural negotiation regarding the meaning of America and Americanness. This, then, sets it at a critical distance to George Frederickson’s generalizing claim of a conservative turn among the American educated elite after the Civil War (1993).28 As a literary scholar I of course limit my examination to the material I am best prepared to analyze. And yet this book owes much to historians such as David Blight (who shows that remembering and forgetting were vital to national reconciliation, which took place at the expense of African-American equality) and Edward Blum (who analyzes the role of Northern Protestantism in white reconciliatory culture).29 It is, significantly, historians like these two who must be credited for having turned to the literature of the day to make their point while scholars of American literature and culture, with their expertise in analyzing textual material and the cultural dynamics that evolve from it, have remained surprisingly silent. Apart from references to William deForest, Albion Tourgée, and (occasionally) Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, most histories of American postwar literature concentrate on the realism of the Gilded Age or (with the advent of gender studies) on texts formerly considered to be “minor,” including those written in the regionalist mode. Overviews of nineteenth-century American literature commonly frame the Civil War as a rupture in creative output, as the younger generation either served in the army (and had no time to write when they returned) or spent the war in Europe. According to John Stauffer the decade between 1860 and 1870 was marked by a “dwindling of literary output” among “New England men who had been prominent and prolific writers before the war.” Stauffer focuses

28

James M. McPherson’s The Abolitionist Legacy: From Reconstruction to the NAACP (1975) is one of the best-known challenges to Frederickson’s view. For an overview of the debate among historians that was provoked by Frederickson see Butler (2006: 17581).

29

Blight, Race and Reunion; and Edward J. Blum, Reforging the White Republic (2005). Regarding cultural transformation processes in the former Confederacy I wish to mention Peter W. Bardaglio’s Reconstructing the Household (1995). This book provides a unique insight into the interconnections between gender and the law before and after the Civil War. Michael T. Bernath’s ambitious book about the cultural foundations of Confederate nationalism is titled Confederate Minds: The Struggle for Intellectual Independence in the Civil War South (2010).

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on Nathaniel Hawthorne—he died in 1864—and Ralph Waldo Emerson—whose mental faculties declined after the war. These authors were relatively old when the war started, and did not participate as combatants; their romantic approach to literature was no longer deemed “an appropriate mode for representing life,” leading to what Stauffer calls “a crisis of manhood among Northern white men” that lasted for years after the war. Stauffer significantly does not mention Walt Whitman and Herman Melville, both of whom did write about the Civil War and Reconstruction but are still not commonly recognized for their work in that context. By and large, however, Stauffer has a point, and he must be credited for pointing out that women’s writing “burgeoned” between 1860 and 1870, with Harriet Beecher Stowe and Louisa May Alcott its most visible contributors (2006: 121). Stowe, however, never managed to replicate her antebellum success, and while Alcott began her career as America’s most popular author of girls’ novels with a book she published during Reconstruction (Little Women, 1868 and 1869), she too is not usually recognized as a “Reconstruction writer.” Accordingly, one of the effects of the following chapters is to reposition Whitman and Alcott as writers of the Second Founding. In an effort to join the high and low, canonized and forgotten works, they are discussed alongside colleagues who published only one book (and sometimes the one they wrote was published posthumously, as in Hawks’s case) and therefore never received much scholarly attention.30 My work owes a considerable debt to studies of gender and the Civil War and Reconstruction. Most of these studies come from scholars of women’s history who— from the mid-nineteen-sixties onward—have shown the transformative effect of the Civil War on American gender relations: Elizabeth Massey, Catherine Clinton, Drew Gilpin Faust, Nina Silber—to name but a very few.31 Kathleen Diffley, Jane E.

30

When in 2006 I visited the most important archive of Civil War literature, the Reverend Richard H. Wilmer Jr. Collection of Civil War Novels at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, it had not been used for over fifty years. Significantly, however, this seems to be changing: I very recently learned that Amanda Claybaugh of Harvard University grapples with questions similar to mine and is currently working on a literary history of Reconstruction. Cf. Alvin Powell, “Unraveling Reconstruction,” Harvard Gazette, 16 Dec. 2010.

31

Mary Elizabeth Massey, Bonnet Brigades: American Women and the Civil War (1966). For a first glimpse into this scholarship I recommend Catherine Clinton and Nina Silber, eds. Battle Scars: Gender and Sexuality in the American Civil War (2006); and Drew Gilpin Faust, Mothers of Invention: Women of the Slaveholding South in the American Civil War (1996). Another important author is Elizabeth D. Leonard, Yankee Women: Gender Battles in the Civil War (1994); and All the Daring of the Soldier: Women of the Civil War Armies (1999). For a view of the Civil War and Reconstruction in the South


 

  


 

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Schultz, and Elizabeth Young are among the few notable scholars who, with a background in literary studies, have contributed important books and articles to the study of Reconstruction.32 These works have helped uncover the function of literary and visual forms of expression in negotiating the interconnections between gender, class, and race, thereby opening new venues into understanding the war and its aftermath. All of these works, however, focus on women alone, confirming Fahs’s complaint that the tradition of Civil War scholarship is highly selective and rarely aims at a more inclusive picture of American society.33 By analyzing both men’s and women’s texts, the following chapters aim to draw that more inclusive picture. This book of course also considers important single studies such as Gregory Eiselein’s Literature and Humanitarian Reform in the Civil War Era, which contains a chapter on the progressivist humanitarianism in Walt Whitman’s war-related oeuvre; Alice Fahs’s The Imagined Civil War, which investigates how the war became meaningful via various forms of popular expression; or Kirk Savage’s Standing Soldiers Kneeling Slaves, which analyzes how Americans remembered slavery in the public

see LeeAnn Whites, Gender Matters: Civil War, Reconstruction, and the Making of the New South (2005); and Marilyn Mayer Culpepper, Trials and Triumphs: Women of the American Civil War (1991). 32

Kathleen Diffley’s edited anthology Witness to Reconstruction. Constance Fenimore Woolson and the Postbellum South, 1873-1894 (2011) focuses on a Northern observer figure and author. Works on women’s writing in the context of the Civil War itself include Sarah E. Gardner, Blood and Irony: Southern White Women’s Narratives of the Civil War, 1861-1937 (2004); LeeAnn Whites, The Civil War as a Crisis in Gender: Augusta, Georgia, 1860-1890 (1995); and Judith Scheffler, “’Uncommon, bad, and dangerous’: Personal Narratives of Imprisoned Confederate Women, 1861-1865,” Women’s LifeWriting: Finding Voice/Building Community, ed. Linda S. Coleman (1997). The contributors to Catherine Clinton and Nina Silber’s eds., Divided Houses: Gender and the Civil War (1992) focus on both female and male experiences of the war. Lyde Cullen Sizer examines The Political Work of Northern Women Writers and the Civil War, 1850-1872 (2000). Jeanie Attie does the same in Patriotic Toil: Northern Women and the American Civil War (1998). Drew Gilpin Faust’s contribution to James M. McPherson and William J. Cooper Jr’s’ Writing the Civil War provides an overview of the scholarship on gender and the Civil War that had come out until then: “’Ours as Well as that of the Men’: Women and Gender in the Civil War” (1998). Contrary to Daniel Aaron, The Unwritten War (1987). Edmund Wilson includes both male and female writers (white and black) in Patriotic Gore (1994). Both authors focus on the North and South.

33

In The Imagined Civil War Fahs argues that the turn of the nineteenth century was dominated by regionalist and masculinist reinventions, while more recently a focus on feminist and African-American readings dominates Civil War scholarship. (2001: 6).

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realm. Wolfgang Hochbruck’s Die Geschöpfe des Epimetheus (2011, published in German) is the most inclusive analysis of Civil War veteran culture to date, and has alerted me to how deeply entrenched the Second Founding was in wartime nostalgia. While I rarely dwell on these works at much length they have sharpened my view of the era and inspired how I have approached the book’s topic. The single most significant point of reference that was shared by the men and women who imaginatively reconstructed the nation was the Civil War hospital and the discourse of health attached to it. As Joan Burbick has shown in her analysis of nineteenth-century culture as an effort to overcome national disease, this was hardly new: “The need to constitute a universal body for the American nation,” she argues, emerged through a discourse in which “questions of political differences became submerged within a discussion of somatic rules as this ‘constitution’ created hierarchies of the flesh, demarcating gender, race, and class” (1994: 304). Yet while Burbick focuses on the antebellum period, my own analysis highlights the changing function of the Civil War hospital as the real and symbolic site of American suffering during an era fraught with moral concerns. It seems that living among maimed veterans, jobseeking ex-slaves, and increasingly impatient feminists made Reconstruction writers take to the seemingly uncontroversial, sentimental discourse of healing to construe and legitimize their vision of the Second Founding. Inspired by Burbick’s view of the diseased Republic as well as Lisa Long’s attempt to decipher the cultural meaning of disease in close connection with the Civil War (2004: 19-21), this study unfolds in the larger framework of changing historical circumstances. It traces across time a loosely knit intertextual dialogue that considers not only the war with its death toll of more than two percent of the nation’s inhabitants and many more who returned with visible and invisible wounds, but also the manifold transformations in American society during the postwar decade: “the rise of Darwinian evolution and the authority of science, corporate capitalism, and the modern university” and “the challenges of socialism, feminism, and countless other ‘isms’” (Butler 2006: 174) that catapulted Americans into a new era. While all of these changes have long attracted scholars of American culture, they are almost never seen in connection to the Civil War and Reconstruction. This study takes up Amy Kaplan’s critique of a literary history that focuses on aesthetic epochs (1992: esp. 104-60) and challenges established boundaries of classification. By doing so it hopes to spur further scholarship on the potential overlap between Gilded Age and Progressive Era literature and its distant, Reconstruction relative(s).





 

  


 

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If earlier Reconstruction scholarship has been majorly concerned with the era’s political and legal transformation processes there is now a trend to investigate the feel of that period. Duquette attunes us to a deep emotional instability caused by the breakdown of the antebellum family, and Faust attests to a “presence of death.” Postbellum Americans, she writes, were survivors who had to “assume new identities established by their persistence in face of others’ annihilation.” The common denominator is war-induced trauma; the horrors Americans on both sides had faced “forced them to question their ability to cope, their commitment to the war, even their faith in a righteous God” (Faust 2008: xi and xviii) Hardly anyone will doubt that in order to adequately grasp the emotional climate during Reconstruction we must take seriously that “death created the modern American union” (ibid.: xiv). At the same time, however, such considerations strongly suggest that individuals were in dire need of visions to inspire a future that recognizes the past and yet inspired a fresh and hopeful view of United States society. For the contemporary scholar, one of the best ways to understand and systematically grasp such visions lies in the concept of the human figuration that in the following will be adapted to specific situations during the Second Founding. Introduced by Norbert Elias in The Civilizing Process (2000; orig. publ. in 1939) the human figuration describes societies as constellations of human interdependencies and power relations that develop over time. Importantly, such constellations are not stable but dynamic and procedural, leading, in a second step, to what Elias famously called the civilizing process. Describing the long-term evolution of human behavior in Western societies, the latter refers to the regulation of the self as the consequence of a growing awareness of one’s relationship to others. The scope of this all-embracing insight into the “psychogenesis” of Western culture (ibid.: 402) makes the civilizing process unusable to describe such a short time span as Reconstruction. The concept of the human figuration, however, seems promising indeed. With its help this book will single out and examine particular moments during the dynamic human figuration process of Reconstruction. By suggesting that each of the texts in question is a direct outcome and interpretation of a point in time during the larger historical development, the following chapters describe what Elias calls stills (a translation of the German term Standbild) (ibid.).34 By analyzing a total of seven stills that were created during the early-, mid-, and late-Reconstruction periods, this study suggests a loose cultural development over time. By tracing this (imaginary) human figuration process, these chapters shed light on a crucial phase of cultural consolidation, and on the strategies used by an elite of Northern whites to voice its

34

On the term figuration itself see particularly the “Introduction” to Civilizing Process.

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ideological concerns. This, then, helps me identify these Americans’ fears and hopes regarding the setup of the future society. The development just mentioned relied on a number of established narratives, norms, and cultural images that were used repeatedly to enable communication across gendered and ideological lines and authorize varying visions of the American self and society. Among these cultural codes were fantasies of cross-sectional romance, the quest for the kingdom of God on earth, the idea of “going native,” visions of a pastoral order, of spiritual bonding with a metaphysical whole, and of healing the nation. Importantly, however, the incitements for using this shared repertoire differ considerably for each author: Louisa May Alcott, the young feminist writer who grew up in one of America’s most radical families of reformers, exploited the image of the nurse to entirely different ideological ends than, say, the popular New England “Spokesman for a Middle-Class America,”35 Henry Ward Beecher, who adapted it to the needs and values of an earlier, more conservative generation. Writing at about the same time, both authors invoked the idea of woman as motherly helpmate to support their respective cultural interventions, thereby turning the figure of the nurse into a symbolic battlefield. It is only in retrospect that we can get a fuller view of this battlefield and analyze what Jane Tompkins has called the cultural work of individual texts. To identify the methods used for “expressing and shaping the social context that produced [these texts]” (Tompkins 1986: 200) this study relies on a limited number of works. We must not forget, however, that these belong in a larger cultural field of expression with roots in both the antebellum and postbellum eras. Reconstruction was thus not only a phase of acute political, legal, and social consolidation, but also an in-depth negotiation of the country’s cultural heritage. In its effort to build a new nation on the ideals of the founders, Reconstruction was future-oriented against all odds—even if some desired that the future look like the past (cf. Duquette 221): the sheer number of texts produced, many of them with a very personal ring, highlights the dawning of a new phase in American culture, marked by a readiness for individual participation and a widespread desire to be recognized as politically mature citizens. To better understand the relationship between individual texts and the larger culture, this study is based on the principles formulated by Anthony F. C. Wallace in Culture and Personality (1961). Dating back to the early nineteen-sixties, this standard work in modern anthropology criticizes the scholarly tendency to “overestimate not only the psychological but also the cultural homogeneity of even small societies with simple cultures” (Wallace May 27, 1985). Picking up this warning, these chapters assign a central role to the enormous internal differences among Northerners who

35

Cf. the title of Clifford E. Clark, Henry Ward Beecher: Spokesman for a Middle-Class America (1978).


 

  


 

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before and during the war had shared an anti-slavery attitude. Wallace, in other words, provides me with a concept to substantiate my initial impression that there exists, within the postbellum North, an astonishing fragmentation along ideological, political, and emotional lines that has been overlooked due to the dominant narrative of sectional division. Such pulling apart, however, makes it all the more crucial to understand what held this group together and enabled its impact on the larger culture. Again, Culture and Personality offers a valid theoretical starting point, as it explains how a society can develop in a certain collective way precisely because its individual members are the products of experiences they do not necessarily share with others (cf. Wallace 1961: 21). According to Wallace, misunderstandings are not only an unavoidable dimension of the human experience but the very basis of successful social interaction, and fundamental to the dynamics of a given culture. What, then, is the “glue” that binds a group together? Wallace agrees with earlier anthropologists that cultures rely on the replication of uniformity (in certain behaviors and beliefs handed down from one generation to the next), but he finds this insufficient to explain what is unique about a given culture and how that uniqueness persists under changing historical, legal, and social circumstances. The differences between cultures, he concludes, depend not so much on the symbols and codes shared by each member of a society, but on how “various individuals organize themselves culturally into orderly, expanding, changing societies” (ibid.: 23) even as they misunderstand each other fundamentally. By applying this definition of culture to Northern Reconstruction America, this book hopes to show that what made this culture recognizable was the way individual authors represented their ideas of society and social change. What held them together was not only a fixed set of cultural symbols and codes that they all relied on, but a shared sense of competition and democratic self-empowerment. Building on the assumption that white Northerners shared a culturally specific understanding of how to effectively participate in Reconstruction’s highly contested, asynchronous cultural sphere, this study suggests an underlying style that was a prerequisite to being recognized as a legitimate participant in the competition between various religious, philosophical, psychological, scientific and aesthetic approaches that vied for recognition in the reordering of American society. Culture and Personality was developed in the context of anthropology, yet the concept is applicable to textual representations (and interactions) as well: as a practice and a means of communication, literary and non-literary texts are a defining part of the cultural dynamics described by Wallace.36 By participating in a nationwide

36

This is not to deny the profound differences between printed texts and face-to-face conversations that involve the physical aspects of language (voice, mimicry, gestures, etc.), the effects of which have much to do with the relationship between the individuals involved.

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controversy regarding the place of the former slaves—but also of other minorities, including white women—the individual Northern Reconstruction text constitutes both an individual, multi-vocal world apart (that negotiates the contexts that surround it) and a group-specific contribution to the (flawed) conversation that makes Reconstruction culture unique. By analyzing this simultaneity, the following chapters enable a deeper understanding of the cultural dynamics of postemancipation America. Culture and Personality helped me choose from an overwhelmingly large archive of possible texts and to define the focus of this project. To construct a plausible and insightful narrative of Reconstruction, I limited my analysis to this Northern subgroup not to show how it “replicates uniformity” but to identify what enabled its ingroup negotiations in the first place: being influenced by similar experiences and debates, (former) abolitionists from the North shared what Wallace calls “capacities for mutual prediction” (24) based on an understanding of what was important and meaningful in their culture (self-reliance, democracy, freedom of speech, the Bible, science, gender norms, etc.) and what were adequate means to bring these ideas across (the confessional mode, a sincere interest in the matter, a laugh-at-life sense of humor, etc.). Only after identifying this common ground on the level of content and of form can the vast ideological differences between these texts be related to the larger context of the national culture in which they were set. What, then, is the status of the single text that stands at the center of each chapter? We may once more rely on Wallace, who speaks about an individual’s “mental image,” or mazeway, to describe that person’s interpretation of the real: defined as the product of individual meaning-construction, the mazeway “consists of an extremely large number of assemblages or cognitive residues of perception, and is used by its holder as a true and more or less complete representation of the operating characteristics of a ‘real’ world” (15). From a more material-oriented, social theory standpoint, such a conception of the real as perception may seem problematic; for this study, however, this is not an obstacle: after all, its focus is on representations. Yet the mazeway is not entirely removed from the context of its emergence: how Northern Reconstruction writers appropriate the values, images, and techniques available in their culture relies on both their individual mazeways and how they positioned themselves in the conversation described earlier (cf. Wallace 1961: 16-18). This self-positioning, however, can only be touched upon in the conclusion: none of the texts is written as a direct response to another, and even in the one case where such a reference plays a role, various other philosophical and religious contexts are equally important. Before highlighting these contexts, however, the following chapter wishes to unfold the historical basis that motivated the selection of primary texts: a concept of the Civil War hospital as a test case for both the democratic status quo and its (real and desired) limits, a new understanding of woman’s role in society that goes back to the Civil War, and a placement of Reconstruction as continuum rather than fixed historical phase.





!
 
   



 
The traumatic impact of the war bred a language of personal and national regeneration, and of malleable rebirth metaphors that served the ends of rapid reunion, lenient reconstruction, and resistance to revolutions in race relations. But it also bred a notion of regeneration in which the South was made in the North’s image and harshly punished, the freedpeople enfranchised as citizens, and the Constitution rewritten. BLIGHT, RACE AND REUNION 2001: 32


 
 

  

  
  
Among the themes that connect the following six chapters is the collective memory of the Civil War hospital as a contact zone—a space “where cultures meet, clash, and grapple with each other, often in contexts of highly asymmetrical relations of power such as colonialism, slavery, or their aftermaths […]” (Pratt 1991: 33). These sites of physical and mental crisis forced a dysfunctional “family” of helpers from various backgrounds to cooperate in improvised wards filled with people from the North and from the South respectively, including contrabands and free blacks, both male and female.1 Crammed into these institutions, white middle-class Americans could no 1

As Jim Downs points out, “[c]ontraband” women officially “worked in Union camps as washerwomen, cooks, and domestics.” Downs, “The Other Side of Freedom: Destitution, Disease, and Dependency Among Freedwomen and Their Children During and After the Civil War” (2006: 80). According to Elizabeth Massey, however, these women were “often and unofficially used as nurses.” In fact, “many slaves and free Negro women were on hospital payrolls in the Confederacy although the slaves’ pay went to their owners.” See Bonnet Brigades (1966: 52).

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longer evade close contact with the poor—many of them with little education, and not a few of them recent immigrants. The one hospital “battlefield” that we know the most about concerns the relationship between female nurses and male doctors, helpmates, and patients. After the firing on Fort Sumter, approximately two thousand white women from both parts of the country followed the example of Florence Nightingale and volunteered to nurse wounded soldiers.2 Especially in the beginning they were all but welcome since leaving home to nurse the bodies of men not only blurred the gendered division between male and female spheres but challenged the behavioral norms of True Womanhood.2 Deemed unacceptable out of concern “for the compromised delicacy of unmarried women exposed to male nudity, profanity, and lechery,” (Schultz 2004: 123) female nurses, in other words, spearheaded a larger, war-induced development where women intruded into realms typically occupied by men alone. While struggling with a number of personal, social, and institutional obstacles, female nurses quickly established a popular narrative to bulwark such opposition: “white, educated, articulate, and elite” (ibid.: 1) they cast themselves as “surrogates for absent wives, sisters, and mothers” (ibid.: 96) among helpless “boys” (ibid.: 5 and 52-55). These nurses “domesticated” the military hospital by relying on “the family metaphor that came to characterize the nurse-patient bond” (ibid.: 5), depicting themselves triumphantly saving souls as well as bodies (cf. ibid.: 216).3 The myth of female relief workers as patriotic heroines and “tireless crusaders inspired by soldiers’ selflessness” became a common formula throughout the war and Reconstruction (ibid.: 16): according to an estimate by Jane E. Schultz, women wrote 66 monographs about their experiences as nurses, 42 of which were submitted for publication (cf. 2001: 78).4 This, then, is the context from which Alcott’s Hospital Sketches emerged,

2

Regarding the discrepancy between the ideal and the actual lives of nineteenth-century women see, for example, Frances B. Cogan, All-American Girl: The Ideal of Real Womanhood in Mid-Nineteenth-Century America (1989); Linda Kerber, “Separate Spheres, Female Worlds, Woman’s Place: The Rhetoric of Women’s History” (1988); Natasha Kirsten Kraus, A New Type of Womanhood: Discursive Politics and Social Change in Antebellum America (2008); Mary Beth Norton, “The Paradox of Women’s Sphere” (1979); and Rosalind Rosenberg, Beyond Separate Spheres (1982).

3

Hospital Sketches is a case in point here: the hospital, introduced as a site of “disorder, discomfort, [and] bad management” where “unnecessary strictness in one place was counterbalanced by unpardonable laxity in another,” is taken over by the white nurse who gets “the bodies of my boys into something like order” so she can then “minister to their minds” (HS 43).

4

Schultz adds that among the 42 “11 were former Confederate, 31 former Union citizens.” (Ibid.).

 
  
 

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adding decisively to the popularity of the myth that later became a point of departure for Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Gage’s 1882 History of Woman Suffrage. By “putting women at the center of the story” these stories yielded a narrative about progress in which a collective experience of war had prepared women to assume the reins of reform movements that would energize American political life for several decades” (Schultz 2004: 1-2). And yet the Civil War discourse around healing was not limited to women alone: male nurses and doctors, too, contributed their views on what makes a healthy nation. At the same time, both healing and nursing are also important contexts for other Reconstruction debates that are connected to issues that go beyond a concern about gender. What, then, are common characteristics of these Reconstruction narratives of nursing and healing? Many of them center on actual work experience within a Civil War hospital and describe the daily responsibilities of nurses and doctors while paying tribute to suffering patients. In not a few cases, such elaborations lap into individual self-aggrandizement and authorize a racist and xenophobic concept of the nation as built on presumably natural hierarchies. On a more positive side, however, these narratives often negotiate abstract issues such as democracy, cooperation, patriotism, and necessary measures of reform under the sheltering rhetorical umbrella of domesticity, humanitarianism, love, and healing. A few samples from wartime correspondences and diaries provide a glimpse into the cultural negotiations that took their start from the hospital contact zone. Hannah Ropes was a nurse and head matron from Maine with strong abolitionist and feminist leanings. In an 1862 letter to her mother she vividly describes the daily skirmishes between the sexes and recalls how her male superior asked her flatly to leave her post, saying “we can’t live here together.”5 That Ropes was an experienced writer (she had published her letters from Kansas and a novel in the 1850s) should not prompt us to read this as rhetorical flourish: according to Leonard it was absolutely normal to perceive of female nurses as “meddling in other affairs” (1994: 31). Men in fact made it clear that “if left alone, we will in a short time show you how well men can get along without the aid of women.” The quote comes from an 1863 letter that Daniel Holt, a Union surgeon, wrote to his wife back home (1994: 165). By implicitly including her as potential, unauthorized “meddler,” the statement suggests that the crisis of gender went well beyond the bounds of the wartime hospital. It would be overly simplistic, however, to put all the blame on men and their refusal to open their sphere of influence. The example of Catholic nuns hints at another, often neglected aspect of the conflict. These nuns were quickly accepted by hospital authorities since unlike most white Protestant nurses they were thoroughly

5

Ropes recounted the story in a letter she wrote to her mother on November 5, 1862. Cf. Hannah Ropes, Civil War Nurse: The Diary and Letters of Hannah Ropes (1980: 88).

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schooled in medical matters. In Gangrene and Glory, Frank R. Freemon speaks about an “inability” on the part of most nurses “to understand the military chain of command,” which “flowed from the president, through the secretary of war, through the surgeon general, to the medical director of the district or the field army, to the hospital director, and then to the doctor in charge of the patients in the ward” (1998: 54). Particularly during the early years of the war, many women “had no concept of their place in this hierarchy” (ibid.); for them, even the president’s order was inferior to the higher law of the Christian nation. As “Mother” Bickendyke, the Union’s most famous nurse, saw it, her nursing was solely authorized by “the Lord God Almighty” (qtd. in ibid.: 57). It takes no wonder that intergender friction was paramount in much hospital writing. Yet many Civil War nurses had good reasons for not building harmonious work relationships: The sheer variety of jobs meted out to them, not to mention their steep learning curve in matters of military conduct, created friction among women made manifest in elite enmity and mistrust of the lower class and in white dismissal and even hatred of black women. When one considers the competitive model that structured reality for surgeons and officers more generally, it is not surprising that female workers, unsure of their place and with more ground to lose than soldiers who might enlist without raising eyebrows, were subject to gendered infighting. (Schultz 2004: 74)

In most nursing narratives, however, such open conflict was limited to white middleclass women alone: although a significant number of lower-class women worked as (badly paid) laundresses, kitchen aids, et cetera,6 often side-by-side with the volunteers, they are barely mentioned at all.7 One can only guess that they simply did not fit into this new type of popular middle-class narrative that “reproduced the story of an untried woman who had to swallow pride and modesty to carry out her nursing

6

According to Massey “at least 3200 held paying positions in the Union and Confederacy,” a number that does not include those who served for less than the four years of the war but that does include “both whites and Negroes, slave and free.” Massey (1966: 52). Regarding the role of paid nurses see Freemon (1998: 52).

7

I have double-checked this against Louisa May Alcott’s Hospital Sketches (1863); Notes of Hospital Life (1864) by Alonzo Potter; Elvira Power, Hospital Pencillings (1866); Jane Hoge, Boys in Blue (1867); Charlotte McKay, Stories of Hospital and Camp (1876), reprint (2012); and memoirs of Souther nurses such as Kate Cummings, Journal of a Confederate Nurse (1866), reprint (1987); and Fannie A. Beers, Memories: A Record of Personal Experience and Adventure During Four Years of War (1888). Schultz (2004: 48-49) offers a rare insight into the correspondence of such women.

 
  
 

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work effectively, then emerged as a champion of the common soldier” (Schultz 2004: 223). Contrary to a common cliché, “gendered infighting” was not a female specialty. Differing levels of education also prevailed among doctors, who often blamed their male colleagues for the daily chaos in the workplace,8 complained about fellow physicians’ uncaring attitude toward patients, or accused them of professional incompetence. Paul Starr traces this “fraternal hatred” (1982: 93) to the fatal coalition between religious fractionalization and a lack of formalized medical education: More than a qualified analogy links religious and medical sects; they often overlap. The Mormons favored Thomsonian medicine and the Millerites hydropathy.9 The Swedenborgians were inclined toward homeopathic medicine.10 And the Christian Scientists originated in concerns that were medical as well as religious. (Starr 1982: 95)11

Religious intolerance was also widespread among the diverse Protestant denominations that clashed with Catholics, Lutherans, and members of northern border-state Reformed churches, all of whom “offered alternative modes of understanding the Scriptures” (Miller, Stout, and Wilson 1998: 7). As the diary and correspondence of Hannah Ropes (who was a Swedenborgian) indicates, anti-Semitism also played a role in the hospital experience. This is how Ropes describes one of her male assistants: Our first was a Jew, round faced, beady eyes, black hair and short of stature. He would handkerchief talk so sweet to me, and rob me of a bottle of wine, a shirt or pretty pocket at the very moment I was looking at him to reply. […] It was the kind will of providence that this spawn of the reptile species should be sent to the Peninsula. (72)12

8

Since Americans had not anticipated the extremely high number of injuries and the long duration of the war, most hospitals emerged as ad hoc institutions, lacking personnel, supplies, and a functioning administration.

9

Regarding medical concepts in nineteenth-century America see, for example, Norman Gevitz, ed. Other Healers: Unorthodox Medicine in America (1988).

10

S. Weir Mitchell’s first novel, In War Time (1884), focuses on a New England doctor who is a Swedenborgian and who out of cowardice refuses to participate in the Civil War.

11

For brief descriptions of the beliefs and practices of Mormons, Millerites, Swedenborgians, and Christian Scientists, see Sidney Ahlstrom, A Religious History of the American People (1972: 472-87 and 1019-29).

12

Antisemitism was a problem for the approximately ten thousand Jews who served in both armies. In his 1862 “General Order No.11” Ulysses Grant expelled all Jews from his conquered territory “within twenty-four hours.” Cf. Bertram W. Korn, American Jewry

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Ropes, it seems, compensated for her problems with male superiors and co-workers by employing the discriminatory rhetoric of the day in a stylized, literary manner that rhetorically secured her presumed superiority—she may in fact have had publication in mind. There is an almost systematic effort to categorize the men she encounters according to various anti-Semitic, xenophobic, and regionalist clichés. Ropes lists a “gentle, well disposed Pennsylvanian” (who does not know anything about the world and society), a “Number 3” from Virginia (with the “nature of a porcupine”), and “a Frenchman, without principle, and rather large brain” (whom she accuses of robbing and mistreating patients) (1980: 107).13 The idea of the hospital as a space for individual empowerment survived into the Reconstruction era and “accrue[d] therapeutic value” that often had little grounding in the actual hospital experience: 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 wounddresser [in Walt Whitman’s poem of the same title], 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. (Long 2004: 12-13)14

Nursing narratives gained even more in popularity during Reconstruction. Many women writers (who not always had volunteered as nurses) took to writing heroic narratives of nursing to not only cash in on a trend but to express a feminist desire to exercise influence on the larger public. To some extent this contradicts the female nurses’ factual experience: their wartime endeavor had generated mixed results; they

and the Civil War (2009); and Jonathan Gruber, dir. Jewish Soldiers in Blue and Grey (2011). Regarding the role of religion in the Civil War cf. Miller, et al., Religion and the American Civil War (1998); and Stowell (1998). 13

The quotes are from a letter to a doctor who had previously served at the same hospital. While she was particularly outspoken in her views she was hardly an exception. Even Emily Elizabeth Parsons, an otherwise very understanding woman and an abolitionist, drew a strict line between “a German doctor who did not understand neatness, and who was going away” and “a skillful Doctor possessed of Yankee neatness” who “joined forces with me and in I went” (“Memoir of Emily Elizabeth Parsons,” Civil War Nursing, ed. James Redpath (1880), reprint (1984).

14

The writers mentioned (and partly discussed) by Long include Walt Whitman, S. Weir Mitchell, Stephen Crane, Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, William DeForest, and Rebecca Harding Davis. (Long 2004: 12-13).

 
  
 

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had won over “some, but not all, of their earlier opponents” in both the hospital and elsewhere (1966: 44). By the end of the war, nurses and doctors had “grudgingly accepted the idea that the other hoped to be of service and might perhaps, on occasion, actually help the sick and wounded” (Freemon 1998: 48). As years went by, however, Reconstruction spurred nostalgic memories of hospital intimacy and solidarity that worked as bulwarks against the “advent of the modern age in American politics” with its “lack of clearly defined center” and “heterogeneous character” (Quigley 2004: x). For female authors in particular, the bygone hospital experience provided important historical proof for women’s self-sacrificial patriotism and usefulness beyond the domestic household. This was particularly important during the postbellum anti-feminist backlash: contrary to male ex-slaves, who received the Constitutional right to vote (in 1870), white women waited until 1920, when the 19th amendment put an end to sex-based political exclusion. Civil War narratives of nursing are among the most thoroughly researched material from that era while other works from the same time period have been thoroughly neglected. Therefore, this analysis of the Reconstruction adaptation process sets in where the hospital, and the discourses that were related to it, shifted onto a more general, future-oriented plane. During this transitional phase, military hospitals, nurses, and the rhetoric of healing appear regularly, but almost anecdotally, in stories about national survival, family reunion, and cross-sectional romance. Marked as the experience of one generation, Reconstruction stories about Civil War nursing archived the memories of female and male veterans in an emerging narrative about the nation in the making.


 
 
    
To this point I have referred to Reconstruction somewhat vaguely, sometimes subsuming it under the rubric of “postwar” and sometimes as a phase that started, strangely enough, during the Civil War. This analysis in fact views them as one overlapping phase, emphasizing the processual character of the Second Founding. Historical, cultural, and generational reasons support this definition: retrospectively speaking, Reconstruction set in during the first year of the conflict, at least in the South Carolina part of the Sea Islands. In November 1861, after the U.S. Navy’s victory in that region, the Port Royal Experiment was officially begun in an effort to prepare almost ten thousand former slaves for life as free citizens. Fittingly titled a “Rehearsal for Reconstruction” by the historian Willie Lee Rose (1998), this federally funded humanitarian, educational, and agricultural effort was almost immediately joined by groups of patriotic Northern abolitionists who wished to play an active

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role in assisting the so-called contrabands. This very early and regionally limited phase of Reconstruction is the topic of the following chapter. While starting right at the beginning of the war, these “experimental” years also included that crucial historical moment, the January 1, 1863, Emancipation Proclamation that also declared the Sea Island contrabands free men and women. After Abraham Lincoln had liberated slaves throughout the Confederacy, abolition became an acknowledged aim of the war. It is therefore that some works on American history have defined Emancipation as the beginning of Reconstruction despite the severe shortcomings of the Proclamation. (In the so-called “border states,” regulations regarding the future of the slaves were determined on a state-by-state basis.15) Other, equally plausible voices draw a strict distinction between the war and Reconstruction and date the Second Founding as beginning only after the surrender of General Lee in April 1865. From a literary scholar’s perspective, the situation was then vastly different from wartime conflict—Eliza Richards points to the “marked, even bewildering contrast between stories published between 1861 and 1865” and those published during the postwar years, “when the nation was reconceiving itself in the name of Reconstruction.” While the wartime stories emphasize “immersion in immediate experience, the postwar narratives frequently offer an intriguing fusion of retrospect and prospect” (Richards 2005: 356). The postwar shift from personal narrative to fiction further supports this observation. And yet the differences are not at all absolute. In fact, an emphasis on either continuities or rupture depends very much on the works selected, and the questions asked. As Richard also states in her review, it is hard to discern a “collective voice” during this time of disagreement (2005: 355). While many Reconstruction works reacted to the profound legal changes that defined the era, others did not respond at all—which is not unusual since abstract notions of Reconstruction lawmaking say relatively little about “how real institutions and laws touched real lives” (Vorenberg 2006: 168). This study, then, will keep an open eye on the impact of Reconstruction lawmaking on the era’s literary production while exploring, simultaneously, the emotional continuities between wartime experience and the Second Founding. If the traumatic experiences of the war alienated many Americans from their families, society, and their former selves, it also produced regimes of knowledge that later drove the debate about democracy and its limits. While arguably, the American Civil War was the “most religious war in American history” (McPherson 1998: 63), it was also a watershed moment in the history of secularization and data-based science. During the Civil War, anthropologists performed an unprecedented number of autopsies on the corpses of dead soldiers (both white and black), producing large

15

Tennessee and the 48 counties that became West Virginia were also exempt from the Emancipation Proclamation.

 
  
 

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quantities of data that helped legitimize the continuation of racist policies by different means. “[T]he war that freed the slave,” writes John S. Haller, “also helped to justify racial attitudes of nineteenth-century society” (1971: 20). Such overlaps and transitions let the supposedly strict divide between Civil War and Reconstruction crumble, revealing a prolonged and multiply interrupted phase of mental adaptation that started (in a part of the country) in 1861. While the final year of Reconstruction is equally debatable, the generational and cultural changes of the early 1880s suggest, albeit tentatively, an end to that phase of national self-definition. According to Richard Schuster, those were the years when the American novel returned to a romantic version of the South. “To that date,” he writes, the stereotyped Civil War novel, the novel of the Lost Cause or the Lost Civilization, had not yet appeared as a standard form. As E.P. Roe, Charles Kind, Henry Cuyler Bunner, Thomas Nelson Page and other romantics began to publish shortly after 1880, however, the Civil War Novel soon became the romantic tale it has generally remained. (1961: 2)16

In extending its analysis beyond 1877 this book suggest an alternative to the official end of Reconstruction when the newly elected president, Rutherford Hayes, consented to withdraw federal troops from the Southern states as a concession to Democrats. This compromise did not conclude the political conflicts and legal problems of the previous twelve years, nor did it bring a remedy for those who struggled to adapt to the new era. During his presidency (1877-1881) Hayes tried to enforce the rights of Southern blacks but failed because Southern Democrats refused to fund federal marshals to protect former slaves. Thus, if on the abstract level of constitutional lawmaking the struggle to define a multiracial democracy seemed to have been successful, the actual results were “embryonic ideas at best,” changing little about the everyday lives of America’s black population (Vorenberg 2006: 170). It was by the early 1880s, not in 1877, that the country’s experiment in interracial democracy was considered a failure by most critical observers. As a reporter put it in 1881, “by far the largest proportion of negroes are never really known to us. They […] drift off to themselves and are almost as far from the white people […] as if the two races never met” (qtd. in Boyer et al. 2000: 457b).

16

An excellent study that is concerned with the long-term representation of Reconstruction in the American popular imagination is Gerhardt’s Rituale des Scheiterns (2002). Other notable studies include John Limon’s “Swords to Words: Realism and the Civil War,” Writing After War (1994: 32-58), and “Goddesses on the Battlefield: The Combatant Novels of Tourgée, Cable, and DeForest” (ibid.1994: 59-83).

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The selected works were authored by both lay and professional writers. All of them were middle-class, among them a Canadian immigrant and a religious spokesperson. Some of them are well known, but not for their Reconstruction writings. Organized in a rough chronological order that does not preclude occasional overlaps in time, this study progresses from relatively private, autobiographical writings to novels, poetry, and political essays. Covering a broad array of genres, and typical for this era, the texts all suggest an intimate relationship between the narrator/lyrical voice/protagonist and the author, claiming a high degree of authenticity and personal integrity. Sharing a belief in individual self-empowerment and the right to public recognition, they all signal a readiness for democratic participation and renewal. Written against the historical backdrop of emancipation and feminist demands for women’s suffrage, these texts all pay lip service to racial and gender equality. And yet they disagree profoundly on these issues, suggesting vastly different views of American society and its re-organization along gendered and racial lines. Combining the idea of a contact zone with humanitarian reform, the Civil War hospital functions as a shifting signifier here, providing a historical starting point for visions of both radical equality and hierarchical reorganization. Concentrating on one author’s Reconstruction oeuvre, each of the following chapters invokes a larger context of cultural narratives or expressions, including, for example, nursing narratives, letters from the front, and minstrel performances. The first two analyses deal with the Civil War writing of female and male military hospital workers. The first of these chapters examines the diary of Esther Hill Hawks who joined the early Reconstruction Port Royal Experiment on the South Carolina Sea Islands and worked where a “respectable” white woman was not supposed to work: in a hospital for freed slaves. Concentrating on the diary’s appropriation of established literary and cultural tropes to describe an unprecedented “American experience,” this chapter sets the tone for what emerges over the course of this project as a female tradition of experimenting with social roles and reinventing social hierarchies in connection with Reconstruction. The men of Hawks’s generation had little time to reimagine America: living among a diverse mix of men in military camps and hospital wards, their mental adaptation was a very concrete and often nerve-wrecking endeavor. John Bennitt, a Union physician, was—like many of his contemporaries—a very religious man. More sensitive perhaps than most, he considered the war an imposition on his moral integrity and discovered the soothing effect of writing hundreds of letters to his wife. By concentrating on this correspondence, the second analysis accentuates a much underestimated cultural practice that was geared toward a peacetime alternative, not only

 
  
 

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influencing postbellum gender relations but also preparing wartime Americans for dealing with racial and ethnic others and those less educated than themselves. The remaining four chapters also combine female and male viewpoints, but they all focus on the period after the Emancipation Proclamation (chapter five) and the postwar era (chapters six to eight). Chapter five takes up the topic of religion and discusses the theological grounding of Sarah Emma Edmonds’s Nurse and Spy in the Union Army. Commonly perceived as a sensationalist and highly improbable account of a woman’s transgressions across gendered, raced, and ethnic lines, Nurse and Spy is also a subversive appropriation of the nursing narrative as it comments directly on Alcott’s popular Hospital Sketches and her short story “The Brothers/My Contraband.” Unlike the other chapters in this project, this one reads two authors in close conjunction, thereby providing insight into a debate among abolition-minded feminists that so far has evaded scholarly attention. By examining Henry Ward Beecher’s postwar reaction to Darwinian concepts of human evolution, the sixths chapter takes a look at what tends to be ignored in Reconstruction scholarship: the cultural mainstream. The prominent “spokesman for a middle-class America” launched an ideological backlash against more secular visions of society like those suggested by Hawks, Edmonds, or Alcott. As this chapter shows, this new conservatism was characterized by a re-signification of two figures, the nurse and the minister, and by an emphasis on “right reading.” In all of the works discussed, gender is intrinsically linked to racial concerns. This is certainly the case in Walt Whitman’s contradictory postwar oeuvre. Whitman’s ideological struggle takes the form of an aesthetic experiment and an unending concern with the role of individual and collective emotions in the face of the postwar democratic promise. Chapter seven is an effort to explain the cultural significance of this inner conflict that fulfilled personal, representative, and exemplary functions. At the center of this analysis are a number of interrelated poems, essays, and diary entries that will be read in the changing (political, social, legal) contexts of their emergence. By taking Whitman’s famous mourning poem “The Wound Dresser” as a key to his long-term project of national healing, the chapter traces his (aesthetic, moral, and ideological) struggle to view the freed slaves as deserving patients. If for Whitman the Civil War was the most crucial experience of his life, Mary Bradley Lane called for an active departure from what in her eyes was veteran nostalgia. Not surprisingly, her novel Mizora has not been considered a Reconstruction text but a Progressive Era utopia entirely geared toward the future. And yet this early fantasy of an all-female society is explicitly rooted in the Civil War and Reconstruction period(s). Chapter nine investigates the book’s connection to this earlier phase of cultural “disease,” thereby providing a historical framework with which to interpret the novel’s prominent vision of absolute health. Published after 1877, Mizora signals the replacement of the Civil War discourse of healing with theories of evolution, elimination, and reform.

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The conclusion returns to the concept of Reconstruction as a mental adaptation process. Focusing on the ideal human figuration that each of the texts imparts, it briefly sums up the strategies used to legitimize the limits of democratic representation. By indicating significant overlaps and digressions that occur between texts it identifies a “set of shared symbols and codes” that enabled a conversation regarding the “rules of the democratic game” but that ultimately failed to resolve the profound miscommunication within Northern Reconstruction discourse. These—ideological and mental—dissonances are the Second Founding’s lingering soundtrack.







 



 





 
  


 
  


When in July 1861, after the battle of Manassas, hundreds of injured soldiers were brought to Richmond, Virginia, the few hospitals in that city “were filled in just a few hours” (Freemon 1998: 31). Soon enough beds were filled up, and neither doctors nor nurses were sufficiently available to care for the wounded. In this emergency, many patients were transported to towns at the periphery of the war theatre where hospitals were less crowded. Similar shortages emerged all over the wartime South, resulting in a movement among ordinary civilians to take in the wounded, with improvised hospitals popping up all over the place. While the “proportion of new recruits who came down with measles, mumps, and diarrhea amazed both the military authorities and the civilian medical community,” professional staff was scarce.1 Not a few doctors fled from the hospitals when they saw the extent of physical suffering, and experienced physicians and doctors hesitated to put their work in the service of either army (cf. Freemon 1998: 35-50). Overstrained by the unending influx of patients, Americans on both sides of the conflict soon called for a functioning infrastructure to manage this unprecedented situation.2 For women who wanted to do more for the Union cause than prepare and forward hospital comfortsit seemed just the right time to apply for a position as a military doctor. In August 1861, Esther Hill Hawks travelled to Washington to try her luck: after all, she was one of only a few American women with a medical degree, with excellent credentials.3 Since she had 1

Regarding the pitiful education standards among American medical doctors before the

2

Regarding the medical situation during the early war years see Freemon (1998: esp.

war see Freemon, chapter 1: “American Medicine in the 1850s.” chapters 2-4). 3

Hawks had studied with the “European wunderkind” Maria Zakrzewka at the New England Female Medical College, where she graduated in 1857 with only seven other female students. She belonged to a well-organized female elite that gathered around Elizabeth

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been running a private practice in Manchester, New Hampshire, she also possessed ample practical experience (see Schwartz 1984: 22; Elshtain 1987: 144-145). Yet Esther shared the fate or her better-known contemporary, the trouser-wearing feminist, radical abolitionist, and medical doctor Mary Edwards Walker,4 whose pursuit of an official commission as a surgeon of the Union Army had been turned down a few months earlier, simply because the Federal government “identified the professional care of the sick and the public stature of the physician with maleness” and categorically refused to hire women doctors (Leonard 1994: 107).5 Refusing to give up, Hawks applied as an army nurse—she may have hoped that, once in the hospital, her professional expertise would trump her gender. Yet Victorian prejudice once more declared her ineligible for patriotic service: Dorothea Dix, First Superintendent for Army Nurses and a proponent of female plainness, gave jobs only to middle-aged nurses, preferably mothers, who were seen as natural experts in the field of healing.6 Relatively young, pretty, and a trained professional, Hawks embodied the antithesis of this concept of respectable womanhood. Having exhausted all other possibilities to adequately contribute to the Union’s cause, she eventually joined an early post-slavery experiment, together with her husband. When in the summer of 1862, Milton (the name she calls him throughout her diary) was appointed surgeon in the hospital for blacks in the town of Beaufort in South Carolina’s Sea Islands, the couple immediately seized the chance: “[t]he prospect, Dearest Ette, never seemed so fine for the future as now,” Milton wrote enthusiastically (MH to EHH, qtd. in Schwartz 1984: 25). Hawks apparently did not mind the prevailing prejudice against women who wished to work in such an occupation:7 as Schwartz has hinted, the young female doctor was already used to such reactions

Blackwell; members of Blackwell’s circle formed their own networks in order to make careers for themselves as medical doctors (see Twelbeck 2013: 173-187). 4

According to Elizabeth D. Leonard, Dr. Mary Edwards Walker was the only woman who served the entire four years in the Union Army (2006: 105). See also Adriana Schroeder, “Mary Edwards Walker,” (2008).

5

On women as army surgeons and the general rejection of women in the medical profes-

6

On Dix’s role in the organization of Civil War hospitals see Leonard (1994: chapter 1);

sion see also Massey (1966: 43-64; esp. 62). Massey (1966: chapter 3); and Agatha Young (1959). On Dix’s strategic uses of gender performance see Michel (1994-1995). 7

For an overview of teaching as a female profession during the Civil War see Massey (1966: 108-129). The chapter (“A Female Teacher Will Do”) is nuanced, yet its analysis regarding society’s reluctant acceptance of teaching as a female profession focuses predominantly on the Southern population.

 

   

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as a physician with her own practice.8 That she had lived and worked in Florida certainly facilitated her far-reaching decision: in 1854, Esther had followed her husband to that state, where she worked as a schoolteacher, partly in an illegal school for African-American children (see Schwartz 1984: 9). Although her marriage with Milton is known to have been strained (Schwartz 1984: 1-28), it enabled her to continue on the abolitionist and feminist path, and it stabilized her position within the larger scene of political and religious activists and social experimenters during the early Reconstruction. In October 1862 she sought to secure her autonomy and gain social influence by joining a predominantly spiritual and educational endeavor,9 together with Milton. Esther became a part of the so-called Port Royal Experiment that had begun a few months earlier with the arrival of fifty-three missionaries and abolitionists on South Carolina’s Sea Islands. These reformers were determined “to give shape to liberation and guidance and help to the liberated” (Woodward 1999: xii)10 namely some ten thousand slaves whose owners had fled the region. Hawks was not as eccentric as she may appear when set against the nineteenthcentury ideal of true womanhood: retrospectively speaking, she embodied that peculiar mix of reform-oriented patriotism that led to the much-debated “feminization” of nineteenth-century American culture, and was part of a feminist trend that gained ground during the war-related absence of husbands, fathers and sons (see Douglas 1977; Tompkins 1986; Smith-Rosenberg 1985).11 Ahead of the cultural mainstream and yet an integral part of an era known to have “experimented with the most drastic social changes ever attempted in American history” (Woodward 1999: xi), Esther’s life and textual work signal the massive cultural transformation that had been under way since the Jacksonian era. Born in 1833 in New England, she was in her teens during the 1848 Declaration of Sentiments and saw how the Civil War furthered female visibility in the public sphere.12 This makes her a member of what was perhaps the most interesting generation of nineteenth-century American women.

8

Regarding the prejudice she encountered as a physician and her growing acceptance in that role see Schwartz (1984: 14 and 17). The theory that war provided a foundation for modern feminism is discussed by Drew Gilpin Faust (1998: 128-132).

9

In 1862 this was fairly routine behavior for a woman “with aspirations” like Hawks. Regarding the self-positioning of Hawks’s predecessors, the Jacksonian-era generation of women who followed a particular spiritual leader in order to retain their agency, see Smith-Rosenberg (1985: 144-164).

10

Regarding Milton Hawks see Rose (1998: 185).

11

I refrain from rehearsing the widely recognized debate between the former two at this

12

She lived long enough (Hawks passed away in 1906) to experience how the ideal of True

point. Womanhood was relegated to nostalgia.

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In 1975 the three volumes that now make up Hawks’s A Woman Doctor’s Civil War were accidentally found in a trash bin. They were found to provide rare insight into the historical significance of that generation of “Civil War women” that had just begun to become an object of scholarly interest. Unlike most diaries of this era, Hawks’s describes much more than a woman’s personal battles at the home front: covering the period from October 1862 to November 1866, the diary sheds light on the Port Royal Experiment, a missionary, educational, and economic enterprise on the South Carolina portion of the Sea Islands13 that C. Vann Woodward has called “a dress rehearsal for Reconstruction.” The region became a meeting place for an unusual social mixture that included not only missionaries from various backgrounds and circa ten thousand so-called contrabands but also soldiers and officers from the Union army who were stationed there. In this Reconstruction rehearsal, when neither the duration of the war nor its outcome were known, the debate about whether a former slave was “to be entirely free at all, and if free, whether he was to be a serf, a laborer, a land owner, a citizen, a soldier, a voter, an officeholder” (Woodward 1999: xi-xiii) was largely unrestrained: because the contrabands were not free in the legal sense (their status defined them as neither free nor enslaved) their ambivalent position encouraged a particularly candid discussion of their further destiny (see Rose 1998: 15).14 That slavery had been particularly brutal on the Sea Islands15 did not facilitate interracial interaction and influenced the behavior of all people involved. All of this, then, must be taken into consideration whenever one looks into the particular features of the interracial negotiations on these islands. Hawks was one of only a few white women on these islands, and her “daily jottings” not only describe her work as a doctor and teacher among the freed slaves but served a number of psychological purposes as well, helping her to deal with her loneliness and estrangement and offering an outlet for her daily worries—she repeatedly complains about her marriage, releasing her anger and frustration on the empty pages. And yet her diary is not primarily a private document but, first and foremost, an act of resistance that aspired to being recognized on a public plane, and that turned against the inadequate, or even counterproductive, cultural and symbolic conventions of the late Victorian era in America. Combining claims to authenticity with entertaining elements borrowed from popular fiction, Hawks seems to have aimed at a larger readership from the very beginning. Since she never published the book she did not learn what readers thought about its awkward mixture of generic modes. Wavering between fact and fiction and alternating between various narrative conventions and

13

These islands stretch along the South Carolina, Georgia, and Florida shorelines.

14

Only in 1863 were they officially declared freedmen.

15

Slaves had been forced to convert the wooded islands and salt marshes into cotton and rice fields, and escape from bondage was virtually impossible.

 

   

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textual determinants, the diary displays an unresolved struggle to imaginatively solve America’s virulent political and social problems. While for the scholar of culture there is much to be learned from the diary’s formal flaws, they nevertheless threaten to distract us from the author’s unusual sensibility and critical awareness of the era’s interracial complexities. Hawks was genuinely interested in the daily lives of the liberated slaves and emphasized the importance of personal relationships across the color-line. This approximation to the “race problem” differed significantly from the military, economic, and legal Reconstruction program that would later aim to restore the Union, transform southern society, and recognize the rights of freed slaves. And yet Hawks was not free from contemporary ideological constraints; on the contrary: her diary may be considered another site of her de facto exile, and an effort to redefine her position as a white female reformer from within the essentially racist and patriarchal tradition she had been brought up with. She enthusiastically embraced the idea of racial uplift and was not exempt from the discourse of white superiority; she must in fact be considered an active contributor to the nineteenth-century discourse of imperialism. At the same time, Hawks’s ideological self-positionings and literary choices had much to do with the gender-specific limitations she experienced. This links her work to mid-nineteenth-century female colonial travel writing which drew on the “dominant discursive formations” while nevertheless remaining “excluded from full adoption of them” because of the author’s “position within the discourse of the feminine” (Mills 1991: 22, 96). Hawks, it seems, became increasingly aware of her limited options when trying to give an authentic voice to her experience. She, in typical Victorian fashion, cast her lines as spontaneous, daily jottings, hoping to be able to publish her narrative by positioning it as a light-hearted report of an abolitionist’s adventures among the ex-slaves. Her voice is nevertheless often tentative and marked by multiple constraints. We can of course only speculate that she would have maintained the book’s adventurous and at times unstable character if she had published it during her lifetime. The edited text can best be considered as what Catherine Gallagher and Stephen Greenblatt have programmatically termed a “significant artifact” (2000: 14) of a particular culture, a textual trace from the “mass of traces” that constitutes American Reconstruction as a cultural text with its own “history of possibilities” (ibid.: 14, 16). While what makes this diary so particularly “significant” can only be found out in the course of analysis (ibid: 15), its unorthodox mixture of truthfulness and fiction suggests some degree of flexibility and playfulness on the part of its author, a “certain independence” and “limited immunity from the policing functions” of her society (ibid.: 16-17). Because of its unfinished status, A Woman Doctor’s Civil War is of particular value for the contemporary cultural scholar: hampered by gender-specific and political constraints, Hawks’s diary opens a window into the complicated, and ultimately dynamic, architecture of the Reconstruction mind. As one significant aspect of this architecture, the text negotiates a white

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woman’s moral and political principles as well as her struggle to live up to the truthfulness that is the implied law of any autobiographical genre while at the same time holding back her “unwomanly” anger. Far from being a mere act of self-definition in an alien environment, Hawks’s diary is particularly meaningful when it is viewed as the public text it always wanted to be. Because of gender-specific constraints that complicated nineteenth-century writings about cultural contact (see Mills 1991: 39), there is an occasional clash between the conventions of patriotic and reformist discourse and other discourses like femininity and feminism. These clashes as primarily responsible for the diary’s unusual, idiosyncratic structure and, possibly, for its failure to be published during Reconstruction. In addition to such a reading, this chapter wishes to complicate established notions of that era by privileging relationship-oriented aspects of the Second Founding. This strategy turns the diary into an individual effort to discuss the status quo of social relations in the South Carolina Sea Islands and to imaginatively reconstruct the nation at large. It thereby sets the course for an increasingly multifaceted analysis that examines the immediate connection between the Reconstruction discourses of race, gender, and citizenship. How did Hawks define her role as a white woman in the male-dominated, quasi-colonial society in the Sea Islands? What were the implications of her self-positioning with regard to postbellum nation-building? What were the tropes and structures she relied on to come to terms with the complexities of the past and present, and with the uncertainties of the future?


 
 

   
 
In line with an older American tradition, Hawks’s diary combines the individual, psychological needs of its author with the democratic claim of full citizenship for all people.16 Seeking to establish a sense of conspiracy and recognition among potential (female) readers, it fuses the sense of intimacy that is intrinsic to the genre with sentimental thrill and sensation. Elements from popular genres such as the adventure story, the (female) success story, and the slave narrative, are among the diary’s most obvious signals toward a larger readership.

16

I am extending Alfred Hornung’s definition of “minority” autobiographies as “democratic” to also include more fictional texts. According to Hornung the autobiographic genre allows an individual to fully represent him- or herself even if he or she has no voice in the realm of politics. (1990: 249). Thomas Couser (1979) makes a similar argument with regard to American autobiographies in general. Given the annotations by relatives and friends, nineteenth-century diaries and journals were not considered private in any absolute sense.

 

   

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Importantly, however, A Woman Doctor’s Civil War is visibly unedited, a work in progress that provides rare and revealing glimpses into the mental adaptation processes practiced by one woman living at the beginning of an era of unprecedented changes in American politics, society, and culture. In line with a more general observation regarding the diary as genre (see Bunkers and Huff 1996: 8), Hawks assimilated the pattern and style of her writing to changes in her psychological and social situation. Wavering between individual soul-searching and fictionalization, A Woman Doctor’s Civil War is but a first draft of an unfinished literary nation-building project, resonating with its author’s self-assuring reflections on her choice of structure, story, and tone. Seeking to capture the dynamics of her experiences on a dayto-day basis, the narrator continuously documents modifications of earlier convictions and revises passages that appeared many pages (and weeks or even months) earlier. This tentativeness and provisionality does not express ideological wavering but a—traditionally female—reaction to “disciplinary pressure, tending to exhibit a concern with displaying the ‘self’” (Mills 1991: 19). This disciplinary pressure caused the few women among that “conflicted and little organized group of philanthropists, missionaries, politicians, military leaders, and fortune seekers” of the Port Royal Experiment to move in a different discursive framework than the men. While crowding “to contest with each other over the destiny of the emancipated slaves” (Woodward 1999: xiii),17 many of these male and female helpmates took to various forms of life writing to sort out all the new experience. Women’s diaries, however, also aimed at securing their white middle-class respectability. When Esther stays in a particularly untidy New York hotel she comments on this precarious transgression with “a bow in the direction of the feminine” (see Mills 1991: 19, 72, and 98) and uses irony when referring to “[r]ooms that smell of tobacco smoke and beds that show an innocence of any recent acquaintance with water” (31). Yet the problem of spending a night in such an—admittedly “unwomanly”—hotel is quickly dismissed as mere “disagreeables” and “trifles” against the higher purpose Hawks is serving. She also downplays

17

In her admirably nuanced study, Willie Lee Rose examines the tensions between abolitionists as “in a considerable degree attributable to the fundamental difference between the outlook of the New York organization, which rapidly formed connections with the Western movement, and that of the Boston wing, which had grown up in intellectual partnership with transcendentalism and had its spiritual roots in ‘liberal’ Christianity” (1998: 73). The Hawks spouses belonged to the New York group. Among the former white inhabitants of the Sea Islands were many outspoken secessionists including the poet and proslavery advocate William J. Grayson. Grayson’s poem The Hireling and the Slave (1856), a defense of slavery set in the Sea Islands, had led to a widespread association of the “peculiar institution” with that area. See Joe Lockard (2004-12).

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the situation by stating that she is only one among “several other women” with “the same missin [sic]18,” most of whom “had been out before” and are therefore “a great support” to an innocent newcomer like herself (31). When these women eventually embark on the boat that takes them South, they are contrasted sharply with the “men passengers” who share a “spirit of adventure” (31):19 seasick and drowned amid a “pile of baggage” (32) that symbolically turns the public sphere into the private, this group of female philanthropists becomes a “very limp and forlorn looking” (32) company that accords perfectly with the Victorian ideal of female frailty and domesticity. At this early point in the diary we cannot yet discern the motifs that will grow into that “clash between discourses of femininity and discourses of feminism” that the diary shares with much female colonial travel writing (ibid.: 72). Yet considering Esther’s 1861 humiliation by Dorothea Dix, her chosen role of meek missionary is easily discerned as strategic: Esther left the North immediately after her husband had become “assistant [contract] surgeon and the physician of the First South Carolina Infantry, the first regiment of blacks to be mustered into the U.S. army” (SchroederLein 2008: 127). A woman of ambitions, she cannot possibly have overlooked the potential loophole that opened up before her. Both her biographical experience20 and the timing of her departure suggest that she hoped to work beside Milton as a doctor among the contrabands. She knew, of course, that a white woman working as a doctor among black men risked being ostracized. Like other adventurous ladies of her generation she therefore casts her ambition and “rebelliousness” in religious terms: “having firm faith in the belief that I was born to be a missionary, I decided that the time had arrived for me to sacrifice myself” (31). In the story that follows, however, neither self-sacrifice nor religion play a role. Helped by the fact that “military officials were at best uninterested in people of color” and “looked the other way” (Schultz 2004: 16), Esther was able to practice among the predominantly black soldiers and residents of the islands. This made her the only white female doctor to nurse AfricanAmerican soldiers during the Civil War, and one of only thirteen Northern and three Southern women with medical training who served as military doctors.

18

Esther Hill Hawks’s spelling and punctuation include many flaws and inconsistencies. In order to maintain her individual “voice” as nearly as possible I have followed Gerald Schwartz’s transcription and will from now on eschew “[sic]” notations when quoting directly from her diary.

19

Regarding the role of the “bold adventuring hero of male travel texts” and women’s nar-

20

She had relied on Milton before when she needed a helpmate to spur her otherwise im-

rative roles see Mills (1991: 22). probable professional career: when she took over his medical practice in the late 1850s, her husband’s former patients knew themselves to be under the good care of another “Hawks.”

 

   

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While Hawks is by far less indebted to nineteenth-century sentimental discourse than, say, Harriet Beecher-Stowe, she nevertheless relies on a strategy that Stephen Greenblatt refers to as a manipulation of a culture’s symbolic economy. As a nineteenth-century product of and contributor to the matrix of American culture, Hawks’s diary takes “symbolic materials from one zone of the culture and moves them to another, augmenting their emotional force, altering their significance, linking them with other materials taken from a different zone, changing their place in a larger social design” (Greenblatt 1990: 230). To make her experiences both individually and nationally meaningful, Hawks negotiates a set of established symbols that define “America” as an exceptional and unique culture and suggests alternative images, rituals, and linguistic formulas. As Nelson has pointed out, this “active literacy” should become a defining feature of women’s writing during the American Civil War (1997). In line with the patriotic creed of the day, Hawks aligns her personal venture with the iconography of American exceptionalism: the image of a pioneering people, the early encounter with the natives, Manifest Destiny—tropes that conjure up the mythical concept of a new beginning that is at once dynamic and inevitable. Yet instead of merely joining in with mainstream nineteenth-century receptions of America’s proud history of settlement and revolution, she feminizes these events, thereby replacing the gendered constraints that a female travel writer was inevitably confronted with. Hawks begins her story with a familiar departure scene: fashioning herself as a “full-blooded native whose ancestry can be traced back to the American revolution” (Schwartz 1984: 3), she perceives the city of New York as a port of entry, a transit zone for a certain class of foreigners whose habits made this deteriorated, amoral American Babel. Doubtless, the “citty upon a hill” has lost its original vigor. Relying on the narrative structure and symbolic implications of America’s foundational myths, the adventurous heroine then indulges in the idea of a Second Founding, a rewinding of American history under female supervision. This time it is the Northern doctor and schoolmarm who embarks on a journey to the Promised Land21 or, to quote from Rose’s Rehearsal for Reconstruction, plays the part of “tutelary goddess of American liberty” and goes South “to build there a new New England, replete with Yankee institutions.”22 Hawks’s feminized version of the Puritans’ journey(s) resorts to the aforementioned discourse of female dependence and frailty: describing how the small and

21

On the mythical dimensions of the journey motif in the American literary tradition see Bercovitch (1975); Chase (1957); Simonson (1970); and Stout (1983).

22

Edward Atkinson, “The Reign of King Cotton” (1961: 454), quoted in Rose (1998: 229). By 1863, 2500 children were being taught in the Sea Islands, along with many more adults. Cf. ibid., 85, 203, 230, 323, 365.

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overloaded Delaware was lost in a storm, she proves to be anything but a female John Winthrop. Her belief in a higher calling starts to shake when she becomes seasick, and when “[m]easles [break] out among the soldiers who were crowded into the least possible space, […] for a time all the enthusiasm and romance [is] washed out.” Upon her arrival she feels “more strongly than ever, that [she] had mistaken [her] mission.” (32) The next morning, however, Esther resumes the tomboyish tone that nineteenthcentury female authors often relied on as a means of downplaying “risky” behavior and integrates her hardship into America’s mythic repertoire: in a picturesque scene the “forlorn looking party” of women is transformed into a “sturdy band of pioneers” who are taken on a “gay little tug-boat—very much bedecked with flags and bunting” which brings them “up the beautiful river Beaufort—to the little city of the same name” (32). At this point Esther fashions herself most fully as a female “accomplice” 23 to the patriarchal North: by helping to uphold the northern claim of moral superiority she does what missionaries always do in the context of armed conflict: “[w]here they preceded the army, they pacified the population; where they followed the army, they consolidated the conquest” (Bercovitch 1975: 140). Missionary societies were deeply patriarchal organizations: in 1861, “the sending of ladies [was] as yet an experiment” in the eyes of the organizers.24 Hawks quickly realized that her education and professional experience counted little among her group of mainly male reformers. (Her Washington experience may have sharpened her senses for gender-related inequality when she saw it).25 Immediately after she set foot on the South Carolina shore, her initial “female” voice switches to a markedly feminist one. Here is how she describes her group of women being “welcomed” by a “most comical,” “beardless young fellow” who assumes leadership simply on the grounds of his gender: I looked at the boy, then at the core of resolute looking women and the pile of baggage—and my thoughts ran something in this wise—Oh, what a big thing it is to be born a man! We all meekly followed his directions—two ambulances and a cart were in waiting into which we were packed—and we started for the “Home”—where we soon arrived, were counted and left on deposit ‘till called for. (32-33)

Written a few days after Hawks’s arrival in Hilton Head (during and immediately after her journey she had been too busy to write), the passage transforms her anger

23

I rely on Renate Hof’s use of this term (1995: 73).

24

Edward L. Pierce to Salmon P. Chase, February 21, 1862, quoted in Rose (1998: 44).

25

Carol Faulkner (2004) describes how, during the Civil War and Reconstruction years, abolitionist women were systematically and increasingly marginalized to secure male political influence.

 

   

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into a biting criticism that—remarkably—includes the “sheepish” behavior of her own sex. Yet the scene is also an effort to appropriate the Puritans’ primal scene, the pioneers’ encounter with the natives, to feminist ends. The diary here relies on a strategy had already been used by an earlier generation of female writers, including Catharine Sedgwick and Lydia Maria Child:26 both author’s offered readings of early American history that challenged the myth of Puritan superiority over Native Americans in order to create an imaginary space for a less hierarchical version of gender relations.27 In Hawks’s more complicated version of the mythical arrival scene, the “other country” is significantly not feminized, and the native waiting at the shore is an old acquaintance—a male other from the women’s own race and region. The encounter sets the tone for the diary as a whole: the man’s behavior is hopelessly anachronistic. Thus although the newcomers “meekly” follow his orders, he appears doomed (in line with the cultural myth of the Indian), and the reader can hope for the women’s eventual triumph over the (male, white) “natives.” Although the diary does not develop this particular feminist appropriation of national mythology any further, the episode must be counted among the author’s ongoing efforts to appropriate American myths in order to make Reconstruction a history of “Her” own. The passage is also important because it shows how strongly Hawks perceived of her new home in terms of a gendered space: seen through her eyes, the liberated Sea Islands resemble a human factory run by anxious white men obsessed with counting and categorizing the human capital they have “left on deposit ‘till called for.” This not only ridicules the “tendency of numerical accumulation to flatten out difference and distinction” that largely organized the relationship between individual and collective during the American Civil War (Dawes 2002: 26), but marks a paradigmatic counterpoint to what would become Esther’s way of “doing things”—an alternative practice of social interaction and interracial cooperation that will be examined in the course of this chapter. It is fascinating to see how, in the early part of Hawks’s diary, her feminism becomes the driving force behind her increasingly skeptical view of the white “liberators” on the Sea Islands. Like many female travel writers before her, Hawks seems to be caught in a “conflict with the discourse of ‘femininity’” that operates on her diary “in equal, and sometimes stronger, measure” than patriotism etc., leading to “contradictory elements” which “act as a critique of some of the components of other colonial writing” (Mills 1991: 63), including male reports on the Sea Island experiment (as will be shown later). 26 27

Regarding this feminist tradition see, for instance Kelly (1987: xxi-xxiii). I thank Ruth Mayer for pointing this out to me. For a discussion of these feminist appropriations see Kelly (1987: xxi-xxiii and 72); Matter-Seibel (2000); Samuels (2008), and Vásquez (2001).

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Hawks relied on her diary to confide her alienation from her surroundings. Such feelings had much to do with the male hegemony on these islands, a power structure that included legal measures that forbade women’s entry into Morris Island.28 To make things worse, Hawks’s altogether supportive husband directly and indirectly kept her from fully embracing her professional potential: when in September 1865 she was offered a promotion to the post of Assistant Superintendent for Florida schools, she feared his disapproval and resigned. Hawks was “stranded between exoticization and identification,” a dilemma that Ruth Mayer has described in her more general discussion of female colonial travel writing (Mayer 2002: 128).29 Suspended between the colonial order (which allows white women relative independence and feelings of racial superiority) and her (partial) identification with the colonized, Hawks (very much like Isak Dinesen decades later) “time and again evokes the utopia of establishing contact and yet staying detached, or of being in charge yet not altogether in control […]” (ibid. Mayer 2002: 123). As a result, Hawks’s diary tends to tell more about the author than she herself intended. Speaking from the position of white liberator and woman at the margins of a predominantly male environment, the narrating I30 emerges as a colonial figure that nevertheless struggles to mark and secure her place as full citizen in a utopian multiracial ensemble. Judging from the increasingly self-assured tone of the diary and the liberties taken by its author, life-writing became a means of female self-assurance and a means to cultivate “family feelings” toward the islands’ African-American community. Hawks thus invented, during long hours of loneliness, a hopeful, postslavery notion of white womanhood that was authorized by a multiracial network of social relations. One can only speculate that this active yearning, along with her very real assimilation to the social constellation on these islands, made her particularly receptive to the everyday realities of African American lives under Northern “protection.”




28

Implemented by General Schimmelpfennig, the law virtually banned women from stepping on shore. Schimmelpfennig was a supporter of the 1848 revolution in Germany who escaped to Switzerland, where he met Carl Schurz. The two of them then fled to England and later emigrated to the United States. See Schwartz, footnote 94 in Hawks 92.

29 30

Mayer here investigates this mechanism with regard to Isak Dinesen’s Out of Africa. I will use this term throughout this project to highlight the complex composition of the autobiographical I. According to Julia Watson and Sidonie Smith, the latter needs to be divided into narrated I, narrating I, and multiple selves. (2001:58-61).

 

   

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Hawks’s diary approximates these realities through the lens of an established genre: the antebellum plantation novel. She may even have experienced life in the liberated Sea Islands in that established Northern fashion that acknowledged Southern culture by praising its “well kept yards and beautiful gardens” and its “[m]ansions furnished with almost princely magnificense [sic]—whole libraries full of costly books” (33). Such fantasies not only anticipate postbellum efforts to rhetorically reconcile the nation but dissociate Hawks from her fellow Northerners as she gestures toward a more civilized, aristocratic (white) South. And while she does not deny that behind the romantic scenery stands an occasional “whipping post” (43), and that the “pretty” schoolhouse on the plantation was “one of the show places, for the many visitors who came to Camp Saxon” (42) she also laments the raw brutality of the Northern troops that destroyed the towns and “mistreated” a divine Southern landscape (35). The primary target of her accusations, however, is the behavior of the white Union soldiers on the Sea Islands, who heaped every indignity which human ingenuity could devise […] upon the poor negroes, who had hailed their coming so joyfully—and during the first year of our soldiers coming the blacks probably suffered more from their tyranny and insults, than ever in their lives before (34).

This description counters the official representation of the Sea Islands at that time, which was dominated by celebratory reports of abolition and the formation of the first black regiment under General David Hunter.31 As one of only a few whites with firsthand knowledge of events, Hawks attests to how former slaves were forced into the ranks rather than joining voluntarily. She was particularly knowledgeable about the treatment of the troops because, soon after her arrival on the islands, she turned from teaching to helping her husband care for patients in the newly founded hospital for colored troops. When wounded black soldiers arrived there in large numbers she could demonstrate her medical skill, and she eventually became a contract physician there. In addition to her professional commitment to black patients she saw herself as an incorruptible historical witness and addressed a particularly contentious topic:

31

General Hunter had organized the first slave regiment only a few months before Hawks’s arrival. Hunter’s praise of the soldiers’ military aptitude and devotion to the cause influenced popular perception. The situation lasted only until the end of 1862, when Butler’s successor, General Nathaniel P. Banks, replaced black officers with white men. See Ira Berlin, et al., eds. (1998: 27). On racial hierarchy in the Union army see also Glatthaar (1992). On the forceful first “Negro draft” see Rose (1998: 146).

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“[n]o colored woman or girl was safe from the brutal lusts of the [white] soldiers— and by soldiers I mean both officers and men” (34). As Thomas P. Lowry has shown, the rape of contraband women was a common crime, and black women were often forced into relationships with white officers (1994).32 Hawks adopted her role as a spokesperson for the mostly illiterate black women at a very early point in her stay. When Hawks found out that white women in her circle, too, were not entirely safe from sexual molestation33 she came to understand that sexual violence was also a structural problem in an exclusively male organization, and she despaired in the face of her own powerlessness: [T]here are now several women in our little hospital who have been shot by soldiers for resisting their vile demands. One poor old woman but a few months since, for trying to protect her daughter against one of these men was caught by her hair and as she still struggled, shot through the shoulder. She is still in Hospital. No one is punished for these offences for the officers are as bad as the men. Many such instances have come to my knowledge […]. (34)

One year later, in fall 1863, she observed that the man recently put in command of the hospital (a “young, inefficient disipated negro-hating tyrant”), together with his German-American steward, “had a pretty colored girl to minister to their private

32

Lowry has a tendency to mix historical sources and fictional accounts, yet his chapter on rape is firmly founded on historical records. According to his book there “is evidence that there was less rape during the Civil War than in comparable conflicts,” in part because soldiers faced “the likely fate of hanging or shooting if arrested” (1994: 123). Nevertheless, rape was a common crime committed by Union soldiers while passing through the South. They especially targeted African-American women, with whom they were “positively fascinated” (ibid.: 84). According to Lowry, “[t]he psychology [of Northern troops] seemed a mixture of forbearance towards whites plus a wish to prove to both blacks and whites that the white masters (and mistresses) could not protect their property” (130)–a motivation that did not apply to the situation on the Sea Islands, since they had been abandoned by most of their white population by the time the Union army arrived. Yet in a cultural climate that considered African-American women promiscuous, and in which soldiers faced a lower penalty if the woman they raped was black, there was not much disincentive to commit this major crime. Regarding voluntary liaisons across the color line in the nineteenth-century South, and the accompanying stereotypes, see Hodes (1997).

33

The rape of white women was comparatively rare during the Civil War because men directed their aggression against the more helpless black women. As Hawks shows in her diary, however, white soldiers could do as they pleased without having to fear serious punishment. Cf. Lowry (1994: 123-131).

 

   

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wants” (55). As the diary explains, there was nothing to be done to stop the men, although both black patients and white nurses filed complaints against them. The diary describes an absolute male hegemony that secures its power through immoral and illegal acts of violence, ignorance, and the marginalization of white women. When she realizes her lack of agency, Hawks leaves the hospital—“much to [her] own and the patients regret” (55). This personal failure, that she experienced during her first weeks and months on the Sea Islands, was far worse than anything she had formerly been acquainted with. In the face of daily horror and tragedy and overcome by her own impotence and vulnerability, Hawks sought refuge in the diary’s testimonial function. Yet she also recognized the vast cultural rift that severed her from the Gullah population: after filling several pages with ethnographic and political hypotheses regarding the “true […] character of these people” (36) she concluded that “[i]t is a difficult thing to give a clear synopsis of the peculiar characteristics of the negro after even a year’s study into their habits and disposition” (37). This does not keep her from suggesting parallels between the experiences of white women and the lives of blacks in the Sea Islands: in a move faintly reminiscent of earlier nineteenth-century writers but far less sentimental and self-apologetic (see Samuels 1992: 191-202), Hawks challenges the “Adamic myth” and its “conquest over nonwhite males and women of any color” (ibid.). It is hardly surprising that Hawks developed this vision through recourse to Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin. She thereby followed what has been identified as a more general nineteenth-century trend: Stowe’s groundbreaking novel was a motor for many aspiring female authors in nineteenth-century America, as its success enabled them to (as Helen Grey Cone put it in 1891, in “Woman and Literature”) “hold the pen more firmly, to move it more freely” (qtd. in Young 1999: 24). Hawks’s experiences among the freedmen, however, not only made her move her pen “more freely” but eventually made her stray away from Stowe’s text altogether. As Milton travelled frequently, Esther often found herself alone with the freedpeople and with the few other teachers and missionaries who worked among them.34 Particularly at the beginning of her stay, she describes her encounters in blatantly racist terms: “the negroes of these Sea Islands are of the lowest type—the flattest nosed and thickest lipped—accompanied by the numbest sculls, any where [sic] to be met with in America” (38). Significantly, however, such views are soon replaced by more sophisticated albeit problematic imagery of intercultural relations. Hawks, it seems, was very much aware that without a child of her own, and often working as a schoolteacher,35 she came dangerously close to embodying the “Aunt

34

For more information on John Milton Hawks’s reformist activities see “Introduction and

35

Regarding the role of adult education in the Port Royal Experiment see Rachal (1986).

Editorial Policy” in Hawks vii-26.

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Ophelia” image of the matronly spinster. Theoretically, she could have dissociated herself from this unfavorable stereotype by casting herself as a “motherly” and caring female doctor, but such an image (that mixed the notion of mother with higher education and female professionalism) was not yet part of the established cultural repertoire.36 She instead aligned herself with an equally popular female martyr-figure, Longfellow’s “Evangeline.” Centering on a self-sacrificial daughter’s quest for her lover, the 1847 poem “Evangeline—A Tale of Acadie” had been extremely popular in antebellum America where it served as “vicarious vehicle of the plight of enslaved black people” (Seelye 1984: 43). Hawks significantly authorizes her identification with this figure via another’s perception: Mr. Henry, a young preacher, “enquired if I had ever seen the picture of ‘Evangeline’ […] because, he added, ‘as you stand there your head reminds me of it’” (68).37 By fashioning herself along the lines of selfsacrificial femininity, Hawks skillfully replaces the haunting image of the childless spinster. At the same time, however, Hawks’s mentioning of Longfellow’s Evangeline gestures toward that other, by far more saintly character from Uncle Tom’s Cabin, the child-heroine Little Eva.38 Hawks’s flirtation with the image of the angelic child has crucial meaning because it is used as an introduction to a lengthy and highly dramatic discussion of Esther’s childlessness. The diarist in fact prays to God to give her a child of her own (“something to love”) so that she may develop the “softening purifying influences” that went along with the ideology of motherhood. Her desperation expressed more than personal regret during an era that celebrated “true” women as “maternal guardians of virtue and domesticity” (Bederman 1995: 11); “to break through the bonds which chain [love]” (68) meant touching the world with the civilizing powers of feminine sensibility. For the childless Esther there was only one way to touch the world in an equally powerful manner: by rhetorically becoming a child, Esther metaphorically attains the capacity for unprejudiced love that her culture reserved to mothers and children alone.

36

Regarding the influence of the ideology of motherliness in Uncle Tom’s Cabin upon other writers cf. Ammons (1996). As a woman in a presumably “male” profession, Hawks could not embrace this ideology as straightforwardly as other writers (e.g. Louisa May Alcott).

37

The remark probably refers to Thomas Faed’s 1854 oil painting that was reproduced as an engraving by his brother James in 1854, and that became popular in 1860 and 1863, when it was reproduced by the American firm, Currier & Ives. I am indebted to Ashley Reed who has directed my attention to Longfellow’s poem and its cultural repercussions.

38

As John Seelye has pointed out, this figure has inspired Longfellow’s sentimental character as it, too, focuses on a disrupted (white) family. See also McFarland (2010: 36-60). Cf. also “exile without an end …,” Uncle Tom’s Cabin and American Culture. Longfellow’s Evangeline (online).

 

   

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Like a grown Evangeline—in either the Longfellow or Stowe version of that figure—Hawks aims her civilizing love-power at African Americans. “I am convinced,” she writes, that “save through love no one can be an efficient laborer among these people” (116). Interestingly, however, she eventually abandons the Little Eva figure. As a radical abolitionist she may have sensed the ultimate weakness of a narrative that climaxes in the death of its most hopeful character.39 Instead, the diary turns to the angelic child’s complementary other, the unruly Topsy—a character that, as Young has pointed out, made “an appearance, as passing citation, extended reference, [or] implicit intertext” in “the majority of women’s writings about the war” (Young 1999: 24). This is how Hawks renders the famous scene from Uncle Tom’s Cabin: She comes the nearest to Mrs. Stow’s ‘Topsye’40 of any child I have ever seen. She is constantly “turning up” in unlooked for moments and places, and often as we sit, in the early twilight she will bob her head in with a comical, “Call me marm” well knowing we had’nt, and quietly curl herself up on the mat offering to sing “Bob Bidly,” dance or stand on her head and put one foot up “like the boys do marm” if we wont laugh. One day when she was hanging around Miss Buttrick thought best to look a little into her theology—so began the catecism with the usual “Who made you!” God marm, “Well Topsy41, who is God?” With a broad grin and a whirl on one toe “O, he’s de fine gentleman what makes all de folks marm.” (150)

Hawks’s “Topsye” (whose real name was Amy) is almost a copy of Stowe’s literary character; even the chronology of her singing, dancing, and answering mimic the fictional source of one of the most persistent black stereotypes. As Young has pointed out, the figure was particularly attractive for white women who enjoyed the “vision of girlhood freed from femininity to masculinity” embodied by Topsy. A quintessentially theatrical character (“stage Topsies” abounded during this time), the “goblin girl” is best understood as a blackface figure who enabled “fantasies of white female rebellion” (Young 1999: 36-37). While all of this applies to Hawks’s “Topsye,” too, the diary adds still another aspect that has to do with the interracial dimension and the presumed authenticity of the conversation that Hawks claims to have witnessed. By fashioning herself as a mere observer, the diary’s author defines herself against

39

As Ann Douglas has famously argued, the little girl’s death was “part of a protest against slavery [which] in no way hinder[ed] the working of that system.” (1977: 12). Regarding the twentieth-century controversy surrounding Eva’s death see Wexler (1992: 1-12).

40

Regarding the spelling see the following footnote.

41

Hawks, whose spelling is unorthodox in general, uses two variations of the name throughout her diary. In what follows I will refer to “Topsye” to distinguish Hawks’s appropriation from Stowe’s text.

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the cliché of the emotionally alienated female spinster and theoretical antislavery activist and emphasizes her superior ability to access reality. Thus, although the scene recuperates the comic elements of the minstrel stereotype that Stowe’s famous character is built upon,42 it also signals a desire to look behind the novel’s distorting mirror, which defined African Americans as naïve and slow-witted. A comparison might help clarify the difference between the two texts. This is how Stowe staged the conversation between the white visitor from the North, Miss Ophelia, and her “goblinlike” student, Topsy: “‘Do you know who made you?’ ‘Nobody, as I knows of,’ said the child, with a short laugh” (Stowe 1995: 224). Hawks’s alternative—and presumably more authentic—“Topsye” character, however, knows her catechism, and therefore leaves her white guardians in a state of speechless amazement: “further queries were indefinitely postponed” (150). Authorized by the authenticating gaze of the historical witness (Hawks), the child’s keen reply discloses the idea of an uncivilized, godless race as a white projection. By documenting the bizarre encounter, the narrating I once more aligns herself with the black community whose cultural codes and strategies she claims to understand. If Hawks’s adaptation of Stowe’s bestseller was a step toward cross-racial recognition, it also reveals her ambivalence toward African Americans. This ambivalence emerged within a context in which, according to Rose, “playing ‘Sambo’” was extremely widespread among the freed slaves, and a refusal to do so “incurred many risks” (Rose 1998: 130). Judging from her diary, Hawks often witnessed this practice (“playing Sambo”), and the more she saw of it the more it seems to have puzzled her. The diary deals with this confusion by repeating Stowe’s description of Topsy like a mantra, as if repetition was a key to the child’s bizarre show. At the same time, however, she notes the girl’s efforts to please her audience, and the control she exerts so subversively, with clear amazement and admiration. Schooled in identifying what Henry Louis Gates (1988) has termed “signifying” one can easily read Amy’s performance as a carnivalesque reversal of a white fantasy, an instance of the subversive African-American tradition of “mimicry.” Approaching the girl by way of Stowe’s text, Hawks identifies a “shrewd[ness], and cunning” similar to that which the famous author had attached to her character,43 but she explains this behavior as a survival strategy derived from interracial interaction: “Topsye,” she notes, “knows quite well how to take care of No. 1” (150). Unlike Stowe’s Aunt Ophelia character, Hawks does not “civilize” the “goblin child,” nor does she delete her from the American

42

Compare Jim O’Loughlin, “Grow’d Again: Articulation and the History of Topsy,” Uncle Tom’s Cabin and American Culture (online).

43

“The expression of her face was an odd mixture of shrewdness and cunning, over which was oddly drawn, like a kind of veil, an expression of the most doleful gravity and solemnity” (Stowe 1995: 221).

 

   

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cultural landscape by fantasizing about her “return” to Africa. This is all the more significant when one considers Milton’s support of the “colonization” movement. (He was very engaged in this endeavor and would even travel to Haiti to negotiate better living conditions for the newly arrived freedmen.)44 And although Esther “sometimes talk[s] of sending [Amy] over to the ‘Home’” (a sort of orphanage for homeless children), she never takes action to do so: “she is so desirous to stay with us, I hardly know how to decide!” (150). Critically speaking, Hawks increases the power of the colonial gaze by symbolically breaking the mirrors which constituted Stowe’s Topsy in order to see the real girl. On the other hand, this rhetorical destruction is a prerequisite for the boundless interracial “love” that (as this chapter will show) would become a crucial aspect of this diary. Having found a key to “Topsye’s” unmediated difference, Hawks became increasingly attached to and fascinated by the girl. When “[p]oor Amy (our Topsy) is in disgrace—accused of stealing money of the matron—and in close confinement, up in a little attic, living on bread and water” (163), Hawks talks to and comforts her, believes her version of the story, and openly advocates her innocence. One can speculate that Hawks even identified with the girl because of her own familiarity with strategies of female performance. This may have helped her do something literally that Stowe never managed to do metaphorically: in her diary, Hawks by and large overcomes her fascination with black female bodies as projections of female unruliness (cf. Young 1999: 24-68) and develops in its place a true interest in the human complexity of those she wishes to educate. Undeniably, however, this interest remained entangled in a messiness of interracial projections and expectations: as a white doctor among black patients, and a white teacher among black pupils, Hawks was neither able nor willing to discuss the white privilege which inhered in the position for which she had fought so vigorously. In the course of her diary Hawks stabilizes her position symbolically not only by referring to Stowe’s Topsy on a regular basis but by claiming the role of Stowe’s more progressive successor: after about two and a half years on the Sea Islands Hawks authorized herself as another white author of black lives. In the course of time, her individual portraits came to lose much of the romantic racism of her earlier accounts. The most notable of these individual portraits is the story of “Susan Black” (154-155). Hawks had encountered that woman in the school where she taught after serving in the hospital. Significantly designed as a titled chapter within the diary, the narrative employs a sobering, descriptive style that lacks the sentimental impact of Stowe’s novel. It chronicles the brutal rape of the then twelve-year-old girl, Susan, by her master, the birth of her son, and the physical violence she suffered when she

44

There is no support for Gerald Schwartz’s claim that Esther shared her husband’s viewpoint. Compare Schwartz (1984: 13).

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did not become pregnant again. Possibly influenced by Harriet Jacobs’s 1861 Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, the chapter insists that such horrors continued far into the Civil War. The narrative climaxes when Susan’s new master reacts to her husband’s escape to the Union army: “he had her stripped naked, tied up and then with his own hands beat her ’till the fever of passion had subsided. Susan said he would take particular pains to beat her over the pubis; until she was terribly swollen and the blood run down her legs and stood in pools on the floor” (154). Covering two entire pages, “Susan Black” is a rare and shocking account of how the war affected slave women who did not make it to the contraband camps. When Susan and her husband are eventually reunited, the story symbolically acknowledges the black husband’s responsible behavior and manliness. In contrast to Stowe’s black characters, who only find personal happiness outside the United States, Hawks’s hopeful ending imagines the black couple’s new start in a reconstructed South. She describes them living under the protection of the Union troops—by then under new and more responsible leadership—“as quietly and happily as though they had only lived prosy ordinary lives like other people” (155). This is more than a mere celebration of white paternalism: written in June 1865, during the early presidency of Andrew Johnson (who wished to end Reconstruction before it had actually started), the story of “Susan Black” retroactively asserts the cause of the Union and the necessity to safeguard black rights. The chapter is just one of a whole series of stories about individual slaves. One month after the Susan Black incident, in August 1865, Hawks sums up the former lives of individual students, assembling them under their respective names. The resulting catalogue is Whitmanesque in its effort to represent the many. Among the list are five young male pupils whom she introduces as both individuals and representatives of their race: “each has a history a few facts of which I gathered from them which I will transcribe in the order in which I learned them” (176). Each of the boys then becomes the subject of a longer paragraph that describes his individual character, family background, and experience during slavery. The passage also includes the life story of a traumatized young girl who managed to escape from a sadistic master and “found friends among some colored people” but suffered from “fitts which have injured her senses” (177). Although abolitionists had always described the black population’s “deep feelings” in order to emphasize their place in the family of man, the diary’s programmatic spotlight on an extremely varied black population is exceptional: by describing a black individuals’ personal qualities and talents along with his or her suffering under slavery, Hawks symbolically frees the Gullah people from their official status of contraband, a term that, as was explained earlier, maintained the equation between African Americans and possessions. The singularity of Hawks’s cross-racial compassion and shared anger comes even more to the fore when set against the correspondence of Arthur Sumner, her teacher-

 

   

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colleague from St. Helena Island.45 Yet unlike Hawks, Sumner denied his black students a sense of agency and never questioned his racist views. In the light of Sumner’s June 15, 1863, letter to his friend Joseph Clark even Hawks’s earlier, racist views, appear significantly less hostile: The truth is these negroes are absolutely selfish. A mean lot, I think. Industrious enough; capable of independence; plucky enough, among themselves; but selfish, ungrateful, deceitful, hypocritical, and licentious. Of course I don’t mean to speak so of the whole race. But I can say that of those whom I have met. This opinion is no sudden change in my feelings. I think much better of them than I did before I came down here; and as to their capacity, my estimate rather increases than diminishes. But I have lost that liking for them which I had during my first acquaintance with them. When an anti-slavery man first mingles with these people, he is delighted; for he sees only the outside. They are habitually courteous and respectful—he is charmed with that and with their apparent humility. They tell the story of their wrongs and former sufferings; they talk religion most devoutly—he is touched. Then he writes beautiful articles for the Northern papers, in which the Negro is dressed out in a white garment of sanctity, with a halo—all stuff! These people are what Slavery has made them. I don’t blame them; but there they are. I am only astonished that they should be fit to live after such generations of mere animal life. A higher race would have lost all moral sense; would have some out of the system with all the negroes’ vices and many more. The negro is temperate, both in eating and drinking; prone to forgive injuries, or as you may say, not vindictive; fairly inclined to industry; not very affectionate (so far as I have observed) not deeply, but only warmly, religious:—very much as the most ignorant and superstitious of the Roman Catholics are. Very likely my children are as vicious as their parents. But if they are, I shut my eyes to it—the little darlings. The little black tots. They are some, let me tell you.

While it is not entirely fair to compare this example of white male bonding to a first draft of a diary aimed at future publication, there is nevertheless a very notable difference in how these two texts reflect the length of their author’s stay: the longer Hawks lived among the Beaufort community, the more careful became her observations, and the more dialogical and descriptive was her narrative mode. Over the course of time her diary evolved increasingly into an archive of black lives. While Sumner’s letters tell more about his attraction to his female pupils, who “look as trim and as pretty as if they were not black,” and about his disciplinary difficulties with

45

An individual focus on every pupil was a major educational aim of the group of educators to which Hawks belonged. See Arthur Sumner, “Letter to Nina Hartshorn, Port Royal, Dec. 26, 1863.” “We have, at present, about 120 scholars, and they, each one, receives separate attention every day.” Ibid.

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these “little black-birds”46 Hawks seeks to acknowledge the specific experience of individual pupils. Of course the role she embraces is one of patronage that helped confirm her moral authority in the culture. And yet making room for the “authentic” voices of the people she worked for was by no means the rule, especially among those who actually lived among the freedmen; writing about her time as a teacher on the Sea Islands, one Mrs. Wister remembers how she welcomed the whipping of undisciplined pupils and describes her voyeuristic pleasure as “a queer experience” (1926), Hawks—who as a doctor had seen outrageous examples of white violence imprinted on black bodies—never indulges in such scenes. And while her famous colleague, Laura Towne, was “much interested in spelling matches between classes and even between schools,”47 she takes a clear stand against such self-interested actions. On a loose sheet of paper inserted in her diary she critically relates how during a geometry session [t]heir teacher was quite anxious for me to test their knowledge so I do so, and many of the answers were quite satisfactory—pointing to the “spiral” at the end of the lesson I asked a bright little woolly head what it was—he looked very hard at it—eyed it side ways like a chicken— then flashing up his bright eyes, quickly he said “Its a spider Miss”—he seemed so thoroughly to enjoy his knowledge that I refrained from correcting him. The next little fellow—went through the chatechism evin better—and on coming to the intricate spiral boldly affirmed it to be a “squirrel.” The teachers eyed me suspiciously—but I could not refrain from smiling at this second deffinition—so I had to expose the ideal hallucinations of my little friends—this provoked an explanation of what the twisted scrol really meant, and I retired during the process. (Hawks 246, Footnote no 318, original spelling)48

While the passage of course reveals Hawks’s uncritical participation in the racial discourse of the era, her friendly humor and fundamental humanism differentiates her from most other white abolitionists whose “common experience,” according to Jane E. Schultz, “did little to foster sympathy between the races” (Schultz 2002: 220).49 Her own marginalization, but also the fact that she had witnessed black suffering at

46

Arthur Sumner. “Freedmen’s Record, St. Helena Island, May 21st, 1863.” and “Letter to

47

“Letter to Frances R. Cope, 24 April 1873.” Towne, who eventually spent her life among

Nina Hartshorn, St. Helena Island, November 22nd, 1862.” the Gullah freedmen, had joined the group as a representative of the Philadelphia committee but devoted most of her work to teaching. 48

Hawks is quoted here in a footnote by the editor.

49

Using a wide range of texts, Schultz emphasizes the racist undertones of female abolitionist rhetoric during the Civil War. While I agree with her general assessment, I perceive Hawks in slightly different terms.

 

   

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the hands of whites (from both regions) just at the beginning of her stay, may have made her more sensitive to the freedpeople’s concerns. There is thus reason to believe that her wish to be accepted among the black community was more than a mere mechanism of abolitionist self-aggrandizement. And yet she wished for her success story to be widely acknowledged: over the course of the text, Hawks’s desire for crossracial recognition grows into a major stylistic and metaphorical device.


  
  

    
While Hawks’s diary tells us much about race relations in the early Reconstruction South, its sober, largely descriptive tone should not be mistaken for an indication of authenticity and truthfulness: what social historians (who tend to read life writing as the straightforward recording of fact50) often overlook are its metaphorical aspects, its subversive borrowings from nineteenth-century literature, and the ironic undertone that laces the text. From a literary scholar’s viewpoint, the fact that Hawks wrote for an audience is crucial for the analysis of her diary. This female doctor, it seems, used this private format to not only render what she had witnessed as a truthful account of Southern Reconstruction but also to fashion herself as a woman in control of her life and text. One of the diary’s most striking features are notions of difference and singularity: by displaying a version of herself that was at once individualistic and humanitarian, Hawks suggested a new, democratic type. She negotiates this primarily in the context of the freedmen’s school where she began work as a teacher after she had left her occupation at the hospital. If the latter provided the stage upon which she could release her anger and express her frustration, the former suggests a particularly female alternative to the larger missionary enterprise of which she was, officially, a part. Her female success story, in other words, begins beyond the hospital (which is cast as a misogynist, potentially dangerous place for a woman), among the freedmen. Taking up Lydia Maria Child’s 1824 strategy of depicting the other culture as less patriarchal, stern, and ultimately more “civilized” than ones own51, she projects a social alternative that combines difference with an egalitarian notion of exchange. Hawks’s

50

Jane E. Schultz’s Women at the Front (2004) is an excellent analysis of the lives of women during the Civil War. But it is also an example of a kind of scholarship that focuses on a text’s informative aspects without paying much attention to the aesthetic choices women made, why they made them, and what that reveals about their fears, desires, and options as women in a conflicted social sphere who had decided to go public with their experiences.

51

Hobomok is the example I refer to here.

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very personal Port Royal Experiment replaces the Christian mission that drove most of her male companions52 with an ideal of secular education. Most importantly, however, it suggests a socioeconomic alternative to slavery that is no longer based on self-interest and exploitation but on recognition, reciprocity, and love. The diary promotes this message with the determination of the exceptionally progressive role model and narrating I to dissociate itself both from the racism of many Southern “schoolmarms”53 and from those Northern teachers who “quarril among themselves in a shameful manner” (241). On top of this Hawks aligns herself explicitly with African-American teachers from the North. In one instance she even identifies with her black female colleagues: [S]ome of the curious outsiders […] shouted “the teachers are coming.” They were still a long way off, so we protracted our dinner—profound silence reigned as they came in and there succeeded such a babel as seldom occurs now adays among people of refinement, which we “colored schoolmarms” hardly dare claim being at all times. (247)

Once more, Hawks’s rhetoric reinforces racial hierarchies, revealing how her flirtation with presumably “black” behavioral norms satiated her “Victorian” craving for a less restrained life. And yet it is important to remember that, contrary to most female reformers of her era, Hawks does not distance herself from African-American women on the grounds of their presumably weak work ethic and their insufficient ideas about marriage and family (comp. Faulkner 2004: 7). Yet what, exactly, can be inferred from these rhetorical alliances? What do they mean in the context of a textual experiment that aimed at reinventing the white female self and societal relations before and after the Second Founding? To explore Hawks’s concrete political vision we must look more closely at her ideals of interracial interactions, particularly in the hierarchical context of black education. Less than a year after Hawks’s initial arrival in the Sea Islands she was present when the abolitionist writer and editor James Redpath54 addressed a number of

52

The Port Royal project aimed to teach the released slaves “civilization and Christianity” and to “elevate them in the scale of humanity, by inspiring them with self-respect.” Letter from William A. White, cited in Rose (1998: 41).

53

In the course of time Southern women outnumbered Northern white and “colored” teachers. See Rose (1998: 398). Hawks’s detailed account contrasts with Massey’s biased description of Northern teachers as “inspired and well meaning” yet naïve. (1966: 122-23).

54

Redpath was editor of the New York Tribune and widely known for his biography of John Brown. He also published the first edition of Alcott’s Hospital Sketches in 1863 and courted controversy as editor of the radical abolitionist newspaper Pine and Palm that

 

   

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schoolboys with the following questions: “How many of you boys expect to be governors of the State of S.C.—How many expect to go to congress? How many expect to be Mayor of Charleston? How many mean to be president of the U.S.?” Hawks finds it “wonderful how unanimously determined all the boys are, to occupy these positions[.] Every hand went up and every boy said I. It was a novel way of setting the question of demorilization and must have satisfied the most exacting pro-slavery” (157). The “question of demorilization” refers to accusations against Redpath from a Southern audience that thought he was “demoralizing” the freedmen by suggesting their full participation in the building of a new nation (cf. 157). How Hawks positions herself in this matter is not entirely clear. While on the level of description she seems to share Redpath’s radicalism, her sarcasm in the last phrase and the irony that prevails in the paragraph and in the text surrounding it undermine this seeming consent. 55 Redpath, she writes, let the audience at the assembly wait and the children (a thousand or more) sing in his honor until he was sent for, only to then try and “slip out before the meeting broke up” (157). At the same time, however, she displays some understanding of his behavior when she comments critically on his “white friends who are jealous of his popularity” (156). Redpath, of course, had long been a controversial figure in abolitionist circles,56 and this might in part explain why Hawks chose the role of observer in describing the scenario. Significantly, however, this also allowed her to dwell on a very crucial moment during the event: Then Mr. Pillsbury was chosen chairman and Saml. Dickenson offered some resolutions, intended to be complementary to Mr. R. but some colored brother took exception to their wording, and at one time it seemed quite likely our meeting would break up in a mob—but the thing

promoted the foundation of a “negro nation” in Haiti. Cf. Redpath, “The Pine and Palm,” American Historical Association. 55

Even the most radical abolitionists rarely considered “ordinary” southern blacks eligible for national leadership. Louisa May Alcott, for instance, limited her vision of black citizenship to the contraband soldier. Compare Edward L. Pierce (November 1861: 633).

56

Redpath had also stirred resentment among other abolitionists and the black elite when, in the 1850s, he began promoting “colonization” (see McPherson 1965-89; Engs 1979: 3-7 and 18-22). He had also courted controversy as editor of the radical abolitionist newspaper Pine and Palm that promoted the foundation of a “negro nation” in Haiti. Cf. James Redpath, “The Pine and Palm.” Most scholars of Elizabeth Keckley’s Thirty Years a Slave and Four Years in the White House suggest that it was Redpath who (without Keckley’s permission) included letters from Mary Lincoln to Keckley, and thereby seriously violated the African-American author’s reputation. Cf. Frances Smith Foster (2001: lilii).

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blew over, (under a compromise), and after some remarks from Pillsbury, Redpath addressed the children. (157)

Hawks identified a certain tension between the white male abolitionists who were present and their black audience, who were spoken about without being granted a voice of their own. The diary displays a subtly ironic tone when it shifts from the dispute to Redpath’s address to the children—and particularly to the little boys among them, a largely illiterate group that Redpath would posit as potential presidents of a new United States. Is this at the root of the narrator’s latent skepticism? Wasn’t Hawks, the children’s white “schoolmarm,” far more eligible for presidency than they were? What was to be her place, and what theirs, in the future nation and its organizational structure? There is reason for this sort of speculation: as the diary stresses elsewhere, white women (and not white men) are key to successful nationbuilding: “the only thing remaining to fit me for some important Military position, is to have command of a Company or Regt for a short time. I have no doubt in my ability to command them—provided they be colored troups” (75). According to Hawks, white men like to be “hurra’d” and “cheered” by black congregations, but the ones who ultimately prepare these people for the role of full citizens are the white women among the missionary crowd. This is how she defines their role in national Reconstruction: Sunday we did’nt go to church. It was cold and rainy. We got Mr. Hull, a young Rev. who is here missionarying interested in our colony and he went out to give them a little preach and see what he can do for their souls. I confess to being more seriously troubled about their bodies just at this time and so between us both I trust the poor creatures may be cared for. (232)

Recorded in 1866, this remark not only sheds light on the continuing debate over the place of the Gospel in the schools of the former Confederacy57 but is typical of a specifically female view of Reconstruction: as Carol Faulkner has found in her research on this period, white women were far more likely to insist that further economic support of the freedpeople was a necessary prerequisite for their becoming self-reliant, while white men often believed that charity would keep former slaves from becoming truly independent (2004: 9-26). Due to her close contact with the contrabands (who were considered freedmen after emancipation), Hawks also saw herself as an interracial mediator. In a February

57

At a very early point in her diary Hawks challenges the system of religious instruction that the Freedmen’s Association sought to establish in the South by pointing to the lack of “practical religion” among the freedmen. See her entry of Oct. 16th 1862 (Hawks 37). For the role of religion in Southern education see Rose (1998: 336).

 

   

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24, 1865, letter that she wrote from Jacksonville, Florida,58 to Horatia Ware (a secretary of an independent freedmen’s aid association) and copied into in her diary, Hawks fashions herself as “the connecting link” to “this much abused people” and offers to “make [Horatia’s] acquaintance with them as pleasant and as thorough as possible” (116). Anticipating the self-reflective approach of twentieth-century ethnography, Hawks assures Ware that her knowledge of “this people” does not merely reflect “the peculiar temprement and ideas of the writer.” At the same time, however, Hawks is not aware of her own racialist bias when she states that “but few take [the freedpeople] just as they are; but few bring themselves down, through sympathy, to understand just their needs” (116). It is on the grounds of this assumed insider knowledge that she takes on the role of a natural leader and organizer of black lives. Quoting from letters that she wrote on behalf of the largely illiterate black community, she claims a key role for the white female teacher in the Northern civilizing endeavor. In well-meaning yet discriminatory passages she discusses the love-letters of her adult students as signs of their capacity for romantic emotion—however imperfect these letters may be. By staging herself as a translator of black language (an idiom she describes as unpolished and clumsy59) into true, refined (that is “white”) expressions of feeling, the white matchmaker among black lovers makes it clear that “racial uplift” involves not only a—secular and Christian—education but also the “refinement” of black hearts. In keeping with the general climate of the day, the notion of racial hierarchy runs through the entire diary. There is classism in Hawks’s thinking about the contrabands and free African Americans from both the Charleston area and the Northern states: her descriptions of these free blacks are devoid of the type of racist condescension she displays elsewhere. In one instance she even offers a surprisingly neutral portrait of a black slave-owning family. Even more interesting are her accounts of the (very compelling) life stories of two “colored” teachers and their mixed-race Southern families—educated people of her own class that she could identify with to some degree. The story of one Miss Mary Weston—her “best (colored) teacher”—is a narrative of (white) paternalism that Hawks understood, at least in part, from her own experience. Weston had run a private school before the Civil War, “in her fathers’ house,” yet had been “obliged to hire a white woman to sit in the room where she taught” (199). “[K]nowing these people and how well able they are to care for themselves,” Hawks scoffs at this practice (199). And yet she, too, perceived of black teachers and nurses as exceptions to the rule and described them with that benevolent racism that she

58

Hawks was there from December 1864 until March 1865 teaching school and helping to

59

She includes a typical nineteenth-century “black English” version of the original: “[M]an

tend sick patients. hab to be berry strong and smart for broke lub, Lub. stan –‘e’ aint gwine broke!” (60).

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shared with many other white abolitionists. Thus, although she writes admiringly about the black teacher Charlotte Forten (Grimké) (who in her own 1864 reminiscences, “Life on the Sea Islands,” told of her social isolation during the “experiment”60), she refers to her in the diminutive as “pretty little Miss Fortin” (253).61 The sense of competition that accompanies Hawks’s description of other female teachers is intrinsically linked to her self-fashioning as the black women’s fairskinned sister. This went beyond the stereotypical projection of a white woman’s yearning for a less restricted way of life, but concerned the spirit of the self-made men and women that she found prevailing among many freedwomen, and that was her own life’s leading maxim. Being an eager learner herself, Hawks praised the pupils who flocked into her school no matter how precarious their living conditions were. Unlike most other reformers, who viewed the freedwomen “as the legal dependents of their husbands” (Faulkner 2004: 4), she admired what she perceived as a female version of self-reliance and was stunned when she saw how two “very smart” African-American women engaged in very hard physical work to earn their own money (231). This is a significant remark when one considers its historical backdrop: according to the missionary association’s discriminatory wage policy, white men were paid more than white women for less work. Through recourse to her “darker sisters,” Hawks challenges the policy in a conversation with the superintendent sent out by the New England Society: unlike most women of her class and race, she did not consider it unpatriotic to ask for adequate pay, and she wallows in recounting

60

Charlotte L. Forten was the only African American to publish a black account of the experiment. Her autobiography, however, upholds racial hierarchies on the symbolic level: finding the Sea Island inhabitants “as foreign […] as they were to her white contemporaries,” she maintained her “distinction from the illiterate, uncultivated, and darkskinned” Gullah community. Long (2004: 130 and 20).

61

She may have been jealous of the attention that some of her male colleagues in the “experiment” paid to this well-educated and politically thinking Northern black woman. In an 1863 letter from St. Helena Island to his cousin Nina, for instance, the teacher Arthur Sumner wrote the following: “One of the teachers within two miles of us is a mulatto girl named Charlotte Forten. She is a very charming young lady of about 20 years, with uncommonly graceful manners, and a very agreeable voice. She is a superior person, in every way; and I see no reason why a fellow might not fall in love with her just as readily as if she belonged to the haughty race of Saxons. As I am not one of the loving kind I shan’t be in danger; but if I were young & susceptible I could lose my independence (I came mighty near saying heart) as readily as if she were all white” (Arthur Sumner. “Letter to Nina Hartshorn, Port Royal, July 9, 1863.” Regarding the relationship between Hawks and Forten see Schultz (2002: 5). Regarding Forten’s admiration for Hawks see Forten, The Journal of Charlotte L. Forten (1953: 192 and 99).

 

   

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how she openly ridiculed the society’s practice of sending female teachers on the islands because schools in remote areas were presumably too dangerous for men: “I couldn’t help saying that I was glad to know definitely, what the women were sent here for, although I hadn’t supposed, previously to this that they were sent as protectors of the men. This sally pleased the girls, and rather disconcerted Mr. W.” (203).62 The diary reveals a self-serving desire for recognition but also a sense of solidarity with, and admiration for, the former slave women who had maintained their dignity and agency. Hawks thereby envisions a specifically female style of leadership based on a quasi-democratic ideal of reciprocity and mutual responsibility. To enable this new, interracial ideal, she relies on an established nineteenth-century concept of a true woman’s personal evolution that Jane Tompkins has termed “sentimental power.”63 Moving from indifference and dependency to love and agency, the diary traces a process that starts—like Uncle Tom’s Cabin—with a learning effort on the part of the white woman. This is how Hawks approaches the contrabands in the early days of her stay: So in the hospitals where they are employed as nurses. They do what you tell them providing you keep an eye on them—but if you ask or expect them to help each other they will probably tell you that they came to Hospital to get well and not to work—and no amount of talk will induce them to admit that they ought to do anything for the comfort of each other—unless they are hired as nurses; many times indeed always they would do a thing to oblige me because they liked me—but not because they felt any moral obligation to do it. Their perception of duty towards each other is very obtuse! I am speaking of them as a whole and I am speaking of them as I have found them—as soldiers—as families—as patients—Nurses—and as pupils—and it is pleasant to remember the many noble exceptions to the rule! (37)

Although Hawks defines the black nurses’ “obtuse perception of duty towards each other” as a lack of “practical religion” (37), her diary is surprisingly devoid of the religiously inflected, heavily sentimental rhetoric that marks Uncle Tom’s Cabin and other popular nineteenth-century novels: because the diary obeys the generic law of authenticity the conventions of the era are visible, but decisively toned down. Thus while Hawks, too, claims to have initiated what Jane Tompkins has called “a process of redemption whose power, transmitted from heart to heart, can change the entire world” (1986: 131), she does not present it in a “vocabulary of clasping hands and

62

Her salary was raised from $ 10 to $ 40 per month, but it continued to be “lower than the salaries of her male counterparts.” Schwartz, footnote 266 in Hawks (203). According to Schwartz, James Redpath wrote to Esther: “Let me advise you to change your sex if you expect to be paid the full value of your labours” (ibid.).

63

Cf. her chapter of the same title in Sensational Designs (1986: 122-46).

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falling tears” (ibid.: 131 and 132). Yet for all its sobered tone and rhetoric, Hawks’s diary, like Stowe’s text, emphasizes a spiritual conversion brought about by the white woman. It is through a connection of hearts that the ex-slaves improve morally: “I know they love me, because I love them!” (82). In line with Stowe’s Aunt Ophelia figure (the white teacher who must learn to love Topsy if she is to have any impact on her), Hawks insists that in order to harvest the fruit of their civilizing measures white Americans must first cultivate their feelings and emotions vis-à-vis the racial other. This, however, is not an activity that follows a biblical script (as in Uncle Tom’s Cabin) but the result of direct interracial interaction, active engagement, and a willingness to fully recognize the other. The diary leaves no doubt that Hawks accomplished this mission with particular aplomb: when upon her return from Florida in 1866 two freemen “expressed themselves as most glad to have me back,” she wrote proudly “I think they all, love me rather more than they do Miss L”—another popular teacher (245). Hawks’s concept of “love” turns her black students into friends (83) and thus differs considerably from the image of the “nigger lover” that was very much frowned upon by abolitionists in general and the Port Royalists in particular. Anyone studying the Sea Island experiment will come across the story of Austa French, the wife of a leading figure in the white community. Arthur Sumner, the school teacher mentioned earlier, related how Mrs. French threw her arms “around a big fat negro woman, kissed her, and sobbed out ‘oh my sister!’” when she first set foot on Hilton Head Island.64 Love, as it appears in Hawks’s diary carefully avoids such disrespectful scenes—although she feels racially superior to the “childish” exslaves. The diary is laces with countless examples describing her emotional closeness as a public ritual of recognition. An emphasis on gifts of fruit, flowers, songs, and dances preserves the dignity and equality of the parties involved: Corp. Tucker, doffed his hat, with a “good evening school-mistress, our boys have been forming a band and would like to seranade you if you do’nt care,” but I do care, I said, and should like it above all pleasures. Will the boys come into this room or stay outside? they concluded to come in, and my little dining room was filled to overflowing. The banjo and “bones” touched by skillful fingers accompanied by their rich voices charmed us for more than an hour with patriotic and other songs—then one they called “Archie” gave us a specimen of his dancing. A curious scene! I enjoyed very much, and was so lucky to have on hand some cakes with which to “treat” them. (76)

64

Arthur Sumner. “Letter to Nina Hartshorn, December 13th, 1864.” See also Rose (1998: 75). Another version is recounted in Massey (1966: 123).

 

   

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The paragraph replaces the nineteenth-century female “ethics of sacrifice”65 with an earlier economy of joyful exchange and mutual recognition.66 According to Claude Leví-Strauss, such processes are inherently ambiguous since goods are […] vehicles and instruments for realities of another order, such as power, influence, sympathy, status, and emotion; and the skillful game of exchange […] consists in a complex totality of conscious or unconscious maneuvers in order to gain security and to guard oneself against risks brought about by alliances and by rivalries (1969: 54).

Leví-Strauss, of course, here refers to what he elsewhere called “primitive thought.” Hawks, too, describes the event as archaic: the flowers and songs she receives emerge as ceremonial offerings that distinguish the African-American presenters of the gift as members of a different culture with a more pleasant model of social interaction. By emphasizing the voluntary character of these offerings (and the circular nature of the exchange) the diary suggests a communal and egalitarian alternative to the rivalries that Hawks abhorred in her own culture. At the same time, however, her descriptions confirm the racial hierarchy of the day: by reciprocating the stereotypical “gifts of the natives” by offering “some cakes” in return, Hawks reminds potential readers of the superior “refinement” of white culture: as a quintessential sign of nineteenthcentury domestic femininity, the white woman’s pastries authorize her defining role in managing interracial relationships during the Second Founding. And yet this logic of exchange differs crucially from both “the culture’s favorite story about itself—the story of salvation through motherly love,” (Tompkins 1986: 125) and its paternalistic alternative. The correspondence between Secretary Chase of the Treasury Department and Hawks’s abolitionist colleague, the “negro supervisor” Edward L. Pierce,67 sheds light on the latter. Chase warned Pierce that the white male superintendents of the emancipated farmhands would need to be selected “as carefully as one would choose the guardian for his children,” and that these superintendents should be allowed to “enforce a paternal discipline” by every means short of whippings.68

65

Jane Tompkins uses this term in her discussion of the “Little Eva” deathbed scene in Sensational Designs (1986: 128).

66

As Stephen Greenblatt (1991) has shown, this logic of reciprocity had been used to explain and justify colonial rule.

67

Pierce was a Boston attorney who had supervised contrabands when they were first accepted into the Union army. He had been called to the Sea Islands to prepare the African Americans “for self-support by their own industry” (Rose 1986: 22).

68

Undated letter from Secretary Chase of the Treasury Department to Pierce, quoted in Rose (1986: 22, 29). The paternalistic approach to the “experiment” was a feature especially of the first phase of the Port Royal mission. See ibid., 155.

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African Americans likewise acted strategically when distributing gifts among these self-appointed guardian figures. As Rose has pointed out, black Sea Islanders were well acquainted with the power of gifts to create “good feeling” among white masters in the context of an overall violent atmosphere (1998: 114-15).69 As “contraband of war,” they still had much to lose, and gift-giving was an important cultural resource to improve their situation. In the context of black trauma and the personal frustrations of a white female doctor, gifts became ideal carriers of provocative, interracial and feminist messages. The transitory character of the gifts that Hawks receives is highly significant as both message and practice: flowers, fruit, and music are products of nature and the body (“skillfull fingers”) and therefore their duration is limited. In Hawks’s fantasies of leadership this ephemerality is by no means a disadvantage; on the contrary, it entails the promise of a fabulous ceremony in which signs of interracial acknowledgement are perpetually renewed. The seemingly endless stream of flowers and songs signals “democracy in action”—a societal contract based on mutual recognition and constant reassurance that rewards Hawks’s own non-material contribution to Reconstruction: Two of my girls (in my first class) Salina and Rose, came to see last night and brought, one a can of peaches, and the other a half dozin eggs—they had just bought them out of their own money and of their own accord—dear girls—it is pleasant to be remembered so kindly. Some of them are constantly bringing me something—which they think I shall relish—and the little children are constantly running in with flowers! (118)

What catches the reader’s attention here is Hawks’s extreme focus on these encounters, and her detailed descriptions of their circumstances. The truth-value of her descriptions, per contrast, is not to be challenged,70 and there is no reason to reduce black generosity to a mere survival strategy: the century-long exclusion of the slaves

69

As one female teacher’s reminiscences of her time in the Sea Islands exemplifies, many Northern whites never questioned their perceptions of being enthusiastically loved by the natives: “Our next step was to get acquainted with the negroes. They at once swarmed in the yard, bringing gifts, sweet potatoes, peanuts, eggs, shaking hands, bobbing and curtseying, and speaking impossible dialect. For hours we could do little but greet them. It was a mob welcoming their ‘Massa’ and their ‘Missis’. I can still see those sturdy, erect, bare-headed women, with their short skirts, picturesque in their squalor; and you all remember that picturesque woman in the field which illustrated one of the Penn School reports. She is almost like a Millet peasant. There were many of them and I can almost hear their chattering now.” Mrs. William R. Wister on November 15, 1926.

70

Similar reports about black generosity were written by Sumner, Towne, and Wister.

 

   

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from literacy, and the power that they attached to its promise, certainly helped establish a friendly relationship between white teachers and their black students. Furthermore, as Rose details, Hawks belonged to a group of evangelicals that was favored for religious reasons by most of the black inhabitants of the Sea Islands.71 What added even more to her popularity was her gender. According to Rose, “the mere presence of ‘white ladies’ brought reassurance to the Negroes” because of the black population’s prevailing suspicion toward white men.72 This, then, was the situation that helped Hawks fashion herself as midwife of what has been called the “second birth” of the nation. By emphasizing the serial character of those ceremonies, she also suggests an interracial economy that furthers what, according to the logic of the day, was an evolution from “nature” to “civilization”: flowers from the fields are reorganized into beautiful bouquets and the “natural” movement of black bodies is channeled into the ordered form of dances and songs for the new leadership. Thus when Hawks “[gets] them to sing some of their native ‘shouts’”73 (207) she—unlike most of her colleagues—does not ridicule this black cultural expression74 but instead acknowledges what in her eyes was an effort to entertain a white audience through the display of an innocent, natural, and transitory performance. By doing so she symbolically appropriates the “autonomous black social and cultural life” that the freedmen had been able to maintain and develop during slavery (Rodrigue 2006: 41). In an act of cultural incorporation she declares a number of spirituals her great favorites (207). Gifts are of course also repositories of cultural meaning.75 In Hawks’s diary, this meaning emerges from within a capitalist logic of reward and a Christian ideal of

71

The religious practice of the evangelically inspired New York delegation made them more popular among the Baptist freedpeople than the other missionary groups that followed. Bostonians, for instance, could not relate as well to the Close-Communion Baptist freedmen. (See Rose 1998: 72-74).

72

Ibid., 85. While she traces this distrust back to slavery, there is reason to believe that the

73

Regarding the “Ring Shout,” a form of dance and song that probably originated in Africa

behavior of the Union army was also to blame for this assessment. See also ibid., 131. but integrated elements from Christianity, see Rosenbaum (1998). 74

The tradition most probably has its roots in Africa. Regarding other “white” reactions to

75

Most of the scholarship on gift economics builds up on Marcel Mauss, “Die Gabe: Form

the “shout” see Rose (1998: 92). und Funktion des Austauschs in archaischen Gesellschaften” (1978), and further develops (and partly criticizes) his argument. A good overview of this scholarship is provided by John Frow, “Gift and Commodity,” Time and Commodity Culture (1997: 102-217). For a discussion of different theoretical approaches to the gift as a powerful agent see Ulla Haselstein, Die Gabe der Zivilisation (2000, esp. Part III). Haselstein’s analysis, of

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unconditionality. While on the one hand the diary insists that the ex-slaves have it in them to give, at the same time they seem to depend on the white woman who inspires them to actually do so. Hawks’s example of selfless devotion teaches African Americans to participate in a ritual of Christian love. Only after such rituals have been firmly established does Hawks reach out to some “[p]oor fellows” who, unlike so many others, have nothing to present her with. Ironically, this failure is quickly turned into the ultimate sign of the ex-slaves’ unlimited devotion to their teacher: “if they only had something to give, I should be loaded with presents,” (151) she exclaims, thereby stripping the gift of its material dimension and turning it—through her facesaving emphasis on the men’s positive intent—into the quintessential expression of mutual cross-racial affirmation. Just with how much care Hawks stages such encounters can be seen in her almost iconographic rendering of a scene that seems to have impressed her so deeply that she took it up twice in her diary. Set (and witnessed by herself) during the march of the Union army through Charleston (June 1865) it encapsulates the author’s basic notion of interracial acknowledgement. When the Union regiment arrived in the city, a black woman expressed her readiness to distinguish between “good” and “bad” whites by doing “the only thing she could do to show her patriotism” and spread her shawl “in front of the soldiers for them to walk on” (117). The scene reached a second climax when the “Col. gallantly picked it up and passed it to her, while the soldiers cheered vociferously” (117). While this confirms the existing racial hierarchy and gender order and legitimizes Northern leadership, it also suggests a more balanced relationship. The spontaneous act of giving “the only thing” she has, and the “gallant” refusal of the Colonel to tread on it, suggests a more balanced interracial relationship where the possessions and integrity of the other are recognized and valued highly. Read against the historical backdrop of the sexual exploitation of black slave women, the erotically charged overtone of the encounter suggests a model of reconciliation based on the notion of respect for the raced and gendered other. The metaphorical possibilities of this encounter seem to have inspired Hawks to transform it into the full-fledged narrative mentioned earlier: the “Susan Black” chapter. Written almost four months after the Charleston event, the “fine looking black woman” becomes “Susan” who upon the arrival of the Northern troops is redeemed from a life of torture and sexual abuse. In this version the moment of salvation is blown up to even larger proportions: while in the first version the Colonel picks up the shawl and passes it to the woman, the second version avoids anything that would even faintly suggest physical contact across the color line. In place of the Colonel

course, refers to three earlier American texts (1682-1861). For a concrete, nineteenthcentury example of the gift’s power and meaning see Judith Walsh (October 1999); she interprets the “coded language of love” conveyed by nineteenth-century bouquets.

 

   

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there are now several officers who “gallantly ste[p] aside and rais[e] their hats in recognition of her delicate compliment” (155). By staging the encounter as a choreography for a black queen, the diary not only repairs the damaged reputation of the Union Army but also projects an alternative to the lack of acknowledgement with which Hawks herself had been confronted in the misogynistic climate of the postslavery Sea Islands. Like Laura Towne, who wrote that the widespread acceptance of white women among the freedpeople was “quite a triumph, after having been rejected as useless” (qtd in Rose 1998: 85), Hawks relied on her diary to imagine alternative scenarios of recognition across the lines of gender, race, and also class. Importantly, however, the white woman is cast as leader of this female version of democracy, in which the freedpeople constantly confirm their consent to the new order by showering their white doctor and teacher with signs of affection. Yet the gifts she receives never live up to what the white woman is ready to give: the diary itself creates and stabilizes the existing dependency and racial hierarchy. By remembering and recording the most modest gift, the text symbolically returns and annuls it, rendering it rhetorically impossible for the recipient to requite the gesture of solidarity and thus reestablish the equality between giver and receiver.76 This understanding of the diary as gift can only be argued at the hypothetical level since it was not published until 1984. We do not know whether Hawks ever tried to find a publisher; it is possible that she resigned her original plan to publish a book because, after returning from her mission to the South, she was too busy establishing herself as a medical doctor and gynecologist in New England to pursue a career as an author. But we can speculate that what kept her from presenting the diary to a larger readership was the risk her ideas would have posed for her hard-won career as a doctor. Because it represents the former slaves as the better citizens while accusing the northern “liberators” of lacking morality, the diary’s message challenged the dominant discourse of the era: as scholars of American memory culture have argued, “race” was long downplayed in postbellum narratives of the war because it became “so powerful a source of division in American social psychology, that it served as the antithesis of a culture of reconciliation” (Blight 2001: 4; see also Urwin 2004: 2).77

76

Regarding the complex relationship between giving and receiving, and the role of time in this process cf. Haselstein’s discussion of Marcel Mauss and the phenomenon of the potlatsch, (2000: 165-72).

77

As Gregory J.W. Urwin has argued, this “collective amnesia” would last until late in the nineteenth century. This is not to deny that in the literature of this era the figure of the grateful freedman and the African-American veteran played a role (2004: 2). But Reconstruction bestsellers such as Anna Dickinson’s What Answer? (1869), or Albion Tourgée’s A Fool’s Errand avoided the sense of scandal underlying Hawks’s diary.

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Hawks belonged to that generation of Civil War women who were the heirs of Jacksonian-era feminism on the one hand and who spearheaded the postbellum wave of white female self-realization under the cover of “racial uplift” on the other. Her frequent changes of occupation between nursing, doctoring, and teaching among the freedmen exemplify how crucially important it was for a white middle-class woman to compromise, adapt, and find niches of her own that would enable her to realize her professional dreams and ideological ideals. As evidenced by her diary, she never fully gave up one of her jobs for the other: during her work in the hospital and in the school she would teach the contrabands how to take care of each other and to act responsibly in a larger social context. And while she taught school she would also look after the sick and worry about the physical condition of her students. It is only logical that her humanitarian principles and her wish to define the terms of the “democratic game” alternate in this diary, resulting in a mixed message somewhere between radical egalitarianism and racial uplift. Wavering between notions of racial superiority and identification with the freedpeople, the diary cannot be read outside of the gender-specific constraints that had not only limited Hawks’s professional options but also influenced her view of Northern liberation and the Port Royal Experiment. The scandalous behavior of the Union army and the self-congratulatory missions of some of her male colleagues seem to have augmented her radical agenda: over a period of several months she recorded a number of cases of what was later called “miscegenation,” and even when her liberal viewpoint was challenged by a case of bigamy—a former slave wanted to marry his former mistress but turned out to be already married (189)78— she remained firm in her abolitionist convictions.791 After the war she founded Florida’s first interracial school in Smyrna (when the school was burned down she taught outdoors even in the winter). She also joined the Woman’s National Loyal League80 and handed in “the first petition in favor of women’s suffrage ever put before the

78

Hawks discovered that the man in question already had a wife and child, and that his African- American wife also had a very light-skinned second child whose father Hawks dared not ask about. She chose to sum up the situation by using irony: “It would puzzle a wiser than Solomon to straighten the matrimonial tangle of these people” (190).

79

Hawks’s discussion was part of a broader discourse about bigamy that evolved in summer 1862, when a general order obliged African-American men to choose one wife. See Rose (1998: 236).

80

This group “formed during the war to promote abolition and women’s rights.” (Schultz 2004: 174).

 

   

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Florida legislature” (Schwartz 1984: 21-22).81 When she no longer felt safe in the former Confederacy she eventually returned to New England, leaving her husband behind.82 Unlike most other reform-minded women of her generation (who joined missionary movements or taught on the newly formed Indian Reservations) she had an actual professional alternative: once settled in Lynn, Massachusetts, Hawks joined the medical practice of Lizzie Breed Welch, became a much sought-after gynecologist, and was twice elected to the City Council (Schultz 2004: 174). Hawks’s actual or perceived accomplishments and acknowledgement among the freedmen also boosted her self-esteem: in the relatively uncontrolled environment of the South Carolina mission she managed to (at least imaginatively) establish what Carroll Smith-Rosenberg has called the nineteenth-century “female world of love and ritual” in which (white) “men made but a shadowy appearance” (1985: 53). As the previous chapter has shown, Hawks repeatedly—and at times quite suddenly—changed her interpretive framework in order to make sense of her experiences. In order to overcome a sense of crisis she seeks refuge in a female/feminist tradition of rewriting Puritanism, appropriates Stowe’s concept of the heathen child, claims the status of an authorized narrator of black lives, or imagines an (ultimately feminine) culture of reciprocity. Interestingly, however, the established cultural texts she relies on fail to render adequately what she experienced among the contrabands. It is ultimately the truth-claim that inheres in the diary-as-genre that sets the limits of her appropriations. Gradually, but never fully, Hawks came to challenge her own racial preconceptions and cultural stereotypes and eventually resolved to concentrate on her daily interactions with others rather than searching for a mythical text on which to pattern a meaningful model of interracial relations. The result, of course, is not without antecedents either: the gendered myth of recognition, reciprocity, and love can already be found in Mary Rowlandson’s captivity narrative and in sentimental novels such as Hobomok. Hawks lends new prevalence to this tradition by establishing the topic of gift-circulation as a central narrative trope, thereby managing to smoothly combine a vision of interracial love and respect with a desire for leadership that depended on an ideology of black neediness and racial “uplift.”

81

Around the same time Milton complained about his marriage, blaming the profession she had chosen: “I wish[ed] Esther had never seen a medical book, or heard a lecture. It is not a business man-like worker that a husband needs. It is a loving woman.” John Milton Hawks, quoted in Schwartz (1984: 11). No exact source indicated.

82

The couple remained connected through a long-distance relationship. Cf. local historian JoAnne Sikes, author of “The Story of Two Hawks,” paraphrased by Lynn Buhlmahn in “Women Lay the Foundation,” The Florida Quest (2013). Online.

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By chronicling black lives after slavery, Hawks exhibited a capacity to give that could not be matched by the largely illiterate freedpeople. Her diary was not exempt from the dilemma that Michael C. Nelson attests to women’s Civil War narratives in general: they are “second only to the slave narrative in their emphasis on both the threat literacy poses to the established order and on the role literacy plays in maintaining the cultural status quo” (1997: 52). In what remains, sadly enough, the bestcase scenario of a white person bearing witness to post-slavery black lives, the meaning of African-American lives remains structured by a linguistic and cultural universe that is marked by symbols of gratitude, loyalty, and devotion to a fair-skinned female savior.


 





 
 
 


 




  
  
  
 
 
During the American Civil War women managed farms, plantations, and businesses, signed contracts, and became experts in legal matters in addition to fulfilling their traditional domestic duties.1 Yet unlike their colonial foremothers they could no longer legitimate such “un-feminine” behavior through recourse to the concept of “deputy husband.”2 However, when what was initially thought of as a brief military interlude developed into “a long, sad war” (Walt Whitman),3 the antebellum order of gender relations was adapted to the prevailing realities, and traditionally male occupations became long-term routines among white middle-class women. It was in this context that an increasing number of women volunteered for work in Civil War hospitals. It was a female mission that ignored the established spatial separation between women and men and therefore threatened a true woman’s respectability. It is no wonder, then, that these hospital workers became known by a masculinized term: they 1

Although antebellum middle-class women had begun to desegregate the male public sphere, the focus of their attention had been on the home as the “uncontaminated wellspring of civic virtue”. Mary P. Ryan (1998: 207). Regarding women’s inroads into the public sphere between 1830 and 1860 see ibid., 202-208.

2

Lauren Thatcher Ulrich discusses the concept of the “deputy husband” in Good Wives (1982: 259-65). She limits the concept to the premodern phase in English North America, when “abstract notions like ‘femininity’” were less important than “concrete roles like ‘wife’ or ‘neighbor’” (261); the concept can therefore not be applied to the nineteenthcentury context of this chapter. Mary Beth Norton, however, speaks of a pervasive change of gender roles in Liberty’s Daughters (1980). To find out whether and to what degree the colonial American concept of the “deputy husband” was taken over by Civil War Americans is not within the scope of these chapters.

3

The famous quotation stems from the “To Thee, Old Cause!” section of the 1872 edition of Leaves of Grass.

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were the “army in white.”4 The women themselves were often frustrated with the lack of recognition they received and “pressed, with varying degrees of strength, for an altered system in which their demonstrated abilities and contributions could be acknowledged and rewarded with gratitude, with pay, with respect, and perhaps even with a share of undisguised power” (Leonard 1994: 44). Their efforts were in part successful: after the tension-ridden first year of the war had passed, a number of military surgeons openly welcomed female nurses “to the point of lobbying the Surgeon General for the right to select their own as they saw fit” (ibid.: 20). This incident may seem minor in comparison to the ongoing laments of female nurses, yet it shows how important it is to include male views of the nurseand-surgeon relationship, and to pay attention even to subtle changes in the social contract between the men and women of the Civil War generation. As Margaret Higonnet et al. remind us in their book about the World Wars, “feminine identities and roles—femininity itself—must always be analyzed as part of a system that also defines masculine ones” (1987: 4). It is in this systemic sense that the Civil War evoked a profound and widespread questioning of Victorian norms and conventions: Prewar judgments about middle-class women’s frailty and emotional instability, and about the impropriety of their dealing with blood, wounds, ailing bodies, and death outside of the family gave way to increasingly positive evaluations of women’s various strengths, and of the potential benefits the sick and wounded might derive from exposure to women’s “natural” caretaking talents. By requiring women who had previously devoted their managerial skills to the proper maintenance of bourgeois households […] the war also dictated men’s adaptation to women’s sharing of bureaucratic power. (Leonard 1994: xxiii)

By examining this adaptation process this chapter hopes to provide a fuller picture of wartime gender relations and their effects on postbellum society: after all, Reconstruction was distinguished not only by the legal backlash against women’s suffrage but also by the increasing visibility of the female gender in a public realm that had been defined as potentially damaging to their moral natures. Even if women’s warrelated responsibilities were merely “ ‘temporary’ alterations in societal expectations with regard to men’s and women’s ‘natures,’ abilities, roles, and interaction” (ibid.: xxi)5 the sheer number of nursing narratives and the public recognition that female

4

Regarding the use of military jargon in female accounts of the war see Leonard (1994: xvii). For a summary of the introduction of female nurses to Civil War hospitals see Freemon, Gangrene and Glory (1998: 54).

5

Her quotations refer to Higonnet, et al., Behind the Lines (1987).

    

 
 

  

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health workers received after the war strongly suggest that their successes resulted in “certain long-term consequences for gender redefinition” (Leonard 1994: xxi).6 Without ignoring the conservative backlash of the Reconstruction era, this chapter seeks to show that despite these regressive postwar changes the Civil War contributed to a new understanding between the sexes that became crucial for the nation’s social figuration during the later part of the century. This new relationship was not only furthered by countless celebratory accounts of civil war nursing in magazine fiction, articles, and novels, but also by the everyday correspondence between husbands and wives. For both genders, letter writing was a “literal as well as a literary project” (Berry II 2003: 224)7 as it served as an important psychological (re)source and as an inspiration for fictional accounts of war. Arguably, such correspondence was particularly important for the men in camp: as Joanne Jacobson has observed with regard to Henry Adams and his contemporaries, the genre of the personal letter from the soldier at war to his wife at home “straddled a set of rhetorical boundaries” that gave it “substantial advantages in the management of transition, especially as a source of strategies of resistance and control” (1992: 3-4). As a genre that has traditionally served to stabilize a “self-satisfied class identity” but has also provided a space for “scenes of subversion and insurgency, a claiming of power that may or may not achieve effective social form” (Decker 1998: 14), the letter has always served an important, self-empowering function. This was all the more true with regard to the many letters from the front that constituted the main and most important connection between life in the army and civilian society. Significantly, Americans wrote many more letters (and diaries) during the Civil War than during any previous war (see McPherson 1998: 12). Irregular as such correspondence may have been,8 it constituted a dialogue9 that continuously crossed the line between the public/military and the private/domestic realms. This ongoing and very intimate cultural activity deserves more attention than it has received, as it may have contributed as crucially to the (re)formation of peacetime gender relations as did the larger postwar campaign for women’s rights. “[W]ritten

6

In her book The Reconstruction of White Southern Womanhood 1865-1895, Jane Turner Censer claims that “[t]he Civil War changed the climate of opinion about white women’s participation in at least some public areas” (2003: 228). Censer mentions “publication” as a field that was particularly important for Southern women. Regarding the impact of the war on gender relations cf. Higonnet, et al., Behind the Line (1987: 4-6 and 17).

7

Regarding basic aspects of the genre cf. William Merill Decker, Epistolary Practices (1998: 3-17).

8

“Even after a federal postal system had been created, irregularity in the movement of mail

9

Regarding the dialogical form of the letter cf. ibid., 9.

from and within the United States persisted until after the Civil War”, Decker (1998: 58).

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in a time of crisis that might end [the men’s] lives at any moment” letters from and to the front “revealed more of their [the soldiers’ and, as I would like to add, the women’s, K.T.] inner selves than [would be revealed] in [their] normal everyday lives” (McPherson 1998: x). Because letters were not subject to censorship and could be unusually blunt when describing the details of military life (ibid.: 12), “this type of immediate primary source material” also “tends to be more trustworthy than contemporary newspaper reports or self-serving memoirs written years after the events described” (Anderson 2005: xv). It is therefore not surprising that such letters have long been perceived as valuable historical sources.10 Yet considering the textual nature of the genre and the concern of Civil War correspondents with human fears and hopes during wartime, stunningly little has been written about these letters from a literary scholar’s viewpoint. (Michael C. Nelson is a notable exception here. See 1997: 43-68). This chapter, then, hopes to contribute to this underdeveloped branch of Civil War scholarship by centering on the “performative, fictive, and textual dimensions” of letter writing (Decker 1998: 4), through a study of the correspondence between John Bennitt and his wife Lottie (short for Charlotte). The dialogic nature of their correspondence must be hypothesized rather than analyzed: since only one of Lottie’s letters has been preserved, this chapter will concentrate on John’s part of the conversation, and on the rhetorical means he used to imaginatively overcome his separation from his wife and the world she stood for. There is ample reason to argue that Bennitt relied on the cultural mechanism of homeward correspondence not only to cope with the physical and social ills he encountered during his service but also to develop a vision of the future nation that would make his wartime engagement and personal existence meaningful. The surgeon not only lamented his own ineffectiveness in the face of unprecedented physical destruction, but was, most of all, shocked by the kinds of men he encountered in the army. A representative of America’s pious middleclass, John experienced army life as marked by horrifying encounters between men from all social classes, some of whom displayed the lowest qualities of human character. This made it difficult for him to adapt to the situation. His letters reveal a man who struggles to maintain his professional ethos, and who is as deeply concerned about the morals and behavior of his white countrymen as he is about their physical wellbeing. As this chapter hopes to convey, this struggle to live among men from his own racial and regional background caused Bennitt to develop an ideological position that differed significantly from his antebellum views of American race and gender

10

The historian James McPherson selected a “quasi-representative group of soldiers whose letters or diaries have survived” to find out why American men both North and South decided to enlist and fight in the war (1998: vii). While the sheer number of texts he has investigated is impressive, his approach is strictly content-oriented.

    

 
 

  

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relations. Arguing that his correspondence played a major part in this personal transformation process, and seeking to assess the cultural work of these letters, the following pages draw on other collections as well, particularly the letters of Union doctors Daniel M. Holt11 (assistant surgeon in the 121st New York Volunteers from 18621864) and William Watson12 (surgeon in the Army of the Potomac from 1862-1865). Louisa May Alcott’s references to Civil War letter writing as a very gendered activity also play a role here. As a first step, however, sharing a few facts and characteristics of Bennitt’s life and correspondence will help to better understand the meaning of his correspondence for this book as a whole. Bennitt was one of about sixteen thousand physicians who served in the Union and Confederate armies; due to the high number of injuries and illnesses in the army ranks, the Union Army alone retained 5,532 contract civilian surgeons (Anderson 2005: xvi)13. Bennitt belonged to the latter category. When he enlisted in the summer of 1862 he was thirty-two years old and an assistant surgeon with the 19th Michigan Infantry.14 During his years in the military he witnessed Sherman’s Atlanta Campaign, the “March to the Sea,” and the Carolinas Campaign. Through his correspondence he emerges as a family man who worries much about the “dear ones at home” and life in general. An overtly pious, God-fearing man, he wrote in a dry, almost Puritan style and voiced his affection for his wife and daughters in an indirect way; only in his religiously inflected monologues did he allow himself to be openly emotional. The “frantic code” that was typical for American Christians who feared the coming of the millennium (Wills 1990: 23) appears in his letters in the form of prayers and Jeremiads; biblical citations and millennial speculation dominate passages and disrupt sentences, regularly shifting his correspondence onto a metaphysical plane. References to the Almighty are standard in many letters of the era, and while the doctor’s sense of religious urgency was particularly pronounced it does not mark these letters as exceptional or eccentric: they reveal a typical Victorian middle-class man firmly rooted in the religious climate of his day. This typicality is one of the reasons why these letters became the object of the following analysis. Another was that this husband and father of three daughters15 was the only man in his family, so

11

Published under the title A Surgeon’s Civil War (1994).

12

Published under the title Letters of a Civil War Surgeon (1996).

13

See also Bobby A. Wintermute, Public Health and the US Military (2011: 20).

14

The regiment supported the Army of Kentucky, the Reserve Corps of the Department of

15

The oldest, Clara, was the daughter of Charlotte’s previous marriage. (Her first husband

the Cumberland, and ultimately the 20th Corps, Army of the Cumberland. probably died in 1850). Jennie was nine years old when the war started and Hattie was

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his correspondence with the “dear ones” was not diluted by any concern for his son and heir. The sheer scope of this correspondence is an advantage as well: covering the entire course of the war, his two hundred letters leave a clear trace of his personal views and their development over time. For all of his unique characteristics Bennitt shared much in common with other men of his profession. As James A. Morone has pointed out, Civil War surgeons often saw themselves as natural leaders, yet at the same time their authority was under constant attack: under the influence of Jacksonian ideology, they did not receive the public recognition they deemed adequate and therefore tried to establish themselves as civil leaders by “standing up for Science, God, and Country” (2003: 253).16 Bennitt, who had been a doctor in Centreville, Michigan, before he worked in the Union army, embodied precisely this type. In one of the letters he wrote before enlistment he complained about a lack of public recognition by the residents of his home town, who “cared so little about their obligations to the physician” (Nov. 27, 1861, p. 11).17 As the overall tone of his correspondence suggests, this lament refers not only to the many unpaid bills (which threatened to drive his family from their as yet unpaid house18) but also to the more general disrespect of those around him. If serving as a medical doctor in a wartime hospital offered a regular salary19 it also promised to put an end to the humiliating experience of ingratitude: as an army physician his work would be recognized as a patriotic deed performed for a greater national cause.

still a baby. Three other children, one of them a boy, died very young, and two subsequent daughters were born in 1865 and 1870. See Anderson (2005: xvii). 16

Regarding the status of doctors in antebellum America see also Freemon (1998: 24). Dur-

17

To facilitate orientation, I include the dates of the letters and where the letters can be

ing his stay in Ann Arbor Bennitt attended public lectures about new findings in science. found in the printed edition in the main text. Since the page numbers refer to the 2005 publication and not to the preceding dates, abbreviations (p./pp.) are used to distinguish these entries from all others in this book. 18

On November 27, 1861, Bennitt wrote to Lottie: “Don’t you think that in view of the probability our home being sold I would better enter the army if I can? There will be redemption (of the mortgage foreclosure) for one year from this time, & I might if in the army save enough to redeem it from Mr. McCormick, i.e., pay his claim” (11). According to Paul Starr, his experiences were not unusual: “the distance between the middle and the top of a profession is itself a fact of interest, and among nineteenth-century physicians that distance was so great that doctors cannot be said to have belonged to a single social class.” Regarding Bennitt’s financial situation see William M. Anderson’s foreword to “Introduction” (2005: xvii).

19

As many of his letters would betray, however, his hopes remained unfulfilled.

    

 
 

  

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Yet for many of the sixteen thousand physicians who served in the Union and Confederate armies, the bloody carnage of the war, together with the bad sanitary conditions and the shortage of hospital staff and medication, turned this hopeful vision into a nightmare. Tens of thousands of dead and injured and “a variety of invisible wounds, illnesses, and infirmities that beset modern America throughout the nineteenth century” such as “nerve injury, neurasthenia, hysteria, hyperaesthesia, phantom limb pain, and degeneracy” (Long 2004: 4) further damaged the already bad reputation of American medical doctors.20 This may well be a reason why so few Civil War doctors published their reminiscences.21 As the editor of Bennitt’s correspondence, Robert Baesecker, maintains, “Civil War letters and diaries are more alike than unique.” And yet “those written by 19th Michigan Infantry surgeon John Bennitt have some distinguishing features,” including an above-average mastery of the written language.22 There is an almost “Puritan” dryness to these letters, a descriptive style with matter of fact explanations and instructions that mixes with Christian imagery and language, as when Bennitt writes: “May God be the judge, & make us all on the right side speedily. I think that if you have not heard from Bacon before the receipt of this that you would better go home so as to see him” (August 29, 1863, p. 161). Such sentences tell us more about Bennitt than he intended to say. While he seeks to impress on “the dear ones” a sense of patriarchal control, his projected mastery vanishes whenever sudden outbursts of despair disrupt his writing. Time and again he seems to be gripped by fear of a wrathful God that is often linked to a fundamental anxiety that evil might befall not only him but also his wife and three daughters. Yet while in the beginning of his army service these fears and religious allusions interrupt more general descriptions of his life among soldiers, he soon manages to integrate them as a defining part of a more structured and balanced whole. Bennitt’s personal resolve seems to grow as the war progresses, and there is a sense of optimism toward

20

Regarding the low standard of medical expertise in America (as compared to Europe) cf.

21

Even today, when we are witnessing a new interest in Civil War medicine, only nine

Starr, The Social Transformation of American Medicine (1982: chapter 1-3). collections of letters by Union or Confederate surgeons can be found on the book market. Baesecker lists a selection of texts in the bibliography to “I Hope to Do My Country Service.” Bennitt’s letters were purchased from an antiquarian book dealer in 1992 and became part of the Abraham Lincoln and Civil War collection of the Grand Valley State University Library. Cf. Bennitt (2005: xx). 22

As McPherson points out, 10-12 percent of all white soldiers and 70 percent of all black soldiers were illiterate (1998: viii-ix). According to Baesecker, Bennitt’s letters exhibit “some literary idiosyncrasies” that the editor left unaltered. The little editing that was done is marked as such in the text.

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the end of the war, when he “earnestly hope[s]” that “we may not longer need these scourgings and chastisements. We have been very wicked and would not see our own national and individual depravity and wickedness till God should by chastisement remind us that Sin bringeth sorrow and woe” (2005: April 26, 1865, p. 368). As “secondary readers”23 of his correspondence, we witness Bennitt’s gradual transformation from a man who is largely oriented toward his own private circles to an alert citizen who prepares for the Christian nation’s Second Founding. This transformation was not radical in any way: Bennitt’s insistent and authoritative tone shows that he was a deeply conservative man who did not change fundamentally during his time in the army. To better assess his conservatism in the larger context of medical professionalism during the Civil War it may be helpful at this point to compare Bennitt’s treatment of his wife with other physicians’ relationships to theirs. Judging from the correspondences of his colleagues Hold and Watson, Bennitt’s slightly condescending, paternalistic relationship to women demarcates a middle position between extremes. Older than the majority of soldiers and senior to Bennitt, the 42-year-old Daniel Holt shared his colleague’s opinion that the war was a divine battle (255). Yet with his frank, spontaneous tone and a sense of humor that sometimes bordered on sarcasm, he seems to have had a very different personality from Bennitt’s. While Bennitt’s letters sound almost impersonal at times, Holt’s correspondence suggests a companionate and passionate relationship with his wife, whose letters he responded to in minute detail. Although he vehemently opposes the presence of women in army hospitals he refers to the topic in a mocking tone that expresses trust in his wife’s sense of humor.24 In an 1863 letter Holt reclaims from women what in his eyes had become a feminized space—the Civil War hospital: The world is full of wonders, and one of these is, that we are in comfortable quarters—the best of any Brigade of the Army of the Potomac. […] Log huts, good as any I ever saw, grace our well laid out streets, and now the men are engaged in constructing side walks […]. Every man keeps his house in order while company cooks, in houses erected for that purpose, prepare food for the regiment. Evergreens grace the hospital enclosure, as also a walk from thence to my

23

Elizabeth Heckendorn Cook introduces this term in the first chapter of Epistolary Bodies

24

Some other men were openly hostile to female nurses. In his reminiscences of the war,

(1996: 31). first published in 1914, the Union surgeon John H. Brinton complained that “if the men were bad, the women were worse.[…] Can you fancy half a dozen or a dozen old hags, for that is what they were (our modern efficient trained nurses were unknown), surrounding a bewildered hospital surgeon, each one clamorous for her little wants?” Personal Memoirs of John H. Brinton, Civil War Surgeon, 1861-1865 (1996: 44).

    

 
 

  

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own house. Col. Olcott has in process of erection a gothic structure which when finished will be the pride of the Army. […] If left alone, we will in a short time show you how well men can get along without the aid of women. (Dec. 15, 1863, p. 165)

Significantly, Holt’s vision of a harmonious male household goes beyond a “temporary alternation” of traditional roles.25 In fact he seems rather comfortable with his vision of a new masculine identity when he fantasizes about the nation’s reconstruction after a Union victory: Lee and his generals are risking their all upon a single die. If successful, Heaven knows what disgraceful compromises may be made:—if unsuccessful, the last hard blow will be struck, and we shall have to go to work and clean up, like a good housewife her house after the day’s work is over. (June 19th, 1863, p. 113-114)

Holt’s appropriation of an essentially female model of power is particularly interesting in light of the “imperialist” rhetoric of “manifest domesticity”26 that Louisa May Alcott had promoted only a few months earlier. Her acclaimed novella Hospital Sketches had introduced Americans to a new type of “soldiering woman” who “enlists” to fight a feminist’s battle in the “hurly-burly hospital” near the front lines: In a few days a townswoman heard of my desire, approved of it, and brought about an interview with one of the sisterhood which I wished to join, who was at home on a furlough, and able and willing to satisfy all inquiries. A morning chat with Miss General S.—we hear no end of Mrs. Generals, why not a Miss?—produced three results: I felt that I could do the work, was offered a place, and accepted it, promising not to desert, but stand ready to march on Washington at an hour’s notice. (HS 10)

While Alcott seems to suggest that “the best woman for the hospital is surprisingly like a man” (Young 1999: 74) Holt insists that in order to be truly independent and a good citizen a man must act like a woman. Seen as two sides of the same coin, these cross-identifications go significantly beyond a subversive effort at symbolic appropriation: there is an air of playfulness and delight that indicates a more general, carnivalesque mood and a readiness to deviate from established gender norms in times of war. Interestingly, such deviations seem to have been met with more acceptance than one might expect: William Watson, who also worked as a surgeon in the Union

25 26

Cf. the first paragraph of this chapter. On the imperialist orientation of domestic ideology in nineteenth-century American literature see Amy Kaplan’s The Anarchy of Empire in the Making of U.S. Culture (2002: 23-50).

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Army, celebrates with obvious enthusiasm what for him was a new type of woman. Unaware of Alcott’s “soldiering nurse,” he openly admired the “masculine” qualities of another doctor’s wife whom he met during his service in the fall of 1862. In a letter to his sister Eliza, Watson described this woman as a good soldier. Takes every thing as it comes without exhibiting either fear or fatigue. I always give her a permit to ride in an Ambulance. She undergoes all the hardships of a soldier except picket and guard duty and walking. In fact, she is a jewel of a woman. Letter of Nov. 1, 1862 (Watson 1996: 41)

It is hardly imaginable that Bennitt would have reacted with the same enthusiasm to such a sight. And yet, for all their ideological differences, all three men believed that women were of crucial importance for the outcome of the war. In keeping with official army rhetoric they cherished their wives’ letters in particular and considered these letters central to individual morale and successful warfare.27 An apt example of this is Holt’s March 7, 1863, letter from Virginia in which he instructs “the partner of his life and object of his affection” to write cheerful, patriotic letters that “resonate with ‘christian enthusiasm’” and “make me feel that I am a man and have a country and family to defend, and giv[e] me an idea of freedom such as God intends all to possess.” Blaming desertions on “complaining, fault-finding letters” from home, Holt, who strictly opposed women’s presence in the wartime hospital, nevertheless casts the war as a joint endeavor that is fought by men but decided by their wives back home (1994: 79).28 As shall be shown in the following parts of this chapter, Bennitt’s letters conjured up an equally strong ideal of marital cooperation. The war in which he claimed to serve, however, was vastly different from the ideal that Holt was fighting for: it was, by definition, a moral crusade.


 
  
 
  
  


When he first entered the army John Bennitt was unaware that his life among soldiers would become a personal rehearsal for Reconstruction, a crucial learning experience that would change his views of society and his role therein. As he confided in a November 16, 1861, letter to his wife, he was initially “not very anxious to go into the

27

“An efficient mail service played a large part in maintaining morale. Both armies understood this and made strong efforts to provide one”, McPherson (1998: 123).

28

Regarding the importance of letters to the front cf. Nelson (1997: 60). McPherson claims, that “sustenance on the home front” was crucial for the motivation of the soldiers. (Ibid.: 131-47).

    

 
 

  

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army” (5). This is hardly surprising: the physician had other professional priorities. The letter was sent from Ann Arbor, where Bennitt took classes in the Department of Medicine and Surgery of the University of Michigan.29 He was there for two months and feeling homesick. Meanwhile the Civil War was claiming its first victims as thousands died and were injured during the Second Battle of Bull Run and the Battle of Antietam. In his letters from the university Bennitt described growing pressure from his peers to follow their example and enlist. But for reasons that he does not make clear in his letters he was reluctant to embrace this option. In his Ann Arbor correspondence, he muses about the personal advantages his enlistment would bring and somewhat hesitantly informs his wife that he “think[s] of attending” a “Soldiers’ aid Social” (December 10, 1861, p. 26). It is interesting to see how Bennitt used his correspondence to meditate on the subject of enlistment. Although his financial difficulties were a major factor in his decision-making process,30 he also began to ponder the political and spiritual crisis that the nation was undergoing and was very much preoccupied with defining his place as a natural leader and professional healer of society. At the same time, however, Bennitt seems to have felt a certain moral pressure to justify his occasional strolls in his Ann Arbor neighborhood when writing to his wife that [t]he only excuse I can give for going out at all here is that I hope thereby to enlarge my knowledge of human nature & prepare myself to fill better the social position I occupy; & be enabled to communicate good to those with whom I come in contact. It is quite important that a physician should have a good knowledge of the world, & of what is going on around, especially in his own country. (Dec. 19, 1861, p. 29)

In order for Bennitt to cure the individual patient, in other words, society itself had to be studied carefully. Written eight months before his first letters from the front would begin to arrive, this passage anticipates how he viewed himself during his years in camp: as detached and full of analytical fervor, but never forgetting his pious

29

The department was one of forty medical schools in the nation in the 1860s. With a faculty of seven and less than 150 students it was a school of medium size for the time. See Freemon (1998: 25). For Bennitt’s education as a medical doctor see Robert Baesecker’s “Biographical Note” in I Hope to Do My Country Service (2005: xvi-xxii). Paul Starr portrays the medical education of the era. Since a “graded curriculum” had only been introduced in the 1850s, Bennitt’s medical education was probably not very structured. He did, however, keep track of recent medical debates. Cf. Starr (1982: 43).

30

His case contradicts McPherson’s claim that Civil War soldiers “did not fight for money.” (1998: 5).

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upbringing. At the same time there is a sense of uneasiness in this passage that would become paramount during his stay among soldiers. When he first arrived in camp Bennitt quickly learned how extremely difficult it would be to maintain the calm and detached posture he strove for. Bennitt, it seems, was overwhelmed by the many impressions and experiences that challenged the norms of his class. His letters often begin with an account of his life in camp and his daily work among the wounded, but then meander into other subjects as if the author has forgotten about the addressee. Religious meditations and self-centered worries regarding the future of his family and nation are a defining trait of his correspondence. Far away from the “dear ones,” Bennitt often displays little interest in his family’s daily lives and instead reveals an urgent need to get things off his soul.31 Strangely fragmented and ungrounded, his correspondence suggests a continuous struggle to anchor his fundamentally destabilized self in an idealized notion of home. What, then, caused this instability? The sense of panic that resonates through Bennitt’s letters echoes the class and gender anxieties of the antebellum era.32 A pious, middle-class man, Bennitt felt extremely alienated among the poorly educated, considerably younger men of the army ranks,33 some of them recent immigrants without family in America. For him his fellow soldiers were “as rough a sett of customers as it was ever my lot to fall in with”: he noted that “card-playing—Whiskey-drinking—smoking—swearing are the chief employments and an idea of Pandemonium might very well be realized by coming into this cabin where I am now writing” (February 5, 1863, p. 97). The shock seems to have been fundamental: a few months later he related that the men did not even ask “a blessing […] at table.” Instead of living “the life of a consistent follower of the Lamb” by “taking up the cross and following Him through evil as well as good report” (September 20, 1863, p. 169), Bennitt saw many succumb to what he later termed the “temptations in camp life” (October 18, 1863, p. 182).

31

The doctor’s rhetoric differed significantly from the “language of war” that according to James Dawes emerged during the Civil War and helped structure the overpowering experiences that men went through in camp and on the battlefields. Bennitt’s private correspondence does not betray a “new mathematical organization of reality” but instead registers the recurring failure of interpretive powers. Dawes, The Language of War (2002: 25).

32

Regarding class anxieties during the Second Great Awakening cf. Morone, Hellfire Nation (2003: 123-27). According to McPherson there were “[t]wo versions of manhood” that “competed in the Victorian era: the hard-drinking, gambling, whoring two-fisted man among men, and the sober, responsible, dutiful son or husband” (1998: 26).

33

It is also very likely that some of the soldiers had known each other as civilians as regiments were usually recruited from the same county. Cf. Ibid. (1998: 80).

    

 
 

  

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The physician’s alienation is significant, as it anticipates the decades following the Civil War when many Americans would feel threatened by an influx of “savage” and presumably immoral people from other parts of the world. What is perhaps even more interesting is his growing involvement with those who shared his social status and aspirations. He quarreled almost daily with his colleague, one Doctor Clarke, who “on account of not being fully recruited” loaded much of the medical work on Bennitt’s shoulders (Sept. 16, 1862, p. 49). While tensions among Civil War medical doctors were the norm rather than the exception34 (they were rooted in the social, economic, and educational tensions that were intrinsic to the profession before the war (cf. Starr 1982: 80 and 93-99)35, they took on new significance in a war for national union. If Bennitt’s earlier letters had been an effort to solidify his class status,36 his unhappy encounters with men of his social stratum posed a dilemma: he could no longer counterbalance his uneasiness and anger by writing home. This is why he eventually set the necessity of cooperating with doctor Clarke in opposition to his role as a husband and father. In Bennitt’s worldview, patriotic duty and domestic responsibilities went hand in hand. Yet it was ultimately his role in the family that trumped patriotism: I shall remain […] as long as duty seems to dictate; but if Dr. Clarke does not resign or get transferred to some other regiment I think I shall try to sever my connection with it in some manner—for I cannot in duty to my family remain here under the circumstances longer. (May 24, 1863, p. 125)

By pitting these two notions of duty against each other, Bennitt seems to confirm James McPherson, who claims that during the Civil War military duty and a soldier’s intimate relations were mutually exclusive (1998: 23 and 168-9). Interestingly, however, the physician eventually managed to reconcile his conflicting ideals of manliness by reimagining his role as husband and father, turning them into a motor for his activities in camp. To better understand this transformation process, and to thereby interpret Bennitt’s behavior along more conceptual lines, it is helpful to once more

34

Cf. William Mervale Smith (also known as “the Swamp Doctor” since he worked in the Virginia and North Carolina marshes): he “can’t like” and “won’t like” his colleague, one Dr. Hand, whom he describes as a “sort of dog-in-the-manger.” Smith, Swamp Doctor (2001: 53). Cf. also Watson, Letters of a Civil War Surgeon (1996: 52 and 98), the May 22, 1863, letter by Confederate surgeon Thomas Fanning Wood, published in Wood, Doctor to the Front (2000: 84).

35

Regarding the organization of hospitals consult Alfred Jay Bollet, Civil War Medicine

36

Regarding the function of letters as “class markers” cf. Decker (1998: 14).

(2002).

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compare Bennitt’s views with those of some of his colleagues. As the following section makes clear, the physician’s redefinition of his male self was crucially linked to a redefinition of “woman’s” role in the marital partnership, and also to an understanding that a transformation of the self was an individual investment.


  
 
 
The most persistent narratives of wartime manhood involve a growing immunity to suffering (both one’s own and the pain of others), a growing acceptance of death and violence, and a “getting used to a variety of discomforts and privations.”37 According to Stephen W. Berry II the concept of “hardening” is conceptually linked to love and passion, as “the crush of early love should deepen and color the affections of a man for his fellow man, for his God and his country’s cause” (2003: 217). Significantly, however, the actual behavior of Civil War soldiers often challenged this idea: as Berry has shown, many soldiers actively resisted “hardening” by strengthening their imaginative ties to the “dear one” back home. Studying the attachments of Mary Todd Lincoln’s brother-in-law, Dawson, Berry concludes: In a culture in which men surrender nothing easily to each other, the natural appetite for submission to something larger than the self can become unbearable. God was too distant, the Confederacy too vague; Dawson only felt comfortable granting his obeisance to a woman. (ibid.)

What Berry has here pointed out with regard to Confederate manhood is equally true for the diaries and letters of Union soldiers. Bennitt, for instance, assures his wife that “hardening” is not what individual soldiers strive for: “Hence each one in a measure lives within himself here, and looks Northward for warm hearts, and kind words” (July 9, 1864, p. 291).38 A year before this he had openly admitted that his separation from Lottie was “the worst part of the war” (February 24, 1863, p. 106). Yet there was more to such longing than the term “homesickness” implies: as Berry suggests,

37

For a definition of “hardening” cf. Reid Mitchell, Civil War Soldiers (1998: 7-8). Cf. also McPherson (1998: 74).

38

Union soldier Cyrus F. Boyd also mentions homesick “boys” who “began to think of their mothers and to talk of returning to their comfortable homes in the western counties”. Mildred Throne, ed. The Civil War Diary of Cyrus F. Boyd (1972: 25). Evidence of this can also be found in most nursing narratives. See, for example, Cornelia Hancock, Letters of a Civil War Nurse (1998), Parsons (1984) and Ropes (1980).

    

 
 

  

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the idea of “woman” became a true alternative to those most powerful abstractions of the era—God and nation. As will be elaborated later, Bennitt, too, took refuge in the idea of woman. This does not imply, however, that he was immune to the concept of hardening; on the contrary, he, too, acknowledges that the army service does not tend to refine the sensibilities, and there is a disposition to steel our hearts to anything like sympathy. The argument for this is; that there is so much of suffering around us that if we sympathize with all we suffer with all, and we be thus worn out by pure sympathy. (July 9, 1864, p. 291)

Significantly, “hardening” is not a passive reaction to everyday atrocities but an exercise undertaken in the interest of individual survival. This is confirmed by Thomas Fanning Wood, another Union surgeon who strove to control such retrospective glances, and in a few hours after I got into camp I learned to look upon home and all its happy applications as a romantic little spot, having existence only in the imagination; and the happy faces there, as my guardian spirits, they too have existence in the imagination. I hope to prove their real existence though in six months, or at any rate when our family circle can again be restored entire, without the loss of a single face. But to come to real things, the rain is falling fast. (2000: 68)

It is this learning experience, specific to war, and the changed view of women that accompanied it that this chapter emphasizes through an analysis of Bennitt’s correspondence. For all the similarities that one can find among men of his generation, masculine identities, too, are plural and unstable,39 and a deep, contextualized analysis of one individual “case” seems the most promising way to learn more about the potential impact of the war on husbands, wives, and society at large. Bennitt developed an alternative concept of masculinity that emphasized the struggle between civilian and military manhood. Challenging the prevailing idea that “remaining a civilian was thought unmanly; going to war a proof of manhood” (Mitchell 1993: 4), his letters interpret his army experiences as a rite of passage into a renewed version of Victorian manliness. While at first sight his ideal resembles the antebellum concept of a gentle yet authoritative father figure, once the war had begun it came to be defined by its embattled status and its “hero’s” successful efforts to repeatedly triumph over evil. Bennitt, in other words, saw himself as a soldier for his own moral cause. Before this chapter turns to the textual and ideological implications

39

Regarding criticism of older approaches to the concept of masculinity compare Robert W. Connell and James W. Messerschmidt, “Hegemonic Masculinity” (2005: 829-59).

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of this self-image it will shed light on the early phase of the physician’s self-definition and on the role of religion therein. There is in Bennitt’s letters a crucial, dramaturgically significant moment at which he makes up his mind to embark on a personal crusade against “vice”: in February 1863, a growing number of soldiers asked to leave the army because they were no longer willing to tolerate the living conditions in camp. In a letter to his wife Bennitt attests a certain “Nostalgia [sic] among the men” many of whom were “trying to get discharged,” but instead of deferring such wishes to a somewhat unmanly, “romantic little spot” (as Wood may have done) he readily admits that he, too, hopes to be reunited with his family as soon as possible (February 24, 1863, p. 106). Importantly however, he decides to “remain that I may serve and minister to the wants of the soldiers” (ibid.). The doctor’s heroic deed, in other words, relied on a sentimentalization of the men he had initially reduced to a “rough sett of customers.” By emphasizing the “unmanly” neediness of his patients he was able to define his place as a natural leader and professional healer precisely as he had aspired to during his stay in Ann Arbor. Importantly, this was very much an act of textual self-fashioning: Bennitt relied on the dialogical form of letter writing to imagine himself as the healer-citizen he wanted to be. In order to maintain the inspiration that he derived from his model, he depended upon his wife’s consent and encouragement. This, then, was one of the themes and motivations of these letters. This does not mean, however, that he hungered for words of affirmation: what he needed most was a Christian anchor in a hellish world. This anchor, then, was what Lotti could provide. What must be emphasized here are the strong religious inflections that distinguish these letters from others: it is as a Christian soldier that Bennitt is able to preserve the ideal of fatherly authority within a military environment. This identity allows him to neither withdraw into nostalgia nor “harden himself” to the same extent as Wood and others, but instead to create a concept of the self that finds a middle way between civilian and military manliness. For Bennitt (and others like him40), “steeling his heart” was not primarily a measure to shield himself against impressions of physical suffering but in fact was a way to bear the moral decay that he lamented and to fight it effectively. The strategy he chose to accomplish this double aim was both religious and textual:

40

In his discussion of the autobiography of the Northern soldier and officer Cyrus F. Boyd, Mitchell argues that Boyd “and other northerners were as proud of their ability to withstand the temptations to which other soldiers gave in as they were of their service to the Union” (ibid.: 7).

    

 
 

  

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I am becoming more tolerant of the men around me than at first, for “Vice is a monster - &c.,” and I am fast becoming “familiar with her face.” I do “pity” to some extent—O that I may have strength from on high to keep me from “Embracing.” (Feb. 7, 1863, p. 99)

While it is interesting that he chooses Alexander Pope’s Essay on Man (1732)41 to authorize the passage and regulate his emotional confusion, the more general means that he relies on here are even more significant: the passage is laced with religious expression and relates this Christian discourse (semi)publicly. The “public” in this case is his wife Lotti, who is both the motivation and the prerequisite for this textual exercise in intellectual, emotional, and spiritual growth as well as the most intimate witness to her husband’s moral victory and successful transformation. It is thus no coincidence that Bennitt uses a confessional tone when he informs Lottie that he no longer withdraws to his room to avoid contact with “sinful” soldiers and colleagues, and his repeated insistence on how he preserved his moral integrity while associating with these men also borders on justification. By sharing his prayers that God would give him the power to resist the “devil’s embrace,” Bennitt makes Lottie a witness to his repeated (and always successful) struggles against the temptations of army life. A year after Bennitt left for the army Lottie learned in detail about his most important personal triumph, his friendship with one Doctor Bluthardt, who was “a man of some scientific attainments but not a christian—a german” [sic] (Nov. 22, 1863, p. 199).42 The avowed atheist is the only person with whom Bennitt can discuss “science and politics, & the general conduct of the war” (Dec. 25, 1863, p. 215). One of their favorite topics is William Paley’s rationalist theology. (Bennitt does not mention whether these discussions included the radical feminist, antislavery, and anti-capitalist ideas of the philosopher.) Bennitt is so grateful for this inspirational friendship that he not only spends Christmas with the “forty-eighter” but concludes that “it may not be in vain for us to have entered the army, if we properly improve our time” (ibid.). Improvement is certainly the message he sends to Lottie by unfolding what is, essentially, a Christian narrative of resistance against the temptation of Bluthardt’s rationalist worldview. Bennitt, in other words, presents his wife with his personal

41

“Vice is a monster of so frightful mien / As to be hated but to be seen; / Yet seen too oft, familiar with her face, / We first endure, then pity, then embrace.” Quoted in Baesecker’s footnote 26 to this passage in the letter.

42

By far the largest immigrant group that enrolled in the army (many of them were mustered into a mixed unit) came from Germany, and discrimination against them was a major topic in the German-American press. See Joseph R. Reinhard, Two Germans in the Civil War (2004: xxxiii and 67). Regarding the ambivalent image of German immigrants in America see Leonard Dinnerstein and David M. Reimers, “An Expanding Population,” Ethnic Americans (1988).

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success story: his faith is now strong enough to make him a natural leader with “knowledge of the world & what is going on around.” This of course implies a marked shift in his relationship to Lottie: the times when a shy and God-fearing husband apologetically explained his occasional neighborhood strolls to his wife are implicitly declared over. The army, in other words, has transformed Bennitt from husband to citizen; it has changed his predominantly private concept of masculinity to a public one. And yet the army doctor’s idea of leadership is fundamentally civilian: it is only by taking on the role of dutiful “father” of both the “dear ones” and the nation’s self-sacrificial heroes that he finds a way to not resign from service. This interrelated attachment, then, is reason enough to cast a closer look at his relationship to home. The concept of home was key to Bennitt’s vision of a renewed nation with an active citizenry. It was in fact so important for him that he even turned to the public to promote it: during the third year of the war he published a letter addressed to the U.S. Sanitary Commission; it appeared under the heading “Testimonial of Surgeon Bennett” [sic] in the November 15, 1864, issue of the Sanitary Reporter, a twicemonthly journal to “Promote the Health, Comfort, and Efficiency of our Army and Navy.” While the letter acknowledges the strength of the government, its actual purpose is to celebrate the role of “the people, its strength in the patriotism and welldirected energies of the masses, [and] not only of the men, who, muscle and sword in hand, go forth to the bloody encounter with the traitorous foes” (Appendix B, 383). By identifying the “support, sympathy, and aid given directly by the people who remain at home” as an intrinsic part of the war effort (ibid.), the letter responds to rather than echoing Lincoln’s November 19th, 1863 Gettysburg Address. Lincoln had reminded his countrymen and -women that it was “for us the living” to “be dedicated here to the unfinished work” which the soldiers had “thus far so nobly advanced.”43 Bennitt goes one step further when he claims that the support of those at home is in fact far more effective than the “slow process of legislation and military orders.” In his gendered interpretation of the war effort he effusively celebrates “a loved mother, wife, sister, daughter, or, may be, sweetheart” who sees what “the wisest of men could not foresee and provide against” (Oct. 2, 1864, p. 384).44 His open letter even

43

I rely on the so-called “Bliss version of the Gettysburg Address” here. It is a version that Lincoln copied as a gift to Colonel Alexander Bliss after he gave the speech. It is the only version that was signed by the president. See quod.lib.umich.edu/l/lincoln/lincoln7/ 1:40?rgn=div1;view=fulltext.

44

From Abraham Lincoln, “Gettysburg Address”: “It is for us the living rather to be dedicated here to the unfinished work, which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us— that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they

    

 
 

  

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contains a prayer in which he asks that “the God of Heaven bless [the women] and their agencies in their noble work, and give them and us great success, and hasten the time when efforts in this direction shall no longer be necessary” (ibid.). While the President finished his address with the famous lines of hope “that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom—and that government: of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth,” the surgeon reminded his contemporaries that the nation’s spiritual rebirth was in fact already under way: by sending “necessities for the comfort of the invalid,” he argued, Northern women who were “engaged in the matter, heart and hand” made an invaluable contribution to the Christian nation’s rebirth, “when traitorous hands shall not longer be raised against our country, but peace restored with righteousness enthroned” (ibid.). The idea that “woman” “was to be the Preserver; the Teacher or Inspirer; and the Exemplar” was not new, of course: antebellum reformers like Sarah Josepha Hale had long positioned women as the most important moral influence on the nation’s citizenry (1852: xxxix). Yet unlike that “gentle crusader” who “cherished the opinion that society would be improved, not damaged, by women’s contributions” (J. F. Clarke), Bennitt was originally far from seeing women as active shapers of public affairs. That was certainly the case when he first enlisted, and it was particularly true with regard to his own wife: like other men who served in the army he experienced the war as a gendered conflict. Many of his early letters show how he struggled with the fact that Lottie had been plunged into the traditional duties of a husband and breadwinner. Although she was inexperienced in matters of domestic economy she had to manage the family’s shaky finances, claim money from her husband’s numerous debtors, pay the bills, look for and purchase a new house, and find a school for the girls. Although she does not mention it she must have gained insight into John’s daily business (which was in many respects a failure) and remained in touch with a potentially corrupt public sphere. It was a change of roles with dramatic consequences: when John, like many soldiers and army physicians, did not receive his monthly payment, he had to ask Lottie for financial support and at the same time admit that even men could not endure forever: “If any money can be spared me I would be glad to have it, for I have yet no saddle & it might be very inconvenient to travel far overland without saddle as the government does not furnish me transportation across the country” (Oct. 12, 1862, p. 56). Remarks such as “It seems to me that you would better place all your business affairs in the hands of Mr. Chafee” (a Cen-

gave the last full measure of devotion—that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain, that this nation under God shall have a new birth of freedom, and that government of the people, by the people, for the people shall not perish from the earth.”

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treville lawyer) (June 1, 1863, p. 129) testify to his fear that he might lose his authority within the family and indicate how desperately he sought to uphold it. In the course of the war, however, his initial efforts to secure the moral purity of “his” women shifted to class-related worries: It seems to me that you are doing to[o] much hard work for your own physical good, and hope that you will be careful. I do not think it necessary for you to do all your hard work yourself, and especially that it should all be done at once. You seem to think that because you have no money, you must therefore, do everything yourself. I hope you will consider it enough of sacrifice at present, that I am in the army, and try to make yourself physically as comfortable as possible. (Oct. 30, 1864, p. 326)45

While the passage stresses the physical exhaustion brought on by Lottie’s position as economic head of the family, it implicitly points to the moral side as well, since female passiveness/dependency and moral superiority went together in Victorian discourse. And yet Bennitt had reached a point where he no longer believed in his earlier, rather inflexible notions of a woman’s role in society; he eventually placed all his hope on women’s potential to actively shape a morally superior nation. Two things may had brought about this adaptation process: first of all, he had been forced to accept that his wife had taken over most of his prewar responsibilities, and that she been able to do this rather well. Second, his life among drinking, gambling, and cursing soldiers had taught him how limited his own impact actually was: he simply did not have the authority and “masculine” personality that was needed to control this “rough sett of customers.” Bennitt’s recognition of his own limited impact does not contradict this chapter’s earlier claim that the war had boosted the physician’s manly self-image: Bennitt’s concept of male leadership would never go beyond the image of a committed citizen and a father to those in need. As an army physician he was in a rare position to cultivate this self-image, and he became increasingly relaxed whenever he was asked to act in a more authoritative way. Thus when, shortly before the war ended, he was offered a professorship at his Alma Mater, the Cleveland Medical College, he seemed quite content with turning it down simply because he thought that the task required “stronger men than I, and stronger influences than I can bring, to keep it up” (Feb. 26, 1865, p. 346). Significantly, however, he then immediately suggested an alternative field of personal engagement: the passage is followed by an utterly disconnected statement regarding the future role of women in American society: “I am anxious that

45

For a nuanced analysis of the changing roles of American women and their limits during the war and its aftermath cf., for example, Sizer (2000: 1-15).

    

 
 

  

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my daughters should become thoroughly educated, and that my wife may have opportunity for reading, and learning more of the world by actual observation” (ibid.). The latter part of the sentence is particularly remarkable because it echoes the justification that he himself had given some years earlier for mixing with the crowd in Ann Arbor: having a “good knowledge of the world” is no longer a male privilege but a joint, gender-neutral endeavour under heavenly instruction. Bennitt, in other words, may not be the type of leader to rebuild a deteriorating college, but as a husband and father of girls he actively embraces his educational responsibilities. His life in the army had taught him where his talents lay and how to use them most effectively. How serious he was about this can be derived from the next sentence in this remarkably multifaceted passage; it is another devout ejaculation: “O my [God],... Give us all wisdom to improve every means and opportunity of mental and moral culture, that we may be fitted for the highest usefulness in this world” (Feb. 26, 1865, p. 346, italics mine). A week later he once more emphasized the seriousness of his vision and implored that his daughters be encouraged to spend all their time in a manner that will have a tendency to mental, moral, physical, or social improvement, and keep in mind that all these days and hours and minutes are given us for a purpose, and God will require a strict account of us, of the manner in which we improve them (March 3, 1865, p. 348).

Although he never brought himself to imagine his wife as a true shaper of the new nation, Bennitt was more than willing to shed his conservative qualifications when it came to the next generation. As early as September 1862, when he was under the impression of the soldiers’ immoral behavior, he confided to the “Dear Daughters” that he was glad that you are comfortably situated & that you can go to school & learn music & hope you will improve your time to the utmost so that you may grow up to usefulness & exert such an influence upon society in future as shall tend to prevent war & all its attendant distress, & degradation (Sept. 26, 1862, p. 53).

Bennitt maintained this hopeful view of the country’s young women after he had learned to cope with army conditions more easily, and indeed became even more decided about them: instead of asking his daughters to excel in the domestic sphere alone, he urged them to attain “the high Christian motives to ensure great excellence as a scholar, and usefulness as a member of society” (May 17, 1863, p. 121). Such urging was not entirely new to the doctor, who had already wished his daughters to visit school before he entered the army. During his prolonged stay among ”vile” men, however, the issue gained a new priority in his thinking, and he eventually arrived at the conclusion that the nation’s survival depended on a joint effort of the educated

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classes among the younger generation. The clearest words he found for this appeared in a March 1864 passage that sought to imagine a more hopeful national future: “never was I impressed more forcibly than now with this fact,” that “the future of our country depends very much upon the little girls and boys that are growing up now” (March 11, 1864, p. 247). That said, I wish to qualify what may appear to have been a straightforward adaptation process: the changes in the doctor’s views of women were subtle, and the development he envisioned involved a gradual and incomplete shift in responsibilities instead of a radical transformation. While he eventually saw the necessity of integrating women as active shapers of the moral nation, he remained torn between a conservative, patriarchal ideology and a “gentle crusade” in the tradition of Hale and other antebellum reformers, in which women worked for the progress of the nation alongside men. An example of how thin the line was that Bennitt treaded is his obsession with the threat of female “indolence”: while on the one hand he could not stand the thought that his wife “seem[ed] to think” that she must “do everything [her]self,” on the other hand he worried that his daughters might fail to live up to the Victorian ideal of usefulness. When in the spring of 1864 an illness demanded that Jennie rest, he implored that she resist “Satan’s work” in the guise of “that worst of vices: indolence” (March 11, 1864, p. 247). One is struck with the despair and urgency that resonates through these lines; Bennitt, it seems, suffered from not being able to actually perform the duties that defined, in his view, a valid American father. Around Christmas of 1865 he anxiously asked his wife whether “the daughters” were “doing as well as though I was there?” (332). It seems that by the end of the war it had dawned on him that his role in the formation of those who would decide the nation’s moral future had actually been a minor one. Judging by his correspondence, the thought had tortured him for years: in March 1864, for instance, he had lamented that his “daughters may be grown to womanhood before I can stay at home with them to assist in training them,” and he urged them to “heed well the instructions & admonitions of their good mother” and to fulfill their “[d]uty to God & Love for Him & and for that mother & and for me” for “in just the same degree as you strive to make others happy will you be happy yourself, and by your own happiness you will increase that of those around” (247). The logical hierarchy inscribed into this Victorian pattern of systemic happiness is worth noting: it is, first of all, for the love of God that women should obey their mothers. Yet at least in Lottie’s case she is merely standing in for the absent father, as her performance of motherhood is meant to follow her husband’s written instructions: Especially urge upon the daughters the necessity of application with reference to culture in all good respects, and to do whatever their hands find to do with all their might, and thereby they

    

 
 

  

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will not only please me, but what is infinitively of more importance, will please their Heavenly Father. (Feb. 26, 1865, p. 346)

Again, and even more explicitly than in his March 1864 letter, Bennitt’s reference to God is not merely formulaic but a sanctification of communal relations that aims to secure the distant letter-writer’s influence on his family.46 At the same time, however, he seeks to imaginatively secure his endangered status as a Christian soldier. As will be discussed in the following section, Bennitt’s anxious invocations of the Savior were (at least in part) a reaction to that savior’s dwindling influence among army men, and an effort to imaginatively save his own pious dream of a future nation under God.


  


 

 
That the American Civil War was religiously motivated has been an argument ever since 1864, when the historian R. L. Stanton claimed that the split in the American churches that preceded the war marked not only “the first break between the sections” but was in fact “the chief cause of the final break.”47 While this explanation reduces, and thereby oversimplifies, a far more complex situation, it is true that once disunion had become a reality the American churches gave up their neutrality “on all ‘political’ issues, including slavery” and “expressed their deep conviction that ‘this struggle is not alone for civil rights and property and home, but also for religion, for the church, for the gospel, for existence itself” (Ahlstrom 1972: 674).48 Referring to the year 1861, Sydney E. Ahlstrom agrees that “two divinely authorized crusades were set in motion, each of them absolutizing a given social and political order” (Ahlstrom 1972: 672). Whatever weight scholars have given to this argument, it is certain that the men who fought the Civil War were a product of the Second Great Awakening and made

46

A somewhat similar articulation of “sanctified communal relations” is described in Decker (1998: 69).

47

The Church and the Rebellion, 1864, cited in Ahlstrom (1972: 673). Also see William Warren Sweet, The Story of Religion in America (1950: 312) and James W. Silver, Confederate Morale and Church Propaganda (1957: 101).

48

Ahlstrom cites Henry E. Jacobs, A History of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in the United States, vol. 4, American Church History Series (1893), arguing that “the same positions were formally taken or practically demonstrated in virtually every church.” Cf. also Wills, Under God (1990: 20).

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up the most religious army in American history (cf. McPherson 1998: 63).49 This, it may be argued, had enormous consequences for how Americans made sense of the war, how they interpreted their roles within the army, and how they wished the nation to become once the war was over. As Morone has pointed out, these soldiers not only shared a belief that “salvation could be achieved by faith and an attempt to abjure sin” (McPherson 1998: 67), but saw themselves as part of a movement that “rivaled political parties” in its mission “to save the nation, and redeem the world” (Morone 2003: 123). In keeping with the religious climate of his day, Bennitt subscribed to a “sacralized interpretation of the Union’s meaning” (Stout 2006: 183) that viewed the war as a sign from a wrathful God who could only be appeased via a crusade with global dimensions: “We may be—nay we must be,—we are already severely punished for our own sins & God will make this wicked people an instrument for establishing the great principle of man’s duty to man, in the world” (Oct. 12, 1863, p. 181). There can be no doubt that his religious faith was Bennitt’s most important mental resource. It helped him interpret his unpleasant army encounters as religious trials and informed his work as a doctor among the severely wounded and dying: confronted with his frequent impotence in these hopeless situations he declared the saving of souls his core responsibility. “[T]he most important thing,” he wrote at one point, was providing patients with “religious instruction and impressions” (April 23, 1864, p. 263). While to some extent this may have been a reaction to the limits of his profession in the face of unbearable sanitary conditions and the rapidly increasing number of injured soldiers, it also indicates a typical nineteenth-century understanding of healing: like many of his contemporaries Bennitt perceived of physical diseases and pain “as being of the same etiological order as the distress and misbehavior caused by loneliness, dissatisfaction, or so-called immorality” (Long 2004: 85).50 This holistic, spiritual approach was a typical marker of mid-nineteenth-century moral authority. The physician from Centreville belonged to a profession that aspired to elite status by “standing up for Science, God, and Country”:

49

Morone offers an insightful introduction to the evolution of religious thought during the pre-war era. The anthology edited by Randall A. Miller (1998), shows the crucial role of religion in the Civil War theatre from a variety of viewpoints. The diary of Rufus Kinsley, a Union officer and Protestant evangelist, offers another example of how Christian convictions provided the guiding principle in some military decision-making processes. Cf. David C. Rankin, ed. Diary of A Christian Soldier (2004).

50

In her book Long mentions that other, far more famous Civil War physician, S. Weir Mitchell, who in his 1866 short story “The Case of George Dedlow” focused on the “interstices between flesh, mind, and that amorphous essence called soul” (ibid.: 29). Bennitt, however, says surprisingly little about maimed bodies and concentrates almost exclusively on the souls of the wounded.

    

 
 

  

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Oh sure, theologians and parents were important. But only the doctors could draw on science to present the subject in a way that guided legislators trying to frame “suitable laws” […]. The doctors simultaneously cleared away their fraudulent rivals and posed as moral pillars of the community. (Morone 2003: 253)

In line with this self-fashioning, which went beyond the medical doctors’ role as healers, Bennitt had been elected deacon and director of the Baptist Sunday school in his hometown.51 His Ann Arbor correspondence reveals that this position left him doubtful regarding his effectiveness as a true servant of God: as he related to Lottie, the Baptist congregations in Ann Arbor remained “confined to the members of the church and their families”; he therefore feared that “their sphere of usefulness [was] limited” (Nov. 27, 1861, p. 12). Believing that “one of the chief objects of a church organization” was “holding forth the ‘Word of Life’ to the unconverted around” (Bennitt 2005: 231),52 Bennitt came to see the army as a unique opportunity to serve “Him” to the fullest. In addition to organizing Sunday services for the soldiers he also initiated a Christian association, having for its object the regular maintenance of religious worship as preching [sic]—prayer & conference meetings &c. There are thirteen names on the Society’s list of members, & there will be a large number more as soon as we are fully organized & unfurl our banner. I hope this measure may prove for the everlasting good of all who may be engaged in it and may shed an influence upon those with whom they are associated that may be a seed sown in good ground—bringing forth an hundred fold to the glory of the redeemer. (July 15, 1863, p. 145). (Author’s note: he is quoting from Matt. 13:8; Mark 4:8; and Luke, 8:8).

Bennitt joined the large group of lay preachers who offered an alternative to the network of appointed army chaplains, who were in fact numerous. Contradicting Ahlstrom, who views appointed army chaplains as “heroic” and successful in converting soldiers (cf. Ahlstrom 1972: 675), Bennitt explains that Chaplains have to some extent have [sic] been a nuisance & I should not dare to recommend any one to that position till I had them on trial in the army. A man’s integrity is thoroughly tried. A man who appears to be a good and earnest man at home does not always make a good chaplain. We wish to see how they will be influenced by the temptations here. We wish to know what influence they can exercise with the men &c & c. (Nov. 18, 1863, p. 198)

51

Regarding Bennitt’s church activities cf. Anderson, “Introduction” (2005: xvii).

52

For his views on the church as a missionary institution see also Bennitt 12 and 13.

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Bennitt’s democratic understanding of religious organizing involved a right and duty to control office holders who worked under the auspices of the army. In an effort that recalled his earlier wish “to have a good knowledge of the world, & of what is going on around,” he used his spare time to visit Church services that were offered by army chaplains and lay members of various Protestant denominations, documenting their mistakes or general failure. As he related in his letters, one member of the Disciples of Christ was “not much of a preacher,” an unidentified army chaplain talked “unpleasantly loud & repeat[ed] too much” (Jan. 21, 1864, p. 231), and a Methodist preacher, who believed in his absolute authority over his congregation, was a daunting example of undemocratic leadership. The doctor also objected to a member of his own Church, a Baptist minister, whose “sympathies [were] with secession” (208). Bennitt was not alone in his observations. In his May 17, 1863, letter to one William Hartley Watson (his father or his brother), the army physician William Watson lamented that “with one or two exceptions all the Chaplains I have met are not only of no good or utility to the Army but a disgrace to the religion they profess” (Watson 1996: 99).53 Such criticism reminds us that the era was not only a time of Christian fervor but of religious dissent. As members from many different denominations and religious sects met in the narrow spatial confines of army camps and hospitals the religious marketplace of the Second Great Awakening became more competitive than it had been before the war. Bennitt became an active agent in this competition, which was also a competition to produce the most meaningful explanation for the enormous bloodshed caused by the nation’s most severe political and spiritual crisis. To sum this up: the religious activities and structures within the army suggested an alternative to the strict, hierarchical order of the military. Loosely organized and open to all, religious life in the army trained American men (and the women who worked as nurses and in other positions) to engage in democratic forms of competition and debate. This, however, entailed a potential risk of personal failure. For unspecified reasons the church organization that Bennitt began to set up at Nashville, Tennessee, was “never completed” (July 12, 1863, p. 144), and his Sunday services were poorly attended. Whether this had to do with the particular dynamics of a homosocial environment, with an oversupply of religious services, or with a traditional “tension between the aspirations of physicians to privileged status and popular resistance to their

53

In his discussion of church activities during the war Ahlstrom gives a more positive picture of army chaplains. Although Bennitt does not offer specific reasons for his disdain for chaplains, his criticism may have been based on the fact that as a surgeon he was routinely aided by chaplains sent by the Christian Commission. Regarding the work of army chaplains cf. Ahlstrom (1972: 678-9).

    

 
 

  

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claims” (Starr 1982: 31)54 is never explained in Bennitt’s letters; according to him it was simply hard “to keep alive the vital spark” through “the stimulus of religious association” (ibid.). He thus learned a central lesson in democracy: while it is in principle open to all people it does not grant full recognition to everybody. In line with his Christian understanding of experience he read his failure as a divine test and accepted a far more modest form of religious leadership when defining his position in relation to the soldiers: There are many temptations in camp life to lead men astray and I sometimes feel as though my life before the men of this Regiment is not what it should be—that I am not a faithful example of a living active Christian. With God’s help I will live nearer him, and do my duty as a christian [sic] to those around me. (Oct. 18, 1863, p. 182)

Longing for more public recognition, Bennitt soon came to view this role of devout and modest missionary as another divine test: four months later his personal struggle reached a new critical stage. As he confided to Lottie, he felt “inclined to neglect religious duties” and admitted that it “requires a debate in my mind to get me to prayer meeting” (Jan. 24, 1864, p. 231). Three months later he blamed himself for failing to attend to the religious needs of a “very fine young man” who had died before “fully consider[ing] his future relations to his Maker” (April 23, 1864, p. 263). Bennitt, it seems, sought to alleviate his guilt by intensifying his communication with God. While prayer had been a defining element of his earlier letters, he now incorporated more and longer passages in which he pleaded with God and mused about theological themes. In keeping with his missionary credo he often encouraged the “dear ones”—and civilian society as a whole—to join “[t]he prayer of all Christian patriots”: “‘God keep the soldiers from vice & make them christians’” (Jan. 24, 1864, p. 231). His theology was surprisingly general, ignoring denominational specificities: according to his December 11, 1863, letter to Lottie, true piety was not a matter of denomination but of individual commitment and faith: “Really the great question is; is the heart right in the sight of God, and are we willing, yea anxious to do whatever He commands?” (209). The statement goes beyond individual soulsearching: only three weeks earlier, Abraham Lincoln had substituted the wish for union with the future-oriented concept of nation in his Gettysburg Address, and the Christian doctor took the opportunity to move this message onto a religious plane by emphasizing the “we” of citizenship in “His” kingdom. Bennitt’s discourse, in other words, shifted beyond the logic of sectional division and toward spiritual redemption for all.

54

According to Starr this tension “reflected a more general conflict in American life between a democratic culture and a stratified society” (ibid.: 31).

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Bennitt became increasingly self-confident and politically explicit after emancipation. Like many of his contemporaries (including Lincoln himself) he believed that national renewal depended upon collective moral purification. In keeping with what Ahlstrom has written about this era, he “sought to bring all Americans first to penitence and reformation, and only then to reconciliation” (1972: 685).55 This is how Bennitt envisions this process of renewal: Let the Daughters feel that there are sacrifices for them to make for the good of others, that they may be instrumental in doing good. This is a great struggle we are engaged in and it is necessary for [a] Christian patriot and philanthropist to use all his God-given energies in the right direction for the accomplishment of this one thing; viz: the maintaining this best form of government on earth—best, because founded on justice and right and accordance with the law of God. This nation destroyed and world goes back to the dark ages. Then again would be enacted the scenes of the Inquisition or those of a character equally repugnant to christianized humanity of more enlightened ages. God grant the world may be spared such scenes, and that the present dark hour be the harbinger of a glorious day upon which [we] are about to enter. (July 9, 1864, p. 293)

Of course such recourse to Christ and Christianity, along with the call “for a constitutional amendment invoking God,” was typical in the rhetoric of Northern evangelicals who felt provoked by Confederate claims that the C.S.A. was “the only truly Christian nation” since “no God was ever acknowledged in the Constitution of the old United States” (Stout 2006: 97).56 More significantly, however, Bennitt seems to have made up his mind after the Emancipation Proclamation, resting his hopes on America’s women with a new frequency and intensity. His July 1864 letter may be fatalistic at points, yet it maintains the notion of a feminized country’s splendid future. Americans, he believed, could only spiritually renew themselves as individuals and as members of a national community in God if men and women worked hand in hand. In the course of the physician’s correspondence his rhetoric shifted from male

55

My emphasis. As Bennitt put it on July 17, 1864, there would be “no national blessing till God is publicly recognized as the source of all good, and His favor humbly sought, with penitence and prayer” (296).

56

The frequent mention of Christ (along with the call “for a constitutional amendment invoking God”) has political implications, as Christian themes played a crucial role in the rhetoric of Northern evangelicals, who felt the need to counter the Confederate claim that the CSA was the true Christian heir to the Founders’ original vision (Stout 2006: 97). As Stout points out, Southerners “underscored their superiority as the only truly Christian nation” by frequently reminding Northerners that “no God was ever acknowledged in the Constitution of the old United States.”

    

 
 

  

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control to a vision of direct female influence that foreshadowed the social activism that was to emerge during the late Reconstruction era, when the concept of “woman” became “one of the major ideas out of which Americans created […] the embodiment of their collective will” (Banta 1987: 21).57 Yet while the generation that made up the bulk of the Christian temperance and missionary movements depended for its justification on the feminized rhetoric of manifest domesticity, Bennitt’s crusade for a better nation was rooted in a dynamic relationship between his pen, the women whom he wished to join his endeavor, and God himself.


   
    
 
  
  
As Decker reminds us, epistolary practices are “not exclusive to America but prominent in the American experience” since they “coincide with American experiences of space, settlement, separation, and reunion” (1998: 10) and have always “served as an important channel to cultural transmission” (ibid.: 11). This was especially true during the sectional conflict, when letter writing became a mass phenomenon. The potential of the genre to “complicate the boundaries between public and private, political and personal” applied not only to the correspondence of self-reflective intellectuals like Adams, Emerson, and Dickinson (whom Decker focuses on), but also to the literate American soldier who struggled to define his place in a social figuration that was new to him (ibid.: 12). For Bennitt it was an “[o]asis to get a letter from home” (July 9, 1864, p. 291), and he made sure he enjoyed every part of the experience— the receiving and opening of the envelope, the view of the familiar handwriting, the temporary overlap between feeling “at home” and life in the military: all of this was as important for him as the content of the letter itself. For Bennitt, then, letters were more than a retreat into privacy, intimacy, and individual agency: as a kind of anchor in the civilian world they helped structure his life in the army. Bennitt seems to have depended so much on the dialogic creation of this “ersatz domestic world” that he came to perceive the epistolary process as an act that could and must be controlled. He reminded his daughters to “write oftener” (July 21, 1863, p. 147) and thanked his “Own Dear Wife” for her “kindness in thus writing to me often,—none too often however. Indeed I would be glad to have a letter from you every day” (Feb. 24, 1863, p. 104). A sense of addiction echoes through his correspondence when he complains that there has been “[n]o letter from [Lottie] since the little one written at Orland on

57

As Mary P. Ryan points out with regard to the years between 1865 and 1880, “women’s charity and reform associations” were “as much an outgrowth of the class position they shared with their husbands, as an extension of their gender roles. Before 1880, moreover, their activities seldom generated a challenge to sexual inequality itself.” (1998: 214).

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the 15th Inst.” (124) or that he “cannot think [she has] failed to write all this time” (May 29, 1863, p. 126), or when he reproachfully reports that her ”most welcome letters of the 18th & 22nd were received to-day—the first that I have had since leaving home nearly four weeks ago” (July 5, 1863, p. 136).58 Bennitt was remarkably aware of the fact that he wrote in order to be written to: “it occurred to me that I should be very much delighted to hear from you & that I should be willing to make a large sacrifice of present ease if I could get a letter from you; so I sit me down to write a few lines at least” (July 12, 1863, p. 143). While the content of these lines seems irrelevant (he admittedly wrote letters “of some length without much being said”) (May 24, 1863, p. 126), the physician reminded his wife and daughters that their letters should follow a different pattern: “I am very well pleased with what they [the daughters] write. It is just what I want to hear from them” (July 12, 1863, p. 147). As Nelson has pointed out, such interventions appeared as part of “a running discourse about what constitutes male and female literacy, about what genres and topics are proper to men and women during wartime—a discourse that both recapitulates and challenges prewar notions of normative male and female behavior” (1997: 48). While the Bennitts were conducting their long-distance relationship, the writing of letters across the military-domestic divide became a metaphor for the soldiers’ endangered manhood (cf. Cook 1996: 7): in Louisa May Alcott’s highly popular—and controversial—Hospital Sketches (1863), an energetic female nurse takes “possession” of the patients’ “money and valuables,” “get[s] the bodies” of these ailing “boys” into “something like order,” and writes letters for the physically handicapped (HS 42). The text signals an all-encompassing female takeover of male bodies and minds: the heroine confides to the reader (with a conspiring wink of the eye) that “the letters dictated to me, and revised by me, […] would have made an excellent chapter for some future history of the war” (HS 44). Defining herself as an editor rather than a secretary, the narrating I describes the original “scribbling” of maimed veterans as shaped by dysfunctional cultural norms and outmoded literary practices. By replacing the soldiers’ “lively accounts of the battle” with her own narrative, Alcott’s Nurse Periwinkle suggests an alternative to the traditional male-to-female hierarchy: a female-to-female (nurse-to-wife) correspondence. Hospital Sketches was a popular success, but reviewers were not enthusiastic, complaining about the book’s “laxity of

58

That the frequency and length of letters from home was received in moral terms can also be observed in other men’s letters of the time. On Friday, August 8, 1862, for instance, William Mervale Smith commented of his fiancée’s recent letter that it had “not the same warmth and devotion in its tone as her letters used to have”, Swamp Doctor (2001: 31).

    

 
 

  

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tone” and its “sad want of Christian experience” (qtd. in Alcott 1869: i).59 Bennitt may not have read Hospital Sketches, but if he had he would certainly have agreed. The controversy surrounding Hospital Sketches highlights the increasingly destabilized gender norms of the era and the loss of the true woman’s presumed innocence; through the letter-writing scene Alcott explores both of these upheavals. Regardless of whether he read the novella or not, the religious tone that pervades Bennitt’s correspondence takes on a shriller sound when correlated with that “unwomanly” intervention into male territory that was so expertly thematized by Alcott—an intervention that originated in the very recent entry of female nurses into military hospitals. It can in fact be argued that by writing “in the name of the father” Bennitt established a bulwark against the female takeover that was also taking place, albeit to a lesser extent, in his own family. While in the Bennitts’ case we cannot talk about a full-fledged gender war, it is clear that John Bennitt’s waning influence on the “dear ones” had weakened his sense of male superiority and agency. Unable to directly influence his family’s decisions and dependent on his pen and paper (there being no letter-writing nurse at hand to serve as secretary and editor), he inscribed his self-doubts and feelings of inadequacy into his correspondence: There is much to say that might interest you if it could be dressed up in good style; but [my] powers of description are not good, and if I attempt to tell of any affair or scene that was full of interest to me, I should fail of putting the proper coloring so much, that it would be dry and uninteresting to the reader. Therefore it is of little use for me to try anything of the description or narrative. I can get along better with drawing conclusions than any other drawing, so that my descriptions and narrations are most apt to end in conclusions if I attempt any. (October 18, 1863, p. 182)

59

Alcott quotes these critics in the added “Preface to Hospital Sketches” to protect her reputation as a writer and her female respectability she resorts to claims of authenticity and feminine modesty when she insists that the “sharp contrast of the tragic and comic” mirrors the unique atmosphere in the war hospital, while her refusal to share her prayers with the readers of The Atlantic Monthly proves the depth of her religious experience. In 1863 the young author’s publisher, James Redpath, had apparently underestimated the sensibilities of his contemporaries when he advised her to remove “biblical allusions” to “suit customers.” Cf. her journal entry of February 1st, 1868, in The Journals (1997: 164). Regarding the cultural meaning of the “preface” in the context of postwar religiosity cf. Kirsten Twelbeck, “The New Rules of the Democratic Game: Emancipation, SelfRegulation, and the ‘Second Founding’ of The Unites States,” Civilizing and Decivilizing Processes (2011).

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In this self-reflective remark Bennitt’s rhetoric reveals an additional dimension and function: the physician, it seems, was struggling to find a language that was at once authoritative and imaginative and that would compensate for the deficits of his dry, “Puritan” tone. This, then, was another function of the letters’ evangelical jargon, and especially of the hellfire rhetoric that surfaces at least once on every page: “There is doubtless fire for us to pass through, and may be burn up all our works, and we saved only as by Fire [sic]” (Sept. 23, 1864, p. 320). At the same time, however, this effort to linguistically “touch” the “dear ones” testifies to a Victorian husband’s spiritual dependency on his ideally pure and pious wife. In keeping with the antebellum gender contract, Bennitt perceived of Lottie as his “conduit to God”; her piety would enable both of them to come “as close to Him as they wanted to be” (Berry II 2003: 92). But because they were separated for many years Bennitt had to establish an imaginary alternative that secured his connection to both Lottie and the Almighty. This, then, was perhaps the most important function of the letters: by making his wife a witness to the constant flow of religious feeling that emanated from his letters, John secured his access to the Divine. It is only logical, then, that his letters are laced with what Decker (in his analysis of John Winthrop’s letters to his wife) has called “prayer-meditations addressing a solitude deepened by the uncertain status of the one missed; it is a text that may thus speak finally only to himself and God” (1998: 71). To sum up: what may best be described as a triangulation between Bennitt, Lottie, and God was an absent father’s effort to secure his male authority within the family, but in addition to shielding them from evil he also saved himself. It is for this overarching, inclusive purpose that the physician’s correspondence establishes an ever- and omnipresent metaphysical Father-figure: “I pray Our Heavenly Father that He will keep you & me in the way of duty & obedience, & then we shall always be happy, in time & in Eternity—” (Nov. 30, 1862, p. 71). So far this chapter has emphasized the religious side of the letters’ triangulating strategy. Yet love plays a role in this triangulation as well: Bennitt connects romance and religion in a way that makes his letters stylistically unique. To be sure, as a pious and fearful man the physician rarely used words of affection or gave vent to passionate feelings (Berry II 2003: 92).60 But by staying close to his wife through spiritual contact with God and by ”touching” the Divine through recourse to Lottie, he intensified the emotional connection between himself, his wife, and the Almighty. Bennitt, in other words, relied on the spiritual link between romance and religion that had been established in the first half of the nineteenth century, when romance became “a

60

This was not true of all men in service. In his analysis of the Civil War letters that William D. Pender wrote to his wife, Berry argues that for Pender becoming a Christian was “less a religious quest than a romantic one.”

    

 
 

  

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personal religion, complete with intercessor (the beloved), church (the home), conversion experience (falling in love), and sacraments (engagement, marriage, physical intimacy, writing letters, and mourning)” (ibid.: 92). By strengthening the religious side of his marriage Bennitt secured its Christian foundation and at the same time fulfilled his “longing for transcendental or telepathic contact” with God. Thus when he writes to Lottie that God “is always near those who call upon Him in faith” (June 14, 1863, p. 133) and asks her to “pray that I be kept in the path of true Holiness, & be found at last ‘without spot,’”61 he not only uses his wife as his “conduit to God” but also reminds her that the “path of true Holiness” is still their joint project (March 1, 1864, p. 243).62 Bennitt depended on this sense of spiritual closeness and togetherness to help him fight against fatalism, shock, and depression63 and to resist the “temptations” of life in camp. In other words, he created this “oasis” of letter writing (and reading) as a space where he could pray with the “dear ones” “that God would give me faith according to my need, -& strength & wisdom for every emergency & trial” (June 14, 1863, p. 133). On September 18, 1864, he proudly reported on his personal victory: “I can only say that I am guilty of enough sins of various kinds, but of Intemperance and gambling not any. Indeed for me there is now no temptation in these vices, they are so utterly disgusting to contemplate” (Sept. 18, 1864, p. 319). To recapitulate: the receiving and writing of letters refueled Bennitt’s fading religious fervor, empowered him to “heal” the sinners around him, and, ultimately, helped him develop a vision of national salvation after the war. All of this makes him a prototypical example of the kind of literacy that according to Nelson “links fighting men to civilization, synechdochically represented by the reading and writing woman at home” (1997: 61). As has been mentioned earlier, this process emerged as a set of actions with a repetitive, ritual character. Bennitt reserved time and space for this activity and arranged his desk in a manner that would enable passage from the “sinful” military realm to the religious one and vice versa. Most importantly, he surrounded himself with the photographic “likenesses” that his wife and daughters had sent him (after he

61

The quotation is from I Pet. 1:19.

62

Bennitt, in other words, actively used what Decker has called “the capacity of language

63

As James Dawes has pointed out, Civil War soldiers were largely unable to make sense

to mediate social relations.” of their individual experience: “As war reveals, violence harms language; it imposes silence upon groups and, through trauma and injury, disables the capacity of the individual to speak effectively.” According to Dawes these men often obsessed over numbers (of casualties, of shots fired, of victories won) in order to rationalize what they experienced. Bennitt, who as a doctor did not participate in the actual fighting, could rely on an alternative linguistic survival strategy: prayer. Dawes (2002: 2 and 25).

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requested that they do so), thereby reducing the distance between home and camp to a minimum: Your pictures & that of your mother are before me where I can look them in the face every time. I look up, and it is very pleasant indeed. It would however be much more pleasant could I see you all with the little sister, indeed, & know that we would not be separated again. (Aug. 16, 1863, p. 157)

During his three years of service Bennitt did everything he could to further diminish that separation, writing more than two hundred letters home and always hoping to construct a presence that would collapse distance:64 “I was very much delighted to receive a letter from the dear ones at home & would have been still more so, had it contained letters in your handwriting so that I should have seen that you had not forgotten me” (Sept. 26, 1863, 53). Longing to be continuously “in touch” with both “his” women and God, he ached for a ceaseless trace of their hands’ writing. Fortunately for John, Lottie followed the rules of his game, expertly assuring him of the “ideal communion that correspondents ask of epistolary relations” (ibid.: 45) by confirming her role as “conduit to God”: I sometimes think I feel the influence of your prayers. I need much grace & wisdom to bring up these dear children. I am at a loss many times to know how & what to do with them they now are so large but try to do my best. Jennie is learning Dearest Lillie one that you used to sing, she feels quite interested in her music. Clara is doing well, I think. (Letter from Lottie Bennitt, Nov. 5th, 1863, p. 381)

Unfortunately, this November 5, 1863, letter is the only one by Lottie that has been preserved, but it exemplifies the mechanism that turned a largely formulaic correspondence into a teleological—and telepathic—experience: a man can only touch God if his wife acknowledges the effect of his prayer.65

64

Regarding the particularly American tradition of using letters in order to be recognized as present cf. Decker (1998: 61-94).

65

This observation extends rather than challenges an argument that Decker makes with regard to John Winthrop’s letters to his wife: The affirmation of a God who is bodiless and therefore ever present in (and by virtue of) bodily absence permits Winthrop to affirm their abiding presence to one another: rather than figuring his wife and himself as mutually absent, he conceives of them as incompletely present. Their reunion in “His good time” —in heaven if not in New England—is ordained. He hopes that they will meet in New England, but they are together already in eternity (ibid.: 71).

    

 
 

  

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Since for Bennitt the nation’s moral improvement depended on the functioning interconnectivity of the public and private spheres, he worried about those who were not privileged to rely on a female “conduit to God,” as he was. In a December 17, 1863, letter to Lottie he confided that [n]o one can estimate the influence that frequent correspondence with home has upon the minds of the soldier. Would you wean a man from home, let him not have a friendly epistle from it for months and he will conclude there is little care for him there and will seek other associations and form other attachments. So it may be to some extent with those left at home (212).

If the imaginary presence of “woman” secured the moral order, the potential “wickedness” of the individual soldier was connected to the fading of this imaginary presence or to “her” actual non-existence: There is one thing that troubles me more than anything else & that is the fact that many are becoming comparatively careless about home i.e. they are becoming accustomed to a soldier’s life, and do not stop to consider that there is any better. This is more apt to be the case with those who have no wife & children to bind them to home. (ibid.)66

Haunted by the idea that the immediate environment had a stronger impact on a person than his or her social background and Christian upbringing, Bennitt feared that his wife and daughters might not be immune to the potential “vileness” of the public sphere: after hinting at “a bit of Scandal” connected to an army lieutenant who was found out to be engaged in a relationship with a prostitute, he worried that such laxity of morals might spill over to the women back home. “O my God!” he exclaimed in one of his spontaneous outbursts, “protect my children from such influence!” (Feb. 17, 1864, p. 238).67 That he resorts to prayer at this point (and elsewhere) adds a significant twist to his discourse: by semi-publicly engaging in a dialogue with God he tries to quite

66

Bennitt was not alone in this assessment. Daniel M. Holt similarly wrote about a “class of men” who either “receive[d] no letters” or were “the recipients of complaining, faultfinding letters—letters worthy of no Christian’s mind” and who therefore would “disgracefully leave our country in the hands of traitors.” Cf. Holt (1994: 79). A few samples from similar letters are quoted in McPherson (1998: 133-4).

67

Prostitution flourished during the Civil War as it has in other wars before and since. According to some of Bennitt’s colleagues who were more outspoken on the subject, it was a notorious phenomenon of camp life. See, for example, Smith, Swamp Doctor (2001: 67, 108, 11, 69) and Lowry, Sex in the Civil War (1994: esp. 61-87).

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literally influence those who would read his letters.68 Yet besides “influencing” himself, his family, and society, Bennitt’s ceaseless conversation with home seems to have had another effect as well: after experiencing the care and solidarity of his wife over a period of many years, he grew increasingly relaxed regarding women’s role in society. Paradoxically, then, the couple’s geographical separation seems to have bound them closer together, revealing a degree of mutual dependency they had not noticed when separated for shorter periods of time. If Bennitt’s imaginary escapes to the “dear ones” secured his survival as a Christian they also made him dream of an extension of this “oasis”; the result was that the man who had objected so vehemently to his wife’s increasing public responsibilities began to echo antebellum demands that the female sphere of influence be extended beyond the home. His transformation, of course, was gradual rather than absolute: two years into the war he was still instructing his wife with regard to business transactions (“Turn your property in Indiana into property in Mich. if you can.—Ascertain if Mr. Smith has done anything about the debt for the melodeon he had. See or give away the old melodeon”) (93) but by then he seemed more at ease with the situation. His objections dwindled and became less frequent until, on May 24, 1863, he finally told Lottie to simply decide as she pleased: “With reference to business matters you must act according to your own judgment” (125). Gradually but distinctly Bennitt’s earlier nervousness and urgency made room for an increasing interest in his immediate surroundings. After a year among “sinful” soldiers he found consolation in thinking that his “dear daughters” would grow up to be “useful Christian women, loving the Savior and laboring earnestly in his cause, for the advancement of His kingdom” (Oct. 18, 1863, p. 183). How this “usefulness” might look became clearer in his last year of service, during a stay in Charleston, South Carolina. Bennitt related to Lottie that he had had an “agreeable chat” with Louisa A. Morse, a native of Concord, New Hampshire, who (like Esther Hill Hawks) had moved to the liberated territories as “one of the principal teachers” in a “school of darkies” (March 18, 1865, p. 358). By referring to this evidently very independent white woman in a predominantly African-American environment as a “pleasant lady” he displayed a tolerance that was not always the norm at the time.69 Bennitt described her as a prototypical nineteenth-century “true woman” who was “of nervous temperament, not very robust health” but who “makes no complaint, but is hopeful of good.” By explicitly acknowledging that it was possible for

68

Letters are always “semi-public” because they assume at least one recipient. While McPherson is certainly right when he insists that such letters were “not written for publication” (1998: 11), it is equally true that letter writers were aware of the fact that their correspondence might be read by a larger audience including relatives, friends, and neighbors of the addressee.

69

Regarding this early phase of Reconstruction see my chapter on Esther Hill Hawks.

    

 
 

  

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a woman to preserve the superior qualities of a domestic “angel” outside the confines of the home, Bennitt sent a clear message to his wife. His letter suggests that there is nothing wrong with a pious white woman working among “40 or 50 […] altogether uncultivated imps of all ages” whom she “attempt[s] to train […] into a thing like order” (ibid.): after all, the Northern “schoolmarm’s” mission resembles his own residence among the “rough […] sett of customers” in camp, and as a “true” woman she seems particularly suited to succeed. Furthermore, there was no doubt about Louisa Morse’s respectability: though Bennitt’s “chat” with her took place in the marked absence of her husband, he did not represent it as an inappropriate situation. At least in this individual case, racial reconstruction allowed middle-class white men and women to meet as equals.


  
  

   
 

   

 
Bennitt’s March 18, 1865, letter to Lottie is significant in a number of ways. Written three weeks before the surrender of the Confederate army,70 it reveals Bennitt’s unshaken prejudice against Southern blacks but also his optimism with regard to racial “uplift” and women’s role in social reform. The atmosphere of departure, together with the explicitly political issues the letter raises, are a unique feature of his correspondence in the wake of the Emancipation Proclamation. Although the Proclamation played an important role in the development of his views of race he rarely addressed it explicitly. Although he must have experienced the extremely tumultuous weeks that followed the event, when thousands of freedmen fled across the lines to Union camps, he refrained from mentioning these occurrences at all. In keeping with the emotional reserve that marked his correspondence, he merely drew “conclusions.” But these were more radical and politically explicit than anything he had written before. As shall be elaborated later, the encounter with Northern “schoolmarms” was the (preliminary) endpoint of the physician’s mental adaptation process, which would never really come to an end, at least where his correspondence was concerned. To be sure, Bennitt did not discuss these matters solely with his wife; his letter to the Sanitary Commission and his conversations on “science and politics” with Dr. Bluthardt portray a man who increasingly engaged in intellectual debates. And yet his correspondence with his wife must be considered especially instructive. As Decker reminds us, the

70

The letter dates from March 18, 1865; the surrender took place on April 9.

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fundamental fiction of letter writing is that the epistolary utterance, despite the absence of the addresser to addressee, if not precisely because of that absence, speaks with an immediacy and intimacy unavailable in the face-to-face conversation that letter writing typically takes as its model (Decker 1998: 5).

The heightened sense of a “contiguity of soul to soul” that “assumes the existence of a certain confidentiality as its enabling condition” (cf. ibid.: 15) allows for the presumably authentic political self-fashioning of the letter writer.71 Bennitt, it may be argued, relied on the “oasis” of the letter-writing situation to negotiate his unstable views of American race relations and democratic participation. By voicing his ideas and concerns in the name of God he gave them the Christian sanction he needed to maintain his confidence and optimism. The Emancipation Proclamation was a watershed moment in the history of race relations in America, but it did not come out of the blue: the debate on slavery had dominated political discussions for a long time, and several political efforts were made in 1862 to gradually abolish slavery. In June of the same year slavery was officially prohibited in all current and future U.S. territories (albeit not in the states), and a month later Lincoln signed the “Second Confiscation Act,” which revised the Dred Scott decision of 1850 by declaring slaves in occupied territories “contrabands of war.” In September 1862 Lincoln issued the first executive order regarding the emancipation of former slaves—basically a first draft of the 1863 Emancipation Proclamation (cf. McPherson 1998: 117-30). It is therefore all the more interesting that Bennitt, like most of his contemporaries, ignored the issue entirely during this time, focusing instead on signs of moral decay among white army members. Instead of making sense of the war as a political and economic conflict, he saw it as a Divine test with a purifying function. He shared this opinion with many others, including Lincoln, whose political philosophy was grounded in “the sanctity of sacrifice almost as a renewal ceremony” (Diggins 1984: 297-98).72 Such a generalized, religious reading of events circumvented the issue of slavery tout court and implicitly denied African Americans a defining space in the national community. Only after President Lincoln had “highlighted emancipation as the true cause of the war and its intended effect” (Stout 2006: 187) did political declarations and religious explanations begin

71

Although the notion of authenticity is an intrinsic part of the letter writing contract, the stories that are told here are better described as fashioning the self in a particular historical and performative context.

72

As Diggins points out, “[t]he highest function of political authority, for Lincoln […] is not to impose judgment but to honor the redemptive meaning of sacrifice by providing hope and compassion.[…] In […] Lincoln the American political imagination Christianizes itself.” Ibid.

    

 
 

  

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alternating or appearing simultaneously in Bennitt’s letters. August 1863, for instance, was the first time he explicitly linked his millennialist hopes to black liberation and referred to the notion of “sin” in connection with slavery: It seems to me that the end approaches; but the only fear that I have is that it will come too soon, i.e. that in our haste for peace we shall not finish the work which Providence seems to have designed to be accomplished by this rebellion viz: the total overthrow of the Slave power & the extinction of slavery in the U.S. God grant it may not be necessary to repeat the lesson of this war to make us repent of this great National sin. (Aug. 29, 1863, p. 160)

Like many Northerners he had come to regard the Union troops as an army of liberation, and two months later he elevated national sin to a global plane: This is a great war of principal [sic] for the whole world. The spirit of oppression is arrayed against freedom. All the world looks on to see the result. It is not the question of negro or African slavery simply—but a question of Slavery in the abstract. Shall one man enslave, buy & sell & do what he pleases with his fellow man, without reference to his rights & the world look on and permit it—or shall evil men be taught that every man of whatever race or nation has God-given, inalienable rights that must be respected. (Oct. 12, 1863, p. 181)

Six days later, on October 18, he was still in the same radical mood, vehemently supporting the presidential proclamation of the day before, in which Lincoln had asked for three hundred thousand additional volunteers. To emphasize his loyalty Bennitt cast the military campaign as a moral crusade in the service of the next generation. The war, he told his wife, was a war for a great principle, i.e. a solution to the question whether one man has a right to deprive another of his rights without his consent, or not. It is not a question of negro slavery simply, but a question that applies to every individual. Shall I bequeath my children an inheritance,— a country in which it is acknowledged that the stronger have a right to enslave the weaker, of whatever color. This is the issue. (Oct. 18, 1863, p. 184)

This seemingly humanist turn is firmly embedded in the doctor’s millennial interpretation of the war. Raging against Northern “Copperheads”73 in particular, who “know nothing of what they speak when they talk about this be a ‘war for the niggers’” (181),

73

A “Copperhead” was a Northerner who was opposed to the war and who believed that a negotiated peace was the best solution to the conflict. Most “Copperheads” were Democrats who sympathized with the South.

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he insists that America is almost finished with a process that will transform his “wicked” countrymen into an instrument for establishing the great principle of mans [sic] duty to man, in the world. Then when throughout this nation, and all other nations man shall recognize all his duties and his true relations to his fellow man & his Maker; will be the true millenium [sic]—Peace on Earth and God will to men & Glory to God in the highest (Oct. 12, 1863, 181).74

In this abstract yet emotionally loaded prayer for national salvation and global conversion the liberation of the slaves reestablishes America’s role as the “City upon a Hill.” Problematically, then, Bennitt ignores the freedmen’s difficult economic situation; what really matters is that “the world looks on to see the result” (181). Although he never completely shed his bent toward abstraction, Bennitt (like most Union soldiers) (cf. McPherson 1998: 118) was markedly impressed by what he saw during his stay in the South. His description of an October 1863 ride near Murfreesboro, Tennessee, contains a particularly interesting passage about a group of slaves picking cotton: The negroes go through the field with a bag tied around the neck and handing in front with something to keep it open, & the grasp the cotton with the three of four fingers, pulling the cotton out with the seeds, but leaving the bowle upon the stalk. One negro said he could pick in this manner when the cotton is good, 250 lbs. In this case it was rather low and required some stopping and could not be gathered very fast. The seeds which you see form more than half the weight, are separated by a machine called a “Gin.” After this the cotton is pressed into Bales of about 200 lbs each & strongly bound with hoops or ropes. The[y] are sometimes used for breastworks, for men to stand behind and shoot at the enemy. Two bales will stop a canon [sic] ball. (Oct. 22, 1863, p. 185)

Described by Bennitt, a white man on horseback, the scene represents the AfricanAmerican farmhands in a rather abstract way.75 And yet the description, which con-

74

Bennitt quotes from Luke 2:14 here. Regarding the theological debate surrounding millennialism before and after the Civil War cf. Ann Douglas, The Feminization of American Culture (1977: 265-68).

75

Bennitt’s view differs considerably from that held by Daniel M. Holt. Before January 1863 Holt represented the enslaved in a rather unfavorable light; after the Emancipation Proclamation he focused on their intellectual capabilities. But throughout his correspondence he emphasized their individuality. In a letter Holt wrote in the spring of 1864 he

    

 
 

  

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tains a paraphrased interview with one of the workers, differs considerably from stereotypical antebellum plantation scenes in which a white master placidly oversaw his slaves. In the context in which it appears it is, rather, an outspoken acknowledgement of black labor as efficient and reliable. The sight impresses Bennitt as “the only evidence of cultivation” in a “desolate” district, and he situates it as an interruption in a longer narration that dwells on “the graves of many hundreds of our brave men, and one place where 300 ‘rebs’ were buried in one long grave.” Bennitt also makes note of destroyed houses and points out that “those left are perforated in many places with bullets and canon [sic] shot” (Oct. 22, 1863, p. 185). Impressions and experiences such as this one and their textual organization in the dialogical form of the letter played a role in the political turn of this formerly apolitical man. What he significantly ignored in his process of narrativization was the dark side of emancipation: it had, after all, “legitimated—and promoted—an escalation of the war on the battlefields and the Southern home fronts like no other action could do” (Stout 2006: 185). In his strong identification with the role of liberator Bennitt also did not notice or admit that the recently freed men and women in the cotton fields were doing the same work as ever for the white owner of the land. In spite of his abolitionist conviction the doctor could not imagine a racially egalitarian society at this point: in the summer of 1863 most white Americans could not picture African Americans in any role other than that of (lowly paid) wage laborers— economic participants in a postwar society, but nothing more. Bennitt’s limited recognition of African-American citizenship was evident in his embrace of colonization as a solution to what soon began to dawn on him as a future “negro problem.” Unlike Lincoln, who ceased to mention colonization after the slaves had been officially declared free to fill the ranks of a flagging Union army,76 Bennitt supported the idea because, he claimed, “[s]lavery stands in the way of the elevation of the white man in the south. They are ready to see slavery abolished if the negro can be sent off. They will soon be for unconditional emancipation” (Dec. 3, 1863, p. 202). What really interested Bennitt at this point, then, was the class structure in the “aristocratic” South: when in December 1863 a troop of 150 Confederate soldiers gave themselves up to the regiment that Bennitt belonged to, he referred to them as “poor whites” who were “just opening their eyes to the fact that they are fighting for their oppressors.”

dwelt on “one slave in particular—a young man of great manly beauty” who was “a perfect wonder to all our officers for the depth of his knowledge of causes which produced the rebellion, and the condition of things as they were at present.” Holt (1994: 174). 76

Lincoln had favored the concept of a voluntary “return” to Africa or emigration to the Caribbean until he signed the Emancipation Proclamation in January 1863. Regarding the history of black registration in the Union army cf. Berlin, et al., Freedom’s Soldiers (1998: vii-x); and Harry S. Stout, Upon the Altar of the Nation (2006: 183).

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In other words, the doctor’s Christian and humanist “principle” advocating individual rights regardless of color was easily dissolved by a personal encounter with men of his own race. (This seems to have been a typical reaction among other Union men as well: Holt, for instance, was shocked at encountering “a fair specimen of ‘poor white trash’—a set of men and women far less attractive than the poorest Negro.[…] No people, or set of people I ever met with, so deserve our pity, or need the influences of religious instruction, conjoined with free schools”).77 And still this was not the end of the story: Bennitt’s post-emancipation letters grapple with his conflicting ideas of “the negro’s” place in the future nation. His sympathies for poor Southern whites alternate with an admiration for black Union troops that he again shares with Holt,78 culminating in the exclamation that “The time […] that man will recognize the rights of even a black man” is “fast coming” (Dec. 3, 1863, p. 202-3).79 Although he was wrong when he assumed that African-American soldiers received the same “pay and bounty […] as the white soldier” (ibid.) it is nevertheless significant that he brought this up at all: for the man who had experienced financial hardships, economic fairness lay at the core of how he understood notions of equality and democratic participation.80

77

Holt, too, was shocked when he encountered “a fair specimen of ‘poor white trash’—a set of men and women far less attractive than the poorest Negro.[…] No people, or set of people I ever met with, so deserve our pity, or need the influences of religious instruction, conjoined with free schools.” Letter dated October 2nd, 1864.

78

Regarding Northern views of African-American participatory rights see Berlin, et al. (1998). For an African-American viewpoint cf. Yacavone (1997: esp. 161); and Reid Mitchell (1988: esp. 104). Thomas Wentworth Higginson’s reminiscences of his time as colonel of a black regiment (originally published in 1869) have been reissued as Army Life in a Black Regiment (1869), reprint (2002) and also describe the many hardships his men had to endure.

79

Holt was even more outspoken and far more concrete in his assessment of African-American regiments. On June 18, 1864, he wrote in his journal: “Negro troops charged upon rebel works and capture 21 guns, after white troops had given up the job as impossible to execute” (208).

80

The situation for black soldiers was so bad that in August 1863 Frederick Douglass went to Washington to demand equal pay for black soldiers and to protest their treatment in black regiments. Cf. Blight (2001: 16). Berlin et al have described the situation among black troops: “Organized into separate black regiments, paid at a lower rate than white soldiers, denied the opportunity to become commissioned officers, often ill-used by commanders whose mode of discipline resembled that of slave masters, and frequently assigned to menial duties rather than combat, black soldiers learned forcefully of the con-

    

 
 

  

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By the end of the year of the Emancipation Proclamation the doctor’s views on race had become hopelessly contradictory. Impressed, on the one hand, by the growing number of freedmen who had enlisted and pitying, on the other, the capitulating Southern troops, he struggled to unite his Christian principles and his democratic ideals with the deep-seated racial prejudice that he shared with most of his white contemporaries.81 On March 3, 1864, he proposed a preliminary solution to the “negro problem”: My convictions are that the Black race is inferior by nature and that if every master was a true Christian & would treat his servants as children should be treated that a condition of servitude would be better for them than unconditional emancipation, without any preparation. But as the case is now it seems to me that compensated labor would pay better & leave the negro in some degree to be responsible for his own conduct, and treat him as a rational accountable man, for whom Christ died & in that sense a brother. (244)

In this passage the physician’s earlier enthusiasm for all men’s “inalienable rights that must be respected” (Oct. 12, 1863, p. 181) gives way to pragmatic considerations that reveal his profoundly racist ideas and conceptions. The paragraph is particularly interesting in light of its awkward struggle between rationality and religion and the shift it performs from lamenting a childlike black “nature” to espousing a cultural definition of the freedmen as “rational accountable” adult men. For this pious and God-fearing evangelical who held an interest in science, the Christian belief system was his only resource for putting an end to his ideological dilemma: interracial “brotherhood” might not be “natural,” but since it was theologically valid there was no reason to discuss the matter further.82

tinued inequities of American life.” Berlin, et al. (1998: 2). First-hand accounts by African-Americans who served as soldiers or who were army correspondents include James Henry Gooding, On the Altar of Freedom (1991); Gould IV (2002); and Thomas Morris Chester, Black Civil War Correspondent (1989). 81

Generally speaking, commitment to emancipation had been growing since summer 1862, when Union troops invaded the South and witnessed the humanitarian and economic consequences of slavery. This does not imply that after the issuing of the Emancipation Proclamation there was a general agreement over the matter: as McPherson points out there was also a “backlash of anti-emancipation sentiment” that “brewed up from a mixture of racism, conservatism, and partisan politics” (1998: 120). It is highly probable that the issue was subject of debate among white Union soldiers and created considerably tension among the men in camp.

82

Daniel M. Holt, by contrast, concluded that his unwillingness “to be on perfect equality” was a result of childhood education and had nothing to do with nature. Holt (1994: 61).

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One might assume that this somewhat limited theological explanation anticipated a cultural and political “compromise” along the lines of the “separate but equal” regulations of the postwar period. Yet during a war that was increasingly fought in the name of emancipation, Bennitt’s theological conclusions had (at least for a while) far-reaching consequences for how he viewed the American “family.” His Christian belief in cross-racial brotherhood was the prerequisite for a temporary radicalization that emerged during the last six months of the war. On October 14, 1864, Bennitt reached an emotional nadir; frustrated with the political inflexibility of the Southern states, he cast the defenders of slavery as the nation’s ultimate others: “For my part I should prefer to have no more to do with the south if it cannot consent to the present republican government—than with France or Japan. […] Anything, but compromise, with slave-driving traitors in arms” (Oct. 14, 1864, p. 323).83 By rhetorically joining the (Catholic, authoritarian) foil to the American Revolution, France,84 with a foreign and feudal Japan (Hing 1993)85 and aligning them with Confederate America, Bennitt cast Southerners as political and racial others. This kind of racialized othering was an established formula in Civil War discourse, in which proponents of a “New South” claimed racial superiority by metaphorically blackening the enemy.86 Bennitt appropriated this logic, emphasizing its religious dimension: in much of nineteenth-century America neither the Japanese nor the Catholic French were considered a part of the truly Christian family of nations.

83

A similar proposal can be found in a letter of August 6, 1862, by John Vance Lauderdale in Wounded River (1993: 114).

84

During the Civil War many Americans believed that the French sympathized with the

85

Bill Ong Hing writes: “The Japanese opening of the West commenced with the arrival of

Confederacy. Commodore Matthew Perry and four U.S. naval ships in Tokyo Bay in 1854. Perry forced the Japanese to sign the Treaty of Peace and Amity, in which Japan agreed to open its doors to foreign trade, and which helped bring about the Meiji Restoration of 1868. In the decades that followed Japan rapidly emerged from centuries of feudalism and isolation into modern industrialization and international commerce” (26). 86

See, for example, Thomas Fanning Wood, a doctor in the Confederate army, who wondered with regard to the Northern population “how we ever lived as long as we did with these fellows. Their accent, inclinations, etc. are distinctly separate from ours, as between us and the darkies.” Thomas Fanning Wood (2000: 85). As Ayers has pointed out, “Southern white men did not fight for slavery; they fought for a new nation built on slavery” (2005: 134). On the increasing role of slavery as constituting Southern identity cf. Ayers, What Caused the Civil War? (2005: 131-44).

    

 
 

  

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Three months after this letter (and four weeks before Lee’s surrender and Lincoln’s assassination), Bennitt envisioned the final stroke against the South being brought by African Americans themselves: The condition of this country will be totally revolutionized before the end of this war. The black state of the [sic] South Carolina will be given over to the domination of the negro race. The few white men that remain being but a small fraction of the whole population. It only wants the right kind of leaders now to engage the whole able-bodied negro race here in a general rise an[d] asserting of their rights to freedom. Leaders they certainly will find among them. I am inclined to look to a properly directed effort in this direction for giving the finishing stroke to the rebellion. Guerrilla warfare would soon become unprofitable if all the intelligent slaves throughout the south could be armed against the rebels. A few months in the future will have great events in them. (March 15, 1865, p. 355)

Written three days after a bill authorizing black employment in the Confederate army, these lines testify to Bennitt’s growing confidence in the freedpeople—a confidence that he shared with Esther Hill Hawks, who at the time lived in the same region. For a very brief time he followed her path, superintending one of the newly established integrated schools in Charleston. Although he was soon ordered back to his regiment, he stayed long enough that his belief in the moral, religious, and cultural “uplift” of the ex-slaves was strengthened,87 and he enthusiastically shed his former reserve. Much like his colleague Daniel M. Holt, who imagined that “Southern Chivalry” would “take the back seat” while the “baronical estates and mansions” of former plantation owners would “become town halls and seats of villages in which true lessons of life [would] daily develop the growth and power of Northern freemen” (1994: 172), Bennitt reveled in a miniature vision of an interracial democracy under white Northern oversight. Written only a few days before Lee’s surrender, this vision reverberates with anti-Confederate satisfaction: For the six thousand children in the schools there are but six or eight teachers from the North, and these are employed as principals, employing at the same time about seventy-five of the native teachers black and white. […] Hard as it seems, these chivalric ladies teach school in the same house, receive the same compensation and treatment in all respects, as the colored teachers, perhaps their former slaves, who had managed to get a little education stealthily, illegally. Three blacks & two chivalric ladies, teachers in the same school called socially upon the lady of this house who is principal in one of the schools. Distinction of color was not recognized by

87

This opinion was not shared by Holt, who did not believe that African-Americans could become truly Christian. Cf. Smith, Swamp Doctor (2001: 59).

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the Yankee schoolma’m. Such is the result of the rebellion, which was not clearly foreseen by those who initiated it.— (April 5, 1865, p. 362)

Two weeks later the President was assassinated88 and Bennitt merged his earlier selfimage as a social healer with his radical integrationist concerns. While visiting a church service in Charleston conducted by leading Northern politicians and abolitionists, he dropped all his earlier doubts and waxed enthusiastic over “a very black man making a speech, very eloquent and appropriate” (April 17, 1865, p. 365). In the passage describing the service Bennitt brings all his earlier indecision to an end and reaches the climax of his political egalitarianism. As the use of medical language indicates, the doctor was extremely serious about his evolving sentiments: I could hardly realize the fact that all this abolition speech-making, and negro free speech was right in the nest of where the slave-holder’s rebellion was hatched,—in the very hot-bed of Secession where no man has for years dared to utter such sentiments as freedom for the African, much less they themselves get up and make abolition harangues themselves without molestation. It is a bitter pill for secessionists to swallow. But the disease was deep seated and the remedy must be severe. Garrison & his coworkers now are earnestly advocating negro enfranchisement as not only just, but dictated by the soundest policy. […] I am inclined to subscribe to the doctrine, as I think ballots in their hands will be safer than in the hands of those who have been striving for the past four years to destroy our government. There are comparatively few men who can rid themselves of their long established prejudice against color, enough to acknowledge negro equality. But I am satisfied that the colored population of S.C. will make better citizens, and if allowed vote more intelligently than the masses of poor whites. (April 17, 1865, p. 366)

Bennitt’s considerations were more than strategic: as he confided to his wife nine days later, on April 26, 1865, he became “almost a negro equality man”89 since [t]he Negro has not been so long down-trodden for naught. In the very order of nature it must be so. History has shown the Black race at times superior. Why not again? Especially if we sin so deeply toward them, God will cast us down and raise them up. It is time for America to be wise, and be taught by events in all past times, to be just. (369)

88

Bennitt merely mentions the assassination in a postscript that he added to the letter the

89

As McPherson points out, such radicalizations were common among Union soldiers at

next day, but it is highly probable that he heard about it during the service. the time. (1998: 118, 20).

    

 
 

  

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Bennitt’s sympathies with black suffrage were intrinsically linked to national security, echoing the considerations that had led the deceased President to champion the Emancipation Proclamation.90 More significantly, however, his concept of “sin” had changed over the course of the war: while he originally associated the term with white men’s moral misbehavior and only later linked it to slavery, he now applied it to the ex-slaves’ new rights as freedmen. By the end of the war, in other words, the physician no longer considered colonization a solution to “what to do with the negro”91 but instead developed a vision of interracial justice in America. For all his readiness to rethink earlier positions, Bennitt was, above all, a deeply insecure man. His radical shifts in opinion were never absolute, and they very much depended on changed circumstances. Because his letters document particular moments over a longer period of time, Bennitt’s long-term correspondence offers a particularly good medium for proving this point. In a letter that he wrote shortly after Lee’s surrender Bennitt was, as may be expected, far more friendly when considering the South and its white inhabitants. During his last journey through Southern territory, on the way to a war hospital in Virginia where he was assigned to work for an interim period, he admired the “very beautiful and furtile” landscape and developed a desire to “have a farm in the neighborhood of Washington and live on it, now that Slavery is dead” (May 19, 1865, p. 374).92 Since the very beginning of his correspondence Bennitt had displayed a deep dissatisfaction with his life in Centreville, and it is hardly surprising that such thoughts emerged precisely when he was on his way back North. It is also no coincidence that his last letter discussing the future of black and white relations lacked the radical undertone that had dominated his correspondence from Charleston and Raleigh. Rhetorically authorizing itself by invoking the Almighty, this letter comes surprisingly close to reintroducing the racist hierarchy

90

Regarding Lincoln’s changing reasons for issuing the Emancipation Proclamation see the chapter on “Lincoln, Emancipation, and Total War,” in Harry S. Stout (2006: 182-90). Stout mentions national security, “[p]reventing England from recognizing the Confederacy, ... [m]aintaining the loyalty or at least the neutrality of the border states,” and, most of all, “winning the war” by turning the conflict into a crusade and enlisting AfricanAmerican soldiers (ibid.: 182-83).

91

Bennitt had previously shared Lincoln’s pre-1863 views of colonization. Cf. Wills, Under

92

Apparently this worked the other way around as well: the Confederate officer Barziza

God (1990: 209). similarly praised the countryside around Philadelphia as better than “any farming land I ever saw. The finest wheat it has ever been my privilege to look upon, here waved in golden splendor over hundreds of acres; and the improvement and cultivation of the soil must be carried on to perfection.” Decimus et Ultimus Barziza, The Adventures of a Prisoner of War 1863-1864 (1964: 43).

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that had defined working conditions in the antebellum South; the only difference is that now the black worker will be offered compensation for his labor, which nevertheless remains significantly undefined: The question is often asked us as we pass through, “What are you going to do with the niggers?” They say they will not work now. On the other hand the negroes tell us that the masters say that there has been no law passed setting them free and that they will be informed as soon as they are free. But I have not much fear that all will be well in the end. The negro & the white man will both find that it is for the interest of both to make the best of their present condition, the negro to continue to labor for the master for compensation, and the master to requite regularly the negro for his services. God had brought us thus far in our way through this great struggle and will not leave this great question to be solved by the foolishness of man, but will give wisdom to our legislators and people, that the best may be done. He had brought us peace now, for which we will praise his name and rejoice. (May 6, 1865, p. 372-3)


   
Bennitt’s wartime correspondence does not provide narrative closure or straightforward political solutions, and yet it tells readers more about the Civil War roots of the Reconstruction “mental adaptation process” than do many of the more polished, fictional accounts of the war. The mostly subtle and occasionally radical changes in Bennitt’s opinions and emotional apparatus show that even a conservative Victorian man like Bennitt could have his view of self, society, gender, and race relations changed by the war. He was less radical than some of his colleagues who used the exceptional situation of life in camp to imaginatively transgress established gender roles. And yet he, too, began to question some of the established norms of Victorian society simply because they had become meaningless in the context of marital separation and the re-ordering of the public sphere that went along with it. Bennitt’s letters trace a conservative Victorian’s gradual transformation into an active supporter of women’s influence in the public sphere. The war changed his views of both men and women: while he came to see the former as a threat to the Christian nation’s moral Reconstruction, he found the latter to be less frail and easily manipulated than he had been educated to expect. The longer he was forced to rely on the practical skills, social competence, and moral firmness of the “dear ones at home,” the more he confided in their ability to redeem the nation. And yet he never relinquished his claim to leadership; on the contrary, Bennitt’s personal adaptation process was also an effort to maintain the moral contract that had been so essential for antebellum America and to secure the male healer’s traditional belief in his natural right to define and heal the nation. By remaining connected to the moral anchor of

    

 
 

  

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Victorian society—the wife—Bennitt preserved what the wartime environment threatened to destroy: man’s access to God. In this time of war, then, the Victorian mother’s established place was supercharged with additional symbolic power: as the only link between an apocalyptic reality and the spiritual realm, she mediated between God, absent husband, and child. Importantly, however, Bennitt’s imaginative turn toward the Victorian home was not entirely nostalgic: only by learning to accept the changes that his family was going through in his absence was he able to imaginatively secure his spiritual resources. Writing to the “dear ones” took on a superior status in the routine of his regular army life: by establishing his letter-writing as a vital and constitutive ritual he was able to combine intersubjective intimacy and moral self–control, thereby resisting the “temptations” of his immediate surroundings. By analyzing this ritual at the level of both content and form, this chapter hopes to have shed light on a cultural practice whose significance in connection to the American Civil War has not yet been fully recognized. Men’s wartime correspondences were an indispensable instrument in their struggle to mentally, morally, and spiritually survive the Civil War, become accustomed to life in the conflict-ridden arena of camp, battle field, and hospital, and stay in touch with an increasingly “feminized” civilian world. While further research is needed to support this claim, my glimpses into the writing of Bennitt’s colleagues suggest that he was not the only soldier who gradually changed his views of women over the course of the war. None of these issues can be divorced from the deeply evangelical aura of the Civil War United States. According to this chapter’s earlier elaborations, the very form of Bennitt’s correspondence helped triangulate the (potential) sinner’s relationship to wife and God, thereby securing this Victorian gentleman’s authority as a Christian husband, doctor, and citizen. By infusing his letters with prayers and religiously inflected monologues on the one hand and with concessions to women’s role in society on the other, the physician reinvigorated the concept of a Christian marriage as a framing institution in which men and women could jointly “uplift” America. By arguing that this vision materialized because of the couple’s epistolary conversation this chapter has, hopefully, contributed something new to our understanding of the Civil War and Reconstruction as a phase of cultural consolidation. While more research is needed to further substantiate this claim, it is likely that the findings of this chapter can be generalized and that wartime correspondences between husbands and wives had subtle but lasting consequences for American gender relations. Viewed as preparation for the mental adaptation process that followed after the war was over, letters to and from the front can be read as contributing at least indirectly to the decline of the ideology of “separate spheres.” As evidenced by Bennitt’s gradual acknowledgement of female activism, such correspondences had the potential to strengthen a couple’s trust in one another and to deepen their understanding of their mutual dependencies. It was on the basis of this “contract” that postwar women were

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able to embark on moral reform endeavors with new ease; it also facilitated their daughters’ engagement in home and foreign missions, movements they joined in unprecedented numbers. John Bennitt’s letters also suggest that it was only a small step from his “oasis” at his desk to what Gaines M. Foster has identified as postbellum America’s “Christian Lobby,” the multi-faceted group of religious reformers that included Anthony Comstock. Comstock became the nation’s most notorious moral crusader after he, like Bennitt, was shocked to see his fellow soldiers indulge in drinking, smoking, gambling, and “frail” women.93 It is not known whether the Bennitts actually joined the postwar moral crusade, and if so whether they supported Comstock’s radical causes. What can be said, however, is that John Bennitt’s wartime vision of a multiracial democracy grew blurry as the war ended, anticipating the culture of sectional reconciliation that would become the basis of America’s self-definition for decades to come. After he left South Carolina Bennitt seemed to feel that his white brother from the former Confederacy was closer to him than his Christian ideal of a brotherhood of man would ever be, and he readily immersed himself in a vision of black labor on white territory. This marginalization of African Americans was a crucial feature of Reconstruction and late-nineteenth-century American culture, and it could be found in the nation’s public cultural memory and among Northern reform societies.94 Anticipating these developments, Bennitt could not bring himself to embrace the idea of full African-American citizenship. His solidarity with the freedmen was a spontaneous reaction to his immediate contact with South Carolina freedmen rather than a secular conversion experience. While it is impossible to say whether this was the endpoint of his ideological negotiations, his retrenchment tells us much about the fragility of even the most radical democratic ideas: even after experiencing a phase of radical support for the nineteenth-century black cause, Bennitt readily shed that stance and moved on to imagine his peacetime career as a doctor for white Southern patients. The only thing Bennitt acknowledged without the least reserve was the contribution of black regiments to the Union victory. Yet by tying his understanding of democracy to black self-sacrifice and the “rational accountability” of black men he symbolically denied African-American women access to full citizenship. In marked contrast to Hawks he ignored them entirely: as members of an underprivileged class, a gender that was considered intellectually weak, and a “tradition” that had denied them the noble traits of true womanhood, black women become democracy’s invisible other. As we will come to understand in the course of this project this denial was a crucial aspect of much Reconstruction writing, especially among male authors.

93

Cf. “Comstockery,” Morone (2003: 228-34). Regarding the role of the “Christian Lobby”

94

This is a central argument in Blight’s and Blum’s work on Reconstruction America.

cf. Gaines M. Foster, Moral Reconstruction (2002).

    

 
 

  

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White female writers, however, could hardly avoid the subject of their black “sisters” and their prospective place in the democratic nation. Yet as the following chapter will show, their visions were hardly less problematic, and they rarely agreed upon the topic.



 


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Writing about the years they spent among strangers in wartime hospitals, camps, schools, and beyond helped Esther Hill Hawks and John Bennitt come to grips with the personal limitations they experienced in the classed, raced, and gendered environments that had been a direct result of the sectional conflict. While it was not the primary aim of their writings to project a postwar solution to the country’s enormous social problems, they implicitly (and at moments explicitly) developed visions of peacetime America that involved profound cultural and individual changes. If Hawks had already recognized the potential of her story to reach a larger audience, other writers from her class and generation more actively embraced the opportunity to gain access to a book market that craved imaginative and yet intimate works on the Civil War experience.1 Female authors in particular set their stories in the hospital because that wartime institution had become an increasingly accepted space even for a respectable Victorian “angel,” allowing them to freely “assert their opinions and share their plans” (Censer 2003: 211).2 Yet what also attracted these newly independent, curious, and patriotic women was the metaphorical dimension of this realistic setting: 1

As Jane Turner Censer has pointed out, this was particularly the case among Southern women whose writing often “started as personal jottings: a chronicle of the war in diary form or in letters to be shared with family or friends. The importance of the Civil War seemed to demand that such writings become public—extending them beyond the family” (211). While there was less “justification” needed among female writers from the North, they, too, profited from the general interest and urgency of their topic. Cf. 2003: 110-11).

2

Again, Censer focuses on Southern women’s writing, which she defines as a space for self-empowerment and liberation. Northern women, particularly those from a reformist background, had less to lose and more to gain when it came to envisioning literary careers.

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easily recognizable to all, the Civil War hospital was the American contact zone par excellence and a sort of imaginary test space for a less patriarchal and more democratic society to come. This chapter analyzes two prominent examples of this imaginary testing, centering on the literary conversation between two women: the New Englander Louisa May Alcott and the Canadian Sarah Emma Edmonds. Alcott published her well-received fictionalized memoir3 Hospital Sketches in 1863 and in the same year came out with the short story “The Brothers.” (It was later re-titled “My Contraband.”4) This story, together with Hospital Sketches and “An Hour” (another short story that she wrote in 1864), are at the center of this chapter. The following pages will discuss Alcott’s early oeuvre in conjunction with Edmonds’s semi-confessional reminiscences of her time as a female-to-male cross-dresser, which she published under the sensational title Nurse and Spy: The Adventures and Experiences of a Woman in Hospitals, Camps, and Battlefields. Both authors are somewhat typical for a generation that for the first time in decades experienced what it meant to live without a controlling patriarchal influence: radical in tone and content, their texts indicate a feminist desire for social change but also an acute need for money. When Alcott and Edmonds wrote their stories they did so for financial reasons; consequently, they relied on the sentimental formula, mixed with a hint of scandal, to sell their work. Beyond that, however, they, like their antebellum foremothers, “told stories about the emergent self negotiating amidst social possibilities, attempting to assert and maintain a territory within a social space full of warring claims” (Baym 1978: 36). These two aspiring writers set themselves off even more vehemently from concepts of female helplessness and dependency than had earlier women writers: authorized by the exceptional situation of the war, they challenged the gendered assumptions of the Victorian era on a fundamental level and discussed the meaning of emancipation. To avoid putting off more conservative readers, both authors relied on a mixture of intimate confession and girlish fantasy. By naming her alter ego “Tribulation Periwinkle” Alcott promoted Hospital Sketches as a semi-fictional account of the six weeks she spent as a nurse in a wartime hospital in Washington, D.C.5 Yet like Edmonds she treated the autobiographical “contract”—which rests on the full identification between author, narrator, and protagonist—(cf. Anderson 2001: 3)—with a certain laxity: as firstperson narratives both stories imply a high degree of truthfulness, but the respective

3

Throughout this chapter I will also use the term “novella” to describe both texts.

4

This chapter uses the combination of both titles: “The Brothers / My Contraband.”

5

Alcott worked in the Union Hotel Hospital in the Georgetown area. The “wards were fashioned from old hotel ballrooms, suites, and reception areas.” Sarah Elbert, “Introduction,” Louisa May Alcott (1997: xxviii).

 
 

   
 

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“experiences” they claim to represent seem improbable, if not extraordinary. Edmonds’s “record”6 in particular seems highly exaggerated, but it was commonly perceived as authentic: nineteenth-century reviews and articles never tired of reiterating that the author had cross-dressed as a male soldier (cf. Schultz 2001: 75). Both books were popular during the war and for decades afterwards, suggesting that readers welcomed their eye-winking unconventionality and lively tone as deviations from the images of shock and horror usually associated with wartime nursing.7 At the same time, however, these very personal, openly playful texts facilitated an equally playful preoccupation with the moral principles and social visions on display.8 That Alcott’s and Edmonds’s work has not yet been read as a “conversation” is surprising, since Nurse and Spy integrated many well-known passages from Hospital Sketches and openly staged itself as an heir to Alcott’s popular novella. And the works are similar in that both are far more complex (and complicated) than their tone and brevity might suggest. Fortunately, there has been some excellent scholarship focusing on either Alcott or Edmonds—particularly by Jane E. Schultz, Laura Laffrado, and Elizabeth Young. (The latter’s Disarming the Nation includes both Alcott and Edmonds but treats them separately.) Young’s chapter on Alcott’s Civil War writings has been particularly important for my work, which departs from Disarming the Nation primarily through a subtle shift in emphasis rather than by challenging Young’s analytical argument: while Young offers an insightful analysis of “the relation between womanhood and nationhood—or, more specifically, between the disorderly body of the woman author and the diseased body politics of the country at war” (1999: 71) this chapter investigates how the categories of gender and race are symbolically organized to fit Alcott’s more general social vision. While the “inseparability of race from Alcott’s self-representation” (ibid.: 79) are very obvious indeed,

6

According to the authenticating “Publisher’s Notice,” Nurse and Spy “is simply a record of events which have transpired in the experience and under the observation of one who has been on the field and participated in numerous battles.”

7

As Ruth MacDonald points out, the fictional nurse’s ability to withstand such shock and horror was quite unusual: “To any Victorian woman the sight of wounded men would have been shocking; the duty of undressing and scrubbing new casualties so that the extent of their injuries could be determined would have frightened other women to the extent that they would have fled back to the comfort of their homes.” Louisa May Alcott (1983: 5).

8

Regarding the role of such principles and the national aims of women’s literature between 1820 and 1870 cf. Baym, Woman’s Fiction (1978: 33-34).

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these pages are not so much interested in her self-referential flirtations with “blackness” but in how the professed abolitionist and “Black Republican”9 reconciled these projections with the very real historical event of emancipation itself. Thus instead of focusing, once more, on the “soldiering nurse’s” imaginary cross-dressing, or on how Edmonds’s “queer” text challenged basic assumptions about genre, gender, race, and class in the nineteenth century,10 this chapter is primarily interested in the relationship between the two and what they contributed to the larger American debate about democracy and its limits. In other words: the following discussion is less concerned about the texts’ immediate implications than their theoretical consequences. While it agrees that “Alcott’s fictional nation serves more to revitalize white women than to admit black bodies, male or female, into the national body politic” (Young 1999: 197), it wishes to position Alcott’s text against Nurse and Spy in order to understand how this debate anticipated future discussions and in what measure this intertextual conversation marked an exceptional moment in a national history that would soon devolve into anti-black violence and racial segregation. This chapter, then, focuses on national identity formation rather than individual identity formation, and its perspective is the postwar future rather than the time of the texts’ publication. The “conversation” between Alcott and Edmonds that has been mentioned several times now is surprisingly intense: Nurse and Spy is laced with allusions to Alcott’s first literary success. Through what today is called “plagiarizing,” Edmonds placed Alcott’s “original” in new contexts that recast the political agenda of the New Englander’s literary work. Arguably, the Canadian was very aware that after emancipation her New England sister had struggled to reconcile her feminist and radical abolitionist agendas. This constellation, then, offers a unique opportunity to examine how even the most radical reformers disagreed profoundly when it came to the concrete place that would be held by white women and former slaves in the newly emerging nation. It must be noted, however, that Nurse and Spy is much more than a critical intervention: Edmonds paid tribute to Alcott even as she challenged some aspects of the latter’s ideological agenda. Thus, instead of focusing on dissent this chapter traces and analyzes an important, yet widely forgotten, feminist debate regarding the “glue”

9

According to Elbert, Alcott numbered herself among those Republicans who had supported Lincoln even as the first skirmishes of the war were setting in, before his inauguration in 1861. “Introduction” (1997: xxvii).

10

The discussions by Schultz and Laffrado, especially, are highly recommended reading for anyone interested in looking beyond the clichéd images of the Victorian age. See Schultz’s “Performing Genres” (2001), and Laura Laffrado, “’I am Other Than My Appearance Indicates’,” Over Here (1997). Schultz in particular was inspired by Elizabeth Young’s discussion of another cross-dressed (Confederate) soldier, Loreta Velasquez, in chapter four of Young’s Disarming the Nation.

 
 

   
 

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that should bind the new nation. This does not imply that this analysis shall be limited to this intertextual relationship. On the contrary, Edmonds’s plagiarizing must be viewed as part of a more general strategy of appropriating, borrowing, and stealing that is subsumed under the category of spy:11 Nurse and Spy also contains unidentified quotes from the correspondence of General McClellan, from declarations by the Christian Commission, and from a few other authors both identified and unidentified. Edmonds even lists her own diary as a source of inspiration. It would therefore be too simple to argue that Edmonds merely sought to feed on Alcott’s popular success. Nor is it likely that Edmonds wished to add “a measure of respectability” to her “otherwise lurid tale” (Schultz 2001: 78) by referencing Alcott: as will be elaborated in more detail later, Hospital Sketches was itself often criticized for its tomboyish, ironic tone and its perceived lack of Christian piety. This chapter argues instead that all this borrowing and stealing served to authorize and authenticate the narrative, helping Edmonds to rhetorically challenge the social norms and categories that she wished to overcome in the name of a greater, transcendent unity. It goes without saying, then, that this analysis is as much concerned with narrative form as with content: Nurse and Spy is written from an authenticating, first-person perspective, and the religious themes and language that weave through the narrative give the main protagonist an aura of Christian piety and sentimentality. At the same time the book is openly sensationalist; its story is improbable and borders on the fantastic, liberally mixing various genres such as the spy story, the sentimental nursing narrative, and the military history. This formal and ideological unorthodoxy and contradictoriness was part of Edmonds’s larger critical project: by transcending the normative categories that defined both literature and—by extension—American society, she gestured toward an imaginary female alternative to the national status quo. Since for Edmonds writing (and reading) had a fundamentally liberating function, she could subvert the notion of control and order that marks the habitus and narrative voice of Alcott’s fictional alter ego, one “Nurse Tribulation Periwinkle.” For all her adventurousness and unconventionality, the tomboyish heroine of Hospital Sketches resembles the popular protagonists of antebellum women’s fiction and fights a Victorian woman’s prototypical “battle with life”: unwilling to “agree that women had to be victims,” “Trib” refuses let herself be overwhelmed by empathy and helplessness, and instead resorts to what Nina Baym has termed “effective virtue”12 when

11

I thank MaryAnn Snyder-Körber for pointing this out to me.

12

Regarding the concept of “effective virtue” and the relationship between feeling and doing in nineteenth-century women’s fiction cf. Baym, Woman’s Fiction (1978: 34 and 2526). Cf. also E. Young (1999).

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dealing with her wounded “boys.” Consequently, the “soldiering” nurse lacks the religiosity of Edmonds’s heroine: her tireless service among the wounded leaves her no time for prayer. The role of religion is one of the main topics in this chapter. Edmonds’s Christian approach to experience is far more central to her novella than scholars have recognized. Once more it is Baym’s analysis of nineteenth-century women’s literature that provides a starting point for the following investigation. As Baym points out in her overview of antebellum fiction, the “place of religious belief in the heroine’s life varies widely in woman’s fiction.” Some female novelists, for instance, found “piety an effective strategy in a woman’s struggle to define herself over against social encroachment, and […] presented it as a pragmatic tool for their heroines’ use” (1978: 41-42). Yet while Edmonds and Alcott shared some fundamental moral principles, their use of religion marks them as quite different types of newly independent Civil War women. It was (not only but significantly) on these grounds that their ideas of a future America differed widely. On the other hand, however, their narratives have a lot in common. Most importantly, perhaps, they both begin with the author’s alter ego volunteering to work in a Civil War hospital. In both cases this space of healing and humanitarianism works as an initiation into other, less respectable roles and public spaces. This, then, is where these alleged “diaries” turn into fiction: only after establishing their nurse protagonists as patriotic “angels in white”13 do both Alcott and Edmonds dare to promote a concept of female self-reliance and adventurousness and a radical expansion of woman’s sphere of influence: the nurse who secretly commands the hospital, or the nurse that turns into spy and soldier. These developments surface around the far more conventional, autobiographical mode of the nursing story:14 Hospital Sketches is divided into six neatly separated chapters and told from the perspective of an adventurous and highly “effective” heroine who perceives of “her” hospital as a “hurlyburly house” in need of a young woman’s commanding qualities. Edmonds, for her part, mixes this commanding tone with religious exclamations, à la Bennitt, and other

13

Regarding the significance of volunteering to the construction of the nursing profession, see my introduction.

14

Here I disagree with Schultz who, in a comparison with Nurse and Spy, casts Alcott’s tale as a conventional nursing narrative along the lines of Jane Hoge’s The Boys in Blue (1867), Sophronia Bucklin’s In Hospital and Camp (1869), and “scores of other accounts written by northern nurses.” Schultz (2001: 78). As Schultz herself has argued elsewhere, Hospital Sketches is far more critical of nineteenth-century notions of femininity than its title suggests (1992: 104). In fact, Hospital Sketches challenged the sentimental model on which it was based, and when the novella reappeared in 1869 Alcott wrote an apologetic introduction to counter the criticism she had received.

 
 

   
 

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modes of speech and expands the imaginative framework of the hospital to include other sites of national healing and remedies that went beyond the rhetoric of nursing a wounded republic. Criticized by some conservative reviewers, both works seem to have struck a chord, becoming bestsellers before the term was even coined.15 After sketching out the general aims of this chapter and some of the shared concerns of both writers, this introduction comes to an end by saying a few words about the historical context that shaped their narratives and their reception. This chapter begins by tracing the thought patterns and textual strategies that Alcott relied on to project her ideal of a multiracial nation. Starting from the assumption that the Civil War challenged and partly destroyed the social mechanisms, cultural norms, and interpersonal relations of antebellum America on many levels, including the relationship between African Americans and whites and between men and women, it reads Alcott’s post-emancipation work as an early contribution to the debate on the meaning and organization of diversity in a democratic society. The second part of the following analysis then turns to Nurse and Spy as a critical continuation of this debate: as an immigrant and a woman for whom (as we will see) the observation of others had long been a matter of survival, Edmonds was particularly sensitive to her American “sister’s” somewhat desperate efforts to reconcile her abolitionist and feminist agendas. Before turning to Alcott’s oeuvre, we may want to remind ourselves that both Hospital Sketches and Nurse and Spy came out shortly after Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation. Both women were fervent abolitionists, and the full meaning of their writings unfolds before the backdrop of the political events that followed the Proclamation, when black enlistment became a fiercely debated public issue. By 1863 most Northerners supported abolition but insisted, as one Union sergeant put it, that “the negro” should not be “put upon an equality with us in being allowed to fight with us, and being called a united states [sic] soldier.”16 With the increase of white

15

The term “bestseller,” of course, dates back only to 1895, when the magazine The Bookman published the first list of American bestsellers. Cf. Laura J. Miller, “The Best-Seller List as Marketing Tool and Historical Fiction,” Book History 3 (2000: 289). Regarding the favorable reactions to Alcott’s novel cf. Louis Masur, ed. The Real War Will Never Get in the Books (1994: 20); and Ednah D. Cheney, ed. Louisa May Alcott (1889). Reviews can also be found in Beverly Lyon Clark, ed. Louisa May Alcott (2001: 10-11). Regarding the British response see Mary Cadogan, “Sweet, If Somewhat Tomboyish’: The British Response to Louisa May Alcott,” Critical Essays on American Literature (1984). The books’ reception will be taken up again at a later point in this chapter.

16

Pennsylvania sergeant Felix Brannigan, quoted in Randall C. Jimerson, The Private Civil War (1988: 93).

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casualties and a “dwindling supply of new recruits” (ibid.: 98), however, open opposition to African-American enlistment decreased.17 At the same time, many Northerners agreed that while “dependence and obedience made blacks good soldiers, such qualities hardly recommended them as candidates for full citizenship” (Jimerson 1988: 103).18 When Alcott published Hospital Sketches she was still very much under the spell of the Proclamation. The famous assault against Fort Wagner by the black 54th Massachusetts regiment (July 18, 1863) came shortly after Hospital Sketches19 appeared, in serial form, in The [Boston] Commonwealth, an abolitionist newspaper (May-June 1863). Alcott’s November 1863 short story “The Brothers” must be viewed in light of this heroic moment in African-American military history. At the same time, however, “The Brothers” emerged against the backdrop of the racial tensions of mid-July 1863, when “hundreds of New Yorkers, many of them Irish immigrants, angered by the inequities of the draft, lashed out at the most visible and vulnerable symbols of the war: their black neighbors” (Berlin, Reidy, and Rowland 1998: 14).20 Far more ambivalent and ambiguous than Hospital Sketches, “The Brothers” (later retitled “My Contraband”) shows itself deeply aware of Northern anxieties, and even “The Hour,” a story that sympathizes with a rebellious African-American woman, displays a certain insecurity with regard to black citizenship.

17

Regarding whites’ reaction to the formation of black regiments see (ibid.: 96-98). See also Berlin et al.: “Although the figures do not allow precise calculation, it appears that in many areas of the North proportionately more black men served in the Union army than white men” (1998: 22).

18

African-Americans, of course, viewed this differently. As the editors of Freedom’s Soldiers have pointed out, “Enlistment not only strengthened the bondsman’s claim to freedom; it also enhanced the freeman’s claim to equality As free blacks and their abolitionist allies had argued from the beginning of the war, Northern black men welcomed the chance to strike at slavery as a means of acquiring all the rights of citizens.” Berlin et al. 1998: 22. As the history of black army service during the Civil War has shown, however, “Union policies at all levels shaped the distinctive nature of the black military experience.” African-American soldiers served in separate units, were excluded from commissioned office, received lower pay than white soldiers, and had to wait an extremely long time to be paid at all. See ibid., 25-26 and 29-30. “By the end of the war, more than 180,000 black men had served in the Union army, and 24,000 in the navy. One-third died in battle, or of wounds or disease.” Eric Foner, Forever Free (2005: 52).

19

Alcott added two chapters to the book: “Obtaining Supplies” and “A Forward Movement.”

20

Cf. also Leslie M. Harris, In the Shadow of Slavery (2003: 279-88).

 
 

   
 

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This, then, is the most crucial difference between Alcott’s and Edmonds’s oeuvres: Edmonds had little difficulty defining a radical democratic vision; as an immigrant and cross-dresser with a less fixed and more recently created social network than Alcott’s, she was less concerned with preserving her respectability as a female author than with securing her economic survival. The result was a book that described the sensationalist yet extremely patriotic “adventures” of an aspiring new citizen whose host country was more welcoming of an unconventional newcomer than it was of the behavioral transgressions of American-born white women. Alcott, by contrast, struggled to sketch out a vision of democracy that fit her own ideological needs and conflicts, preserved her family’s reputation, and took the larger population’s racial anxieties seriously: all of this had to be considered if she wanted to sell her work. As a result she had to balance her feminist concerns against her abolitionist convictions, referencing a number of established cultural, social, political, and legal contexts to establish a functioning metaphor for national unity and belonging. Taking refuge in the rhetoric of health and physical wholeness, in kinship metaphors and in the sentimental formula, Alcott probed established discourses to the point of exhaustion.


  
  
   
  
To understand the differences between Alcott’s and Edmonds’s political views and ideologies it is helpful to look at their (in both cases very unusual) biographies. In Alcott’s case the facts are well known and need only be touched upon in passing. The daughter of the influential reformer and educator Amos Bronson Alcott was born in 1832; her mother Abigail May was an abolitionist and feminist. Louisa grew up among the Transcendentalist circle of New England, and while she was not an atheist she never joined any church. In her 1867 short story “What the Bells Saw and Said” she commented—with mild humor—on the American marketplace of Christian religions: “The Baptist bell cried, briskly, ‘Come up and be dipped! come up and be dipped!’ The Episcopal bell slowly said, ‘Apos-tol-ic suc-cess-ion! apos-tol-ic suc-cess-ion!’ The Orthodox bell solemnly pronounced, ‘Eternal damnation! eternal damnation!’ and the Methodist shouted, invitingly, ‘Room for all! room for all!’” (online)

While the statement conveys some affinity to the Methodist non-hierarchical credo, the story is not without irony regarding the “open arms” of that evangelistic denomination. Edmonds, importantly, was a Methodist—and as we will see later on this denominational background was key to her vision of the Second Founding. For Al-

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cott, however, the ex-minister Ralph Waldo Emerson was a more important philosophical source of inspiration than the theologian Theodore Parker. Alcott had known Emerson since her childhood and remained attached to him all her life; she dedicated her first novel, Flower Fables (1854), to his daughter Ellen.21 This is important because the Emersonian ideals of individual self-reliance and experience (which Emerson considered a prerequisite to individual growth and social progress)22 are a central point of reference in all of Alcott’s stories. But her work as an author did not exist simply to fulfill her philosophical needs, but grew out of financial necessity: since Bronson Alcott was unable to support his family Louisa May became the Alcotts’ breadwinner. As the offspring of one of America’s most radical reformers Louisa May Alcott was already fairly well known as an author when she published Hospital Sketches. Adapted from letters that Alcott wrote to her family during the six weeks she spent as a nurse in a Washington Civil War hospital, the novella was her literary breakthrough. First published serially in The Commonwealth in 1863, the text was published in book form later that same year but maintained the serial character of the original installments. Though the six chapters are loosely connected anecdotes and scenes of hospital life they form a rounded story—much more so than the crammed and disorganized chapters that make up Edmonds’s Nurse and Spy. Hospital Sketches can be described as a developmental narrative vaguely reminiscent of a coming-ofage story, complete with an anticipation of later life, a departure into the unknown, more steps into personal independence, disillusionment, and, finally, a vision of the protagonist’s future. And yet Hospital Sketches did not include all that Alcott had to say about white women’s role in a culture that was in the midst of a process of reinvention. Here I agree with Elizabeth Young, who has observed that Alcott frequently returned to the war as a setting for her stories as a way to solve the ambiguities and ambivalences that persisted in her personal thinking (1999: 76-77). This chapter takes up the idea of Alcott’s larger, interdependent project, focusing on “The Brothers / My Contraband” in particular. And yet I have a different interpretation of the relationship between Alcott’s Civil War narratives. According to Young, these stories are “related

21

Louisa’s early attempts at breadwinning had also led to the publication of several wellreceived stories, which she published under a pseudonym. Cf. Madeleine Stern, ed., Behind a Mask: The Unknown Thrillers of Louisa May Alcott. Later reprinted with Plots and Counterplots as The Hidden Louisa May Alcott (1985). Biographical information on Alcott can be found in Sarah Elbert, “Introduction” (1997) and in Madeleine B. Stern, “Introduction,” The Journals of Louisa May Alcott (1997: 3-39).

22

See, for example, Ralph Waldo Emerson’s essays “The American Scholar,” “Self-Reliance,” and “Experience” in Selected Essays, Lectures, and Poems (1965).

 
 

   
 

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versions of a revitalized body politic” that seek to overcome the cultural hierarchy between male doctor and female nurse (ibid.: 93). Instead of interpreting them merely as variations on a theme, however, their creation may be understood to be part of a systematic problem-solving strategy: intended to reconcile Alcott’s feminist and abolitionist concerns with the democratic ideal of an egalitarian society, each new narrative seeks to fill an ideological gap in her post-emancipation oeuvre, highlighting the author’s astonishingly high level of critical self-awareness. In the course of her textual negotiations, Alcott not only challenged the inferior position of white women in American society but also analyzed the complex network of social interdependencies and cultural concepts (the human figuration) that blocked the way to a true Second Founding. This analysis, then, treats writing as a systematic working through of ideological concerns that were both personal and national in scope. After identifying the logical limits of Hospital Sketches this chapter reads “The Brothers / My Contraband” as a critical investigation of the emotional dilemma that motivated those limits in the first place. This analysis ends with a brief glimpse at the 1864 short story “An Hour,” which will be read as an attempt to compensate for a contradiction in Alcott’s abolitionist agenda: her neglect of African-American women. Before proceeding, however, a few words about Alcott’s publication history should provide a basis for understanding the texts’ transitional position between the war and “official” Reconstruction. As was claimed in the introduction to this project, Hospital Sketches was a key text for other nursing narratives to come: even Walt Whitman could not hide his envy when in 1863 he advertised his Memoranda as “something considerably beyond mere hospital sketches.”23 After Alcott’s Little Women achieved huge sales in 1868, Hospital Sketches (already fairly popular) found new fame: together with “The Brothers” / “My Contraband”, “An Hour,” and many other early stories it was reissued, at the height of Reconstruction, under the title Hospital Sketches and Camp and Fireside Stories (1869).24 This illustrated compilation became immensely successful, further cementing Alcott’s reputation as one of the postwar era’s most popular women writers. These texts, then, should not be read solely as “Civil War literature” but, rather, as Reconstruction narratives that provided answers to questions raised by the war. For this reason, the chapter depart at some points from its otherwise narrow focus on the 1863 and 1864 editions of Hospital Sketches to investigate the cultural work of the 1869 edition—particularly its illustrations. One must of course consider the text’s editorial history: while the 1869 reissue of Alcott’s short stories showed few differences from the original versions, the postwar edition of Hospital Sketches contains a

23

Letter to James Redpath, printed in: Walt Whitman, The Correspondence (1961-1977).

24

Another edition of Hospital Sketches was published in 1892.

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number of crucial revisions that confirm what David Blight and others have said about the reconciliatory climate of the post-1865 decades and about the anti-feminist backlash that went along with it (2001).25 In this later edition Alcott’s fictional alter ego (and personal narrator) refers to the “rebels” as part of the mothering nurse’s extended family; and in a new preface the author resorts to claims of authenticity and feminine modesty to restore her slightly damaged reputation. According to Alcott, the “sharp contrast of the tragic and comic” that some conservative reviewers had criticized in the Sketches’ original edition mirrored the unique atmosphere of the wartime hospital, and she refutes the accusation that her heroine suffers from a “sad want of Christian experience” by pointing to her religious sensibilities.26 As will be elaborated later, Alcott’s perceived neglect of religion also preoccupied her less conservative critic—and feminist soulmate—Edmonds. My first concern, however, is Hospital Sketches’ role as an imaginary exploration of the American status quo and a woman’s limited options for changing it. Despite its rounded narrative dramaturgy, metaphorical imagery, and playful tone, Hospital Sketches was an effort to tell a true story: as early as 1854 Alcott had proclaimed that she was departing from her earlier “fairies and fables” and moving on to “men and realities.”27 This does not, of course, make Alcott an early proponent of realist fiction; her approach to the real was highly metaphorical: arguing that Hospital Sketches “bursts with allegorical reinventions of the nation at war and in peace” (1999: 87), Young has elaborated very convincingly on the metaphorical function of the writer’s fictional wartime hospital in a larger scenario of national fragmentation and subsequent healing.28 This process is set in motion by the nurse herself, who

25

Regarding the anti-feminist climate of those years see Rita J. Simon and Gloria Danziger, Women’s Movements in America (1991: 2-3 and 11-13).

26

Alcott quotes these critics in her preface to Hospital Sketches and Camp and Fireside Stories. What is interesting about this episode is that both Alcott and her publisher had apparently misjudged the cultural climate of the day: in 1868 James Redpath had advised Alcott to remove “biblical allusions” from her letters before republishing them, ostensibly to “suit customers.” Cf. Alcott, The Journals (1997: 164). I discuss Alcott’s preface to the 1869 edition of Hospital Sketches in the context of female self-restraint and Norbert Elias’s civilizing process in my article “The New Rules of the Democratic Game” (Twelbeck 2011: 175-208).

27

Louisa May in a letter to her mother on Christmas Day, 1854. Louisa May Alcott, The Selected Letters of Louisa May Alcott (1987: ii). Alcott nevertheless continued writing fantasy stories all her life. Cf. Louisa May Alcott, Louisa May Alcott’s Fairy Tales and Fantasy Stories (1992: xv).

28

According to James Allen Marten, many women found meaning in nursing precisely because of this metaphorical dimension. It helped them “explain to themselves the meaning

 
 

   
 

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stages her departure from home as an intervention into male territory. The nurse’s name, Tribulation Periwinkle, signals this function from the beginning: it is a female appropriation of a central figure in the American cultural imagination, “Rip van Winkle,” whose story appeared in another, more famous “Sketch Book” authored by Washington Irving. When “Trib” leaves her family in Concord, Massachusetts,29 the narrator relies on a rhetoric that Young has described as “an embattled form of access to masculine agency” (1999: 71):30 As boys going to sea immediately become nautical in speech, walk as if they already had their “sea legs” on, and shiver their timbers on all possible occasions, so I turned military at once, called my dinner my rations, saluted all new comers, and ordered a dress parade that very afternoon. (HS 11)31

At the very outset of the novella the narrating I is thus not only aware of the social limitations that prevented women from fully representing themselves during this era but also insists on the possibility of transgressing such boundaries with the help of the imagination. “Trib’s” rhetorical cross-dressing as a soldiering nurse (which must be distinguish from the actual cross-dressing dramatized/depicted in Edmonds’s narrative) challenged a new ideal of citizenship during the Civil War that excluded women even more sharply than before: starting in the eighteen-fifties, when abolitionist men “mobilized themselves into unofficial armies against the slave power,” “citizenship’s virtues” became “more explicitly martial ones.”.32 By using what

of the war, helped them come to a greater appreciation of the character of Americans, and opened them up to ideas about the nature of human character—courage, piety, duty, honor—that they held so dear.” Civil War America (2007: 114). 29

Regarding the role of departure in Alcott’s writings see Glenn Hendler, “The Limits of

30

Jane Schultz makes a similar point in her article “Embattled Care: Narrative Authority in

31

Abbreviations for “The Brothers/My Contraband” and Nurse and Spy in the Union Army

Sympathy: Louisa May Alcott and the Sentimental Novel” (1991: 687). Louisa May Alcott’s Hospital Sketches,” (1992). as “TB/MC” and NaS (followed by page number). 32

Stephen Kantrowitz, “Fighting Like Men: Civil War Dilemmas of Abolitionist Manhood,” Battle Scars (2006: 19). The development had substantial consequences: in the course of the conflict “abolitionist men’s emphasis on military struggle as the essence of citizenship” diminished their support for women’s suffrage (but not necessarily, as I have argued previously, their support for a more active role for women in public life). See Kantrowitz (35). In 1870, Lewis Hayden, a longtime abolitionist and feminist, “offered the example of an eighteenth-century black woman who had disguised herself as a

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Young has termed a “vocabulary of carnivalesque gender confusion,” Alcott “relocates the traits of masculinity within the figure of the female nurse.” At the same time, however, she “valorizes the injured soldier for his feminine characteristics” (1999: 71): in the famous middle chapter of Hospital Sketches Nurse Periwinkle meets a heroic white soldier who is about to die. Introduced by the nurse / officer as “the manliest man among my forty” (HS 53), he and his visiting friend eventually kiss “as tenderly as women” (HS 57). Thus while the nurse’s work in the hospital transforms her into the full citizen that she wishes to be, it also helps remake the men she encounters there, subverting martial Civil War definitions of who has a right to shape the nation. For all this radical gesturing it is important to understand that Hospital Sketches counterbalances all of its presumably un-feminine rhetorical acts. As Nurse Periwinkle confesses at one point, she is “quite ready to be a ‘timid trembler’ if necessary” while remaining “a woman’s rights woman” (HS 11). Like many other statements in this narrative,33 this one is highly ambiguous. While on the one hand the nurse’s proclaimed readiness to live up to (male) expectations is offered as a subversive strategy for meeting her feminist goals, on the other hand it represents her as unreliable and ultimately lacking in authority. The same is true for the nurse’s initial proclamation, “I want something to do”: the novella’s very first phrase combines “Trib’s” wish to remake the world she lives in while also fashioning her as a defiant child who stomps her feet. Alcott would perfect this figure of the tomboyish, unruly girl in novels like Little Women, where such characters represented alternative models of womanhood within the safe, temporary bounds of what today is called puberty.34 If in Little Women the absence of the father (who is serving as a chaplain in the Civil War) creates new behavioral options for the women at home,35 it is the war itself that allows “Trib” to take a (temporary) “trip” away from her father’s house. The flight from the restrictive

man and served in the patriot army during the Revolution” as the strongest point he could make to support African-American women’s suffrage. Cf. ibid. (36). 33

Alcott also takes on the role of delicate female when she tries to obtain a “free pass” to Washington. Exhausted by her efforts to obtain a passport, she is “quite sure that the evening papers would announce the appearance of the Wandering Jew, in feminine habiliments” (HS 12).

34

Cf. Richard Brodhead, Cultures of Letters (1995: 69-106), for this argument.

35

Regarding the role of the Civil War in Little Women cf. Elbert, “Introduction” (1997: ix); Limon (1994: 183-88); and E. Young (1999: 94 and 99ff). James Wallace’s “Where the Absent Father Went” also elaborates on the topic: cf. Yeager and Kowalski, eds. Refiguring the Father (1985: 259-74).

 
 

   
 

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norms and conventions of Victorian culture stands at the center of her journey;36 beside the aforementioned rhetorical cross-dressing it forms the second thematic motif in Hospital Sketches. Subtitled “A Forward Movement,” Periwinkle’s train ride to the Washington hospital echoes Esther Hill Hawks’s flight from a life of limited potential for a talented young woman.37 Like Hawks (who felt humiliated when she had to follow the orders of a “beardless young fellow”), Alcott’s alter ego undergoes a bureaucratic procedure that involves “a venerable creature of sixteen” who “deliver[s] [her papers] with […] paternal directions” (HS 14). Like Hawks, Periwinkle instructs her female audience that such inconveniences must be ignored, and suggests a playful handling of the matter: having heard complaints about the absurd way in which American women “become images of petrified propriety if addressed by strangers, when traveling alone,” Periwinkle plunges into an unfocused, and thus unthreatening, “conversation on the war, the weather, music, Carlyle, skating, genius, hoops, and the immortality of the soul” (HS 16). Performing the role of inexperienced and untested young woman, Periwinkle manages to obscure the deeper purpose of her journey as she seeks a version of America that suits her needs as a feminist and radical abolitionist. Interestingly, she never really touches this world: throughout the narrative the “almost bodiless barrier”38 of a window keeps her aloof from active participation. Periwinkle experiences her journey to the hospital as an excited onlooker, divided from the outside world by the window in her train compartment. In keeping with what Wolfgang Schivelbusch has described as the mid-nineteenth-century perception of the world as panorama (2007: 59-62), the nurse experiences a shrinking landscape. Travelling at a speed that in 1863 was still very new she takes in what she sees while she is moved through the disconnected scenes of a multifaceted nation and is shocked into a realization of national fragmentation. The domestic world that unfolds while the train passes through Philadelphia is incompatible with modernity as the city defies her expectations of change, progress, and simultaneity:39

36

While I agree with Elaine Showalter that “By the time Trib arrives at Hurly-Burly House, we feel that she has come very far from the illusions of home and that she is almost in a foreign country,” I do not share her conviction that in the hospital “gender is irrelevant in the face of sickness and death.” Alternative Alcott (1988: xxvii). In her discussion of Alcott’s “travelogue” Mary Cappello suggests that “this section is more of a self-parody, an ironizing of the position of woman writer as traveler.” “Looking About Me With All My Eyes’” (1994: 64).

37

Alcott was lucky to be more plain-looking than Hawks, whose youth and beauty had barred her from entering the hospital in the role of nurse.

38

Richard Lucac, quoted in Wolfgang Schivelbusch, Geschichte der Eisenbahnreise (2007: 61). The “almost bodiless barrier” is my translation of “die fast wesenlose Schranke.”

39

Regarding the perception of the world as panorama see Schivelbusch 51-66.

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Philadelphia.—An old place, full of Dutch women, in “bellus top” bonnets, selling vegetables, in long, open markets. Every one seems to be scrubbing their white steps. All the houses look like tidy jails, with their outside shutters. Several have crape on the door-handles, and many have flags flying from roof or balcony. Few men appear, and the women seem to do the business, which, perhaps accounts for its being so well done. (HS 20)

Sitting in one of the most important technological innovations of the mid-nineteenth century, the nurse criticizes the self-ghettoization of European immigrants as a counterpoint to modernity. The gendered organization of their “old place,” as she terms the German quarter, is rendered as a fleeting impression—a fading picture of values and norms about to be overcome.40 Yet the traveller misses a more suitable alternative: as the nurse passes through Baltimore, a city that at the time was still associated with the 1861 riots (the Union’s Sixth Massachusetts Regiment had been attacked by secessionists and Southern sympathizers), she describes a “big, dirty, shippy, shiftless place, full of goats, geese, colored people, and coal” (HS 27). A racialized counterimage to the white, European world of the Pennsylvania Germans, the disorderliness of the space appeals both to the white woman’s imperial desire to establish (moral) order and to the radical abolitionist’s wish to remove the stain of slavery from the “white steps” of the nation/jail. Thus, although she is cut off from action by the “almost bodiless barrier” of the window, the white female traveller is energized by what she sees, as it allows her to imaginatively cross the gendered and racial barriers of her day. When she takes refuge in the role of an angry black man the reader can almost hear her smashing the window that severs her world from the public realm: “[I p]ass near the spot where the riot took place, and feel as if I should enjoy throwing a stone at somebody, hard” (HS 21). While this is certainly one of those moments Mary Cappello had in mind when she spoke about the novella’s “radical gestures” (1994: 66), it is nevertheless a markedly rhetorical act: Periwinkle’s transgressions of the lines demarcating gender and race are purely imaginary. It is only in her imagination that she is able to develop an idea of individual agency—an idea that on a psychological plane can be explained as auto-aggression. Both the window and the protagonist’s imaginary cross-dressing (as a soldier, as a—presumably black—rioter) are ambivalent metaphors for the prisonhouse of nineteenth-century womanhood and for the nurse’s creative strategies to extend her own radius of mobility. A symbol of the heroine’s authority as an observer and of her successful self-distancing, the window reappears throughout the novella to emphasize what Young has termed the “internal ‘civil wars’” that result from the tension between the heroine’s “topsy-turvy self” and the “sexual and racial norms of

40

“Dutch” refers to the Pennsylvania Germans, a group of protestant immigrants known for their clannishness.

 
 

   
 

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white femininity” (1999: 71). As Young has shown, this tension between rebelliousness and self-discipline was undergirded by a symbolic blackening of the heroine’s “unruly” impulses (cf. ibid.: 71).41 Hospital Sketches catches the attention of readers by moving scandalously close to the line that separated white and black lives; Periwinkle’s flirtation with the racial divide as symbolized by the window climaxes when the nurse partakes in the celebratory mood of the hospital’s contraband labor as they greet news of the Emancipation Proclamation: I waited for New Year’s day with more eagerness than I had ever known before; and, though it brought me no gift, I felt rich in the act of justice so tardily performed toward some of those about me. As the bells rung midnight, I electrified my room-mate by dancing out of bed, throwing up the window, and flapping my handkerchief, with a feeble cheer, in answer to the shout of a group of colored men in the street below. (HS 82)

The historical event causes the abolitionist to temporarily shake off the credo of white self-discipline in what is perhaps the narrative’s most dramatic moment: Periwinkle throws open the (literal and metaphorical) window that cuts her off from the “real world” of historical change and—with a “feeble cheer”—grants herself a brief moment of activity in which she is, significantly, losing control and thereby “acting black.” As Young has argued, this was “a would-be proclamation of emancipation for Alcott herself” (1999: 82). The nurse’s enthusiastic reaction emerges against the backdrop of an environment that she finds suffocating and egocentric, one in which “every one seems to be scrubbing their white steps.” “Feeble” as the nurse’s voice may be, the narrative’s message is fairly loud at this point: in addition to taking political sides, Hospital Sketches calls for a profound cultural change. At the same time, however, the story once more insists almost painfully on the spatial distance and social hierarchy between the two racial groups, thereby preserving the white woman’s female respectability. Flapping her handkerchief like an onlooker on the mezzanine, the nurse is staged as a privileged member of an enthusiastic white audience that has made the performance below—a traditional “ring-shout”42— possible in the first place. The image represents a deeply ambiguous idea of racial

41

As Elizabeth Young has pointed out, Alcott’s self-representation (in private writings, but also in Hospital Sketches) suggests a “brown” rather than a “black” self: “her whiteness is energized by, rather than wholly transformed into, blackness” (1999: 80, see also 7982). Regarding the role of self-restraint in Alcott’s work cf. Brodhead (1995: 69-196).

42

This ritual was frequently depicted by writers during the war years as Northern whites for the first time came into contact with slaves from the South. During a shout, participants worship God by moving in a circle, stomping their feet, and clapping their hands.

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inclusion: while on the one hand it acknowledges and embraces the “shout” as a unique expression of African-American culture, on the other hand it emphasizes the white woman’s superior self-control: after all, she manages to muffle her cheer and stay put. By exercising self-restraint the nurse, in other words, validates the racial and gendered norms of antebellum society. To paraphrase Cappello, Alcott’s effort to make the unseen visible and the unspeakable spoken “requires that the body of the African-American slave be driven underground” (1994: 62). There is, however, an additional dimension to the white woman’s temporary “emancipation” that adds a twist to what I have just argued: Periwinkle’s “cheer” is also a cry for help. In this reading of the scene the nurse is a sort of prisoner in the room above the street: the “youngest surgeon in the hospital,” a “paternal” yet “kindhearted little gentleman… who seemed to consider [her] a frail young blossom” (HS 66) has sent the coughing and feverish Periwinkle off duty, thereby returning her to the state of “uselessness” that had made her volunteer in the first place. And yet she is not locked in, in the actual sense of the term: the true “illness” that keeps Periwinkle from joining the men below is her internalization of Victorian norms of female behavior. Framed by the window, the memorable image of the nurse who flaps a handkerchief as she emits her muted cheer highlights white women’s involuntary uselessness in an era of otherwise massive political changes. Via ambiguous passages such as this Hospital Sketches depicts not only a woman’s triumphant victory over her “unruly” impulses but also the pain of recognition: distinguishing sharply between the before and after of her trip into the “real world” of the Civil War hospital, the protagonist learns that her expectations were mere illusions. The idealized hospital that Periwinkle initially imagined as a space where she could fully represent herself turns out to welcome women only as an unpaid workforce: Periwinkle learns that she is ultimately excluded from what David Quigley has termed the “democratic game” of the 1860s and 1870s (2004: ix). When the nurse’s father shows up at the hospital to re-integrate his metaphorically invalid daughter into the paternal household, a defiant yet obedient “Miss Periwinkle” takes refuge in the nineteenth-century realm of female self-realization, her imagination: The next hospital I enter will, I hope, be one for the colored regiments, as they seem to be proving their right to the admiration and kind offices of their white relations, who owe them so large a debt, a little part of which I shall be proud to pay. (HS 96)

That Periwinkle imagines herself as the freedmen’s most devoted servant is a concession to Victorian gender norms, albeit one that, due to its racial component, raised objections among its white readership. The New York Tribune commented, with biting sarcasm, that the “laughing Miss Periwinkle” saw “nothing but the funny side” of the hospital and “was not at all disconcerted by the ‘dismals’ of her first experiment, but hope[d] to try her hand once more, and among the hospitals of the colored

 
 

   
 

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regiments.”43 Published at the height of anti-black aggression, during the New York draft riots,44 the nurse’s metaphorical efforts to open the window that separated white lives from African-American ones was clearly understood as a provocation by the unnamed critic of the city’s influential newspaper. Alcott was of course aware of the sensibilities of the era and took great pains to prepare her readers for the nurse’s imaginary journey into an interracial contact zone. The novella carefully frames the relationship between the white woman and the freedmen as an evolution from prejudice to acknowledgment. There are five steps that lead up to Periwinkle’s eventual decision to nurse black soldiers. After her initial identification with Baltimore’s angry black men, “Trib,” in a second step, feels alienated as she “often passe[s] colored people, looking as if they had come out of a picture book, or off the stage, but not at all the sort of people I’d been accustomed to see at the North” (HS 23). In this passage reminiscent of Esther Hill Hawks, the nurse lacks a language that can adequately describe the unknown; yet unlike Hawks she relies almost entirely on stock characters from minstrel shows and images “out of a picture book” to define her relationship with this “sort of people.” Echoing a common prejudice, she assumes them to be “obsequious, trickish, lazy, and ignorant, yet kindhearted, merry-tempered, quick to feel and accept the last token of the brotherly love which is slowly teaching the white hand to grasp the black” (HS 74).45 Alcott’s narrator holds on to her condescending view of these “creatures” even as she explains their “state” as the outcome of an inhuman system: they are “the sort of creatures generations of slavery have made them” (HS 74). But this acknowledgement is a first move toward the third step she eventually takes when she is gripped with an impulse to “leave nursing white bodies, and take some care of these black souls” (HS 75). In an approximation of a physically intimate, interracial alternative to the alienated life she had led until then (a life lived from the safe distance of the narrative’s many

43

Review of Hospital Sketches in the New York Tribune, 12 September 1863. Quoted in

44

The riots took place July 13 through 16, 1863.

Clark, The Contemporary Reviews (2001: 11). 45

As a rule, white abolitionists seem to have shared this disillusioned assessment. See, for example, my quote from a letter by the abolitionist Arthur Sumner to Joseph Clark, June 15, 1863, in my chapter on Hawks. Even Frederick Douglass (in his 1866 speech at the Second Session of the Thirty-Ninth Congress) posited that “the ex-slave” had inherited a certain amount of “ignorance and servility” from the conditions of slavery. To change this state of affairs, Douglass demanded that the ex-slave be given “the elective franchise,” which would “form a wall of fire” for his/her protection. Douglass, “Reconstruction,” The Atlantic Monthly (Dec.1, 1866). At a later point in this chapter I will demonstrate how Edmonds appropriated, with metaphorically lifted eyebrows, Alcott’s derogatory descriptions of African Americans.

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windows), Periwinkle, in a fourth step, not only “grasp[s] the black [hand]“ of one of the children who, together with their mothers, found refuge in the hospital, but reminds readers that “the blood of two generations of abolitionists waxe[s] hot in [her] veins.” As if to prove that this “blood” has made her immune to the potentially contagious black body, Periwinkle takes the fifth step by kissing a “funny little black baby” (HS 76).46 The novella politicizes the domestic image evoked by this last step on the ladder toward racial integration when it depicts the white Republican woman stirring “gruel for sick America” with one hand while pressing “Baby Africa” (HS 76) to her breast with the other. The most significant aspect of this last scene is its central omission: the child’s actual, African-American mother remains blatantly absent. As I will discuss in more detail later, Alcott seems to have been irritated, if not annoyed, by the role black women came to play during the war—more, in fact, than by any other segment of American society. Although historically they were indispensable in keeping the Union hospitals running,47 black women rarely appear in Hospital Sketches, and when they do they join a catalogue of functionally inanimate objects that also includes male surgeons and male children: Having been run over by three excited surgeons and bumped against by migratory coal-hods, water-pails, and small boys; nearly scalded by an avalanche of newly-filled tea-pots, and hopelessly entangled in a knot of colored sisters coming to wash I progressed by slow stages up stairs and down. (HS 33)

46

Hugging and kissing African-American children was commonly offered as proof of one’s abolitionist convictions. As the case of Arthur Sumner, a white Northern teacher of South Carolina freedmen, shows, this practice sometimes bordered on abuse: “I have about 20 babies, on the other side of the island, belonging to my first class. They are, mostly, 15 or 18 years old, and three are grown up—45 years old. They are very nice babies, let me tell you. One of them, Martha Anne, about 12 years old, is the most bewitching little creature. I hug her as often as I think decorous, and if it were consistent with my dignity I should kiss her every day. There are two or three sweet little girls who are called by my scholars my ‘huggin’ girls’, because I always have them in my arms while they recite. I’m sorry to say they are rather dirty. If they were clean I should kiss ’em, although such a proceeding would excite the most unbounded astonishment throughout the plantations.” “Letter to Nina Hartshorn, Port Royal July 9, 1863” (Sumner).

47

As Jane Schultz has pointed out, six percent of all nurses, seven percent of the matrons and maids, more than one third of all cooks, and fourteen percent of laundresses were of African descent. Cf. Schultz, “Seldom Thanked” (2002: 220).

 
 

   
 

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The scene is typical for the novella as it provides “a national embodiment in which male leadership is disorderly at every level” (Schultz 2001: 91). At the same time it supports the notion that “white women’s attempts to subordinate blacks at work illuminated their own embattled status within military hospitals” (Schultz 2002: 220). Appearing at the very end of the description, the “knot of colored sisters” represents chaos and untidiness and its members are denied their individuality. Although it may be argued that the nurse herself becomes a part of this entanglement, she significantly emerges from it as a governing force that, if only she were allowed to, would found her own, ideal hospital where she might “be in charge, not only caring for male soldiers but also governing race relations […]” (Young 1999: 93). Significantly, then, the narrating I, who had initially criticized how white nurses treated their AfricanAmerican co-workers (they “never thanked them, never praised, and scarcely recognized them in the street,” HS 82), describes her own interaction with black women in a fairly similar, condescending way. A lithograph that appears in the 1869 edition of Hospital Sketches augments the sense of competition between white and black women that already loomed large in the 1863 text. It illustrates the afore mentioned “Baby Africa” scene by representing the white nurse pressing a black baby to her chest while literally positioning the child’s biological mother at the very margin of the image. A heavily Africanized figure complete with headscarf and earrings (an image that anticipates Walt Whitman’s famous “Ethiopia” of 1867, a figure that will be discussed in chapter seven), the child’s mother glances suspiciously at the white nurse who, holding the black baby, stands with her back turned halfway against the “contraband” woman.

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Figure 1: “One hand stirred gruel for sick America, and the other hugged baby Africa.”

Source: Hospital Sketches and Camp and Fireside Stories, 1869. Illustration. Courtesy of the Library of Congress.

Added to the story at a time when sectional reconciliation went hand in hand with black marginalization, the black woman (not the black man!) is cast as the reconciled nation’s furtive enemy. The mother in the illustration is peeling potatoes, but the knife in her hand might be used to more violent ends. It corresponds to the spoon in the nurse’s hand, a utensil that (like the Bible that lurks from Periwinkle’s apron pocket) promises peace, support, and the nourishment of a presumably “childish” race. Interestingly, Nurse Periwinkle’s white arm and the black child’s left leg are visually merged into one limb, thereby heightening the impression that the baby’s effort to free her- or himself from the nurse’s firm grip and excessive care will be fruitless: Allegorically, the “little black spider’s” (HS 76) rebellious body becomes a part of the larger, disciplining body of a white maternal nation—Miss Columbia become flesh.48 The image, of course, was not a new one; Americans had been familiar with it ever since Aunt Ophelia “civilized” Topsy. Yet the symbolic marginalization of the 48

Elizabeth Young interprets this illustration along similar lines, but does not comment on the physical dimension of the figures or on the role of the African-American mother. (Cf. 1999: 93).

 
 

   
 

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black mother and of black women in general, and the focus on white women’s and men’s struggle with their presence, is a defining theme in the culture of Reconstruction that will be further analyzed in the following discussion, which takes up Alcott’s short story “The Brothers,” published soon after Hospital Sketches.


 
  
  
   
    
 
  

 
 
Freed from the expectation of truth attached to the autobiographical mode,49 “The Brothers / My Contraband” leaves no doubt as to its fictional status.50 The November 1863 narrative discusses American race relations and gender issues more directly and radically than Hospital Sketches. Dominated by its main protagonist’s emotional conflict and her erotically charged attraction to a freedman, “The Brothers / My Contraband” has been rightly called an “interracial thriller” (Elbert 1997: x). If Hospital Sketches depicted a white woman’s venture into the contact zone of the Civil War hospital and her triumphant battle against the moral threats that awaited her there, “The Brothers / My Contraband” fulfills Periwinkle’s expectation of future work among the freed slaves: the white nurse, who in this story is named Faith Dane, has an African-American assistant whom she eventually nurses in a hospital for the colored regiments.51 Their relationship is akin to the one between teacher and pupil, and it functions as a preparatory phase before the nurse’s eventual departure to the South. There she becomes a teacher among “contrabands”—a personal dream of Alcott’s that had been crushed in the early war years because she was not married.52

49

If traditional autobiography criticism insisted on the “truth value” of an autobiographical tale, more recent scholars have complicated the issue. For the traditional argument, see Roy Pascal, Design and Truth in Autobiography (1960); for a more pragmatic approach, see Paul J. Eakin, Touching the World (1992).

50

As Alcott herself admitted in reply to a letter from the reformer Thomas Wentworth Higginson, who had commented on the story, she “knew that my contraband did not talk as he should, for even in Washington I had no time to study the genuine dialect.” Louisa May Alcott to Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Nov. 12th, 1863, reproduced in Alcott, Selected Letters (1987: 96).

51

In what follows I cite from the reissue of “My Contraband,” Civil War Memories (2000).

52

This departure is mentioned only in passing, in a subordinate clause toward the end of

Page numbers are cited parenthetically in the text. the story. As Alcott confided in one of her letters, teaching among the freedmen was a very tempting option: “Fields spoke of engaging some letters for his Magazine if I did go [teach freedpeople in the South], & I was much disappointed as I was willing to rough it

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Narrated by Nurse Dane herself, the story focuses on her friendship with the former slave, a mixed-race character named Bob whose father was his master and whose white half-brother, Ned, is the man whom he helps nurse in the hospital ward.53 While the relationship between nurse and assistant is erotically charged, a deep hatred connects Bob and Ned: the former slave’s ailing half-brother is responsible for the death of Lucy, Bob’s wife. Taking the role of a white and female guardian figure, the nurse/teacher Dane dissuades her assistant/student from murdering Ned and convinces him to join the Union army. In a variation of the “northern-brother-meetssouthern-brother” theme, the two half-brothers meet again on the battlefield. Although filled with patriotic rage, the former slave hesitates when given the opportunity to kill his “rebel” brother and is fatally wounded by “Marster Ned” (“TB/MC” 91), who then falls at the hand of another black soldier.54 In the final scene, Nurse Dane works where Periwinkle wished to work—a hospital for colored soldiers. While Hospital Sketches was very much about the spatial relocation of its heroine, “The Brothers / My Contraband” is about a white woman’s journey into the uncanny depths of her own and America’s hidden “heart of darkness.” Set in the immediate aftermath of the Emancipation Proclamation, the story is highly unusual: the interracial relationship it depicts is both a mutual attraction with sexual overtones55 and an uneven partnership marked by a complicated struggle for social dominance and political power. “The Brothers / My Contraband” wavers continuously between recognition of the freedmen as full citizens and rejection of them on the basis of notions of racial inferiority. A highly metaphorical narrative, the story is, on one level, about

anywhere for a time ….” Alcott, Selected Letters (1987: 96). Sarah Elbert notes that, like her heroines, “Louisa May Alcott wanted to go to Port Royal, to help former slaves.” Sarah Elbert, A Hunger for Home (1987: 160). 53

As Elbert points out, Bob’s autobiography possesses the basic features of antislavery do-

54

The scene is told in such a way that it briefly remains unclear whether it is Bob (who at

mestic fiction and slave narratives. Elbert, “Introduction” (1997: xli). that point in the story is called Robert) or Ned who gets “the sword right through him” and “drop[s] into the ditch.” Only in the following sentence does the reader learn that it was Robert who was fatally wounded because he refrained from killing Ned. Not surprisingly, the scene has been misunderstood even by critics like Abigail Ann Hamblen, who argues that “the white man is killed by the octoroon, who is himself mortally wounded. Vengeance has been done at last.” “Louisa May Alcott and the Racial Question” (1984). 55

I disagree with Hamblen, who argues that Alcott was “quite unaware” of the “sexual overtones which we find here” because her passion was “for the antislavery cause” and because she “was to remain a spinster all her life” (ibid.: 40, footnote 10). Hamblen tends to read Alcott’s fiction as evidence of the author’s personal experience.

 
 

   
 

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the making of an alternative, egalitarian American family that acknowledges its interracial heritage; on another level, however, it reconstructs racial and gendered hierarchies and insists on the indispensability of a white woman’s ordering hand to secure peace in the future nation. Due to its privileging of ambiguities and unresolved associations it actively involves the reader in the meaning-making process and ultimately refuses closure. A few more words about the story’s general themes and narrative strategies will help reveal the multilayered meaning of this story at the time of its appearance. “The Brothers / My Contraband” is not only a literary journey into America’s repressed racial anxieties but also a coming-of-age narrative told from the perspective of a white, female guardian figure. Under the tutelage of the white nurse (whose first name, “Faith,” reverberates with the optimism of a reformer), a former slave (Bob) undergoes a profound transformation process that eventually turns him into a man (now called Robert56) and thereby into a full American citizen. Written a few months after the all-black 54th Massachusetts regiment had “passed the crucial test” that “they could fight bravely” (Jimerson 1988: 107)57 (at Fort Wagner), “The Brothers / My Contraband” traces the evolution of a contraband (by the era’s definition considered property of the Union army) into a truly free man (not to be confused with the legal status of a freedman). The reader witnesses the evolution of Bob, who first leaves his owner (who is also his father), then gradually sheds his feelings of anger and defenselessness and eventually gains acceptance as a member of a northern abolitionist family. This development is both facilitated and complicated by the protagonist’s ambivalent racial heritage. While he does not share the fundamental whiteness indicated by the nurse’s last name (“Dane”), he is, crucially, “more quadroon than mulatto” (“TB/MC” 77). Until the very end of the narrative, when a dark-skinned character takes the place of the mixed-race contraband, the story suggests that the ex-slave’s transformation into a Union hero results from his white heritage. Taking up a common nineteenth-century stereotype, the story is virtually obsessed with its character’s mixed-ness. Equipped with “Saxon features, Spanish complexion darkened by exposure, color in lips and cheek, waving hair, and an eye full of passionate melancholy” (“TB/MC” 77),58 Bob is a tragic mulatto figure not so much in the sense of a man

56

I will elaborate on the role of names at a later point in this section. When discussing “The Brothers / My Contraband” I adhere to the protagonist’s name (“Robert”/”Bob”) as it is used in the part of the narrative to which my analysis refers.

57

Referencing “The Brothers,” Alice Fahs points out that the fight at Fort Wagner led to “a

58

According to E. Young, “Throughout Alcott’s writing, the adjective ‘Spanish’ signifies

forthright celebration of black courage and especially black manhood” (2001: 169). eroticism” (1999: 96).

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who does not “fit” in either the white or the black community, but as a split character with a “cruel sabre-cut” across his face that is only “partly healed” and “held together with strips of... transparent plaster” (“TB/MC” 78).59 Reflecting the era’s preoccupation with racial dichotomies, the two-sided face confuses the white nurse, who observes it carefully as it turns either darker or whiter, depending on the situation. Significantly, the split is eventually “healed”, suggesting a post-racial future. Yet when the hero is again—this time fatally—wounded by the end of the story, this supposed healing of the racial “split” emerges, once more, as an illusion. Confronted with the image of the self-sacrificing ex-slave, the reader is asked to decide what America should “do with the negro”60 now that he has passed the test of patriotism. What this chapter has offered so far is a straightforward, abolitionist reading of the story. And yet at least two things complicate that narrative. First, “The Brothers / My Contraband” is highly self-reflexive: the story establishes its political agenda by means of a narrator who seems to be aware of the ideological borderlines that hem in her otherwise radical abolitionist agenda. The narrative, in other words, constantly reflects on its narrator / protagonist’s cultural determinants, thereby pointing to the critical self-awareness of the author herself. Because the story implicitly reflects on the racialist categories that structure both the nurse’s behavior and the narrative as a whole, its eventual political “solution” is preliminary and suggestive rather than absolute. Second, the eventual death of the ex-slave and the survival of his white, female supporter suggest a gendered struggle for symbolic leadership that complicates the political message of “The Brothers / My Contraband.” The radicality of this story lies not only in its abolitionist agenda, but in the far more general cultural question that it poses to the white reader-citizen: What are the “rules of the democratic game” and who has the right to define them? It is significant that this complex struggle for personal agency and public recognition is staged via a story of mutual attraction and interracial desire. While Bob cherishes the nurse as his chosen guardian figure, the heroine’s fascination with the freedman is described in eroticized detail: Feeling decidedly more interest in the black man than in the white… I glanced furtively at him…. I had seen many contrabands but never one so attractive as this.… This boy was five-

59

As Young puts it so eloquently, “With Robert, then, Alcott symbolically locates the injured nation, divided regionally, racially, and fraternally, in the figure of her injured mixed-race hero.” (95).

60

The question was first asked by the New York Times in 1862 and remained central to wartime and Reconstruction debates about the future of the country’s African-American population.

 
 

   
 

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and-twenty at least, strong-limbed and manly, and had the look of one who never had been cowed by abuse or worn with oppressive labor. (“TB/MC” 77)

As will be shown in more detail later, the story rationalizes the narrative I’s fascination with African-American masculinity by means of female self-regulation. Interestingly, however, the reader witnesses a personal narrator whose struggle to supplant the erotic attraction between the two protagonists (with a narrative of patriotism) fails. It is for this reason that the rationalization effort ultimately appears as an ambivalent mix between the triumph of female self-regulation and the victory of selfdeceit. When by the end of the story the nurse eventually “begins to imagine a nation reconstructed by women” it is not just the notion of “racial difference” in general that “undergirds her narrative fantasy and threatens to undermine it” (Young 1999: 97), but also her particular attraction to the black freedman. Alcott’s political agenda, in other words, is based on a complicated yet thoroughly heterosexual scheme. Before we turn to the significant theoretical consequences of this scheme, the following paragraph will briefly discuss the beginning of the story and its narrative site, the hospital. Like Hospital Sketches, “The Brothers / My Contraband” again relies on the image of the nurse to channel the white woman’s unruly desires into a pattern of care and authority. Descriptions of overcrowded wards and “ladies worked to death” (“TB/MC” 76) create an atmospheric intensity that bursts forth in the various conflicts and tensions that turn this interracial contact zone into a symbolic battlefield: the ward becomes an America in miniature, a Foucauldian heterotopia that partly reflects and partly experiments with the social norms of the society from which it emerges (Foucault 1984). Both a part of that “original” world and a continuation of it, the hospital brings to light the dark and complicated underside of the American family when the black fugitive’s hated white half-brother is brought in, wounded and in agony. At night the ward resonates with the rebel’s curses as he recalls the female slave who died rather than give in to his advances: “I swore I’d whip the devil out of her, and I did; but you know before she cut her throat she said she’d haunt me, and there she is” (“TB/MC” 81). Upon realizing that Robert is ready to commit a mortal sin and kill his (half-) brother, Faith Dane is gripped with a perverted sense of admiration: “I saw murder in his eyes, and turned faint with fear; the fear excited me, and, hardly knowing what I did, I seized the hands that had seized me, crying—No, no; you shall not kill him” (“TB/MC” 83). By reminding Robert of the brotherly bonds that connect him with his wife’s tormentor the white nurse prevents the destruction of the (interracial) family ties that hold America in their grip rather than binding it together. Later, professing herself “[a]mused” with planning the contraband’s future, “as [she] often did [her] own” (“TB/MC” 89), Faith convinces Robert to join the Union Army. Symbolically stripped of his enslaved past, the formerly angry black man regards his white savior with “the docile look of a repentant child” (“TB/MC”

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88) and promises to “fight fer yer till I’m killed” (“TB/MC” 89).61 The description of his departure confirms the intellectual and moral superiority supposedly conferred on Nurse Dane by her race, gender, and profession.62 When Robert eventually joins a black regiment, he enters what Randall C. Jimerson has described as a testing ground for blacks’ qualifications for American citizenship: For northerners, the crucial issue would be whether blacks could act independently and responsibly as soldiers, both in drill and in combat. Beliefs about black inferiority, laziness, and docility would be challenged if they proved their ability and willingness to fight for freedom. (1988: 50)63

61

Alcott relies on a similar constellation in “Colored Soldiers’ Letters” (first published on July 1, 1864 in the Commonwealth), a short collection of letters that were presumably “written by grateful ex-pupils” to a young, white, female teacher. As the narrator states in her introductory passage, the letters serve “as proofs of what a few months of faithful teaching can do for the men, who, with Testament and Primer in their knapsacks, cheerfully shoulder their muskets and march away to fight for a country that disowns them and grudgingly pays for the lives they give in the defense of our liberties as well as their own.” Louisa May Alcott, “Colored Soldiers’ Letters,” Louis May Alcott’s Civil War (2007: 218-222). See also Elbert, “Introduction” (1997: xli).

62

As Elbert points out, “in antislavery stories by white women and white men, the male ‘white slave’ is spared.” Elbert, “Introduction” (1997: xxxix).

63

Even the radical abolitionist William Channing Gannett doubted that African-Americans, and especially freedmen, would make good soldiers. Cf. Jimerson (1988: 92). Somewhat ironically, it was “instincts for self-preservation [that] led to the realization that employment of black soldiers could help reduce white casualties” (ibid: 96). African-American soldiers passed the test in several major engagements. As early as October 1862, when black enlistment first became possible on a limited scale, black soldiers of the 1st Kansas Colored Volunteers fought heroically during the battle of Island Mound, Missouri. In May 1863, African-American soldiers fought against the Confederacy in Louisiana, where many were fatally wounded. Shortly after Hospital Sketches was published in serial form and several months before the book appeared, the black 54th Massachusetts Volunteers reached legendary status after the assault against Fort Wagner, where many of them lost their lives. Interestingly, the notion of “testing” also prevailed in the South: “For southerners, the test of their paternalistic system would be whether their slaves would remain faithful through the crisis or rebel against their benevolent masters. The faithful servant would prove that the South’s plantation society had nurtured mutual affection between master and slave, controlling and protecting the black bondsman for his own good.” Jimerson (1988: 50). Regarding the black military experience during the Civil War, cf. also W.E.B. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction (1935); Herbert Aptheker, The

 
 

   
 

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Whether it was “the proud spirit his father gave him” (“TB/MC” 79) that allowed the contraband to regulate his deadly instincts and fight heroically remains open at this point in the story. But by returning to this question toward the end of the narrative Alcott shows that she creates such ambivalences with a purpose: the mixed-ness of the soldier figure suggests a pro-“miscegenation”64 argument in keeping with Alcott’s own “amalgamationist” convictions. The more “white blood” mixes with the black, she suggests, the less danger the country’s darker-skinned population will pose.65 Significantly, however, interactions between the former slave and his white guardian are complicated not by essentialist racial categories but by cultural prefigurations and stereotypes that create a relationship based on insecurities and mutual misunderstandings. In much of “The Brothers / My Contraband” this interracial struggle is enacted on the material level of language itself, where, in line with the sentimental mode of the era, terms shift to provoke new meanings, pronouns unfold an uncanny doubleness, and names are used in their function as ideological “interpellations.”66 When the white nurse consolingly touches the ex-slave as he grieves for his dead wife, she watches as “the man vanishe[s] and the slave appear[s]”: Freedom was too new a boon to have wrought its blessed changes yet; and as he started up, with his hand at his temple, and an obsequious “Yes, Missis,” any romance that had gathered

Negro in the Civil War (1938); Leon F. Litwack, Been in the Storm So Long (1980); James M. McPherson, Marching Toward Freedom (1991); and Berlin, et al. (1998). Regarding the war experiences of the 1st South Carolina Volunteers cf. Higginson (2002). I also recommend the first-hand account of a former slave, William B. Gould, who served in the Union Navy (2002). The articles of the black journalist and soldier George E. Stephens have been edited by Donald Yacovone (1998). See also Gooding (1991). 64

The term “miscegenation” was coined by David Goodman Croly and George Wakeman, editor and writer of the Democratic New York World newspaper. In December 1863 they published their 72-page pamphlet Miscegenation: The Theory of the Blending of the Races, Applied to the American White Man and Negro. It was sold at newsstands in New York City. Regarding nineteenth-century sexology and the Civil War see Louise Fradenburg and Carla Freccero, “Introduction,” Premodern Sexualities (1996: vii).

65

Regarding Alcott’s “amalgamationist” views cf. Elbert, “Introduction” (1997: ix).

66

The term is Althusser’s (see fn. 71 in this chapter). Regarding the sentimental mode and the role of language cf. Cindy Weinstein, who points out that sentimental fictions are “fascinated by the material implications of words and figures, including pronouns, possessives, characters’ names, analogies, and euphemisms….” Family, Kinship, and Sympathy in Nineteenth-Century American Literature (2004: 5).

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round him fled away, leaving the saddest of all sad facts in living guise before me. (“TB/MC” 77-78)

The scene moves beyond a demonstration of internalized racism as the nurse, too, reflects on the problematic implications of white compassion: “though I went in to comfort him as a friend, I merely gave an order as a mistress” (“TB/MC” 78).67 By pointing to a complicated web of mutual stereotyping and expectations, the story projects a multilayered picture of America’s racial constellation—one that may even cause readers to doubt whether the narrator’s interpretation of the black man’s “slavish” identity is not itself a misconception. Given the descriptions of his extraordinarily manly physical appearance and character, Bob might have called Faith “Missis” in order to symbolically punish her for the insolence and inappropriateness of white compassion. As Nurse Dane recounts in the usual ambiguous tone of her narration, “her” freedman is not a self-sacrificing, “saintly ‘Uncle Tom’” but “a man,—a poor, untaught, outcast, outraged man” (“TB/MC” 86). A sense of manliness is the central lesson the white nurse wishes to teach “her” contraband from the very beginning of their relationship. By refusing to teach him “the beauty of forgiveness, the duty of devout submission”68 (“TB/MC” 89), the radical abolitionist departs from the established white answer to the injustices of slavery, the Uncle-Tom stereotype. It is here that the possessive pronoun “my” undergoes a crucial re-definition: “The Brothers / My Contraband” symbolically appropriates the freedman to the ideals of the free North by subjecting him, in highly ironic fashion, to the nurse’s democratic values. Alcott had originally intended “My Contraband” to be the story’s title (it had been turned down by the Atlantic),69 and in light of the fact that she laces her narrative with this highly self-reflexive terminology, the reverse

67

My reading departs from that offered by Elbert, who interprets the story as depicting a white woman’s efforts to remain within the cultural norms of her era. Elbert writes: “Faith’s sexual attraction to the ‘man’ is immediately disarmed by his performance as the ‘slave,’ and she resumes her own mask of comforting mother and, not incidentally, her dominance.” Elbert interprets this moment as revealing a “tragic Mulatto” who is “conscious of social boundaries and the consequences of crossing them,” thereby forcing the nurse to “see her whiteness.” “Introduction” (1997: xxxviii).

68

The story here intervenes in a larger debate about black self-sacrifice. While some saw it as an unlikely outcome of a brutal system, others argued that Uncle Tom’s behavior was a result of the submissiveness of the slave. Cf. Kenneth W. Warren, Black and White Strangers (1993: 71-108).

69

Alcott had already published another story under an almost identical title. Regarding the publication history of “The Brothers / My Contraband” cf. Alcott, The Journals (1997: 124, footnote 31).

 
 

   
 

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term, “mistress,” also emerges as a double signification. The freedman does not stop calling the nurse “Missis” after he has freed himself from the spirit of revenge, and he clings to it even later, while lying wounded in a hospital for the colored troops: “Were you afraid?” I said, asking the question women often put, and receiving the answer they seldom fail to get. “No Missis!”—emphasis on the “Missis”—“I never thought of anything but the damn’ Rebs, that scalp, slash, an’ cut our ears off, when they git us.” (“TB/MC” 91)

Through descriptions that either highlight the freedman’s consent to the nurse’s leadership or resonate with a nineteenth-century version of what today is sometimes referred to, derogatorily, as “jungle fever”70 and that even allude to the voluntary contract of sadomasochism, Alcott destabilizes the rhetoric of master and slave. This imaginary reconstruction of black manliness and thereby of white/black relations is essentially an act of re-signification traceable at the level of naming: in the course of the narrative the self-identified slave “Bob” becomes the contraband “Robert,” who in the end assumes the last name of his white female savior, “Dane.” Shortly after the nurse’s aborted touch, the titular “contraband” introduces himself as “Bob,” a name that negates his status as a grown man. The nurse finds the thought that “all colored men are called ‘boys’” revolting; since “this boy was five-and-twenty at least, strong-limbed and manly” (“TB/MC” 77), she assumes that “Bob” has uncritically internalized the racist notion of a childlike, “African” race. Finding herself pushed into the unwished-for position of “mistress,” Faith Dane decides to follow her “pet whim,” which is “to teach the men self-respect by treating them respectfully,” meaning she will call them by their last names (“TB/MC” 79). At this point the “ambiguity about proper names” that appears so often in sentimental fiction and that “enables us to see how the novels are working out issues about identity and family” (Weinstein 2004: 6) becomes complicated: the freedman’s statement that he has “got no other, Missis; we has our masters’ names, or do without” (“TB/MC” 79) highlights a fundamental dilemma pervading African-American identity constructions. Bob, aware of the dilemma of being born as a slave, yet fiercely repudiating the plantation tradition of naming, has decided to “do without” his master-father’s name, exclaiming that since his master is dead he “won’t have anything of his ‘bout [him]” (“TB/MC” 79). The use of the future tense is no coincidence: freed from the status of slave, Bob

70

The term “fever” is also mentioned in the narrative, where it carries erotic connotations. When the nurse asks Bob, “Have you had the fever?” and he replies that he has not, she insists that “wounds and fevers should not be together” and that she will try to get him moved to another ward. The passage refers to the problematic relationship between the wounded rebel and his half-brother, but like the rest of the narrative this episode, too, extends to the interpersonal level between the nurse and “her” contraband.

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shifts the meaning of his name (“Bob”) to signify the beginning of a journey into manhood (“Robert Dane”). And yet the ideological dilemma cannot be eradicated entirely: while the narrator acknowledges “Bob’s” personal “declaration of independence” (“TB/MC” 79) she remains caught in the racist dichotomies of her day, explaining that Bob’s insistence on self-determination derives from “the proud spirit his father gave him” (“TB/MC” 79). “The Brothers / My Contraband” plays with the nineteenth-century notion of racially inherited traits but refuses to take sides in the controversy. By relegating the answer to the reader it contests the didacticism that marks many abolitionist texts. In the course of the narrative, the trope of the freedman’s “white blood” is metaphorically challenged by the figure of the white woman who takes the father’s / master’s place as the main source of “influence.” After learning about the latter’s death, Faith feels free(d) to fully embrace the idea of white motherhood and decides to call Bob by a manlier version of his name: “I’ll call you Robert, then, and you may fill this pitcher for me, if you will be so kind” (“TB/MC” 79). The new name, in other words, does not alter the professional hierarchy between the nurse and her helpmate; on the contrary, this “interpellation” 71 constitutes the black subject as an ideological one. From the next paragraph onward, the ex-slave’s “white” characteristics (his “proud spirit”) are metaphorically challenged by the white “mother’s” condescending view of “her” contraband. By claiming the right of motherly ownership the nurse transforms the slave-master relationship into a relation of “uplift” and female “influence” in the tradition of Republican Motherhood: in the Civil War variation on the concept, the self-proclaimed white mother is to instruct her darker son “in the virtues that would sustain the nation and the patriotism that would defend it,” eventually turning him into a defining member of an enlightened citizenry.72 When Robert tells the nurse that his wife, Lucy, was taken from him by the brute force of the rebel patient in their ward, the surrogate “mother” suggests, in true patriotic fashion, that “her” contraband should “go away from here, from the temptation of this place, and the sad thoughts that haunt it”; she tells him she “will write you letters, give you money, and send you to good old Massachusetts to begin your new life a freeman”

71

According to Louis Althusser, individuals are ideological subjects via “interpellation,” an automated process of naming and responding that encourages people to willingly accept ideologies as quasi-natural. Cf. “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses,” Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays (1971: 170-86).

72

Sarah Pierce, quoted by Sarah Robbins in “’The Future Good and Great of Our Land’: Republican Mothers, Female Authors, and Domesticated Literacy in Antebellum New England” (Dec. 2002: 586). Regarding the concept of Republican Motherhood cf. also Linda K. Kerber, “The Republican Mother: Women and the Enlightenment—An American Perspective” (summer 1976); and Kerber, Women of the Republic (1980).

 
 

   
 

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(“TB/MC” 87). Adding a racial aspect to the numerous departure scenes in Civil War popular culture, Robert then leaves to join the famous Massachusetts 54th black regiment. In an alteration of white nineteenth-century literary convention, the freedman’s submissiveness gives way to a sentimentalized, religiously tinted image of interracial kinship and togetherness: “God bless yer, Missis! I’m gwine.” I put out both my hands, and held his fast. “Good-by, Robert! Keep up good heart, and when I come home to Massachusetts, we’ll meet in a happier place than this. Are you quite ready, quite comfortable for your journey? “Yes, Missis, yes; the Doctor’s fixed everything! I’se gwine with a friend of his; my papers are all right; an I’m as happy as I can be till I find” – He stopped there; then went on, with a glance into the room, – I’m glad I didn’t do it, an’ I thank yer Missis, fer hinderin’ me—thank yer hearty; but I’, afraid I hate him jest the same.” Of course he did; and so did I; for these faulty hearts of ours cannot turn perfect in a night, but need frost and fire, wind and rain, to ripen and make them ready for the great harvest-home. Wishing to divert his mind, I put my poor mite into his hand, and, remembering the magic of a certain little book, I gave him mine, on whose dark cover whitely shone the Virgin Mother and the Child, the grand history of whose life the book contained. The money went into Robert’s pocket with a grateful murmur, the book into his bosom, with a long look and a tremulous – “I never saw my baby, Missis.” I broke down then; and though my eyes were too dim to see, I felt the touch of lips upon my hands, heard the sound of departing feet, and knew my contraband was gone. (“TB/MC” 88)

With the contraband’s departure, the shift from white ownership to love is completed; the hierarchy between the nurse and “her” contraband collapses into (color)blindness and physical oneness. Reframing the relationship through the iconographic imagery of Madonna and Child, “The Brothers / My Contraband” replaces the exslave’s disrupted family with a religious ideal. When at last the freedman imagines himself in the place of the Madonna (he never saw his baby) his transformation into the feminist fantasy of a feminized yet heroic black man is complete. The appropriation of white nineteenth-century genre traditions performed by “The Brothers / My Contraband” is a deeply subversive and politically meaningful act. “Robert’s” somewhat smooth integration into the national family (and its literary traditions) contains a fundamental critique of the “rule of consanguinity” that defined the white American family. In the story’s final, climactic scene, the black hero demands full membership in the multiracial American family: when the white nurse meets the dying soldier one last time in a Civil War hospital, the ticket above his head

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bears his “mother’s” name, which he has selected as his own: “Dane.”73 At this point the story resonates with the sentimental device that defines the family according to “an ideal of contract” rather than biological relationship. “The Brothers / My Contraband” expands the established, sentimental story pattern about (white) orphans and their foster parents that emphasized the ‘child’s’ intellectually and emotionally skilled selection of a parent (Weinstein 2004: 10),74 extending that tale into a multiracial field. By staging the hero as the loyal son of white America, Alcott highlights “consanguinity’s insufficiencies” and reveals the necessity for reforming the institutions of the family and nation (ibid.: 8). And yet, in keeping with most of the narrative’s ideological subtext, the presumed radicality of this claim appears in a significantly muted form: by choosing a “mixed” protagonist Alcott reminds readers that consanguinity crossed racial lines75 even as she remains vague on the question of generalized black citizenship. The ending, in other words, forces readers to provide narrative closure from the resources of their own imaginations.76 Robert’s self-assured choice of kinship is complicated by the cultural implications of naming: as a sign that he is symbolically “owned” by the white nurse (whom he ambivalently calls “Missis” until the very end of the tale), his choice of “Dane” alludes to a practice of naming derived from slavery. This allusion, however, is flawed, since slaves derived their names from their masters, not from plantation mistresses. It is here that “The Brothers / My Contraband” reveals its main ideological aim: by symbolically urging the white nurse to take the place of the Southern “master,” the former slave authorizes the white Northern woman to take the lead in an alternative post-emancipation family and nation. In the context of antebellum lawmaking, Robert’s choice of kinship also implies a legal claim: in the final hospital scene just described, the former slave is not only a freedman but truly free. Tentatively, yet audibly, “The Brothers / My Contraband”

73

Regarding the complex implications of this scene see Matthew R. Davis, “Brother

74

Weinstein here points to the white protagonists in novels such as The Lamplighter or The

75

This “argument” was inspired by antebellum abolitionist discourse. Where “dads don’t

Against Brother (2009: 143). Wide Wide World. simply abandon their daughters” but “rape them, sell them, and sell their children,” many abolitionist, antebellum writers “recognize[d] the validity of consanguinity in order to distance themselves from arguments made in favor of the peculiar institution” (Weinstein 2004: 11). Hendler makes a similar point in his discussion of the sentimental novel. Cf. Hendler (1991: 690). 76

For a more optimistic analysis of the story’s narrative roundedness see Davis, who opines that “Alcott’s vision of brotherhood is inclusive across racial and gendered lines.” Davis (2009: 146).

 
 

   
 

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plays with one of the most significant nineteenth-century distinctions between the free man and the slave: “the former can enter into contractual relations and the latter cannot” (Weinstein 2004: 13). This distinction had not disappeared with the Emancipation Proclamation: in 1863, men who had been slaves were still not permitted to enter into legal contracts involving marriage and adoption, housing, education, etc.77 Significantly called a contraband (who according to Matthew Davis “resides somewhere between freedom and slavery”) (2009: 141)78, Robert is barred from entering into any legal contract, including adoption and marriage (cf. Weinstein 2004: 14).79 The ex-slave’s eventual claim to be officially accepted as a full member of the nurse’s family, in other words, epitomizes the fact that legal contracts that would have turned former slaves into full citizens were denied them even though these same ex-slaves were “free” to sacrifice their lives on the “altar of the nation.”80 But if Alcott wished to remind Americans of the contradictions in their own laws, one has to wonder why she remained so enamored of the perverse “language of possession” that makes the story so disturbing (cf. Schultz 2002: 229). When in 1869 “The Brothers” appeared under the new title “My Contraband,” Alcott’s preferred title was restored, and the author was finally able to emphasize what was, apparently, a central concern with issues of ownership. The difference between the two titles is significant. As Matthew R. Davis has pointed out in his discussion of the story, the popular theme of a “war between brothers”81 enjoyed “a flexibility similar to that of

77

Regarding the legal implications of the Emancipation Proclamation cf. Michael Hochgeschwender, Der Amerikanische Bürgerkrieg (2010: 71-77). These questions remained heavily contested even after the ratification of the 13th, 14th, and 15th amendments: these important additions to the Constitution could not clarify the relationship between citizenship rights and racial laws. Regarding the complicated history of the three amendments cf. Michael Vorenberg, Final Freedom (2001); Robert R. Dykstra, Bright Radical Star (1993) (on lawmaking in the Northern states); and Paul R. Spickard, Mixed Blood (1989).

78

By insisting on Robert’s status as contraband Alcott may have sought to emphasize his origins in a border state (Virginia). The Emancipation Proclamation applied only to those slave states that had joined the Confederate cause.

79

I thank Ashley Reed for directing my attention to Weinstein’s discussion of the adoption trope in nineteenth-century sentimental literature.

80

Stout uses this phrase as title of his book about the “Moral History of the Civil War”.

81

During the war, “brotherhood—often represented by the phrase ‘brother against brother’—became a primary way to describe the horrors of civil conflict.” Matthew R. Davis (2009: 135). Davis interprets the narrative in light of “the culture of fraternalism that blossomed in the last decades of the nineteenth century,” often in the form of secret fraternal organizations like the Freemasons and the Ku Klux Klan.

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‘civilization’” since it brought with it “notions of sameness (being ‘of one blood’) and equality.” (Davis refers to the abolitionist medallion representing a kneeling slave in chains who asks “Am I Not a Man and a Brother?”) (2009: 139). The new title of the 1869 narrative (“My Contraband”), however, shifts the story’s emphasis from the implied debate about jus soli, jus sanguinis and consensual definitions of citizenship (ibid.: 136 and 37) to a somewhat different discourse about white female ownership and black dependence. Referencing a white woman as owner, the narrative alludes to the most crucial legal reforms of the immediate prewar and wartime period, the 1860 Married Women’s Property Act and the 1862 Earnings Act. The outcome of decades of feminist struggle, these important acts mandated white American women’s contractual rights over their personal property: for the first time, they had legal control of their own earnings. As Natasha Kirsten Kraus notes, the Earnings Act was proof that “by 1862… the terms defining a True Woman had dramatically changed shape” (2008: 208). Never shy about pointing a finger at the weaknesses of American lawmaking, Alcott imaginatively investigated the meaning of the Earnings Act in the context of black civil rights. By appropriating the contraband as a personal possession who has paradoxically chosen his new owner, Nurse Dane embodies not only what Kraus has termed “the dawning of a civil existence for women” (ibid.: 210) but also the arrival of a new social order whose hierarchical formation is based on the consent of all of the governed. The narrative represents this voluntary re-hierarchization in one of its final passages, in which the nurse turned again, and Robert’s eyes met mine,—those melancholy eyes, so full of an intelligence that proved he had heard, remembered, and reflected with that preternatural power which often outlives all other faculties. He knew me, yet gave no greeting; was glad to see a woman’s face, yet had no smile wherewith to welcome it; he felt that he was dying, yet uttered no farewell. He was too far across the river to return to linger now; departing thought, strength, breath, were spent in one grateful look, one murmur of submission to the last pang he could ever feel. (“TB/MC” 92)

If for a short moment the white woman’s and the black man’s eyes meet on the same level,82 as if to briefly acknowledge their fundamental equality, the soldier’s final “submission” refers as much to death itself as to his position vis-à-vis the white nurse who, significantly, bends down to the sufferer in the bed below. Confessing one last time his unabated hatred of his half-brother, the freedman’s “lips moved, and, bending to them, a whisper chilled my cheek, as it shaped the broken words,—‘I’d a’ done

82

Once again it is the act of seeing that is utilized to express a new phase of interracial interaction.

 
 

   
 

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it,—but it’s better so,—I’m satisfied’” (“TB/MC” 92). The story thus ends by reminding white America of the freedpeople’s potentially unsatisfied hunger for revenge without weakening the narrative’s radical abolitionist agenda: about to enter “the beautiful hereafter, where there is no black or white, no master and no slave” (“TB/MC” 87), Robert’s death frees not only himself but also his chosen “mistress,” whom he spares the very real dilemma of integrating him into her American family. It may be obvious by now that the narrative lets the discourse of adoption leak into another contractual issue: interracial marriage.83 In a play on the sentimental convention that usually resulted in the couple’s marriage and the reproduction of the biological family, “The Brothers / My Contraband” concludes with a then-scandalous allusion to “miscegenation.” When Faith Dane moves her cheek to the lips of the dying man she imagines his final thoughts, concluding in a “drawing of a breath” that now “my contraband found wife and home, eternal liberty and God” (“TB/MC” 92). In this carefully construed, ambiguous scene, “wife and home” are as much a part of the world of the living as of the dead. In the prolonged moment of death, racial differences collapse to suggest an interracial love relationship that anticipated a legal marriage: in the soldier’s final moment, the black man and the white woman merge under the same family name.84 And yet again, this trope that aligns the white nurse with the hero’s black wife is used ambiguously, confirming what Amy Kaplan has demonstrated in her discussion of American imperialist discourse. The marriage trope, she argues, “asserts a less direct and more complete control” over the realm that has been liberated than other forms of hegemony (2002: 105). In “The Brothers / My Contraband” the complexity of this trope is first established when the delirious, wounded, white rebel brother calls the black woman’s name, “Lucy.” Nurse Dane, who is both erotically attracted to the contraband and flirting with the idea of her own moral blackness, “follow[s] the fancy” and answers, “Yes, here’s Lucy” (“TB/MC” 81). As in Hospital Sketches, however, the white nurse does not in fact enter into a closer, egalitarian relationship with the black man. While the nurse’s name on the hospital bed brings to the fore the taboo of “miscegenation,” the black man’s heroic death keeps the transgression on a theoretical plane and at the same time liberates the nurse from the duties of married life.

83

Here I depart from Elbert, who argues that by the end of the narrative Faith Dane’s “initial sexual attraction to the enslaved “Bob” becomes a maternal adoption of him.” “Introduction” (1997: xli).

84

This interpretation imposes itself on the reader despite the fact that in the nineteenth century a man could not—and would not—take on his wife’s family name. The sexual attraction and intimacy between the two protagonists turns what Alcott thinly veils as a mother-son relationship into an erotically charged love relationship.

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The narrative further complicates its seemingly smooth answer to the “negro problem” by introducing Robert’s successor, a free black Bostonian from the same regiment who swears to take up his leader’s legacy. Thus instead of consigning free(d) African Americans to what Ann Douglas has termed the “celestial retirement village” of an idealized afterlife (1977: 272), the narrative emphasizes the longevity and transregionality of black struggle. It also challenges its own, earlier hypothesis that “Bob’s” insistence on self-determination derives from “the proud spirit his [white] father gave him”: the man from Boston is “as black as the ace of spades” (“TB/MC” 91). If one keeps in mind that in 1863 the overwhelming majority of Americans perceived of the military conflict as “a struggle between competing white men’s visions of manhood” where there was “no room for the black man” (Whites 1995: 13), this final narrative twist comes as a surprise to the reader who, once again, is invited to rethink his or her norms and expectations. While the narrative keeps the future role of African-American men alive as a topic of discussion, it leaves no doubt as to the position of white women as natural leaders in a multi-racial nation. Black women, on the other hand, are conspicuously absent or marginalized in both “The Brothers / My Contraband” and Hospital Sketches. Like other contemporaries, Alcott measures African-Americans’ “worthiness” for citizenship on the basis of their military participation, thereby implicitly denying black women the right of access.85 Sadly yet significantly, and with rare exceptions,86 this exclusion mirrored the role of African-American women in the Civil War, where they were considered “a hindrance and a burden to the military’s efforts” (Downs 2006: 80). According to one Boston newspaper, freedwomen were “often refused to [sic] almshouses for their color and … reduced to degradation that [drove] the husbands almost crazy” (qtd. in ibid.: 81). This dismissal of black women’s needs continued into Reconstruction; after the Freedmen’s Bureau was established in 1865,

85

Emily Parsons is another interesting example of this viewpoint. Parsons, a radical abolitionist like Alcott, ignored the biological mothers of the black children who lived in the wartime hospital where she served. As she told her sister in a letter, she had, as she called them, “nineteen pickanninies” in her ward whom she could bring home: “Ask mother if she would like one. Some are very pretty, I can have as many as I want.” Parsons (1984: 133). Schultz also discusses this “language of possession” (2002: 229).

86

Emily Parsons, whom I have just mentioned, describes her interaction with female, African-American hospital workers as pleasant and actively acknowledges their right to cultural difference. I will further elaborate on this “case” in the chapter on Walt Whitman. As Massey states, there were “thousands of exceptions” for “every generalization” she makes in her own, very conclusive, study of American women’s lives during the Civil War (1966: ix).

 
 

   
 

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the federal government’s emphasis on the benefits of free labor overlooked the ways in which the creation of this new economic system created the category of dependency, referring to those who did not fit into the labor force, namely freedwomen and children. At the end of the war, military officials transported black men to regions in need of workers, leaving their families without the economic means to support themselves. (ibid.: 88)

By rhetorically marginalizing black women, in other words, Alcott’s wartime writings presaged a social development to come. Contrary to Elbert, who on the grounds of Alcott’s journals argues that Louisa “championed the rights of slave women and mothers” out of obedience to her more general conviction that “there was one universal humanity and within it a common female experience” (1997: xii),87 I suggest that Alcott’s notion of sisterhood refuses to recognize African-American women as equals, instead shifting the “freedwomen problem” onto a seemingly private, erotically charged plane: in Alcott’s stories, white women emerge as the winners in a competition for the attention of black men. By representing Lucy as a dependent victim and conveniently effacing her entirely, the New England writer circumvents the problem that a flesh-and-blood “Lucy” would have posed: she would, by her very existence, have challenged Nurse Dane’s self-proclaimed right to “own” Bob/Robert, just as free African-American women had “challenged white perceptions of race, equal rights, free labor, and dependency” ever since the first white teachers arrived on the newly freed Sea Islands in 1861 (Faulkner 2004: 67). By symbolically ridding society of African-American women, Alcott anticipated the late-nineteenth-century decision within the (predominantly white) American women’s movement to limit their demand for voting rights to the country’s white women.88 The New Englander’s emphasis on the somewhat fatal attraction between a white woman and a black man (who is himself the result of an interracial attraction, albeit one based on uneven

87

In M. R. Davis’s interpretation of the relationship between the nurse and Lucy, the white woman “abandons her plea to Bob to respect his blood tie and replaces it with a more powerful sense of universal brotherhood motivated by the imagined shared sisterhood between Lucy and herself.” While this interpretation is intriguing it overlooks the fact that Nurse Dane feels a certain thrill at taking the place of the dead Lucy. See Davis (2009: 145).

88

African-American feminists saw this coming at an early point. In her 1866 speech at the National Women’s Rights Convention, the African-American author, abolitionist, and feminist Frances E.W. Harper identified the common concerns of black and white women but also pointed to the dangers that inhered in the class differences that divided the two groups. For an informed analysis of Harper’s place within the nineteenth-century women’s movement see Shirley Wilson Logan, “Frances E.W. Harper, ‘Woman’s Political Future’” (20 May 1893).

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power relations) casts a new light on racist tendencies within the postbellum women’s movement. If Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s 1869 ranting against “Patrick and Sambo and Hans and Yung Tung, who do not know the difference between a monarchy and a republic, who cannot read the Declaration of Independence or Webster’s spelling book” (2007: 196) was the result of some unhappy “lapse into the language of social and racial hierarchies” at a moment when the “vision of a genuine republic had lost public support,”89 Alcott’s story about sexual desires and the cultural mechanisms that regulate their suppression serves as a reminder of the deep psychological roots of these tensions that in 1869 were less new than is commonly assumed. Alcott did not, however, end her analysis of the larger American “family” by symbolically burying the country’s supposedly useless black women. Somewhat typically, and in keeping with her ongoing struggle to solve society’s problems on the level of fiction, the author returned to this essential flaw with her narrative “An Hour.” Published in the November/December 1864 issues of The Commonwealth, it is the only story in her oeuvre that focuses on an African-American woman.90 “An Hour” centers on the love relationship between a (very fair-skinned) female slave and the slaveowner’s northern-educated abolitionist son, thereby reversing the sexual dynamic of “The Brothers.” A female version of the handsome and tragic mulatto Robert, Milly appears as a “brilliant flower of the tropics” beside “two pale exotics,” as the story describes the heartless stepmother and two stepsisters who run the plantation (48). In an effort to grant the black woman, Milly, some degree of personal agency, the story allows her to both plan a slave rebellion on the plantation and eventually stop it; when she saves the stepmother and stepsisters she does so for the sake of her new master/lover.91 Taking up narrative elements from both “The Brothers / My Contraband” and Hospital Sketches,92 “An Hour” is another story of social re-figuration that may be read as extending Lincoln’s famous question, “What Shall We Do With

89

This reassessment of Stanton’s racist tendencies is formulated by Ann D. Gordon, “Stanton and the Right to Vote: On Account of Race or Sex” (2007: 113).

90

In this chapter I refer to the reprint of “An Hour”, edited by Sarah Elbert in Louisa May Alcott (1997). As with Hospital Sketches and “The Brothers / My Contraband,” page references are given in parentheses within the text.

91

For a brief interpretation of this story in the context of other war-related narratives by

92

The white handkerchief that in Hospital Sketches signals the white woman’s suppressed

Alcott cf. Elbert, ed. Louisa May Alcott: On Race, Sex, and Slavery (1997: 45-47). unruliness appears here as well: standing at a window, Milly drops it as a signal to the rebellious slaves below (51). Read in conjunction with Hospital Sketches, the scene signals a closeness between Nurse Periwinkle, who flirts with blackness, and the lightskinned slave woman who actually commits the crime of disloyalty against her master.

 
 

   
 

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The Negro,”93 to the condition of the freedwomen. As Jim Downs points out, these women were increasingly seen as the social challenge of the era. Benevolent societies, especially those dominated by Northern women who worked in (or for) places like the Sea Islands, discovered “countless freedwomen and children who were being forced to live in abandoned, filthy buildings plagued by disease, suffering from lack of proper nutrition and medical care” and demanding attention and support (2006: 85). It is in this context that the black, female protagonist in “An Hour” is symbolically integrated into society under white male care. Not unlike Robert, Milly acts under the soothing influence of a white benefactor of the opposite sex who knows how to tame “black unruliness.” It is hardly surprising that “Alcott’s readers never learn what happens to Milly; her future remains unresolved in this narrative” (Elbert 1997: li). Alcott, in other words, ultimately failed to imaginatively solve the problems of American society because in the wake of a potentially democratic Second Founding the sentimental discourses underpinning her narratives no longer fulfilled their compensatory function. Neither the ideology of separate spheres nor the ideal of Republican Motherhood nor a happy marriage could serve as the “glue” to bind the new nation. Sarah Emma Edmonds may have understood this when she continued Alcott’s national project using a quite different strategy.


 
     


  
 

 
Almost a decade younger than Alcott and a Canadian by birth, Sarah Emma Edmonds came from a very different family background. She was born in 1841 on a farm in New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, where she was raised as an Anglican. According to biographers her father, a tyrannical man, treated her like the son he never had, so that by the time Emma ran away from home to work as a milliner she was well-equipped with the performative means to embody the role of a man.94 A talented businesswoman, she soon opened a milliner’s shop, but when her father tracked her down to

93

Regarding the centrality of this question and the discourse that revolved around it cf. Paul

94

Biographical sources on Edmonds suggest that her father never got over the fact that he

D. Escott, What Shall We Do With The Negro? (2009) had no son to handle the heavy work on the farm. Since Emma was the last of five daughters, she “took it upon herself to work, play, and think like a boy… in order to gain her father’s approval.” Matthew Lee, “Sarah Emma Edmonds” (1999: 56). A nineteenth-century journalist, Delia T. Davis, however, reported that she did in fact have an older brother who became her role model, “and as little Sarah advanced in years she failed to develop any decided taste for household work, or for any of the young-lady pursuits of that day;

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marry her off to a far older man whom she did not love, she fled again, in 1859, this time across the border to the United States. There she made a living selling Bibles door-to-door, conducting her business while posing as a man, “Franklin Thompson,” a role that presumably allowed her a degree of security and personal freedom.95 In 1861 Edmonds, like a considerable number of other female-to-male cross-dressers, was accepted into the Union army as a male nurse (at the rank of private) under the name “Frank Thompson.”96 Why she cross-dressed for this purpose we do not know for sure, but Laura Leedy Gansler suggests that she “relished the freedom it gave her to go where she wanted, do what she wanted, earn what she could, without the nagging constraints society placed on an unattended woman” (2007: 12). Edmonds soon became a regimental mail carrier and, she claims in her novel, a spy for the Union army.97 After several years supposedly spent as both a man and a woman—sometimes

but was passionately devoted to out-of-door life” (November 20, 1898: 9). Richard Hall also mentions a brother who was “sickly” Patriots in Disguise (1993: 76). Elizabeth Leonard offers a slightly different explanation for Edmonds’s “male” behavior: “as was typical for nineteenth-century farm girls, she and her sisters participated in all the same activities and performed all the same chores as her brother: tending to the animals, chopping wood and milking cows, planting, harvesting, and so forth.” Leonard (1999: 170). 95

Laura Leedy Gansler, in her Edmonds biography The Mysterious Private Thompson (2007), suggests that “Emma discovered that not only could she pass herself off as a young man, but that she was happy doing it” (ibid.: 12). While Gansler’s book offers a very convincing analysis of Edmonds’s life I nevertheless base most of my biographical information on other, more scholarly sources such as Matthew Lee’s entry on Edmonds in Women in World History (1999); Betty L. Fladeland’s short biography of “Sarah Emma Edmonds” (1971: 561-62); and Hall (1993). For a list of additional secondary sources on Edmonds’s soldiering see Leonard (1999: 170-81).

96

Several hundred women passed as men in both armies. Other famous female spies include Belle Boyd, Pauline Cushman, Rose Greenhow, and Harriet Tubman. See Lyde Cullen Sizer, “Acting Her Part: Narratives of Union Women Spies” (1992); and Vern L. Bullough and Bonnie Bullough, “Women and Cross Dressing in the Ninetheeth and Early Thentieth Centuries” (1993: 157-64); DeAnne Blanton and Lauren M. Cook, They Fought Like Demons (2003). According to Reid Mitchell, the Civil War also produced a considerable number of male-to-female cross-dressers: “Soldiers, particularly drummer boys, dressed as ladies for the night. At one ball, an estimated sixty men disguised themselves.” Mitchell, The Vacant Chair (1993: 71).

97

As Gansler has pointed out there is historical evidence that Edmonds spent considerable time working as a spy. Yet it remains unclear whether she really went behind enemy lines

 
 

   
 

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in blackface—in the military, in 1864 she “crossed the line” once again to take up the (female) occupation of writer. This, however, was not a voluntary act: the historical Edmonds had deserted from the military for fear of being detected as a woman. Like Alcott she then took to writing to meet her financial needs. She turned out to be as successful an author as she had been a salesman: first published in 1864 under the title Unsexed; or, the Female Soldier98 and subtitled The Thrilling Adventures, Experiences, and Escapes of a Woman, as Nurse, Spy and Scout, in Hospitals, Camps, and Battle-Fields, her novel became an immediate marketing success. The 1865 Hartford edition of Nurse and Spy: The Adventures and Experiences of a Woman in Hospitals, Camps, and Battlefields99 sold a reported 175,000 copies, making it a bestseller for its time (Fladeland 1971: 562).100 The book was widely distributed by disabled soldiers and war widows, who sold it by subscription. Although poorly edited, the number of copies Nurse and Spy sold in its various editions (one appeared in 1867 and three more before 1900, and there was even a German translation of the book) (cf. Dannett 1960: 235; Schultz 2001: 77-78) was “three times greater than any nursing narrative” (Schultz: 78). Like Alcott, Edmonds clearly answered the cultural needs of at least one generation to come. Considering that Edmonds was a businesswoman in urgent need of money, one can legitimately argue that she banked on Americans’ long-standing fascination with female-to-male cross-dressers and blackface minstrelsy.101 Edmonds herself was aware of the pitfalls of sensationalism and in an effort to “dispel the impression that

in the various guises that she describes in her novel. See Gansler’s afterword to The Mysterious Private Thompson (2007: 221). It is neither within the scope nor is it the aim of this chapter to provide closure to this issue. 98

This first edition was published by Philadelphia Publishing Co. Subsequent editions ap-

99

This chapter relies on the 2006 reprint of the 1865 W.S. Williams Hartford edition that

peared under different titles but were nearly identical in content. was brought out under the title Soldier, Nurse and Spy in the Union Army: The Adventures and Experiences of a Woman in Hospitals, Camps, and Battlefields. The photocopied 1865 Hartford edition can be found online at www.archive.org/. Regarding the editorial history of the novel see the scholarly edition of Nurse and Spy edited by Elizabeth D. Leonard and published as Memoirs of a Soldier, Nurse and Spy (1999); as well as Schultz (2001: 78). As with the Alcott works, page number references to Nurse and Spy are given parenthetically in the text. 100 The first edition of Uncle Tom’s Cabin sold a reported 300,000 copies. 101 Regarding cross-dressing in general see Karen Halttunen, Confidence Men and Painted Women (1982); and Bullough and Bullough, “Women and Cross Dressing in the Ninetheeth and Early Thentieth Centuries” (1993). Regarding the minstrel tradition and cross-dressing cf. Marjorie Garber, Vested Interests (1992: 275-88).

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her aim was personal profit” she underlined her patriotism by “donat[ing] royalties to the Sanitary and Christian commissions” (Schultz 2004: 227).102 Beyond this economic argument, however, it can be assumed that the memoir’s lasting success was also connected to its new model of “American” identity, which will be analyzed in this section. In its form and narrative structure Nurse and Spy may be said to pay homage to an intrinsically “American” literary aesthetics. Making liberal use of various stylistic devices and popular genres, the novel took the form of a chaotic bricolage. Sensationalist in tone and story, Nurse and Spy consists of thirty short and loosely connected chapters that mix elements of the sensationalist novel, sentimental subgenres like the nursing and slave narrative,103 soldiers’ diaries, and immigrant autobiographies. Additionally, it is peppered with songs, letters, and anecdotes that the narrator claims to have heard from others. By combining tradition and innovation, Nurse and Spy challenged the past while at the same time relying on it for inspiration. It is along similar lines that Nurse and Spy also challenges the behavioral norms of the Victorian era. Edmonds takes the perspective of an involved onlooker who is driven as much by Christian values and a love for her new country as by the sense of adventurousness she proudly claims to possess. As the narrative informs us, the spy is naturally fond of adventure, a little ambitious and a good deal romantic, and this together with my devotion to the Federal cause and determination to assist to the utmost of my ability in crushing the rebellion, made me forget the unpleasant items… (NaS 51).104

102 According to Sizer, Edmonds “distributed the proceeds of her earnings from her book… to soldiers’ aid societies.” Whether this referred to the two commissions is not made clear here. Cf. Sizer, “Acting Her Part” (1992: 126). Edmonds must have kept most of the money, however, since she depended on it after she had left the army. 103 Nurse and Spy may have been inspired by one of the best-known slave narratives of the antebellum period, William and Ellen Craft’s Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom (1848). The book describes how a light-skinned slave disguised herself as a man while her dark-skinned husband posed as her servant. For an analysis of this narrative cf. Garber (1992: 282-85). 104 The notion of pleasure is ignored by the apologetic “Publisher’s Notice” that reduces Edmonds’s masquerades to the “purest motives and most praiseworthy patriotism.” The “Publisher’s Notice” acknowledges “cultural anxiety regarding a woman disguised as a man” by reminding readers of the reasons that ostensibly made Edmonds temporarily switch identities. Cf. Laffrado (1997: 164-65).

 
 

   
 

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If in Alcott’s far more cautious narratives nurses resist their unruly impulses by holding on to the norms of True Womanhood, Edmonds’s transgressions across gendered and racial lines appear as “natural” acts in a country that finds itself in a situation of chaos and social disintegration. It is in this context that the heroine adopts no less than eleven roles, including female nurse, male soldier, African-American contraband (man and woman), female Irish peddler, Canadian boy, Union spy, and four others, including the role of dead soldier.105 As this chapter has suggested earlier, Nurse and Spy attracted readers who wanted to “explore alternative identities within the safe bonds of fiction” (cf. Schultz 2001: 80) while on the other hand insisting on its author’s historical experience as a female-to-male cross-dresser. While the latter lends the story a certain amount of credibility and authenticity, the unique mixture of fact and fiction also evokes the crucial question of “how textual role play translates into cultural meaning” (ibid.: 75). It is, very broadly speaking, this question that is explored in what remains of this chapter. By placing Edmonds’s immigrant status at center stage, this analysis interprets her multifaceted heroine’s diverse “experiences and adventures” as acts of imaginary nation-building and reads Edmonds’s various racial, ethnic, and gendered identities as part of a potentially endless chain of cultural performances, thereby suggesting a model of individual and national identity that is based on the repetition of cultural conventions (cf. Butler 1990).106 Taking her life experience as both an immigrant and a cross-dresser as a starting point, I posit that the protagonist’s multiple transgressions across national, regional, racial, gendered, class, and religious borders welded together American places and social groups that had largely existed side-by-side in the country’s cultural imagination. While highlighting the horrors of the Civil War, Nurse and Spy also depicts the era as a time in which older norms have become dysfunctional and therefore fluid, unleashing an enormous transformational power. And yet, as if to counteract the danger of social fragmentation that lurks beneath such an optimistic outlook, Edmonds ultimately relied on something else to bind society together. The constant shifts and transgressions that turn Nurse and Spy into a spectacle of textual reconstruction depend on an overarching, metaphysical concept that will be addressed later in this section—after examining Edmonds’s imaginary role-play and the author’s ambivalent devotion to her literary predecessor, Louisa May Alcott. To better grasp how Edmonds’s excessive role-play is represented one needs to understand that Nurse and Spy’s factual assertions are, as Schultz has pointed out, “dubious at best.” We can legitimately assume that nineteenth-century readers, too,

105 In one instance she plays “possum” in order to escape certain death. 106 Schultz uses the same theoretical framework (2001: 79-80).

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found the protagonist’s performances “increasingly outlandish” even as they “suspend[ed] their disbelief and interpret[ed] Nurse and Spy as a fiction” (2001: 75).107 While the novel insists on its historical authenticity in principle, Nurse and Spy actually encourages readers to approach the narrative via its performative qualities: in a particularly improbable yet memorable scene that openly alludes to blackface minstrelsy, the cross-dressing narrator turns herself into an African-American man simply by the application of some coal, nitrate of silver, and a wig:108 I purchased a suit of contraband clothing, real plantation style, and then I went to a barber and had my hair sheared close to my head. Next came the coloring process—head, face, neck, hands, and arms were colored black as any African, and then, to complete my contraband costume, I required a wig of real negro wool. But how and where was it to be found? There was no such thing at the Fortress, and none short of Washington. Happily I found the mail-boat was about to start, and hastened on board, and finding a Postmaster with whom I was acquainted, I stepped forward to speak to him, forgetting my contraband appearance, and was saluted with: “Well, Massa Cuff—what will you have?” Said I “Massa send me to you wid dis yere money for you to fotch him a darkie wig from Washington.” “What does he want a darkie wig?” asked the Postmaster. “No matter, dat’s my orders; guess it’s for some ‘noiterin’ business.” “Oh, for reconnoitering you mean; all right old fellow, I will bring it, tell him.” (NaS 45)

While Edmonds’s “account of espionage is detached from its actual political content” since an actual contraband “would have faced a return to slavery,”109 the passage is in fact a critique of the cultural status quo. By reducing the need for camouflage to a minimum of items the scene brims with the irony of an immigrant who observes her

107 A number of her tales have been “contradicted by known facts,” at least in part, and “some of her claims are simply too audacious to be believed.” Gansler, The Mysterious Private Thompson (2007: 221). 108 The scene at the same time reads the tradition against the grain: nineteenth-century minstrelsy was an overwhelmingly male tradition of travesty, though during Edmonds’s lifetime there were also a few all-female minstrel troupes. Marjorie Garber mentions the existence of white female troupes in blackface and also discusses the figure of the black transvestite (male and female) in the nineteenth-century minstrel tradition, any or all of which may have inspired Edmonds (and her readers). Cf. Garber (1992: 275-88) . 109 Young makes this distinction and points out that “[t]he episode suggests the importance of racial disguise as another fantasy of freedom in Civil War narratives about white women.” E. Young (1999: 151).

 
 

   
 

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new environment closely: in this and similar scenes the nineteenth-century American mind seems to require only a set of stereotypes and conventions as ordering categories. According to Nurse and Spy the spy could therefore move back and forth between racial and sexual borders with surprising ease. When on one of her missions Edmonds decides to return to the Confederate camp where she had formerly done her job in the role of “darkie” she decides that it would be safer to choose a different disguise. This time, both gender and ethnicity are cast as thinly-veiled performance: “I procured the dress and outfit of an Irish female peddler, following the army, selling cakes, pies, etc., together with a considerable amount of brogue, and a set of Irish phrases, which did much toward characterizing me as one of the ‘rale ould stock of bog-trotters’” (NaS 64). Here and elsewhere Edmonds “expands the racial and sexual dimensions of her masquerade” by subversively appropriating stereotypes that were firmly engrained in American culture: as Young has pointed out, Edmonds’s disguise as an Irish peddler “provides an ironic commentary on [the] tense history of the New York City Draft Riots,” which were in part a “reaction against perceived affinities between African-Americans and Irish-Americans” (Young 1999: 151). As before, Edmonds relies on makeup to assume this role: “with the ink I painted a red line around my eyes, and after giving my pale complexion a deep tinge with some ochre which I found in a closet, I put on my green glasses and my Irish hood” (NaS 70-71). While the spy’s success and survival depends on stereotypes that can easily be produced with the help of mustard, pepper, an “old pair of green spectacles, and a bottle of red ink” to make her look more “Irish,” they are hardly seen as a valid basis for postwar society: Nurse and Spy ends by envisioning a “PEACE WHICH IS NO COUNTERFEIT!” (NaS 175), thereby hinting at a model of identity that goes beyond the norms and social dichotomies that structure the spy’s daily environment(s). Before discussing the implications of the novel’s ending we should assess how nineteenth-century readers may have received Edmonds’s various acts of racial and sexual mimicry. Nurse and Spy is constructed in such a manner as to motivate attentive readers to look behind its sensationalist “mask” and to recognize the profound cultural criticism her cross-dressing implies. The sheer frequency with which the spy changes roles, the potentially endless number of possible disguises suggested by her cross-dressing, and the self-reflexive manner in which she cites the era’s cultural repertoire as repertoire are strategies that at least had the potential to make nineteenthcentury readers wonder whether there was not another, more philosophical dimension to this novel. In the context of nineteenth-century constructions of social difference it is hardly imaginable that Edmonds’s contemporaries subscribed to the proposition that a person’s race depended on an array of physical corrections and a skillful use of dialect. The very serious philosophical and political statements and discussions that lace the text must have enabled nineteenth-century readers, too, to see through the sensationalist “mask” of the novel. It therefore seems plausible that they may have understood what the “wig of real negro wool” really wanted to tell them: identity

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categories are man-made and so strongly embedded in the cultural unconscious that even an incomplete imitation fulfils the purpose.110 At the same time, together with the apologetic statement that Edmonds’s publisher added to the 1865 edition,111 the unusual mix of patriotism, carnival, and humor that pervades Nurse and Spy soothed fears of cultural otherness, including anxieties surrounding ambiguous sex-gender identities and the era’s most feared taboo, “miscegenation.” This humorous approach emerges, for example, when the narrative persona describes her life among the freedpeople: I visited my sable friends and carried some water for them. After taking a draught of the cool beverage, one young darkie looked at me in a puzzled sort of manner, and turning round to one of his companions, said: “Jim, I’ll be darned if that feller aint turnin’ white; if he aint then I’m no nigger.” I felt greatly alarmed at the remark, but said, very carelessly, “Well, gem’in I’ve allers’ ’spected to come white some time; my mudder’s a white woman.” This had the desired effect, for they all laughed at my simplicity, and made no further remark upon the subject. (NaS 49)

Such moments of possible disclosure, which instead of leading to the intruder’s expulsion result in bafflement and a tolerant inclusion in the respective group, are a central aspect of Edmonds’s social and political vision: because she manages to speak the language of the presumed “other” (not necessarily because she speaks the black vernacular but because she makes them laugh112), she is accepted as a friend. Unlike in Alcott’s fiction, there is no trace of an eroticized interracial attraction, and when the cross-dressing narrator eventually finds herself unable to fully remove the dark color from her face her new appearance signals not her acquisition of “black character traits” but rather an understanding of how it feels to be other:

110 Günter Wallraff, a German investigative reporter, had a similar experience when in 2008/9 he performed the role of an African immigrant in Germany for twelve months. The book about racism that resulted from this experience raised some controversy, particularly because of perceived parallels with the minstrel tradition. Cf. Aus der Schönen Neuen Welt (2009). 111 “[S]hould any of her readers object to some of her disguises it may be sufficient to remind them it was for the purest motives and most praiseworthy patriotism, that she laid aside, for a time, her own costume, and assumed that of the opposite sex and hazard [sic] her life for her adopted country, in its trying hour of need.” W.S. Williams, publisher’s preface to the 1865 edition of Nurse and Spy (included in the 2006 reprint). 112 That she ultimately insists on her intellectual superiority is not represented as a racial trait but as an immediate result of spying.

 
 

   
 

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After removing as much of the color as it was possible for soap and water to do, my complexion was a nice maroon113 color, which my new costume showed off to good advantage. Had my own mother seen me then, it would have been difficult to convince her of our relationship. (NaS 51)

Metaphorically darkened, Edmonds returns to white society only to find herself estranged and alienated: when the general she reports to treats her like a servant, she chalks her face, dresses “in the same style as on examination day” and is finally met with the desired respect (NaS 51). From that crucial moment onward the crossdresser’s minstrelsy extends to whiteness as well, establishing the simple truth that readers should not rely on “appearances”—a term Edmonds uses quite often in the novel and one we will return to later. Edmonds’s (biographically validated) sensitivity to the condition of otherness allows her to see social variables such as gender, race, and class as cultural limitations that can be overcome. The book’s playing with established identity categories, in other words, has a critical dimension. Set toward the end of Nurse and Spy one scene is particularly noteworthy in that respect. In this passage “an old lame negro woman” enters a Virginia hospital and challenges the putative racial superiority of the white Southern women who serve there as nurses and who, the text implies, are treating the wounded Union soldiers very poorly indeed. As punishment for the “vindictive spirit manifested by the women of Virginia toward our soldiers,” the text condescendingly renames the white Southern ladies “females” and applauds the impoverished freedwoman as she proffers “a roll of stockings” that she has “knit wid my own hands for de soldiers” (NaS 173). Unlike Alcott, who could not imagine black women in the South possessing individual agency, Edmonds introduces a female equivalent for the black soldier. While the woman identifies as “a slave—my husband and chil’en is slaves” (NaS 173), the sick Union soldiers acknowledge her patriotism and personal agency when she offers them “packages of tea, cans of fruit, pears and peaches, lint, linen for bandages, and pocket handkerchiefs”: they “looked with wonder and admiration on the old colored woman, and soon a hundred voices cried out ‘God bless you, aunty! You are the only white woman we have seen since we came to Winchester’” (NaS 174). Adding what may be termed a dramatic coda to the narrative, this

113 Edmonds’s use of the word “maroon” here is interesting, since nineteenth-century Americans associated the term with rebelliousness and resistance. According to Michael Warner, “Maroons, or cimarrons, were descended from escaped slaves; in Jamaica as in Brazil, groups of maroons had established independent enclaves that held out against colonial armies for generations, beginning in the sixteenth century.” “A Soliloquy ‘Lately Spoken at the African Theatre’: Race and the Public Sphere in New York City, 1821” (2001). Cf. also Milligan (1999).

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collective recognition of black women’s contributions to the war effort is followed by the lines of the “Marching Song of the First Arkansas Colored Regiment,” a highly provocative composition set to the tune of “John Brown’s Body” and the lyrical structure of “The Battle Hymn of the Republic.” After first acknowledging the active patriotism of the old and presumably useless “contraband” woman, Edmonds’s black vernacular version of the song celebrates the new “owners” of the white Union tune and lyrics: the black soldiers, too, are “fightin’ for de Union, we are fightin’ for de law” (NaS 174). Instead of using standard patterns of heroic narration, Nurse and Spy relies on a strategy of constant shifting: race, gender, and class are roles rather than fixed identities and therefore subject to radical change. Behavioral specificities and vernacular forms do not belong to one culture or social group alone but may be appropriated by others to their own purposes. Importantly, however, the spy’s changing disguises are not motivated solely by the protagonist’s self-proclaimed adventurousness but are cast as necessity: time and again the heroine escapes from a “perilous situation” by changing her outer appearance. Cross-dressing, in other words, is presented as an existential necessity and a potentially endless process. An illustration in the 1865 edition of Nurse and Spy demonstrates this quite nicely. It represents the heroine on horseback in a soldier’s uniform; her face is turned backward in the direction of the gun that is firing at her, as if to offer the attacker a last glimpse of a white woman’s face that could vanish at any moment. Figure 2: “Riding for Life.”

Source: Nurse and Spy in the Union Army: Comprising the Adventures and Experiences of a Woman in Hospitals, Camps, and Battle-Fields, 1865. Illustration. Courtesy of the Library of Congress.

 
 

   
 

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As in the narrative itself, the protagonist is identified not through what she (or he) is but what she (or he) has been and what she (or he) is about to become. This fleeting pose to some extent defies those critics who, according to Marjorie Garber, “look through rather than at the cross-dresser” in order to “elide and erase—or to appropriate the transvestite for particular political and critical aims” (1992: 9). In the case of Nurse and Spy, to look at the cross-dresser is to focus on a figure that not only challenges the binary oppositions defining concepts of gender, race, and class, but that does so frequently, leaving behind not an “authentic” identity but an ever-growing heap of clothes, wigs, and utensils. On the run from the defining gaze of her contemporaries, the cross-dresser is always already somebody else. Cast as a means of individual survival, her role-play points to the fragility of a fixed concept of the self. In keeping with this ethos of ever-shifting identities, Nurse and Spy significantly ends with the vision already mentioned rather than with an accomplished change: O Lord of Peace, who art Lord of Righteousness, Constrain the anguished worlds from sin and grief, Pierce them with conscience, purge them with redress, AND GIVE US PEACE WHICH IS NO COUNTERFEIT! (NaS 175)

That these last lines are an unattributed quotation from Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Casa Guidi Windows (1851)114 further complicates the memoir’s social and political message: Nurse and Spy not only “inscribes generic dissonance on the text of war” but also literally dresses in the textual garb of others—it is itself a “cross-dressed text” (Schultz 2001: 80). By ending her narrative with this textual masquerade Edmonds reveals her understanding of the self, the nation, and the role of art therein. For those readers who were familiar with the original, the passage held a certain intellectual pleasure in store: Browning resembled Edmonds in that she too was an immigrant filled with patriotic feeling for her adopted country; an Englishwoman, she lived in Italy and wrote as fervently about the Italian struggle for independence from Austria as the Canadian immigrant, Edmonds, wrote about the civil conflict in the United States. Edmonds’s failure to attribute the line calling for “peace which is no counterfeit” supports the novel’s more general assertion that the message of the narrative should triumph over the requirements of proper conduct. Scholars of nineteenth-century literature may object, of course, that it was common practice for authors to include unattributed quotations because they could assume that readers knew the original texts. Yet Edmonds stands out even among nineteenth-century authors, making use of this technique very extensively and, as a later section will demonstrate,

114 I thank Ashley Reed for pointing this out.

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often interacting in a critical manner with the texts she integrated. Thus while it would be an overstatement to call Nurse and Spy’s unattributed borrowings acts of theft, they were nevertheless more than a cultural convention. There is a philosophical dimension to her integration of Browning’s stanza: through its emphasis on the term “counterfeit” the quotation destabilizes Edmonds’s final departure toward life among an established, collective “we” that identifies with its own cultural norms (the “us” that emerges in the poem’s last line). By appropriating Browning’s lines without identifying their rightful “owner,” Edmonds ends her own patriotic narrative with the notion of a collective “we” that is both authentic and inauthentic, thereby transcending the notion of a language that belongs only to a select circle of cultural insiders. In doing so Edmonds returns the poem to the status of prayer—the form that had inspired Browning in the first place—thereby reminding readers that in America, spiritual and political concerns are inseparable. This very specific strategy of appropriation points to the universal dimension of Nurse and Spy (something this chapter will return to at a later point) and indirectly formulates a pragmatic approach to aesthetic expression in general: the poetry of earlier generations is kept alive in its function of inspiring later generations, especially in times of crisis. Positioned at the very end of the narrative, Browning’s unattributed words signal the climax of Edmonds’s mental and spiritual arrival in the country she has adopted as her own, hearkening back to the novel’s first page, where she significantly used the past tense to relate that originally she “was not an American” but nevertheless worried about the “sorrow and distress” that “filled the land” she had lived in for some time. She had therefore decided to “express a tithe of the gratitude which I feel toward the people of the United States” and “to go to the front and participate in all the excitement of the battle scenes” (NaS 5). Thirty chapters later, the cross-dressed Canadian “Soldier, Nurse, and Spy” has earned the right to be considered an American; and yet her American-ness defies some of the most substantial norms of American society. While authenticity (“a peace which is no counterfeit”) is held up as an ideal to strive for, it is by no means a state to live in: immediately before echoing Browning’s famous words, Edmonds defines America as a work in progress that relies on the principle of individual transformation and transgression in the name of the nation: she is “about to return to the army to offer [her] services in any capacity which will best promote the interests of the Federal cause—no matter how perilous the position may be” (NaS 174). Edmonds exploits her status as an immigrant by establishing it as a starting point from which to approach her host country both enthusiastically and in the function of critical educator. At the very beginning of the novel, the narrating I aligns her auto-

 
 

   
 

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biographical “record” with the popular nineteenth-century genre of the female missionary narrative115 as she confides to her readers that she left her “rural home, not far from the banks of the St. John’s River” because she “believed then, as now, that the ‘Foreign Missionary’ field was the one in which I must labor, sooner or later” (NaS 5). In a light-hearted, chatty tone Edmonds promotes immigration as a way to invigorate the nation in crisis. Nurse and Spy thus combines two narrative impulses: the making of an American and a foreign missionary’s effort to convert an American readership. Reminding readers that she was “not obliged to remain here during this terrible strife” (NaS 5), Edmonds defines her role in the conflict with a degree of extravagance. From the very beginning of the novel when she asks herself “[w]hat part” she is “to act in this great drama?” (NaS 5), the protagonist appears as a performer in a violent and quintessentially theatrical historical event. Importantly, however, Edmonds does not uncritically idealize the concept of multiple selves. As the narrative makes clear, the individual’s potential to “pass” must be controlled and channeled to prevent damage to the national collective. It is hardly coincidental that false, mistaken, or recently transformed identities define the heroine’s environment. Her literary journey takes her through a society filled with malingerers, Confederate spies, female soldiers in drag, and rebel converts. While some of these boundary-crossers are devoted servants of the Union, others pose a threat. Sorting those who are ready to sacrifice their lives for the Union from those who are not, Edmonds reports enemy spies and a malingering Colonel to army authorities but keeps another female-to-male cross-dresser’s secret to herself. In a narrative move reminiscent of James Fenimore Cooper’s 1821 novel The Spy, Edmonds depicts an environment in which individual transgressions may challenge American norms but not American values. To further secure her moral reputation, Edmonds privileges acts of solidarity between very different Americans over displays of the spy’s individual bravery. In one instance the narrator cares and prays for a dying Confederate soldier; in another she highlights how she is helped by a group of African Americans who preserve the secret of her disguise. Working against the aggrandizing of the autobiographical self, Nurse and Spy responds critically to the conditionality of Alcott’s democratic ventures: while the latter sets herself the task of deciding who deserves to be “uplifted,” Edmonds focuses on solidarity as a mutual and omnipresent human quality.

115 See Joan Brumberg, Mission for Life (1980), especially Brumberg’s discussion of Emily Chubbuck Judson, who (using the pen name Fanny Forrester) was one of the most popular woman writers of nineteenth-century sentimental fiction.

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It is in this context that the Civil War hospital figures as a metaphorical site for extended reflections on healing as an act of individual and collective transcendence. Here Edmonds resists the sort of gallows humor with which Hospital Sketches is laced. Dedicating her tale to “the sick and wounded soldiers of the Army of the Potomac,” she downplays the gendered power struggles within the allegorical “hurlyburly” hospital—struggles that Alcott had identified as symptoms of male moral inferiority.116 According to Nurse and Spy the hospital is, above all, a site where Christian love and care prevail against a “suffering… which no pen can describe” (NaS 17).117 And yet the setting also fulfills a more narrowly political function beyond its role as the stylistic embroidery of the nursing tale, one that certainly helped Edmonds “assume [...] a rhetorical piety befitting the evangelical mission of many other volunteer relief workers” (Schultz 2001: 75).118 As a seemingly timeless and fixed space in a novel that otherwise finds its heroine on chaotic battlefields, in temporary camps, or somewhere “on the run,” the hospital serves as a sort of textual laboratory for overcoming seemingly absolute divisions. It is here that individuals, too, master their personal constraints: as if to counteract the condescending image of the recently freed slaves as helpless and dependent, the lame African-American freedwoman celebrated by the white Union soldiers as “the only white woman we have seen since we came to Winchester” becomes an image of black moral superiority and survival. A woman who has managed to turn her own suffering into compassion for others, the former slave serves as a model for a nation in despair. When she makes her appearance in a wartime hospital she brings with her not only food but also a vision of perseverance and peaceful togetherness.

116 See, in particular, the second part of E. Young’s chapter on Hospital Sketches, “A Wound of One’s Own” (1999: 72-87). 117 The near “sacredness” of the place was also suggested by the historical fact that many Civil War hospitals had been churches before the war. A selection of such churches in wartime Northern Virginia can be seen here: library.thinkquest.org/5970/civilwar/churches.htm. Accessed 20 Oct. 2017. Wartime hospitals were also decorated and used as churches on Sundays and during religious holidays. Regarding “other large buildings, such as warehouses or hotels” that were turned into hospitals, cf. Freemon (1998: 89). 118 Young argues that Alcott chose nursing in order to gain “access to masculine agency.” E. Young (1999: 71).

 
 

   
 

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For Edmonds herself, this sense of togetherness goes along with a selflessness that makes her hospital labors “the most important and interesting in [her] life’s history” (NaS 165). During her initial employment as a (female)119 nurse, the protagonist is deprived of the basic categories upon which her identity is built. Work in the hospital reduces the white, Canadian woman to the fundamentals of human existence: “There is no cessation, and yet it is strange that the sight of this suffering and death does not affect me more. I am simply eyes, ears, hands and feet” (NaS 23). In a subversive reversal of the language of amputations and loss that marks most nursing narratives, the heroine is freed from the deficits associated with the female gender, such as frailty and mental weakness. Symbolically renewed via the hospital machinery of healing and caring that has reduced her to her basic sense organs, the nurse is able to proceed wherever she wants to go. Later, fueled by the wish to avenge the death of an old friend, she admits that she does “not enjoy taking care of the sick and wounded as I once did” (NaS 42) and switches to the role of spy and, later, soldier. Interestingly, however, she remains the person the hospital made her: the multifaceted spy approaches her changing environments with the motivation to help and care for the weak. After leaving the hospital—the metaphorical port of entry into the male world of war—the autobiographical I120 fulfills the subtitle’s expansionist promise (The Adventures and Experiences of a Woman in Hospitals, Camps, and Battlefields) and moves further into the military and public spheres. Initially occupied as a field nurse, Edmonds carries the ideology of nursing to other spaces beyond both the hospital and the camp. The figures of nurse and spy are not so different indeed: both care for the larger community or polity and serve as mediators in their respective contexts. The realms of healing and spying overlap and oscillate in one of the most memorable scenes in Nurse and Spy (comparable to the famous deathbed scene of the “brave Virginia blacksmith,” John, in Hospital Sketches) (1863: 65ff)121 as the nurse-

119 Interestingly, the historical Edmonds worked as a male nurse in the Union army. Gansler suggests that she wanted to “nurse men with less embarrassment to them as men than she could as a woman.” Gansler, The Mysterious Private Thompson (2007: 47). By portraying her fictional alter ego as a female nurse, Edmonds was able to deemphasize the thirst for adventure that motivated her to join the army while also making her application to work as a (male) spy stand out more prominently. For a discussion of this decision see Laffrado (1997: 163). 120 At this point I ignore—for pragmatic reasons—the complex composition of the “autobiographical I” that according to Julia Watson and Sidonie Smith needs to be divided into narrated I, narrating I, and multiple selves. It is important, however, to realize that the autobiographical genre invites precisely the sort of playful splits that constitute the plot of Nurse and Spy. Watson and Smith, Reading Autobiography (2001: 58-61). 121 For an in-depth analysis of this scene cf. E. Young (1999: 89-91).

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turned-Union spy expands her sphere of influence beyond the hospital ward. After “procur[ing] the dress and outfit of an Irish female peddler, following the [Confederate] army” (NaS 64), she enters a deserted farmhouse where she encounters a “rebel” soldier “who [lies] upon a straw-tick on the floor in a helpless condition” (NaS 66). The encounter immediately neutralizes the many differences between the two: It is strange how sickness and disease disarm our antipathy and remove our prejudice. There lay before me an enemy to the Government for which I was daily and willingly exposing my life and suffering unspeakable privation; he may have been the very man who took deadly aim at my friend and sent the cruel bullet through his temple [...] but [I] looked upon him only as an unfortunate, suffering man... and I longed to restore him to health and Strength [sic]; not considering that the very health and strength which I wished to secure for him would be employed against the cause which I had espoused. (NaS 67)

It would be wrong to conclude from the previous paragraphs that in Nurse and Spy the hospital is merely a site of initiation into a more universal frontier of healing. Rather, this metaphorical realm is crucially marked by its permanent function as a site of ideological tension as well as by its transcendence. Edmonds returns to the hospital again and again throughout the novel to ask for medical help but also to symbolically “heal” her relationship with the former rebel woman, Alice M. In the course of the narrative this figure is revealed to be a playful variation on Alcott’s fictional alter ego, Nurse Periwinkle. That the relationship between Sarah Edmonds and Alice M. is represented as a somewhat jocular power struggle can be read as a self-reflective comment on the Canadian author’s imagined relationship to Alcott. In an episode that belongs to the “most important and most interesting” in Edmonds’s “life’s history,” Alice M. turns from political enemy to self-denying friend, and her “conversion to the Federal faith” eventually makes her “the only real lady in personal appearance, education and refinement… among the females of the Peninsula” (NaS 40). In a development faintly reminiscent of “Bob’s” rechristening in “The Brothers / My Contraband,” Alice M. is renamed in the course of her acquaintance with the

 
 

   
 

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narrating I,122 who seeks out her friendship.123 Alice M., alias Nellie J.,124 is transformed from a “colleague when on duty” to an “escort on all occasions in [the heroine’s] rides and rambles” (NaS 110). The “Story of Nellie J.,” as one might call it, begins on Alice’s property in Virginia. This is how Edmonds remembers their first encounter: I had scarcely gone a rod when she discharged a pistol at me, by some intuitive movement I threw myself forward on my horse’s neck and the ball passed over my head. I turned my horse in a twinkling, and grasped my revolver. She was in the act of firing the second time, but was so excited that the bullet went off its mark. I held my seven-shooter in my hand, considering where to aim. I did not wish to kill the wretch, but did intend to wound her. When she saw that two could play at this game, she dropped her pistol and threw up her hands imploringly. I took deliberate aim at one of her hands, and sent the ball through the palm of her left hand. She fell to the ground in an instant with a loud shriek. (NaS 39)

The sexual overtones to this scene have led scholars and biographers alike to speculate on a lesbian subtext and, subsequently, on Edmonds’s own sexual orientation.125

122 In this case the “narrating I” is the agent of discourse. Regarding the four autobiographical “I’s” see Watson and Smith (2001: 58-61). 123 That one of Alcott’s Civil War short stories, “Nelly’s Hospital” (1865), presents a heroine of the same name is a mere coincidence. In On Race, Sex, and Slavery (1997) Sarah Elbert lists the story as having been published in 1863, as a contribution to the children’s magazine Our Young Folks. This, however, must be a mistake, since Our Young Folks did not appear until 1865. It was here that “Nelly’s Hospital” first appeared. The entry in Louisa May Alcott Encyclopedia (“Nelly’s Hospital” 2001: 228-29), supports this as well. Regarding the role of “Nelly’s Hospital” in Alcott’s Civil War oeuvre cf. E. Young (1999: 97). The story may be found on pages 223 through 235 of Alcott, Louisa May Alcott’s Civil War (2007). 124 No reason is given for this act of renaming—one may speculate that it was a symbolic act announcing a new beginning. 125 Laura Laffrado claims that Edmonds “reinforces cultural constructions… that guard her self-definition as a heterosexual woman.” Laffrado (1997: 168-69). Although her gendered identity remains unclear during her capture of Alice/Nellie, the erotic otherness of the relationship emerges through a rhetoric of “mysteriousness” and a shared secret that they carefully hide from the Yankee surgeon who falls in love with Nellie: “we both refused to answer any questions relating to the wound” (40). Regarding the lesbian subtext of the novel see Ona Claire Russell, Discourses of Crossing (1998: 32, footnote 17). In “Performing Genres” Schultz asserts that “the narrator’s ambiguous sexing… allows

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While it is futile to further elaborate on this undecided question, it should be noted that the story itself seems to play with this ambiguity: when a Union surgeon asks Alice / Nellie J. (NaS 40) about her injury, the narrator reports that “we both refused to answer any questions relating to the wound” (NaS 40). What seems significant about this display of cross-regional female solidarity is that it centers on the wellestablished trope of wounding: while in “The Brothers / My Contraband” an interracial love relationship comes at the price of the wounded hero’s death, Edmonds’s “female rebel” survives, embraces the “Federal faith,” becomes a nurse in a Union hospital, and establishes a close friendship with her former enemy. A hopeful metaphor for regional reconciliation, the episode helps establish the wartime hospital as a site of healing where racial and gendered hierarchies are transcended. Beyond that, however, the women’s shared silence signals the sense of loyalty and conspiracy that connects the Canadian author to Alcott. The friendship between the spy and the rebel figuratively celebrates the difficult yet inspirational relationship between the Canadian author and her New England predecessor. Nineteenth-century readers must have immediately recognized the many textual fragments that this episode in particular had borrowed from Alcott. One of the best-known phrases from Hospital Sketches was Periwinkle’s description of the depressed atmosphere in the hospital, where a “general ‘Hark!-from-the-tombs-a-doleful-sound’ style of conversation seemed to be the fashion” (HS 40). Nurse and Spy appropriates this memorable phrase to describe Nellie J.’s hospital: She was a splendid woman, and had the best faculty of dispelling the blues, dumps and dismals of any person I ever met. When we went to a hospital and found the nurses looking tired and anxious and the patients gloomy and sad, it never required more than half an hour for us to get up a different state of feeling, and dispel that “Hark-from-the-tombs-a-doleful-sound” sort of spirit, and we invariably left the men in a more cheerful mood, evidently benefited by having a little respite from that depressing melancholy so prevalent among the sick, and so often indulged by nurses. (NaS 110)

Nurse and Spy further intensifies this intertextual overlap when, a little later, the visiting spy not only supports “the gentle Nellie” but actually takes her place, shifting from the position of observant narrator to that of nurse. As clear borders between the texts dissolve (like Alcott, Edmonds sets ambivalent scenes after dark), the narrating nurse paraphrases a passage from Periwinkle’s famous night-watch. In Hospital Sketches the narrator notes:

her the liminal and liberating identity of a sexual go-between—one who defies both gender and sexual orientation.” Schultz (2001: 82-83).

 
 

   
 

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My ward was now divided into three rooms; and, under favor of the matron, I had managed to sort out the patients in such a way that I had what I called, “my duty room,” my “pleasure room,” and my “pathetic room,” and worked for each in a different way. One, I visited, armed with a dressing tray, full of rollers, plasters, and pins; another, with books, flowers, games, and gossip; a third, with teapots, lullabies, consolation, and, sometimes, a shroud. (HS 41)

It becomes rather obvious here why Periwinkle was a valid model for Edmonds: Alcott’s protagonist, too, is not only a “soldiering woman” but equipped with the facets of multiple identities. Yet Nurse and Spy does not simply quote Alcott; it relies on a mixture of closeness and derivation that is symptomatic of its relationship to Alcott’s texts and their underlying ideological message. Here is how Edmonds renders the passage: In our own hospital we generally managed to so assort and arrange the patients as to have all of the same temperament and disease together, so that our patients divided into three classes; one was our working department, another our pleasure department, and a third our pathetic department. One we visited with bandages, plasters, and pins; another, with books and flowers; and the third, with beef tea, currant wine, and general consolation. (NaS 110)

While the paragraph hews closely to the original, Edmonds replaces the individual testimony of Alcott’s alter ego with a notion of nursing as a collective occupation (“our own hospital”). While this may on the one hand be interpreted as a criticism of the New Englander’s self-centeredness, on the other it inscribes Edmonds’s alter ego into the textual realm of Hospital Sketches. As this chapter has already argued, the figures of the spy, Nellie J., and Tribulation Periwinkle overlap to become almost indistinguishable: in caring for America’s wounded, they merge into a patriotic figure of truly “selfless” care. If Edmonds extends the concept of “care” to the world beyond the hospital, she simultaneously links the idea of suffering to the domestic realm. If “nursing” becomes an occupation that is no longer limited to the hospital as an extension of the domestic sphere (as in Hospital Sketches),126 being a patient becomes the epitome of self-limitation and passivity, especially when the patient is a woman. Toward the end of Nurse and Spy, Edmonds, like Periwinkle (and Alcott herself), experiences a fundamental physical and mental crisis in which she “could do nothing but weep hour after hour…. All the horrid scenes that I had witnessed during the past two years seemed now before me with vivid distinctness, and I could think of nothing else”

126 Regarding the extension of “domestic surveillance” in Alcott’s novella see Elbert, “Introduction” (Elbert 1997: xxxiv).

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(NaS 163). Sick and utterly exhausted, Edmonds finds herself stripped of all her “soldierly qualities” and sheds her male attire to become “again a poor, cowardly, nervous, whining woman” (NaS 163). While a war-related “wound” had allowed Nurse Periwinkle to celebrate her attack of typhoid as a personal “badge of honor,”127 a similar crisis fully removes the spy from any association with the military realm: in keeping with the deserter’s actual experience, Edmonds leaves the army for good and takes to writing instead.128 But unlike Alcott, for whom “[w]riting and publishing were increasingly means of self-reliance” (Elbert 1997: xxvi), Edmonds scorns the feminized role of the writer and concludes her narrative with the following claim, which appears shortly before the final Browing quotation: To prove to my friends that I am not ambitious of gaining the reputation of that venerable general (Halleck) whose “pen is mightier than his sword,”129 I am about to return to the army to offer my services in any capacity which will best promote the interests of the Federal cause— no matter how perilous the position may be. (NaS 174)

Writing, in other words, is an occupation for those “passive patients” who do not assume responsibility in war. This can, of course, be interpreted as a not too subtle attack on Alcott, whose “soldiering” qualities were merely a matter of fiction.130

127 As Young puts it pointedly, Periwinkle eventually reappears “before the eyes of a ‘grateful country’” wearing a wig as a temporary prosthesis for the missing part (she lost her hair due to her illness). Once the “‘son of the house’ off to war, she is now “‘back in her teens’ with the battle scar of baldness.” E. Young (1999: 86). (The quotes from Alcott are on page 77 of Hospital Sketches). 128 “[Edmonds’s] version of the incident is that she had contracted a severe fever, and thus faced hospitalization, discovery, and possible dishonorable discharge. The contemporary evidence of two diaries, however, suggests that she had fallen in love with one James Reid of the 79th New York Volunteers, and that her desertion coincided with Reid’s resignation from the army because of an ailing wife. In any event, Sarah Edmonds made her way to Oberlin, Ohio, where she did seek medical attention and resumed the dress and role of woman.” Fladeland, “Sarah Emma Edmonds” (1971: 562). 129 The general-in-chief of the Union army, Henry Wagner Halleck, lacked authority within the higher ranks of the military and was ridiculed as un-masculine. He wrote several books, among them Military Arts and Science (1856), his best-known work. As Lyde Cullen Sizer has pointed out, this passage from Nurse and Spy obscures the fact that the historical Edmonds would return in a woman’s dress to nurse the wounded. “Acting Her Part” (1992: 126). 130 As Cappello has pointed out, Hospital Sketches is structured in such a way as to present writing itself as a highly subversive activity: the “Epilogue” is told from the perspective

 
 

   
 

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By highlighting the difference between the pen and the gun, Edmonds—at least indirectly—pinpoints Alcott’s soldiering nurse as a rhetorical figure that veils the ongoing exclusion of women from the public realm. By describing herself as a “nervous, whining woman” writer, she challenges the very notion of control and self-discipline that reigns supreme in Hospital Sketches. And yet the Canadian’s comment is not without optimism: while Alcott represented wounded men as helpless children in the care of masculinized nurses, Nurse and Spy explicitly acknowledges “feminine” weakness as part of the narrator’s repertoire on the one hand and as the natural endpoint of that repertoire on the other. Unlike the figure of the courageous Irish peddler, the exhausted woman in crisis is no longer in control of her situation, but this situation is temporary and therefore not essential to her character. When the former spy becomes a writer she does so explicitly and for a very limited time, as she lets readers know she is “about to return to the army… no matter how perilous the position may be.” This announcement may be read as a commentary on Nurse Periwinkle’s wish to nurse “colored” soldiers once she has recovered. Yet as if to encourage the young “Periwinkles” among her contemporaries who perceive of nursing as a woman’s only option beyond the domestic realm, Edmonds projects a broad spectrum of opportunities for any adventurous woman of her time. That in the end writing itself is mentioned as one of the occupations women might embrace is only logical here. According to Edmonds, however, it can only be a peacetime activity: after “this cruel war is over,”131 and peace shall once more shed her sweet influence over our land. [sic] I may be permitted to resume it [the pen] again to record the annihilation of rebellion, and the final triumph of Truth, Right, and Liberty. (NaS 175)


 
  

  
 

 
 
 
As the previous discussion has made clear, Edmonds’s novel is itself a record of rebellion. For all its emphasis on tolerance and Christian love of neighbor it challenges the very foundations of a culture that emphasizes categories such as race, gender, and religion and then organizes these differences in a hierarchical manner. Nurse and Spy

of the recovering nurse who, having returned home, takes to the pen as an instrument of social critique. Cf. Cappello (1994: 63). 131 “When this Cruel War is Over” was a famous Civil War song, popular in both the North and the South. For the music and lyrics cf. “When this Cruel War is Over” at freepages.music.rootsweb.ancestry.com/~edgmon/cwcruel.htm. Accessed 20 Oct. 2013.

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blurs such distinctions with its cross-dressed protagonist and its textual strategies involving subtle shifts in perspective, multiple endings, and subversive textual theft. Edmonds’s appropriation of Hospital Sketches is an intrusion into Civil War-era feminist debates; metaphorically speaking, Nurse and Spy responds to the muted cry for help that is always an aspect of Alcott’s narratives about the “civil wars within women” (Young 1999: 70). At the same time, the Canadian writer criticizes her American sister’s twisted efforts to symbolically regulate race relations and suggests a different model of self and culture to overcome the hierarchical thinking that dominates Alcott’s work. This skepticism becomes obvious whenever Edmonds re-contextualizes Hospital Sketches. The most telling scene in this respect is one first told by a sickly Nurse Periwinkle132 and later borrowed by Edmonds. In Hospital Sketches the scene depicts Periwinkle’s social alienation as she views a street scene unfolding beneath her bedroom window; she describes it as a “moving panorama that passed below” (HS 7071). Periwinkle is particularly taken aback by the women who are “so extinguished in three story bonnets, with overhanging balconies of flowers, that their charms [are] obscured.” The men who participate in this “mammoth masquerade” “[do] the picturesque” with their Spanish hats, scarlet lined riding cloaks, swords and sashes, high boots and bright spurs, beards and mustaches, which made plain faces comely, and comely faces heroic; these vanities of the flesh transformed our butchers, bakers, and candlestick makers into gallant riders of gaily caparisoned horses, much handsomer than themselves; and dozens of such figures were constantly prancing by, with private prickings of spurs, for the benefit of the perambulating flowerbed. (HS 78)

The nurse feels doubly excluded here: as a True Woman at heart she cannot identify with the immodest “vanities of the flesh” below her window, yet at the same time she is denied her favorite morally superior occupation of compassionate care: due to her illness, she is “forbidden to meddle with fleshly arms and legs.” When she informs the reader that she has “solaced [her]self by mending cotton ones” (meaning that she reeled up bandages) (HS 78) she implicitly racializes her alienation and exclusion.

132 According to standard biographies, Alcott herself contracted typhoid while serving as a nurse and was treated with inorganic mercury. This aggressive treatment regimen “scarred her for life and eventually killed her.” Cappello (1994: 62). This explanation was challenged in 2001, when Norbert Hirschhorn et al. suggested that she had systemic lupus erythematosus. See “Abraham Lincoln's Blue Pills.”

 
 

   
 

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An analogy between the cotton-mending white nurse and the slaves who picked cotton on southern plantations is not as far-fetched as it may seem. As she continues her description, the nurse’s identification as a slave becomes more pronounced: The mules were my especial delight; and an hour's study of a constant succession of them introduced me to many of their characteristics; for six of these odd little beasts drew each army wagon, and went hopping like frogs through the stream of mud that gently rolled along the street. (HS 79)

As Robert E. Hemenway has pointed out with regard to Zora Neale Hurston’s research on the term “mule” in American slave society, African Americans in the South used the term allegorically: not only were mules “bought and sold by massa” and “forced to work long hours just as slaves were” but they were also individualistic, stubborn, strong, and unpredictable (cf. 1977: 222). This is precisely what causes the delight of the cotton-mending nurse. It apparently fascinated Edmonds as well, for the following passage was virtually “stolen” by the author of Nurse and Spy, who did not alter it in any way: The coquettish mule had small feet, a nicely trimmed tassel of a tail, perked up ears, and seemed much given to little tosses of the head, affected skips and prances; and, if he wore the bells, or were bedizzened with a bit of finery, put on as many airs as any belle. The moral mule was a stout, hard-working creature, always tugging with all his might; often pulling away after the rest had stopped, laboring under the conscientious delusion that food for the entire army depended upon his private exertions. I respected this style of mule; and, had I possessed a juicy cabbage, would have pressed it upon him, with thanks for his excellent example. The historical mule was a melo-dramatic quadruped, prone to startling humanity by erratic leaps, and wild plunges, much shaking of his stubborn head, and lashing out of his vicious heels; now and then falling flat, and apparently dying a la Forrest:133 a gasp—a squirm—a flop, and so on, till the street was well blocked up, the drivers all swearing like demons in bad hats, and the chief actor's circulation decidedly quickened by every variety of kick, cuff, jerk and haul. When the last breath seemed to have left his body, and “Doctors were in vain,” a sudden resurrection took place; and if ever a mule laughed with scornful triumph, that was the beast, as he leisurely rose, gave a comfortable shake; and, calmly regarding the excited crowd seemed to say—”A hit! a decided hit! for the stupidest of animals has bamboozled a dozen men. Now, then! what are you stopping the way for?” The pathetic mule was, perhaps, the most interesting of all; for, though he always seemed to be the smallest, thinnest, weakest of the six, the postillion, with big boots, long-tailed coat, and heavy whip, was sure to bestride this one, who struggled feebly

133 This is an allusion to Edwin Forrest, the famous New York actor, who was most successful during the 1840s.

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along, head down, coat muddy and rough, eye spiritless and sad, his very tail a mortified stump, and the whole beast a picture of meek misery, fit to touch a heart of stone. The jovial mule was a roly poly, happy-go-lucky little piece of horse-flesh, taking everything easily, from cudgeling to caressing; strolling along with a roguish twinkle of the eye, and, if the thing were possible, would have had his hands in his pockets, and whistled as he went. If there ever chanced to be an apple core, a stray turnip, or wisp of hay, in the gutter, this Mark Tapley was sure to find it, and none of his mates seemed to begrudge him his bite. I suspected this fellow was the peacemaker, confidant and friend of all the others, for he had a sort of “Cheer-up,-old-boy,-I'll-pullyou-through” look, which was exceedingly engaging. (NaS 31 and HS 79)

If Alcott inserted this passage to celebrate the nurse’s imperturbable sense of rebellion, she could not hide from her readers that her alter ego remained in a state of imposed passivity. The Victorian woman who “s[its] sewing”134—once more—at her “window, watch[ing] the moving panorama” (HS 79), identifies with the fate of these domestic animals. Since, as a rule, mules are not able to reproduce, they were a perfect choice to represent the powerlessness of those whose wish for individual selfrealization was continuously limited from without.135 Additionally, however, the mules also symbolized the physical exploitation and untamed spirit of the “childlike” slave. It is significant that in the same paragraph, Nurse Periwinkle also describes what she terms “the genuine article”—her “colored brothers and sisters.” While she finds the freedpeople “more interesting” than the “officers, ladies, mules, or pigs” on parade, she refers to them in condescending terms as “obsequious, trickish, lazy and ignorant, yet kind-hearted, merry-tempered, quick to feel and accept the least token of the brotherly love which is slowly teaching the white hand to grasp the black” (HS 80). The disempowered nurse builds up her largely demolished sense of agency through a fantasy of brotherhood that thinly veils her unquestioned belief in white superiority: by metaphorically “grasp[ing] the black [hand],” Periwinkle projects herself as an active agent in “this great struggle for the liberty of both the races” (HS 81). Curiously, these fantasies of interracial friendship and uplift were based on a denial of Alcott’s actual dependency on black hospital workers: her novel does not mention Matilda Cleaver John, the thirty-one-year-old free black woman who tended to the sick Alcott when she fell ill in the Washington hospital (Schultz 2002: 223).

134 Regarding the role of sewing as an “emblem of integration that symbolized women’s designated role of binding all peoples together,” cf. Cappello (1994: 67). 135 This concern with power aligns with Alcott’s more general philosophy, including her secret fascination with Thoreau’s “On the Duty of Civil Disobedience,” while reflecting, on the other hand, her promotion of female self-sacrifice and the need to discipline “unruly” impulses. Cf. Elbert (1987: especially pages 151-53).

 
 

   
 

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Closely intertwined with her musings about the mules, Alcott’s description of African Americans reinforces the imaginary link between the ex-slaves and the domestic animals and allows Periwinkle greater freedom to project herself as the victim of a disciplinary regime. Thus while she symbolically “blackens” her own gendered experience, she manages to maintain a thin line between herself and those whom she considers “the genuine article.” In the course of this passage, African Americans are depicted as “the sort of creatures generations of slavery have made them” and are therefore worthy of the efforts of a white woman who will “uplift” them. At the same time, however, the text denies them the individual resistance that it grants the mules. Alcott, in other words, flirts with the notion of blackness via the metaphor of the mules, links this notion to the actual historical situation of the freedpeople, and yet manages to distinguish what one might call the “moral blackness” of the stereotypical slave from her own. In keeping with the established rhetoric among other white feminists of the era, Alcott severs the notion of “blackness” from the historical situation of the ex-slaves and uses it to describe her heroine’s acts of female rebellion. At the same time, however, she diminishes the distance between her heroine and the freed slaves, using their proximity to spice up her narrative while adding a sense of danger. But by describing the scenario from behind a window—as a “moving panorama” that virtually scrolls past the (reading) onlooker while Periwinkle provides commentary—Alcott makes sure that all of this is only fiction. Edmonds chooses a significantly different setting for this scene. While she, too, is a nurse here and equally ill, she is not cut off from her surroundings; on the contrary, in her function as a field nurse she sits in her tent, itself a fragile structure that shelters her from the “cold, drizzling rain” (NaS 30) while still allowing her to smell the “breeze from the adjacent swamps and marshes.” Feeling “the effects of the miasma which [comes] floating” toward her from a hostile environment, bringing with it “fever and ague,” the white nurse emerges from the “Virginia mud”136 as an independent, masculinized, and rough-tongued tent-dweller who takes “a strange pleasure” in what she sees: As I sat in my tent, roasting or shivering as the case might be, I took a strange pleasure in watching the long trains of six mule teams which were constantly passing and repassing within

136 Cappello juxtaposes Alcott’s “repeated references to the piggish element—whether it be the mud she finds herself covered with early in the book, the mud she washes off the soldiers, or the mud that the statue of liberty is mired in” with “her representation of Washington, D.C., as festive spectacle,” as “both an emblem of her own alienated desire… and a form of social protest.” Edmonds, one may argue, re-interpreted the metaphor as a fluid connection between watching self and watching others. Cf. “Looking About Me” (1994: 61).

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a few rods of my tent. As “Miss Periwinkle” remarks, there are several classes of mules. (NaS 30)

This introduction figures as an ironic and self-reflexive description of how Edmonds approaches Alcott’s text: the pleasure of the observer in the text is also the pleasure of the writer who watches, and eventually appropriates, Alcott’s metaphorical mules. It continues with an exact copy of the mule episode quoted above. And yet the meaning is radically altered by the passage’s different framing. Emphasizing that the mules “were constantly passing and repassing within a few rods of my tent” (NaS 30), the textual image constructs a close proximity between observer and observed, who both feel the rain, the “floating miasma,” and the muddy soil below. More importantly, both of them manage to preserve their individuality in a disciplinary context. Given the fact that Alcott uses windows to signify the invisible separation between the secluded world of white Victorian women and the public sphere, Edmonds’s perspective from a tent is a rather significant alteration. While watching the mules, she is gripped with a “strange pleasure” (NaS 30) that differs considerably from the “especial delight” that Periwinkle experienced when she recognized the limits of her own agency in the controlled and ultimately inconsequential rebelliousness of the mules. While Alcott’s novella had cast white nineteenth-century women as inherently masochistic, Edmonds’s “pleasure” derives from the triumph of rebellion over human efforts to discipline it. This rebellion is clearly racialized: immediately before the introductory passage quoted above, the reader is informed that Edmonds has just returned from “meddling” with bodies (like Alcott)—albeit with black ones. The paragraph leaves no doubt that such a rebellion will eventually succeed, since it is preceded by a poem that describes a sense of brotherhood devoid of the condescension that Periwinkle attaches to her black “brothers and sisters”: Resolved, although my brother be a slave, And poor and black, he is my brother still; Can I, o’er trampled “institutions,” save That brother from the chain and lash, I will. (NaS 30)

Nurse and Spy, in other words, does not manipulate the slavery metaphor to criticize the patriarchal structures with which Alcott is primarily concerned. By framing the mule episode between, on the one hand, celebratory descriptions of a charismatic African-American preacher and an antislavery poem and, on the other, a story about a “faithful colored boy” who supports the Union in “most approved military style” (NaS 31), Edmonds’s version of the scene emphasizes black agency. While Edmonds playfully blurs social boundaries through acts of cross-dressing, Alcott’s fictionalized nurses ultimately rely on these self-same boundaries to re-empower white womanhood. Both of Alcott’s nurses, Periwinkle and Dane, flirt with

 
 

   
 

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ideas of black identity and “miscegenation;” yet notwithstanding much rhetorical shifting, their respective self-constructions rely on clear racial distinctions. This is particularly obvious in Periwinkle’s visit to the Senate Chamber. What she finds on one of her off-duty “rambles” to this highly symbolic place confuses the racial categorizations that define her sense of American-ness. The statues on exhibition there challenge the established myth of the country’s white origin: Several robust ladies attracted me; but which was American and which Pocahontas was a mystery; for all affected such looseness of costume, dishevelment of hair, swords, arrows, lances, scales, and other ornaments quite passé with damsels of our day. (HS 69)

It remains unclear what attracts her more here: the sculptured ladies’ monumental robustness or the racial disorder that unfolds before her.137 In its appropriation of the passage, Nurse and Spy departs from Alcott’s feminist, “unruly” spirit. After a sweeping view that signals racial inclusion, the novel celebrates the first American president: After admiring Pocahontas sufficiently, and gazing at expiring heroes […] I then turned for relief to the noble form of ‘The Father of his Country,’ which looked out from the canvas in all the princely majesty which characterized that great and good man. (NaS 105)

To secure her respectability as an author and as a cross-dresser, Edmonds emphasizes her devotion to her adopted country by rhetorically positioning herself against Alcott’s feminist agenda. At the same time, however, she shifts Alcott’s primary concern with gender to the issue of race. In the New Englander’s nightmarish vision of an interracial democracy, men are irresponsible children, regardless of color. Thus

137 The text becomes more outspoken on the latter a few lines later, when the nurse admires the Washington “Statue of Liberty” (today known as the “Statue of Freedom”). Contrary to popular belief (and we do not know how far Alcott was informed on the matter) the statue does not represent a Native American but a female allegorical figure. It stood “flat in the mud, with Young America fitfully making dirt pies, and chip forts, in its shadow. But high above the squabbling little throng and their petty plans, the sun shone full on Liberty's broad forehead, and, in her hand, some summer bird had built its nest. I accepted the good omen then, and, on the first of January, the Emancipation Act gave the statue a nobler and more enduring pedestal than any marble or granite ever carved and quarried by human hands.” (HS 76) The “Statue of Freedom” was placed on the dome of the Washington Capitol on December 2, 1863. Alcott must have seen it earlier, when it was temporarily displayed on the Capitol grounds.

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when Periwinkle-as-tourist138 enters the Senate Chamber (after the politicians have left) she finds the Speaker’s chair occupied by a colored gentleman of ten; while two others were on their legs, having a hot debate over the cornball question, as they gathered the waste paper strewn about the floor into bags; and several white members played leap-frog over the desks. (HS 689)

Echoing her earlier descriptions of the ill-running “smaller machine” of the “hurlyburly hospital” (HS 68), Periwinkle uses the language a mother might use with regard to her unruly children to describe the central site of American democracy. Edmonds, too, readily ridicules the male members of an imaginary Senate (after confirming her admiration for the generation of the founders), but carefully avoids racial specification. She eschews any well established allusion to future African-American senators139 as quarreling children and instead shifts the reader’s attention to a less hypothetical field, focusing on the recently freed African-American population that seeks shelter before the gates of the Senate. Placed at the end of a page that quotes excessively from Alcott’s novella, Edmonds’s passage describes African Americans as “saucy, lazy, degraded creature[s]” (NaS 105), hereby replicating what Alcott had written about Periwinkle’s encounter with the freedpeople: “Much as the lazy boys and saucy girls tormented me, I liked them, and found that any show of interest or friendliness brought out the better traits which live in the most degraded and forsaken of us all.” (HS 81) After this allusion to Hospital Sketches Edmonds continues by introducing a wellknown white character: I found a young lady there, from the North, who had come to Washington with the intention of nursing the sick soldiers, but her sympathies being divided between sick America and down trodden Africa, she decided to teach the contrabands instead. She seemed delighted with her

138 As Cappello argues convincingly, Periwinkle “gains the freedom to go out in the name of cure” and is basically “hallucinating” the scenes that she encounters (69). Illness, in other words, becomes a woman’s “ideological shield” against the “risk of exposition” (66). 139 The first African-American senator was Hiram Revels, a free black man from North Carolina. Elected an alderman in Mississippi in 1868, he became state senator in 1870. Some white members of the Senate objected to his election, claiming that since he had only recently been granted full citizenship by the Fourteenth Amendment, he had not been a United States citizen for at least nine years, and thus did not meet the Constitutional requirements for serving in the Senate.

 
 

   
 

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employment, and the little black faces were beaming with joy as they gathered around her to receive instruction. (NaS 106)

The vocabulary hews closely to that of Hospital Sketches: nineteenth-century readers could easily identify the “young lady” as Alcott’s “Nurse Periwinkle” turned teacher among the freedmen.140 A self-authorized insider to African-American wants and needs, the spy-narrator suggests that the freedmen perceive of the white woman as an unwelcome intruder. In an ironic commentary on Hospital Sketches the “narrated I” of Nurse and Spy stands next to the benevolent female from the North and eventually takes over the conversation with the freedmen. This is how Edmonds stages the encounter: One colored man stood listening to the questions which were being asked [by the nurse] and answered [by other freedmen], and looked as if he would like to give in his testimony. I [that is Edmonds] turned to him, and asked: “How is it with you? Do you think you can take care of yourself, now that you have no master to look after you?” “Gosh a-mighty, guess I can! Ben taking car’ of self and massa too for dis fifteen year. Guess I can take car’ of dis nig all alone now.” (NaS 106)141

The scene is a critical allusion to the established abolitionist fantasy of black uplift that Americans had been familiar with ever since Stowe’s fictional conversations between Aunt Ophelia and Topsy. Nurse and Spy confronts the white nurse’s naïve abolitionist fantasies with the complexities of American race relations after the Emancipation Proclamation. By placing the freedman’s voice so prominently Edmonds reminds white readers of black agency and individuality in a context in which African Americans were usually ignored altogether: ten pages later, for instance, the spy in blackface easily overhears the conversation of some Confederate officers as they “forget that there were darkies around” (NaS 116). In what is essentially a debate about the immediate needs of black people, Edmonds proposes that in order to be really free, the ex-slaves should be independent of white charity. Although the novel does not mention issues like free labor that had preoccupied the American public ever since the early “experiment” on the Sea Islands, Edmonds seems thoroughly aware of the more general debate regarding white support of the freedmen. As Carol Faulkner has pointed out,

140 Whether Edmonds had read “The Brothers” (or “My Contraband”) remains open to speculation. 141 The scene may also be read as commenting on both Aunt Ophelia’s interview with Topsy and the “Uncle Tom” image that pervaded nineteenth-century American culture. The “colored man” in Edmonds’s novel is an uneducated yet self-reliant citizen.

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many reformers feared that former slaves could not be independent from whites. As a result, the early reports of individual abolitionists and freedmen’s aid societies contained contradictory messages of independence and dependence, free labor and humanitarian prerogatives, and antislavery egalitarianism and racial prejudice. These early tensions between charity and free labor shaped the direction of the freedmen’s aid movement at the end of the war. (2004: 10)

Faulkner’s historical analysis refers, of course, to the postwar period. Edmonds’s intertextual quarrel with Alcott thus anticipated a discussion that largely determined the meaning of Reconstruction. According to Nurse and Spy, “colored men” did not need to be “uplifted” because their admission to the army had permitted them “to assume the privileges of rational beings” (NaS 174). The same is true for “the negro woman” who, “as manifested in the hospital, is a perfect sample of the devotion of the contrabands, male and female, to the Union cause” (NaS 174). By recognizing the patriotic contribution of both freedmen and -women, Nurse and Spy contravenes the hierarchical alliance between white women and black men that Alcott set up in “The Brothers.” At the same time, however, Edmonds herself is not free from racist stereotyping; Nurse and Spy in fact often seems to perpetuate stereotypes unhesitatingly. Thus when the white nurse appears in the African-American community she encounters a familiar scene complete with old women who “grinned and gossiped in the most cheerful manner” and “mothers who tossed their babies with that tender pride and mother-love that beautifies the blackest and homeliest face” (NaS 106). Elsewhere the reader encounters a pitiful “little black urchin selling cakes and pies” (NaS 146) and a Christ-like old “Uncle” who tells his “touching history of slave life” (NaS 152). I am of course tempted to argue that Edmonds imports these stereotypes from writers such as Stowe and Alcott in order to distance herself from these writers of the sentimental mode via a strategy of critical repetition. And yet the narrator who occasionally wears a wig of “negro wool” to conceal her white, female self was not entirely free from the racialized perception of her well-meaning abolitionist contemporaries. Throughout Nurse and Spy, African Americans are idealized as a particularly trustworthy and pious people, yet also as “exceedingly ignorant”: [T]here is one subject upon which they can converse freely and intelligibly, and that is praying men and women. Oh, how I should like to teach these people! They seem so anxious for instruction, I know they would learn quickly. Some of them are whiter and prettier than most of our northern ladies. There is a family here, all of whom have blue eyes, light hair, fair skin and rosy cheeks; yet they are contrabands, and have been slaves. (NaS 29)

The scene of course combines two well-known abolitionist arguments according to which African Americans, some of whom have already approximated the ideal of whiteness, would eagerly embrace the effort to be “civilized.” As elsewhere, the

 
 

   
 

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novel here uses romanticizing depictions of black piety, solidarity, and humaneness and thereby perpetuates racial stereotypes. At the same time, however, Nurse and Spy time and again reaches beyond this essentially racist concept. The passage above, for example, ends with the narrator asking: “But why should blue eyes and golden hair be the distinction between bond and free?” There is thus a general and problematic inconsistency in Edmonds’s representations of African Americans, and yet it is important to realize that stereotypical images fade in contrast to her emphasis on injustice. Thus when some Kentucky military guards meet the “little black urchin,” the main focus of the passage is on the moral vileness of these men: four of the soldiers took hold of him, each one taking hold of a hand or foot, and pulled him almost limb from limb—just as I have seen cruel schoolboys torture frogs. When they threw him on the ground he could neither speak, cry, nor walk, but there he lay a little quivering, convulsive heap of pain and misery. (NaS 146)142

Edmonds, in other words, goes a decisive step further than the author of Hospital Sketches. As Cappello has pointed out, Nurse Periwinkle ministers, first and foremost, to black souls, refusing to look at a “mutilated Black body.” It would take another story, “The Brothers / My Contraband,” before the nurse would acknowledge the “ritualized, routinized violence” (1994: 78)143 that had been part and parcel of the “peculiar institution.”



 
   
  

  

 

 
Edmonds’s critique of Alcott’s Victorian principles was nuanced and thoughtful rather than a total rejection of the New Englander’s work. Edmonds is simply the more optimistic of the two: according to the Canadian immigrant her host country was far more open to radical change than Alcott allowed for in her tales of female desire and

142 There are other scenes that further emphasize the brutality used against African Americans during the war. The novel mentions another black boy who did not receive the medication he needed, and while all the black servants do military support work that is “exceedingly hard for the strongest man,” they are nevertheless given neither meat nor coffee, while the white men have both (NaS 48). 143 Cappello is certainly correct when she reminds readers that the nurse eventually saves Robert’s soul. And yet the story’s focus on the black man’s body is also very much an effort to represent the physical dimension of oppression.

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self-constraint. Yet it is precisely at this point that the provocative optimism that pervades Nurse and Spy displays its own conceptual vulnerability: is it sufficient to say that all men (and women) are created equal and should therefore be able to go wherever they want? And if so, what is left to hold this extremely heterogeneous society together? Nurse and Spy provides an answer to this problem, one that can be found in the often-underestimated religious dimension of the novel: it imagines American Reconstruction not primarily as a political project but as a spiritual awakening. Contrary to Bennitt’s Puritan concept of a punishing God, the novella suggests a loving Almighty who (in line with what Baym has argued with regard to antebellum female fiction) enabled the “sincere heart” of the innately good woman “to return to its earthly struggle fortified to prevail” (1978: 42). That Nurse and Spy has formidable spiritual intentions may at first sound implausible, since cross-dressing was in the nineteenth century “an act forbidden in the Bible, pathologized by the medical establishment, and frequently mandated against by the courts” (Russell 1998: 29). Yet as Baym and Carroll Smith-Rosenberg have reminded us, the Second Great Awakening led not only to “theological and liturgical disputes” but also, in more extreme cases, to a repudiation of traditional Christianity, “iconoclastic behavior,” and “futuristic visions of idealized domestic, sexual, and racial relations,” particularly among women: “Individualism reigned. The immediate experience of the Holy Spirit, not the moral and orderly progress of the fathers, signified piety” (Smith-Rosenberg 1985: 135, 34, 29).144 Jerome John Robbins, a medical steward and assistant surgeon for the 2nd Michigan regiment, confirmed that democratic evangelical fervor directly contributed to the creation of Nurse and Spy: he recalled that religion was a major topic of conversation during his friendship with “Frank.”145 Like many evangelical women and men, Edmonds seems to have believed that “faith” was fundamentally private and existed independently of one’s social setting (cf. Baym 1978: 42). This is why religion appears almost everywhere in her novel: in keeping with many non-fiction accounts of the era, Nurse and Spy emphasizes an open “marketplace” of religion where various religious groups and leaders competed for the attention of individual believers who then chose freely from what

144 Cf. also Baym (1978: 41-44). 145 Diary of Jerome John Robbins, quoted in Leonard, All the Daring of the Soldier (1999:173). Edmonds was probably more than fond of Robbins; yet when she shared her secret with him he was apparently so shocked that “relations between Robbins and Edmonds never quite returned to their previous level of intimacy” (ibid.). Cf. also Gansler, The Mysterious Private Thompson (2007: 75ff).

 
 

   
 

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was offered.146 Edmonds, never shy about moving across borders, joined in this competition: by writing her own novel the former Bible salesman very literally sold her own version of Christianity. The religious dimension of Nurse and Spy answers the one question the novel could not solve through the model of communication, transgression, and cross-identification that otherwise inspires it: what is it that makes people truly belong to a nation? This question is, first of all, answered on the textual level itself. Highly disparate in form and content, the novella is held together by religious rhetoric. It is sprinkled with sermons, psalms, and prayers; there are long hymns complete with hallelujahs, numerous quotations from the Bible, and statements about the cultural meaning of the Christian faith in America. In other words, Nurse and Spy is not only a memoir and a spy story, but also a sermon. Unfortunately, most scholars of Edmonds have ignored this strong religious dimension of her work.147 The only scholar who investigates the topic closely is Ona Claire Russell; she dedicates an entire chapter of her dissertation to the “Soldier on the Cross.” Along the lines of what Schultz, Laffrado, and Young have said about Edmonds’s use of the nursing paradigm, Russell interprets the novel’s religious rhetoric as another legitimizing and face-saving strategy (Russell 1998: 27-31). And indeed, Edmonds seems to have been able to maintain her respectability: decades after the war newspaper reports would attest that the author of Nurse and Spy was “deeply religious all her life” (Fladeland 1971: 561), quot-

146 Regarding the democratization of religion see R. Laurence Moore, Selling God (1994). Evidence for the situation during the sectional conflict can be found in a considerable number of nineteenth-century and recent editions of Civil War chaplains’ letters, memoirs, and diaries. These include Benedict Maryniak and John Wesley Brinfield, The Spirit Divided (2005); Charles Todd Quintard, Doctor Quintard, Chaplain C.S.A and Second Bishop of Tennessee (2003); and William Corby, Memoirs of Chaplain Life, Three Years Chaplain in the Famous Irish Brigade (1864). Several scholarly books have also explored the role of military chaplains during the American Civil War. See e.g. John W. Brinsfield, ed. Faith in the Fight (2003); Richard M. Budd, Serving Two Masters (2002); and Albers Isaac Slomovitz, The Fighting Rabbis (1999). 147 The distinguished scholar of Edmonds, Jane E. Schultz, relegates the novel’s religious “sound” to a footnote by subsuming it under the “evangelical motives of northern relief workers” (2001: 75). Betty L. Fladeland acknowledges the book’s religious investments only in the context of its commercial success: the inclusion of “violence and bloody battle descriptions” alongside scenes of “mother love, religious devotion, and sublime fortitude in the face of death” are calculated to make the novel sell. Fladeland, “Sarah Emma Edmonds” (1971: 562).

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ing a Mrs. McConkey who “found her a devoted, Christian girl” and therefore “became very much attached to her.”148 While there is no reason to doubt that Edmonds’s religious rhetoric helped maintain her respectability, I wish to warn against an interpretation that reduces “piety” to an “effective strategy in a woman’s struggle to define herself over against social encroachment” (emphasis mine). It is certainly true that in much antebellum literature the display of religious values was “a pragmatic tool for [the] heroine’s use” (Baym 1978: 42), yet such “tools” were not necessarily implemented in a calculating manner. It can be argued that in addition to being an economic necessity, Edmonds’s effort to reach a large audience was a serious attempt to contribute to what this book chooses to call her “higher political calling.” There is much evidence to show that religion and politics had been strongly linked throughout her earlier life. An Anglican by birth, she joined the Methodist Episcopal Church in Flint, Michigan, which had “strong anti-slavery and temperance leanings.” When the first Union regiment left the town of Flint, her pastor, the Reverend T.J. Joslin, gave “each volunteer a Bible from [his] congregation inscribed with the words ‘put your trust in God, and keep your powder dry’” (qtd. in Gansler 2007: 20 and 25). Nurse and Spy, then, continues in this vein. As this chapter hopes to show, Nurse and Spy seeks to remind readers of the democratic spirit of the Second Great Awakening, thereby challenging visions of Reconstruction that merely relied on a political solution. It can be considered that this democratic religious spirit was not only connected to Edmonds’s Methodist faith but was also a very individual belief that resulted from a prewar personal experience that cannot possibly have left her religious views untouched. There is reason to believe that this experience made her privilege immediate contact with God over theological debates of any kind. As will be shown after the following excursus about Edmonds’s life in the prewar period, this religious emphasis on a spiritual connection marks not only the spy’s personal politics but also the political vision of the novel. Before she enlisted in 1861, Edmonds had dressed as a man and traveled across the Northern United States selling Bibles from door to door. The fact that she worked for the same Hartford firm for many years suggests that she became deeply knowledgeable about American religious culture: the late eighteen-forties to late -fifties

148 “A Story of the War. Reminiscences of a Lady who Served as a Private Soldier and the Hardships She Underwent” appeared in the Kansas City Star on 28 April 1886. “Woman Soldier of the War. The Romance of ‘Frank Thompson’” appeared in the Dallas Morning News on 1 May 1886. Both papers mention the same interview with Mrs. McConkey. Alcott, as I mentioned earlier, was, by contrast, criticized for her narrative’s “tone of levity” and her protagonist’s “sad want of Christian experience.”

 
 

   
 

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were years of particularly tumultuous theological debate in America, and it was people like Edmonds who served as mediators between theologians, publishing companies, and individual clients. Major doctrinal disagreements emerged in the late eighteen-forties when “a number of different religious bodies engage[d] in the debate over the need to update the King James text” that until then had been the accepted standard for Bibles used in the U.S. (Gutjahr 1999: 91). In his history of the American Bible, Paul C. Gutjahr explains that during the first half of the nineteenth century, “the basic content of the Bible changed little,” but differences in spelling, grammar, punctuation, and chapter headings were the cause of constant vexation. Certain mistakes were so notorious that the editions that contained them took on special names such as the “Wicked Bible,” which commands “Thou Shalt Commit Adultery,” and the “Murderers’ Bible” for a passage in the Gospel of Mark that read “Let the children first be killed,” rather than “filled.” The [American Bible] Society’s ‘Committee on Revision’ was to put an end to diversity and error with a definite “Standard Bible.” (ibid.: 88)

After four years of work the committee appointed by the American Bible Society finally released a “purified” edition. According to an 1898 obituary for the deceased Edmonds, it was this presumably more authentic, 1851 version of the Holy Scriptures that “Frank Thompson” sold “down through Nova Scotia and the States, until in the fall of 1860 her route brought her to Flint, Michigan, where she enlisted.”149 Bearing in mind that the “unexpected firestorm of resentment” (Gutjahr 1999: 89) resulting from the release of the new edition must have affected her income, it seems safe to say that she followed the theological conflict more closely than most of her contemporaries. Although she does not mention the debate as such her book centers very much on its core issue, truth itself. As a former Bible salesman Edmonds was influenced by a religious viewpoint according to which “[t]extual accuracy was more than simply an issue of good craftsmanship; it could mean the difference between orthodoxy and heresy, a life that led to heaven or a life that led to hell” (ibid.: 90).150 These cultural fears were so serious that after years of fierce public debate and pressure from the American Bible Society’s anti-revisionist faction, the crisis culminated in 1858 in the withdrawal of the

149 Delia T. Davis, “She Served All Through Civil War as a Soldier. Death of a Most Remarkable Character of that Struggle,” Philadelphia Inquirer, 20 Nov. 1898. 150 Although the textual changes from the King James to the new edition concerned mainly typographical errors and inconsistencies, the new Bible was quite different from the earlier text.

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revised edition.151 Not least because of the immediate effect this had on travelling booksellers like Edmonds, the event must have left a deep impression on the authorto-be, who would later criticize “those high-toned, intellectual discourses which we so often hear” because they “almost invariably fail to reach the heart” (NaS 87). To “reach the heart” is an intrinsic goal of Edmonds’s autobiography itself: filled with— at times sentimental—accounts of events in camp, between the lines, and at the hospital, it also includes deathbed scenes like the previously mentioned encounter between the rebel soldier and the “Irish” woman. According to the nineteenth-century understanding of sentimentality, this emphasis on feelings did not contradict the moral category that defines the autobiographical genre; on the contrary, the narrator’s reported feelings support the presumed authenticity of the story. To better understand how the religious subtext that laces Nurse and Spy supports this strategy of emotional authentication we must turn to the theological debates of the antebellum era. In the mid eighteen-fifties, the debate about Biblical authenticity had a strong societal dimension. Orthodox Christians who opposed the integration of newly discovered manuscript sources and the adaptation of the English language to modern usage feared that textual modernization would lead to a deterioration of Christian unity; that it was only a starting point in an ongoing revision of the Holy Scriptures; and that in the pluralistic religious landscape of the country there was no central organization authorized to exercise control over such revisions (Gutjahr 1999: 91). Church authorities feared that Americans would be deprived of “a primary cultural ‘anchor’ in the form of a shared national text” (ibid.: 110). In other words, as a national conflict the debate touched on the same issues that Quigley addresses with regard to the nation’s Second Founding and that interested Edmonds in Nurse and Spy. Interestingly, the cultural fears that emerged in the course of this highly publicized theological debate were the same fears that Nurse and Spy sought to counteract through playful strategies of inauthenticity. As we shall see more explicitly later, the novel argues that religious truth, like all other truths, is a category of the heart, not of appearances or intellectual debate. Nurse and Spy, in other words, propagates a fundamentally democratic anti-intellectualism, one that can be traced back to the author’s occupation as a Bible salesman. During this time, Edmonds had developed an awareness of antebellum anxieties regarding cultural modernization as well as a unique understanding of the pitfalls of literary accuracy. Her job was all the more

151 There is good reason to believe that this turmoil led to what Edmonds referred to as a personal “disaster”: one year after the new edition was taken off the market, Edmonds lost “all her money and possessions, with the exception of one sample Bible and a gold pocket watch,” possibly as a result of the publishing crisis caused by the withdrawal. Gansler, The Mysterious Private Thompson (2007: 13).

 
 

   
 

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challenging because she advertised the “purified” edition along with other religious books (cf. Lee 1999: especially 56). While we do not know any of the titles that formed a part of Edmonds’s sales stock, they almost certainly ran counter to an ultraorthodox understanding of the Bible as the cultural anchor. Along with the revised edition of the Bible, she—like other traveling salesmen—may have sold children’s fiction produced in England and the United States for the Sunday School movement, along with religious novels by the Episcopalian minister Joseph Holt Ingraham and others.152 It is, of course, equally possible that potential buyers could obtain Susan Warner’s highly popular The Wide, Wide World and Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin from the traveling bookseller (cf. Moore 1994: 24-25). While by the late eighteen-fifties resistance to popular fiction had largely subsided,153 Edmonds must have had numerous encounters that challenged what R. Laurence Moore, in his book Selling God, has termed the “cultural correctness” of her activity (cf. 1994: 26). She seems to have mastered such conflicts admirably well: according to an interview Edmonds gave in 1884, “the publishing company told me that they had employed agents for thirty years, and they never had employed one that could outsell me.”154 If her professional knowledge of the book market in combination with her religious expertise helped Edmonds compose a novel that was both sensational and religious,155 the moral pitfalls of her experience as a bookseller may have been crucial to the novel’s alternative version of religious purity. In what may be understood as a

152 Popular authors in this vein included Hannah More and Samuel G. Goodrich (known as Peter Parley). The son of a Congregational minister, Goodrich was the author of the very popular “Peter Parley tales” that sold some seven million volumes during the period. See www.theodora.com/encyclopedia/. Accessed 01 Aug. 2016. 153 The chapter on Henry Ward Beecher’s Norwood will show that the controversy nevertheless continued after the Civil War. 154 The interview appears in the Fort Scott Monitor, January 17, 1884. Quoted in Gansler, The Mysterious Private Thompson (2007: 12). 155 As Ashley Reed has pointed out to me, Edmonds’s case may have resembled that of the Episcopal minister, book peddler, and biographer Mason Locke Weems (1759-1825). As Hugh J. Dawson argues in the Dictionary of Literary Biography (1985), “Weems the minister and Weems the peddler were ever at work in Weems the biographer. In his travels as a book purveyor, he saw that the religious and patriotic reading tastes of the new nation might be drawn together and addressed as one.” Weems’s The Life of George Washington (1808) “transcends its subgenre. Although this edifying biography's starchy simplicity has drawn the derision of generations, critics who have looked beneath its didactic idiom have found revealing testimony to the needs of a society in transition” (Hugh J. Dawson, “Mason Locke Weems,” Dictionary of Literary Biography (1985).

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reaction to these experiences, Nurse and Spy suggests a form of truthfulness and immediacy that turned questions of appearance and aesthetic mode into mere trifles. Sensationalist and market-oriented as Nurse and Spy certainly was, it was also, as Edmonds unabashedly explains, a foreign missionary’s contribution to her chosen country. Written in an age when writing was meant to influence readers in a very direct manner, the author’s self-fashioning as missionary connects reading with religious salvation. As we saw earlier, however, Edmonds was convinced that contact with God could only be established via a “language of the heart.” This religious antiintellectualism explains the somewhat awkward mixture of sensationalist story and sermon, both of which are designed to “touch” the reader. If one considers the novel’s setting in an environment of wartime destruction, death, and sickness, Nurse and Spy may very well be seen as a version of what Joan Burbick has termed a nineteenthcentury “heart history.” Such stories, associated with names like Maria Cummins, Fanny Forrester, Catharine Sedgwick, and Harriet Beecher Stowe, “address sickness and healing through the conscious development of the religious and domestic affections of the heart, leading to a vision of a redeemed nation” (1994: 191). Edmonds’s “case,” of course, departs from the usual pattern of sentimental or domestic storytelling by leaving behind both the idealized sphere of the home and the concept of gender that went along with it. Designed to heal a wounded nation, her mission was a written “history of the heart” that aimed at uniting a fragmented American populace under the superior, spiritual law of the Almighty. Before analyzing the narrative mechanisms of this “heart history” in more detail let us once more return to Edmonds’s concept of reading as salvation. Besides the religious meaning of Edmonds’s writerly mission there is a more secular one as well: the historical Edmonds herself had been “saved” by a book. In a postwar interview she attributed almost magical power to reading when she told a journalist that her masquerade was initially inspired by a fictional figure, the eponymous heroine of Maturin Murray Ballou’s156 1844 spy novel Fanny Campbell, Female Pirate Captain. Somewhat ironically, Edmonds’s family had bought this Tale of the Revolution from a traveling peddler, a man whose profession later attracted their youngest daughter. Fanny tells the story of a girl who dresses as a man to rescue her boyfriend from pirates—a suitable role model for a young woman who resisted her own forced marriage to an older farmer by means of a similar disguise. Edmonds may have told the anecdote as an act of self-fashioning; what is interesting here, however, is her conception of fiction as life-saving “influence.” Judging from the self-appointed missionary’s introductory words, Nurse and Spy was written with a similar idea in mind. Edmonds exaggerated her own experiences as a cross-dresser and defined her radical

156 Ballou was the son of the influential Universalist writer and clergyman Hosea Ballou.

 
 

   
 

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textual self as God’s most devoted servant in order to promote an entirely new version of an ideal Christian citizen. By positing a notorious deceiver as the medium through which God’s true voice can be heard, Edmonds issued a thought-provoking religious message recommending that Americans focus not on who is preaching about God, but on the inner truth of the sermon. There are numerous examples in the text emphasizing exactly this: in keeping with the “spiritual immediatism and individualism” of nineteenth-century religiosity (Hutchinson 1986: 24), in Edmonds’s text it does not matter whether a professing Baptist, a Pentecostal preacher, or a bishop from the Methodist Episcopal Church offers his version of Christianity to the congregation.157 Race is no criterion either: listening to an “old colored man’s” vernacular sermon, Edmonds’s narrating I finds that it has “more truth than poetry in it” and states that “many hearts were moved with sympathy towards [the slaves], as was soon proved by the actions of the soldiers” (NaS 30). The spirit of the Second Great Awakening, with its rejection of traditional Christianity and its hierarchies, is of course clearly audible here (and elsewhere in the novel). According to the historian William McLoughlin, social transgression was a major function of all American revival movements: in an age in which “centrifugal forces” ruled supreme, the revival experience “permitted hundreds of thousands of Americans, across class, denominational, and geographic divisions, to reaffirm their connectedness as Christian Americans by participating in a nationwide religious ritual” (1980: 23).158 Yet by explicitly tearing down denominational and racial borders, and by including herself (a notorious cross-dresser, spy, and deceiver) in this vision of a collective emotional experience, Edmonds radicalizes the reform enthusiasm of the era and turns it into a programmatic vision for overcoming virtually all of the divisions within American culture. Through a radical privileging of the heart over the brain159 the novel comes to the logical conclusion that a female-tomale, white-to-black cross-dresser, too, may spread the word. Throughout the novel, truthfulness appears detached from religious authorities, resurfacing as a purely emotional category:

157 Hall writes that Edmonds became close friends with a Baptist minister in the late 1850’s, and that for a while she lived with a Methodist minister’s family. When she enlisted in the army she was presented with a Bible by the Flint (Michigan) Methodist Episcopal Church. Patriots in Disguise (1993: 80 and 82). 158 For an overview of the relationship between women and religious enthusiasm in nineteenth-century America cf. Smith-Rosenberg, Disorderly Conduct (1985: 129-64). 159 Regarding the ideological concepts of brain and heart in nineteenth-century (particularly antebellum) discourse cf. Joan Burbick, Healing the Republic (1994: 137-222).

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[I] attended a meeting in the evening, which was held by a minister of the Christian Commission for the benefit of the wounded soldiers. Oh, what a sermon was that! The tender mercies of the Father, the love of the Son of God, were described; the wailings of the lost and the raptures of the redeemed were portrayed in the most powerful and touching manner. (NaS 87)

Edmonds’s ideal minister is significantly similar to both the narrative I and the narrating I. The cross-dressed soldier encounters him when she visits a Sunday service in camp: [He] did not preach one of those high-toned, intellectual discourses which we so often hear, and which almost invariably fail to reach the heart. But he preached Jesus with such winning simplicity, such forgetfulness of self, and with such an eager yearning after soul, that even the most depraved were melted to tears. […] I seem to see him standing before me now, with uplifted hands, glowing cheeks and streaming eyes—and though I have forgotten much of the discourse, yet I can distinctly remember the impression which it made upon me then. It was good, humbling, purifying. He was evidently not a highly educated man, yet he proclaimed the unsearchable riches of Christ in such a way as to make the proudest eloquence and the most profound philosophy, seem in comparison, “like sounding brass or tinkling cymbal.” (NaS 87)160

The minister’s “forgetfulness of self,” his emphatic emotionality, the priority he gives to “impression”—all these are features that prevail in Edmonds’s self-representation as well. In her various “self-forgetful” roles she experiences rather than analyzes different versions of Christianity and merges them into the multi-vocal sermon that resonates throughout Nurse and Spy. By interpreting gender as a role that can be switched whenever necessary or desirable Edmonds severs the trope of self-forgetfulness from its feminized designation. Interestingly, the cross-dresser’s immediate and spontaneous access to the Almighty exists independently from her gender: contrary to the nineteenth-century concept of a female “conduit to God” (and closer to Judith Sargent Murray’s universalist-inspired concept that spirit was the defining characteristic of all humans”) (Skemp 2000: 289),161 Edmonds’s ideal of leadership is fundamentally non-essentialist: according to Nurse and Spy, religious feelings are necessarily deeper than the looks and surface performances that define human beings as men and women.

160 The quote stems from 1 Corinthians 13:1. 161 I thank Ruth Mayer for reminding me of this point. While Edmonds was not a professed Universalist her emphasis on the spirit as the force that unifies all people—and forms the basis of American patriotism—can be seen in the tradition of Sargent Murray.

 
 

   
 

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Religious feelings are also, according to Nurse and Spy, deeper than the theological debates that marked the antebellum period. Although Edmonds’s Christian discourse does not in a narrow sense engage in the controversy surrounding the revised edition of the King James Bible (in fact she never discusses passages of the Holy Scriptures or engages in Biblical exegesis) it responds to the intellectual debates among church authorities by capturing the spirit of the Great Awakening. Nurse and Spy severs the notion of truth from the idea of an original text, defining it instead as a physically recognizable, emotional state: that of being “touched.” As long as the cross-dresser “can distinctly remember the impression” left by a particular sermon, the concrete words may be forgotten. Anti-intellectual as it may be, this fairly vague definition of a spiritual experience implicitly downplays the theological differences between America’s Protestant denominations. This primarily experiential approach to religious authenticity allows Nurse and Spy to cast a similarly favorable light on Pentecostal, Baptist, and Methodist denominations and on the Catholic faith. In the name of this spiritual unity (this “peace that has no counterfeit”) the novel also emphasizes its enthusiasm for transgressions in the name of national understanding. When Nurse and Spy describes how an army chaplain manages to “touch” the onlookers by “stepp[ing] right out from the ranks, between us and the enemy’s lines, kne[eling] down upon the ground, and lift[ing] his voice” (NaS 148), it is the sentimentality of the scene, not the content of the sermon, that promises an end to the sectional conflict. Possibly influenced by her Anglican upbringing,162 Edmonds’s theology, too, steps between the lines when it focuses on individual behavior and religious practice rather than on textual purity or denominational affiliation. Written during a period of severe regional, political, racial, gendered—and religious—conflict, Nurse and Spy establishes religion as a harmonizing, soothing, and somatic knowledge. Ignorant of outer appearances, it transcends all differences and antagonisms and becomes the ultimate healing power to an ailing nation. With each of the spy’s crossings, Edmonds acknowledges a different brand of American, yet she can do so only by gathering them under what she terms “the sheltering wings of the different evangelical churches throughout the land” (NaS 84). Interestingly, Edmonds hints that people of the Catholic faith, too, are not necessarily excluded from this category. In one of the book’s most memorable scenes, the shared spiritual experience of God’s presence at the death bed breaks down the borders between North and South, man and woman, native and immigrant, enemy soldier and spy, and Protestant and Catholic. It is the aforementioned episode in which the “Irish female peddler” (NaS 64), ostensibly a Catholic, encounters a dying Confederate soldier. When the

162 A distinct Christian religion, the Anglican Church unites elements of Roman Catholicism and Reformed Protestantism.

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dying man professes “to be a Soldier of the Cross” (NaS 67), the need for masquerade becomes obsolete: In this earnest conversation I had unconsciously forgotten much of my Hibernian accent, and I thought that the sick man began to suspect that I was not what my appearance indicated. It alarmed me for a moment, but I soon recovered my composure […]. After studying my countenance a few moments he asked me to pray with him. I did not dare to refuse the dying man’s request, nor did I dare to approach my Maker in an assumed tone of voice; so I knelt down beside him, and in my own natural voice breathed a brief and earnest prayer for the departing soldier, for grace to sustain him in that trying hour, and finally for the triumph of truth and right. (NaS 67)

While on the one hand the scene celebrates the strength of Protestantism, on the other hand it opens up–tentatively and provocatively–the question of whether a true Catholic could not, under the same circumstances, pray together with a Protestant.163 Scenes such as this are key to understanding Nurse and Spy since they depict the desire to put an end not only to the cross-dresser’s own masquerade but to a military confrontation built on false images and projections. Thus instead of celebrating the Union’s victory over an immoral South, Edmonds quotes a bishop of the Methodist Episcopal Church, thereby establishing an alternative symbol of the moral nation: “We will take our glorious flag, the flag of our country, and nail it just below the cross! That is high enough. There let it wave as it waved of old. Around it let us gather: first Christ’s; then our country’s” (NaS 85). With its frequent use of oral forms of expression such as the sermon and the prayer, Nurse and Spy is undergirded by expressions of hope that point beyond the cruel realities and hardened oppositions that marked the war. The urgency that resonates in the novel’s prayers for peace and the will to transcend notions of difference that Edmonds expresses in theological terms is largely ignored by readers of the twenty-first century. And yet it is precisely this radical, visionary belief in communal salvation that helps explain why Nurse and Spy was so extraordinarily well received by a general public that by 1864 was weary of the war, and why critics chose to strongly acknowledge the author’s Christian devotion. The novel ends, significantly, with a prayer that calls for an end to false projections, imaginary processes, and assumed identities. Marking the end of a piece of confessional literature, this last passage is of course also the author’s personal request to be forgiven her sins of false testimony and illegitimate stealing. Edmonds’s all-

163 As Burbick points out in her analysis of nineteenth-century “histories of the heart,” such a “universalist quest” bridging “the separate spheres of Protestantism and Catholicism” was not so uncommon, especially among antebellum women. (1994: 188).

 
 

   
 

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American God is a forgiving power in the vein of Henry Ward Beecher’s “Gospel of Love.” Even the lowest sinner, even a white Canadian woman who pretends to be a black man can rely on His love: The Divine would not expatriate her from His kingdom. By challenging fixed identity categories and their underlying ideological assumptions, Nurse and Spy evinces a yearning for a radically open society built upon the notion of an absolute metaphysical truth. According to Edmonds such a truly pluralistic utopia depends on the shared notion of America as an inherently Christian nation. The novel authorizes its utopian vision by quoting from a very recent address given by the famous Union general Oliver Otis Howard at the Second Anniversary of the Christian Commission:164 This bond, the bond of Christian love, is the true bond after all that shall permanently unite us. There is no other. We speak of the claims of commerce and trade, of corn and cotton, that will unite the sections of our country; but these are temporary, fluctuating, perishing links. The religion of Jesus Christ is the lasting bond that connects not only Maine with Massachusetts and Massachusetts with Connecticut, but Maine with Texas and Florida with Wisconsin. (NaS 108)165

By referencing the general, Edmonds authorizes ideas that crucially lace her own text. Quoted (not stolen) from the famous speech, these words resonate with the authority of an institution of collective healing that (at least according to her own ideology) was genuinely apolitical, humane, and universal: We boast of being an asylum for all nations. From England, Ireland, France, Germany, Russia, and almost every country beyond the ocean, come men, women, and children, who settle down in our midst. How shall we cause them to assimilate to us? How shall we ever make them good and useful citizens? Will it be, think you, by merely giving them land on which to settle? Will they become one with us because they grow in material wealth and prosperity? No, no! Nothing but an education, a true education of heart and morals, such as the religion of Jesus Christ imparts, can ever truly and safely assimilate all these heterogeneous elements, and enable us to be truly one people. (NaS 108)

164 Otis Howard, “Address at the Second Anniversary of the Christian Commission” (1864). 165 Interestingly, this passage resembles Alcott’s novel in that Alcott, too, emphasizes the fragmentation of the federal republic. Yet while in Hospital Sketches the reunited national “body” was referred to as a vision for the afterlife, it here appears as consistent with the Christian nation.

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Appearing in the last third of Nurse and Spy, this is Edmonds’s most radical vision of the United States as a moral nation. The attentive reader witnesses a shift in focus from the country’s existing Protestant sects to a vague notion of “an education of heart and morals, such as the religion of Jesus Christ imparts” (my emphasis). The passage points toward an alternative “education” through the ongoing American experiment—at a patriotism beyond Protestantism and even Christianity. Unlike other writers of the American Civil War, who in some cases turned to an outspoken antiCatholicism and anti-Semitism,166 Edmonds only hints at the religious challenge posed by recent immigrants from Ireland, France, Russia, and Germany—those countries that she mentions besides England. In the mid eighteen-sixties, Edmonds did not have to explain to her contemporaries that among the “countries beyond the ocean” there was none so visible as China, the birthplace of an increasing number of nonChristian immigrants, some of whom even fought in the Civil War.167 Furthermore, although the recently freed slaves are not mentioned here, they are ubiquitously present in the passage’s allusions to land reform. Together with the newly arriving immigrants from across the Atlantic and Pacific oceans, they formed the future citizenry of a new nation that, according to Edmonds, was in dire need of a “true education of heart and morals” in order to survive as a society. Needless to say, Edmonds’s vision of a nationwide religious awakening did not materialize after the war. Her own concept of engaging in theological debate by “selling God,” however, became a crucial marker of postbellum religious life. More than ever before, religious leaders had to attract people to what they were doing. Whether they were trying to clamp controls on the marketplace of culture or not, they found themselves using the language of selling and commodification. Religious controversy spilled out of churches and theological centers to become a form of American entertainment. […] Innovation and participation happened in a variety of ways, some of them aptly labeled democratic and populist and even spiritual. (Moore 1994: 144)

166 In my introduction I mentioned the example of Hannah Ropes, a nurse who relied on antiSemitism, anti-immigrant fervor, and regional prejudice to secure WASP hegemony. Ropes (1980: 72). 167 The most famous American Chinese, the Eng twins (also known as the “Siamese twins”), had two sons who fought in the army—on the Confederate side. Information about individual soldiers of Chinese descent on the “Association to Commemorate the Chinese Serving in the American Civil War” website at: sites.google.com/site/accsacw/.

 
 

   
 

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The latter must have pleased Edmonds, who became a witness to the increasingly liberal turn in American Christianity and actively participated in the religiously driven effort at racial Reconstruction.168 Far from sharing the fears of those anti-revisionist clergy who forced the withdrawal of the revised Bible, Nurse and Spy promoted a Christianity in motion, an undifferentiated principle of unconditional love that relied not on theological exegesis but on “good preaching” that went straight to the heart. By at least trying to address the entire spectrum of those living in the United States (with the notable exception of Native Americans), Nurse and Spy transfers the conflict over the “right” translation of the Holy Scriptures to the realm of the reader-citizen who instinctively knows a true religion from a false one just as he/she recognizes the true patriot behind Edmonds’s diverse masks. For the milliner-cum-businessman-cum-writer, crossdressing, commerce, and religiosity were not contradictory. Edmonds knew very well that the cultural value of a text is defined by the consent of buyers and readers, rather than by church authorities. In the case of Nurse and Spy, readers and critics consented and applauded enthusiastically. Interestingly, this applause was not limited to the duration of the war years when Americans were grateful for any form of diversion. After two years of service Edmonds put away her male attire, married a Canadian immigrant from her hometown, and chose appropriation over assimilation by altering her married name, adding an “e” to the original “Seely.” Through extensive correspondence and paperwork she succeeded in clearing her military record of the desertion charge and became the only woman granted an army pension for active service. Proud to have such a celebrity in their midst, and willing to downplay differences of any kind (except racial ones) in the name of the nation, her former military companions invited her to their 1884 regimental reunion in the town of her recruitment.169


   
Louisa May Alcott and Sarah Emma Edmonds were members of that generation of younger Americans who were to build up the country after the war. Both were deeply rooted in the Victorian value system of the antebellum period and shaped by a liter-

168 In 1875 Edmonds oversaw a Louisiana orphanage for African-American children whose fathers had died as soldiers in the Civil War. The orphanage was run by a Methodist minister from Ohio. Cf. Gansler, The Mysterious Private Thompson (2007: 190). 169 This took place at a time when the influence of the war veterans was (despite the large number of members in veteran organizations) about to end. Cf. Hochbruck (2011: 255).

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ature that perceived of the “self as a social product,” “negotiating amidst social possibilities, attempting to assert and maintain a territory within a social space full of warring claims” (Baym 1978: 36). For both Alcott and Edmonds, the war was an opportunity to test the limits of a Victorian woman’s “territory” and to imagine human figurations that lived up to the promise of a Second Founding: in their writings they philosophized about a reform of gender, race, and nation that was far more radical than their antebellum foremothers had dared discuss. Shielding themselves from public scorn via the moral discourse of national healing and caring, their joint battlecry was their society’s departure from the ideology of separate spheres. While far more unconventional than Alcott, Edmonds made a point of emphasizing that she was deeply indebted to the older author’s literary work. A representative of that evangelical element in the American woman’s movement that took its strength from a loving God, she was significantly not among those who openly criticized Alcott for her apparent lack of Christian piety. On the contrary, Nurse and Spy’s frequent references to the New England author project Alcott as a friend and companion, a colleague and escort, a substitute and an alter ego. The result is a mixture of homage and subtle yet substantial correction of Alcott’s Victorian “program” of female selfrestraint and forced modesty. This has important consequences for how the two authors represent the nation’s racial contract: while Alcott metaphorically splits off her alter ego’s “unruly” impulses as “black” traits to be resisted, Edmonds mingles freely with the freedmen, includes their dissenting voices, and ultimately depicts race as essentially performative. By projecting the war as a stage and society as an ensemble of performers, the immigrant writer provokes questions about full citizenship and the democratic promise of a nation that proclaims that “all men are created equal.” She thereby subverts the binary thought patterns that structure Alcott’s work and offers an alternative to the self-discipline that the older writer’s patriotic nurses must offer in exchange for their newly won liberties. These differences have consequences for how these writers represent their individual heroines. Edmonds’s narrated/narrating I does not merely rely on a rhetoric of cross-dressing (Alcott makes sure that the “soldiering nurse” is never actually mistaken for a man) but actually puts on “other” appearances that are authenticated by the author’s actual experiences as a male private. Another important difference is that Edmonds’s different guises transgress a much larger array of social boundaries than the “permeable boundary between masculinity and femininity” (Young 1999: 71) that preoccupies Alcott. The reasons for these differences can be partially explained by the two women’s different biographies: given her family background it is hardly surprising that the author of Hospital Sketches and “The Brothers / My Contraband” was primarily concerned with extending the established role of white middle-class women to the level of the nation. Edmonds, who was an uprooted immigrant living a somewhat marginal life, cared far less about social etiquette than Alcott did: for her the war was a unique chance to imagine a family entirely different from her own.

 
 

   
 

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It is important to remember that Alcott ultimately fails to reconcile her radical feminist and abolitionist agendas. Periwinkle’s national healing endeavor remains unfinished; other nursing narratives like “The Brothers / My Contraband” were needed to provide closure and ended, significantly, with the death of the self-proclaimed African-American citizen. It is at this point that Edmonds provides a continuation of Alcott’s stories. If Alcott fashions a new type of young woman who is rebellious yet child-like Edmonds presents a significantly more adult heroine who draws her strength from her own private God and follows her intuition against all odds. As an immigrant and a “self-made-woman” Edmonds eagerly confirms the basic values of America as a nation under God and Constitution rather than representing herself as a “woman’s rights woman” in the first place. While the crossdresser’s radical dissolution of both a fixed self and a fixed national identity challenges the Victorian ideals of female frailty and submissiveness, its core message is fundamentally humanist. By continuously changing her position within the human figuration of wartime America, Edmonds celebrates America’s heterogeneous population as a prerequisite for the nation’s survival and progress: “her” America is attractive to men and women of all races and faiths because it allows the immigrant to choose what and who to be instead. By looking at both works simultaneously, this chapter has shed light on a particular aspect of the Civil War feminist milieu: by celebrating, criticizing, and appropriating the older, American-born Alcott from an immigrant’s point of view, Edmonds’s potentially limitless disguises indirectly comment upon Alcott’s narrative struggle to reconcile a white woman’s wish for freedom with the culturally constructed need for self-restraint. God, she argues, accepts everyone, even those who fake their identity, if the heart is good. Although the Canadian acknowledges Alcott’s literary civil war against female exclusion and slavery, she also points to a profound ideological dilemma within American women’s rights circles: the reconcilability of radical feminist and radical abolitionist concerns in the post-slavery nation. By taking on a number of black roles as well as male roles, the notorious cross-dresser emphasizes the general exchangeability and constructedness of identities. This, then, provides an original answer to the dilemma posed in “The Brothers / My Contraband,” in which the heroic circumstances of “Bob’s” death cannot compensate for the fact that the black male citizen is symbolically eliminated and Nurse Dane is positively relieved to find that Lucy is dead because the white woman’s black “sister” disturbs the nurse’s endeavor to “uplift” black children and men. Edmonds, by contrast, recognizes African-American men and women as a defining part of the democratic whole. One of her most impressive characters (besides her own impersonations) is an old, physically handicapped black woman whom she acknowledges as the only true “white” woman south of Washington. Nurse and Spy, then, recognizes Hospital Sketches as a latently racist text and mocks its masochistic

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confirmation of Victorian ideas about gender. However problematic Edmonds’s symbolic “whitening” of the black woman, it was nevertheless far more conducive to a multiracial democracy than Alcott’s symbolic marginalizations of African-American women. An outsider first by birth and then by choice, Edmonds’s pious spy is an ideal citizen of a truly democratic nation because she feels when a contact (and contract) that is “NO COUNTERFEIT” is established between the self and others. According to Nurse and Spy American-ness is a matter of shared somatic knowledge brought about by universal gestures and a common language. Yet the novel does not simply call for charismatic leadership but also encompasses a reconstruction of the individual self: Nurse and Spy encourages the nation’s future citizens to embrace identities other than their own in order to guarantee the survival of the national whole. By downplaying sectional, ethnic, religious, and class- and gender-related frictions and by transgressing whatever lines she encounters, the patriotic cross-dresser reminds Americans of their unity in diversity and of the spiritual glue that keeps them from drifting apart. According to the novel, identification with others was a matter of life and death in a rapidly changing era. And yet the spy is not merely a “passing” figure in a racially diverse environment. Cast as an observer in different disguises, Edmonds remains detached from the group to which she pretends to belong. The result is a strange doubling: while her disguises bring both her and the reader into close proximity to the racial or ethnic other, she never becomes one of “them.” Her roles are therefore artificial in an almost Brechtian sense, as they make the reader identify with the protagonist and her respective “group” even as they turn him into a critical observer of her acts. Confronted with the heaps of clothes, wigs, and makeup the protagonist leaves behind whenever she changes roles, the implied reader is involved in a critical process by which he or she learns to accept the spy’s eccentric, “impure,” and unstable roles as pragmatic answers to changing situations, even if they challenge the ideals of True Womanhood in a most fundamental manner. That these challenges emerge in a context that emphasizes the healing of individuals and the nation helps, of course. Both Alcott and Edmonds rely on this trope to authorize their heroines’ unruly behavior. Nurse and Spy, however, concentrates more explicitly on suffering as the one grand leveler of mankind. By focusing on sentiment and on a fundamental human experience as such, Nurse and Spy downplays the symbolic significance of the hospital and presents it, by and large, as one possible nursing site among others. Importantly, however, nursing itself is a crucial aspect of the heroine’s concept of a purified, authentic America. In the face of her enemy’s death struggle, the heroine sheds both her Irish attire and her political priorities and in her symbolic nakedness becomes the embodiment of selfless care. Nursing, in other words, is the one occupation that transgresses ideological, religious, ethnic, political, racial, or gendered borders. Thus unlike Nurse Periwinkle, whose work in the

 
 

   
 

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“Hurly-burly hospital” is represented as an “effective” woman’s virtuous battle against an imperfect institution, Edmonds’s encounters with the sick and dying return the spy to a state of innocence that enables hopeful glimpses into a peaceful future. Although Nurse and Spy relies on nursing as a metaphor for a fundamentally humane manner of social interaction, it limits its effectiveness to situations of crisis. In a world where identities are perceived as performative, multiple, and essentially unfixed, something else besides nursing is needed to keep society from drifting apart. According to Edmonds, the “glue” that will bind this radically individualistic, antiessentialist nation is of a spiritual nature. Just as the novel itself is held together by a densely spun net of religious rhetoric and themes, the social contract is scrutinized through the vision of an all-embracing religious experience. Brought about by emotions that cut across categories such as gender, race, and class, this spiritual contract supersedes the law as a necessary prerequisite for the making of a peacetime America. Nurse and Spy is, of course, not without its own hidden struggles and contradictions. For all her playful shifting of gender roles, races, and even religious belief systems, Edmonds draws one strict line: between the “heart” and the “brain.” In true evangelical fashion her narrative distinguishes vehemently between those religious leaders whose sermons “reach the heart” and others who “preach those high-toned, intellectual discourses” that invariably “fail to reach the heart.” Edmonds’s national vision combines the ideal of collective and democratic salvation with a problematic anti-intellectualism. As we have seen earlier, its roots can be traced back to Edmonds’s personal involvement in the debate around the 1851 edition of the Bible. Interestingly, the religious theme shielded the author, Edmonds, from public scorn, while Alcott’s less politically radical vision met with severe criticism that made her revise Hospital Sketches in 1869. This, of course, tells us much about the period and its religious sensibilities: as will be shown in the following chapter, America’s most famous minister, Henry Ward Beecher, symbolically declared war on precisely the type of womanhood that was embodied by Periwinkle, Dane, and the woman who created them. All of this shows how difficult it is for us to assess which of the two authors was the more progressive. What we do know is that Edmonds was a cause célèbre among late-nineteenth-century veteran culture, that often-ignored, backward-looking aspect of the Gilded Age that tended to downplay regional, social, and class differences in the service of the white nation. A white woman in the veterans’ midst, one may assume, was a welcome mascot.170 Alcott, as we know, was highly popular among the American mainstream: Hospital Sketches was the first of her “girl’s novels,” which successfully promoted a new “type” of unrestrained woman in the guise of a very

170 Regarding American veteran organizations in the 1880s cf. Hochbruck (2011: 255).

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young adult.171 Men such as Bennitt and Beecher watched their daughters and granddaughters grow up with Alcott’s tomboyish characters—most of all with Little Women, a novel set during the war and suspiciously devoid of an ordering father figure. It was this generation of young women and their daughters who continued what Edmonds’s and Alcott’s heroines had started to do: they joined the home and foreign missionary movement172 and expanded the female sphere of influence to other countries in the world.

171 As Brodhead has convincingly argued with regard to Little Women, the girls’ novel enabled Alcott to represent women in a transitory state of “unruliness” without sanction. (Cf. 1995: 101-02). I further elaborate on this thought in “The New Rules of the Democratic Game.” 172 “Between 1870 and 1900, the number of female Presbyterian missionary auxiliaries rose from fewer than one hundred to more than ten thousand, while over 150,000 Methodists were members of female missionary societies in 1895.” Blum (2005: 215).

 






 

 







 

    
During the antebellum period the role of established clergy dwindled. The prototypical minister was “a figure mostly of nostalgia, not a potent leader of his culture and the chief articulator of its ideals” (Davidson 2004: 107).1 One religious spokesperson who despite many public controversies managed to maintain his authority during this era was Henry Ward Beecher. And he did not only maintain his influence but further developed it during the war and Reconstruction when he published his novel, Norwood (1867).2 William G. McLoughlin is the only scholar who has written extensively about this book, which he considers a “key work” for anyone interested in the mid-Victorian (1840-1870), American mind (cf. McLoughlin 1970: xi-xii). Beecher, he argues, was a transitional figure whose life and work marked the great shift from Calvinism to Liberal Protestantism, from rural to suburban living, from transcendentalism to Social Darwinism, from belief in the omnipresence of the average man to the hero worship of the Horatio Alger captain of industry, from an age of reform to an age of complacency, from an age of egalitarian simplicity to an age of conspicuous consumption and the leisure class. (ibid.: 6)

While I share this perspective on Beecher and admire McLoughlin’s effort not to “break the study of American history at the year 1860—to see the Civil War as the great watershed irrevocably separating the Age of Jackson from the Gilded Age” (ibid.), I choose to examine Norwood in the more immediate context of its creation. Norwood, it seems, was written in such a way as to soothe a deeply disturbed Reconstruction audience that struggled for a sense of continuity between, on the one hand, 1

Cf. also “Clerical Disestablishment,” and “Ministers and Mothers,” in Douglas (1977:17-

2

This chapter relies on Henry Ward Beecher, Norwood (1868), reprint (2010).

39).

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the immediate past and its repercussions in postbellum lives and, on the other hand, the vast social and technological changes mentioned above. As a contribution to what Leslie Butler has called the postwar “mental adaptation” process, Norwood’s main aim was to imaginatively heal American selves and society from the wounds of the country’s immediate past. Therefore, this analysis focuses not so much on what the novel is about as on the narrative strategies it deploys to convey its messages: Norwood may be seen as a strategic means to effect a “mind cure” on the level of both the individual reader and society at large.3 As a commodity that emerged from the crisis of Reconstruction, and was consumed by a large middle-class readership, Beecher’s best seller is an ideal subject for any study of early Reconstruction America. Despite his anti-commercial attitude, the author had an astonishing ability to adapt his views to changing majorities and public concerns; to analyze his novel therefore allows new insights into the cultural climate during the postwar years. Yet before I further introduce the aims of this chapter, I will offer a biographical sketch of the man in question and of his role in America shortly before he published his only work of fiction. It is very probable that Norwood was (at least partly) an effort to secure Beecher’s authority as one of postbellum America’s most influential public spokesmen. The youngest son of Lyman Beecher (the equally renowned evangelist) and brother of Harriet Beecher Stowe (the famed author), Henry became famous for supporting the armed resistance against slavery in Kansas in the late 1850s.4 Importantly, however, he was not a “fanatic” (as he called John Brown and other radical abolitionists) but was mainly concerned with “keeping slavery carefully enclosed within its present boundaries so that it would gradually die out” (McLoughlin 1970: 193).5 He continued to fight for the antislavery cause when he was the editor of The New York Ledger during the early war years. When in May 1863 he travelled to England, he

3

McLoughlin, who was a historian, ignores this literary dimension tout court—his chapter titled “Art for the People, Culture for the Masses” says little about Beecher’s views of fiction and nothing about Norwood as a communications medium with very particular aesthetic features. McLoughlin’s very general discussion focuses on the role of the artist in Norwood and concludes that “by making art subservient to morality and social uplift,” Beecher “merely replaced one yoke [i.e., ‘the narrow aestheticism of the Puritans’] with another, both upon the public and upon the artist” (ibid.: 132).

4

Beecher opposed the Kansas and Nebraska Act and supported fundraising efforts to buy rifles for the immigrants. He “sent to the colony” [an antislavery group known as the Connecticut-Kansas colony] “twenty-five additional rifles together with twenty-five Bibles. The rifles were to provide for the defense of the state, the Bibles for its foundation on principle.” Clifford E. Clark (1978: 123).

5

Regarding his antebellum stance on slavery (cf. also: 189-90).

 




 

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promoted the Northern cause in public lectures both in England and on the Continent. Known to have a keen sense for the “right moment,” he did not return to the United States until November of that year, when public opinion in England had shifted to favor the North over the South. In the American press, however, he was represented as “a lone warrior” in the enemy’s country and celebrated enthusiastically upon his return in the fall of 1863 (cf. C. E. Clark 1978: 158). The trip also helped rehabilitate Beecher among some of his increasingly skeptical allies. The reasons for his departure had been the evolving tensions with his Radical Republican friends and the exhaustion resulting from those tensions and from work in general. Yet he would not win over all of his skeptics: some journalists criticized the traveler’s self-interested conceitedness, and earlier critics like Theodore Tilton spread word that his career was on the decline.6 With the end of the war, however, the fifty-three-year-old minister was the undisputed star on the national stage. President Lincoln had asked him to give a speech at the rising of the Union flag at Fort Sumter. Having seen the devastation along the route of Sherman’s regiment, Beecher was the first to find words of consolation for the Southern population.7 On a symbolic level, he not only proclaimed a new era of national reconciliation but provided closure to the then popular narrative that the war had been caused by his sister Harriet. As the story goes, in 1862 Lincoln had greeted the author of Uncle Tom’s Cabin with the words, “So you're the little woman who wrote the book that started this great war.” (While it remains unclear whether Lincoln actually said this or not, Roy Morris is right when he states that “the sentiment was widespread on both sides of the Mason-Dixon line” (cf. 2007: 8, footnote).) When the president died during Henry’s journey back to the North, this catastrophic moment in the history of the nation made the minister’s speech even more significant. Thus, when in 1867 Beecher published Norwood, the “venerated clergyman and moral counselor” was not only known as a famous “political orator” and a “syndicated commentator on public affairs” (cf. Smith Sept., 1974: 59) but also commonly associated with both the antebellum political crisis and the end of the war. And yet it is important to realize that by 1867 his reputation as public spokesman was challenged as his political views had been anything but consistent. In the fall of 1865 Beecher’s wife Eunice had reported his claims made before a Charleston audience that “God was black,” that Christ was “a mulatto,” that the “Devil was white,”

6

Regarding the development of this alienation between Beecher and Radical Republicans, cf. Debby Applegate, The Most Famous Man in America (2007: 313-53). The letter by Robert Bonner, the editor of the New York Ledger that she mentions to make her point, is quoted at length in Clifford E. Clark (1978: 170).

7

“I would be no man’s servant to be the man to go down among them, and when they are burying their dead to taunt them.” Beecher according to the Philadelphia Inquirer, April 8, 1865. Quoted in Harry S. Stout (2006: 422).

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and that he, Beecher, regretted he were not born black himself.8 In February 1866, however, the minister supported President Johnson’s vetoing of the Freedmen’s Bureau bill that advocated Black suffrage and citizenship. At the same time he promoted moderate reform in the Southern states—an act that required him to differentiate his position from that of the president, whose ideas of state rights and minimal federal involvement in the South he had publicly supported. Whether Beecher was a hypocrite (as McLoughlin has argued9) or not is not what drives this analysis: what makes Beecher interesting for this study is his balancing act between vastly different positions. This tightrope exercise had much to do with the need to clarify and defend his positions (cf. C.E. Clark 1978: 175) but also with his wish to satisfy varying audiences, a wish that highlights the role of human interaction in the minister’s effort to establish himself as spokesman of an ideal America. His self-contradictory, wavering views made him an easy scapegoat for the press.10 In reaction to this criticism, he tried to establish himself as a moderate Republican, yet this move only spurred a new wave of attacks (ibid.: 176). By 1867 Beecher was “forced to concede that he could no longer influence the reconstruction policies of the federal government” (ibid.: 178). Norwood offered him an alternative opportunity to explain his political and religious agenda in great detail, and it marks the shift of his vision from the concrete political plane to the imaginative realm of fiction. This chapter seeks to analyze the cultural work of Beecher’s novel in the context of its emergence during the phase that historians have generally referred to as Radical Reconstruction, a period defined by an effort to grant equal rights to former slaves while limiting the power of former Confederates.11 Unlike McLoughlin, who believes that slavery is not an issue in this novel, this book insists that the “peculiar institution” and its postbellum social heritage is actually one of the text’s core concerns.12 Again this chapter is interested in the social ideal that this novel anticipates, particularly with regard to the place of women and African Americans in the future nation.13 As

8

Eunice’s public statements are quoted in a letter by Calvin Stowe to Beecher, Oct. 28,

9

According to McLoughlin Beecher’s “rhetoric on the score of human rights was mere

1865. Cf. C. E. Clark (1978: 172). bombast, the cheapest form of hypocrisy.” McLoughlin, The Meaning (1970: 190). 10 11

Regarding Beecher’s difficult position (cf. ibid.: 165-78). Recent standard textbooks on Reconstruction include David H. Donald, et al., eds. The Civil War and Reconstruction (2001); Foner, Reconstruction (1988) and James M. McPherson, Ordeal by Fire (2010).

12

According to McLoughlin, Beecher “fails to discuss [slavery] at all in the novel.” The

13

As McLoughlin rightfully remarks, “Beecher’s novel was essentially a forward-looking

Meaning (1970: 206). one” that wished to provide Americans with “a new sense of God’s mission for the Anglo-

 




 

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will be show, however, this ideal is neither complex nor nuanced. What is more interesting is the way this future is anticipated via the novel’s didactic and explicitly fictional mode. Beecher’s novel was clearly designed to fill an emotional and mental void among postwar Americans. This “design” shows on the levels of both content and of form: Norwood relies on narrative strategies and paradigms that help staging it as an imaginative alternative to the status quo. Offering itself as a textual remedy to the ills of postwar America, the novel relies on the paradigm of healing in particular. This, then, is what much of this chapter focuses on, and what it examines in close connection with that other important motif, religion. As will be shown, the book’s “mission” to heal contributed to the indisputable narrative weaknesses of its overall design. These weaknesses are also connected to the ideological contradictions that had turned Beecher into a controversial public figure. The following analysis sheds light on a fundamental conflict between the minister’s liberal Protestantism and the deeply undemocratic ideas that he wished to legitimize. Beecher’s novel, it may be argued, was a strategic measure to create a following for his ideas and to prepare readers to take an active role in shaping a new nation on the basis of the old one. This chapter, then, suggests that Norwood was far more crucial for postwar society than is commonly assumed because it helped Americans to adjust to a new era.14 The following pages will explain how the novel fit into the minister’s larger cultural project and how it was received by his contemporaries. First of all, however, some light must be shed on Beecher’s readership and his novel’s general plotlines. From the very outset Norwood was targeted toward a mass audience. It first appeared in serial form in The New York Ledger, a story paper with a circulation of three hundred thousand. The owner of the paper, Robert Bonner, had asked Beecher to write a novel “with good moral purpose and effect.”15 Anticipating twentieth-century book-marketing strategies, Bonner capitalized on the popularity of an author who in the book’s preface admitted that the task had not been an easy one because he “had never studied the mystery of [a story’s] construction.”16 As can only be hinted at here, he made a virtue out of necessity and solved that “mystery” in a rather creative way. The novel quickly found its audience: Norwood was selling fast after it

Saxon race.” The Meaning (1970: 214). While McLoughlin, too, interprets Beecher as a transitional figure, his conclusions differ from mine in major aspects that will be identified as this chapter progresses. 14

Ruth Miller Elson makes this point in her discussion of bestsellers and their function in American society. Cf. Chapter II: “What Best Sellers Sold,” in Myths and Mores in American Best Sellers, 1865-1965 (1985: 309).

15

Beecher in a letter to Theodore Tilton, June 3, 1867, quoted and reprinted in C. E. Clark

16

Preface to Norwood (2010: v).

(1978: 185).

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came out later the same year, and subsequent editions appeared in 1868, 1874, 1887, 1892, and, possibly, in 1895 and 1898. As Beecher told Theodore Tildon17 he was offered twenty-four thousand four hundred dollars—a sum that nearly doubled his annual salary—for writing it. Too dry to comply with the usual nineteenth-century success formula of sensational melodrama,18 Norwood became a surprise bestseller before the term (“bestseller”) became known.19 The celebrity status of its author was of course crucial for this success. And yet it does not fully explain why Norwood should remain popular throughout the century, inspiring, among other things, the naming of an actual New England settlement: in 1872, to attract new inhabitants, the second parish of Dedham, Massachusetts advertised itself as a material version of Beecher’s fictional “village upon a hill.”20 As noted earlier, the book was designed to fill an emotional and mental void among the country’s crisis-ridden postwar citizens. According to Clifford E. Clark this void was a crisis of postwar modernity: Beecher spoke for a “new middleclass [sic] of lawyers, doctors, clerks, managers, teachers, and engineers—a group both responsible for the increasing industrialization of the period and afraid of it” (1978: 187).21 As will be shown in this chapter, however, this concern with what Leo Marx famously called the relationship between the “garden” and the “machine” (cf. 1964) was only one reason for the appeal of Norwood.22 Beecher fashioned himself as a guide for a fatherless generation—in both a metaphorical and literal sense. As we have already seen in the previous chapters, America’s young and middle-aged men and women had experienced the war as a break with antebellum norms and convictions, and now they eagerly sought ideological and religious orientation. During

17

This was before he started his much-publicized affair with the Radical Republican’s wife,

18

Regarding the genre of sensational melodrama in nineteenth-century bestselling litera-

19

The term was first used in the United States in 1895, when the Bookman listed titles in

Elizabeth. ture, cf. Elson (1985: 315). the order of their demand. Cf. John Sutherland quoted in Resa L. Dudovitz, The Myth of Superwoman (1990: 25). 20

Cf. Joseph S. Wood, “‘Build, Therefore, Your Own World’: The New England Village as Settlement Ideal” (March 1991: 41). Apparently the Massachusetts settlement was not the only one that took its name from the novel. Cf. www.ridleytownshiphistory.com/norwood _history.htm. Accessed 01. Aug. 2016.

21

Henry Nash Smith makes a similar point in “Scribbling Women” (Sept. 1974: 59).

22

I have discussed the relationship between Norwood and postbellum industrialization in “Eden Refound(ed): Post Civil War Literary Gardening” (2014).

 




 

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the war they flocked to Beecher’s frequent lecture-room talks, read his regular contributions to the Ledger and the Radical Republican Independent,23 and welcomed his liberal modifications of orthodox religious thought. Beecher, in other words, had already established a functioning forum to discuss politics and religion before he published Norwood; and when the book finally came out, his effort to clarify his at times self-contradictory views was something that many people could identify with in their own experience and appreciated. Thus when “readers rushed to see what sort of novel a clergyman—a Beecher, no less!—would write” (Applegate 2007: 377) a considerable number were driven by something other than mere curiosity: it was a hope for sincere guidance that urged them to buy the book. What readers find in Norwood is an imaginary New England community whose honest and liberal Christian inhabitants bear speaking names that define their character and social position (e.g. the German immigrant “Esel”). A harmonious blend of characters, the village symbolizes the “brood-combs” (4) of an ideal America. As the novel’s title reminds us, however, this new nation is built on the ideological foundations of the antebellum fight against the “peculiar institution”: the book’s title as well as its didacticism, domestic credo, and tone echo Sarah Josepha Hale’s highly popular antislavery novel Northwood (1827, rep. 1852).24 As will become increasingly clear in the course of this chapter, the promise to bridge tradition and modernity that is implicit in the title’s reference to Hale’s text is also a pattern in the narrative itself. The story is quickly told in the words of Henry Nash Smith, who, like William G. McLoughlin, is one of only a few scholars who have investigated Norwood in detail: There are two pairs of young lovers. One ritual of mating ends triumphantly at the altar. The other is frustrated by the death of the secondary hero at Gettysburg: he has had the poor judgment to fight on the side of his native state, South Carolina. […] [T]he principal heroine, Rose Wentworth, is introduced as a child […] and as she approaches maturity radiates piety along with refined notions about art. […] The tension and rebelliousness arising from the insecurity of earlier heroines have given way to a tranquil mood reflecting the general complacency of public discourse in the North after Appomattox. […] Because the heroine no longer has to endure inner struggles over moral issues, what psychological analysis the novel contains is transferred to the hero and is occasioned by religious doubt. […] When Barton Cathcart is in

23

He also became the editor of The Christian Union, a liberal Protestant journal, in 1870.

24

Condemning slavery as un-Christian and damaging to both slave and master, Northwood promotes its abolition and, like Beecher’s sister Harriet did in Uncle Tom’s Cabin, advocates colonization to Africa. Sarah Josepha Hale, Northwood (1827). The subtitle of the 1852 edition of Northwood was Life North and South. Cf. also Anne C. Rose, Transcendentalism as a Social Movement, 1830-1850 (1981).

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the throes of a prolonged struggle with unbelief, Dr. Wentworth tells him he will never be able to reason his way to faith but must rely on intuition and imagination, particularly as these are brought into play in the contemplation of nature. […] Needless to say, Barton’s conversion comes at last. It is the outcome of an intensely emotional experience, a “trance” induced by his hearing a bird’s call at sundown, which gives an intuitive apprehension of God’s love for him and by this means “a conception of infinite love.” (Sept., 1974: 62-63)

In some four hundred fifty pages Beecher reinvents both himself and the nation, partly contradicting the pamphlets, essays, and sermons that he had delivered before and during the war. It is no wonder that the entire project took far longer than the time agreed upon by Beecher and his publisher Robert Bonner. Because it lacks the hellfire rhetoric of Calvinist-inspired early-century tracts, the result has been referred to as a “statement of liberal Protestantism” (cf. ibid.: 61-62). Like many popular novels, Norwood revives the narrative of the self-made man, telling a very “American” story about the author’s personal victory in his struggle with his Calvinist father’s stern religiosity.25 By linking this narrative to the triumphant revival of that “powerful ideology of civilization, progress, and Manifest Destiny” that had “dominated American public discourse in the 1850s,” Beecher creates what Henry Nash Smith has labeled the “cosmic success story” of a perfectly harmonious nation (Sept., 1974: 58). Merging the “male” and “serious” literary tradition and the traditionally “female” mode of the domestic novel (interspersed with adventure stories and allusions to the plantation romance and the captivity narrative), Norwood is a heavily formulaic example of popular fiction26 primarily “designed to soothe the sensibilities of its readers by fulfilling expectations and expressing only received ideas” (Sept., 1974: 50). It is easy (and legitimate) to interpret Norwood as a mere effort of self-promotion and to put the book aside, as most scholars have done. What is easily overlooked, however, is its contribution to those individual and collective transformation processes that preoccupied postbellum Americans. After all, Beecher was one of the

25

Regarding Beecher’s conflict with his father, cf. C. E. Clark (1978: 6-28). Beecher talked about the “shadow” of his boyhood in a January 28, 1887 “Lecture Room Talk.” Quoted in (ibid.: 6). Henry Ward Beecher was one of several nineteenth-century, American religious leaders who felt that “Religion must enter the common life and cease to be gloomy.” Frederick W. Sawyer, the protestant author of A Plea for Amusements (1847), quoted in Moore (1994: 98).

26

According to John G. Cawelti, “formulaic fiction” emerges through “a structure of narrative or dramatic conventions employed in a great number of individual works.” These conventions can be found in stereotypical descriptions and certain, well-established behavioral patterns. Adventure, Mystery, and Romance (1976: 5).

 




 

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most influential, if not the most influential “Spokesman for a Middle-Class America,”27 and for all its stylistic weaknesses, his book was owned and read in many households throughout the nation. There is reason to believe, then, that the book’s strategies to bridge the old and the new fulfilled an urgent need of a nation. This need relied on nostalgia, but it used this backward-looking device to inspire an optimistic vision of the future. If one reads it as a book about individual and collective renewal it becomes possible to highlight what is subtle and new about how the story of America is told in Norwood.28 To prepare this analysis we must remember, first of all, that Norwood is very much about the political status quo during the time of the novel’s emergence. Symbolically authorized and authenticated via allusions to those personal conflicts with his father’s generation that Beecher was commonly associated with, it negotiates the three most prominent disagreements that preoccupied America during the 1860s and 1870s: the race question, the rights of women, and the relationship between science and religion. Secondly, however, we must understand that Norwood marks a decisive rupture in Beecher’s view of culture and entertainment. By writing a novel, a piece of fiction, this spokesman of postbellum America challenged much of what he had stood for when he was a moral authority during the antebellum era. The text’s fictionality, it can be argued, allowed him to move beyond the narrow confines of contemporary realities and politics, and envision a dream-like future. Norwood was the minister’s only full-length novel, but it was not his only best seller. In 1844 he had achieved an immediate success with his classical advice book, Seven Lectures to Young Men (1844). Decisively Victorian in tone, this slim publication was “apparently addressed not to young men in general but to young employees” specifically, whom it sought to prepare for the moral pitfalls of urban life (Ward and Waller 1907-21). Apart from its notorious warnings of so-called “confidence men,”29 one of the book’s central messages was the common threat posed by “evil” books, plays, and other amusements (Beecher 1844: 182). Seven Lectures remained surprisingly popular until late in the nineteenth century, reminding us of the longevity of opinions, events, and phenomena in a given culture: it reappeared in several new editions even after the war. Its author, however, no longer believed in some of its basic presumptions. By the mid-1850s he had become quite comfortable with public

27

This is the title of C. E. Clark’s biography of Beecher.

28

As McLoughlin, too, has pointed out, “Beecher’s novel was essentially a forward-looking one” that wished to provide Americans with “a new sense of God’s mission for the AngloSaxon race” (214). While McLoughlin, too, interprets Beecher as a transitional figure, his conclusions differ from mine in major aspects that will be identified as this chapter progresses I go along.

29

Regarding this cultural figure, cf. Halttunen (1982: 3).

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entertainment, visited the theater, and was known to “consume dozens of journals and a steady stream of new books.”30 The church where he preached for forty years, Plymouth Church, came to be known then as “Beecher’s theater,” complete with a minister who was (as his sister Harriet remarked critically) celebrated like “a prima donna” (Stowe 1890: 478). When he published Norwood in 1867, “the appropriateness of the action still caused controversy. But the hard cultural work that allowed a famous minister to market an unabashed novel for purposes of personal gain and public instruction had already been done” (Moore 1994: 26). And yet the novel aims to maintain a high degree of cultural correctness. By promoting what Louise Stevenson has called “Serious Reading and Reading Seriously,” Beecher catered to that wide-spread wish to conform that was particularly strong after the Civil War: as a novel, Norwood is a jazzed-up version of that era’s highly successful advice literature that very often focused on proper ways of reading.31 By inserting numerous discussions of “serious” literature, along with advice as to how such books should be read, Norwood reconciles the cultural pessimism of Beecher’s Seven Lectures with his personal enthusiasm for public entertainment.32 What, then, was “serious reading,” according to Norwood? The novel answers this first question indirectly, in the form of an Emersonian list33 that specifies the “excellent sense” of Dr. Buell, the village minister, whose library excluded

30

This is his sister Harriet’s critical statement on finding out that he received “boxes of flowers by total strangers”, Applegate, Most Famous Man (2007: 354).

31

As Louise L. Stevenson puts it, “[t]he popularity of advice books […] shows that people wanted to conform. Readers wanted to know how books could help them be serious and Victorian.” The Victorian Homefront (1991: 32). Regarding the role of nineteenth century “reading advisors” see ibid.: 30-47, esp. 43. In his 1867 essay “Books,” Ralph Waldo Emerson included an annotated list of authors who were “vital and spermatic,” and Thomas Wentworth Higginson identified stylistic “simplicity,” “freshness,” and sophisticated “choice of words” as the qualities that turned books into literature. These two were not alone. The Harvard professor and editor of the North American Review, Charles Eliot Norton believed in the connection between culture and character and emphasized the role of the writer as educator. The President of Yale College, Noah Porter explained in 1871 that through their liberal education graduates should “soften” the “vulgarities” endemic to American society and introduce “amenities into our social life.” Cf. Joan Shelly Rubin, The Making of Middlebrow Culture (1992: 9-13).

32

Beecher’s turn from minister to reading advisor was part of a more general concern of the clergy to maintain its position of authority. Cf. Davidson (2004: 107).

33

See fn. 31 in this chapter.

 




 

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all novels, against which, if we were not writing a history which admits of no delay, we should pause to speak. The Pilgrim’s Progress, Milton’s Paradise Lost, Scott’s Lady of the Lake, and kindred poets, Don Quixote, and two or three of the Waverly series, were found there.34 But these were not, in his judgment, properly to be called novels. They were beneficial stories. By novels he meant “fictions of an injurious tendency.” (245)

At first sight the passage seems to confirm Beecher’s older condemnations of any kind of “amusement.” Yet Buell is not Beecher’s fictional alter ego. Sympathetic but old-fashioned, and a minor character in the book itself, he is merely a concession to the more conservative segment of Beecher’s audience and to an older moral elite that consisted of dogmatic Christian clergy, scholars, and critics (cf. Rubin 1992: 6). Beecher’s novel crucially reassigns the role of village leader; it is the healer, Doctor Wentworth, and not the old-fashioned minister who leads the miniature nation into the future. By strategically shifting the focus from stern preaching to healing, Norwood thus signals a paradigmatic change specific to a post-war environment. Thus, while the minister’s list of great works is certainly recommended to the readers of Norwood, the novel itself is more interested in answering the second question mentioned by Stevenson: how to “read seriously.” This topic, however, will not be discussed until later in this chapter—after having gained a better understand how Norwood itself was read by nineteenth-century critics. While for a reader of the twenty-first century Norwood is hard to digest, Beecher’s contemporaries were surprisingly split on the subject. Many critics judged the novel harshly, as in the following review: Beecher attempted an excursion into imaginative literature, but failed for want of breath. He had not the power of construction and very little power of characterization. The personages are lay figures moving through an action prescribed for them by the author, and speaking his language, not their own. The general woodenness of the book, and several delightful absurdities, lay it open to easy parody. (Ward and Waller 1907-21)

The latter was clearly the case when in 1868 the New York-based playwright Daniel Ottolengui staged a “satirical burlesque” under the telling title “Gnaw-Wood”35 that was based on the novel. Importantly, however, Ottolengui was not only a Southerner who bore a certain grudge against the abolitionist Beecher family; by staging “Gnaw-

34

The titles of these works are not italicized in Norwood.

35

Regarding the evolution of the play and of its written version, cf. Sally Sims Stokes, The Art and Craft of Comic Imitation. The Parodies of Daniel Ottolengui (2017-18). Ottolengui published the play under the pseudonym Henry W. B. Cher and titled it GnawWood (1868).

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Wood” he also promoted his art as a reaction to Augustin Daly’s theater version of Norwood. Immediately after the novel had come out, this first American “director in the modern sense,”36 had turned the story into a play, and staged it successfully on Broadway.37 Yet apart from this largely commercial interest in Norwood there were quite a few “serious” reviewers who were particularly taken by the novel’s rambling tone and unexciting narrative. William Dean Howells, then the co-editor of the Atlantic Monthly, celebrated “the strong, earnest, self-reliant element” that marked not only Beecher’s oratory but also his written work, including Norwood. This was not merely a matter of spontaneous opinion but a deeply felt conviction that anticipated Howell’s increasing skepticism regarding the reader’s ability to extract the moral or philosophical message that inheres in a text. In a subtle attack against a socially detached New England elite, he conceded that Beecher’s middlebrow work was “not refined to intellectual subtility or morbid doubt” and praised its optimism as “perhaps the most hopeful element in New York” and as “the beginning of a social rather than a religious regeneration.” “[I]t is American and good,” Howells wrote; “it has sound sense and wholesome impulses.”38 The statement is one of the most significant ones that have been made with regard to this novel. Besides referring us to Norwood’s proclaimed potential to “heal,” it suggests that America’s most famous minister granted a subordinate place to religion as an aspect of the Second Founding. Henry Nash Smith insightfully claims that this “remarkable” novel not only reacts to the era’s anxiety vis-à-vis technical innovation but also testifies to an intensified relationship between popular fiction and religion (Sept., 1974: 61-62). Yet before turning to this relationship, and how it contributes to the mental adaptation process that is furthered by Norwood, this chapter wants to draw attention to the related paradigm of healing and how it relates to the one historical moment mentioned in the novel, the American Civil War.

36

Don B. Wilmeth and Rosemary Cullen, “Introduction,” Plays by Augustin Daly (1984: 1). Daly was at the beginning of his career then; he staged his first original drama a few months later. His choice of Norwood was quite typical for a director who, according to Albert Asermely, “could serve up controversial subjects but [...] seldom was more than a half-step ahead of the morality of his times.” Unpublished Ph.D. dissertation quoted in (ibid.: 8).

37

The play was published under the title, ’A Legend of ‘Norwood,’ or, Village Life in New England: An Original Dramatic Comedy of American Life, In Four Acts, Founded on a Novel by Rev. Henry Ward Beecher (Daly 1867).

38

Review of James Parton by William Dean Howells, “Famous Americans of Recent Times,” The Atlantic Monthly (May 1867: 637).

 




 

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When I suggested earlier that Norwood filled an emotional and mental void among its postwar readers I was thinking of it as a novel of consolation and encouragement in the face of war-induced suffering, sectional tensions, political fragmentation, and the growing anger in the feminist camp. Importantly, however, this concrete historical and political frame of reference is never directly mentioned in the text; instead, Beecher’s foreword to the novel vaguely describes it as being about “the ordinary experiences of daily life among the common people” (2010: 5). Set in a seemingly timeless, picturesque, and thoroughly sanctified New England landscape,39 Norwood anchors its vision of America’s spiritual and intellectual rebirth in a traditional narrative of the nation’s history: cast as “the archetype of American small towns, standing for community forbearance in a period of strict political, religious, and societal discipline and economic stability” (Smith 1966: 3), Beecher’s miniature America is strangely untouched by political conflict. It is therefore all the more significant that the Civil War is mentioned in the very first sentence of the novel’s preface: Before the Civil War, I had for several years been a regular contributor to the NEW YORK LEDGER. During that great conflict I had almost entirely ceased writing for it. But when the war was closed, I was not unwilling to seek rest or relaxation from the exhausting excitement of public affairs, by turning my mind into entirely new channels of thought and interest. (v)

Contrary to what a twenty-first century reader may expect, the result of this personal withdrawal is a narrative that subsumes history in the depiction of a mythical nation. In line with mythical storytelling, past, present, and future appear on one level here. Nevertheless, the way this levelling takes place is highly unorthodox: that the entire first half of the text is set in the antebellum period is not at all clear until, more than halfway through the novel, the election of president Lincoln specifies the historical context. The novel’s Reconstruction readers, in other words, were first led to believe that the book they read (with its allusions to postwar tourism and urbanization) was set in the New England of their own day before they eventually realized that Norwood was, in fact, a story of the country’s immediate antebellum and Civil War past. What, then, is the narrative purpose of this belated reframing? There is a very general answer to this question: by merging the perceived present with the antebellum happiness of the Norwoodites, the novel builds a normalizing temporal framework that lets the war appear as a tragic instance in an otherwise intact

39

Wood comments on the “continued importance of picturesque place on human values” in Beecher’s novel. Joseph S. Wood (March 1991: 41).

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social figuration. The timeless harmony of Norwood and the values that sustain its population both before and after the Civil War appear as a valid cultural bulwark against social threats and wartime destruction. It is no coincidence, then, that the Civil War becomes a topic in this novel only after this bulwark has been erected. When in the last third of the novel some of the village’s inhabitants volunteer as soldiers, medical doctors, or nurses in the Civil War, they do not suffer war-induced alienation and loneliness as Hawks and Bennitt have described them. On the contrary, Rose Wentworth, the female heroine, serves by the side of her father as a Civil War nurse and, significantly, experiences the “greetings of a field of carnage” like “a home greeting” (471). As Smith has pointed out, the way Norwood refers to historical experience is based on denial, on “what we eagerly desire to be true” (Sept., 1974: 62). The novel itself, however, has a different explanation for its emphasis on the before and after of the conflict: Beecher refers to the inadequacy of linguistic norms vis-à-vis the enormity of the conflict (477) to explain why memories of suffering and personal failure do not belong in the peacetime village. According to Beecher, in other words, a useable past relies on familiar narratives that allow for continuity instead of suggesting profound rupture. It is only logical, then, that Norwood replaces the immediacy of trauma with a mode of quiet perception that symbolically masters the totality of the war. In the one battlefield scene that appears in the book the reader “attends” the battle of Gettysburg as if watching a painted panorama, a form of entertainment that became popular in the mid nineteen-forties and often featured landscapes and battle scenes. As Annette Jael Lehmann has argued, the viewers’ experience of the panorama furthered “a common vision, a common world view and self-affirmation” (2009: 112) because it helped in “appropriating and representing the symbolic order” and gaining “perceptual mastery” in a time of rapid change and social fragmentation (ibid.: 106-07). Reminiscent of the “direct framing of the visual experience through narrative elements” (usually delivered by a commentator standing on a platform next to the painted panorama) the scene is focalized through the eyes of Rose, who has volunteered as a Civil War nurse. In accordance with what was commonly expected from this occupation, her gaze makes one of the worst battles during the sectional conflict appear in a soothing light, demonstrating what Lehmann calls “a culturally legitimate triumph of the civilizing progress” (ibid.: 111) in the face of war. A prototypical true woman, Rose’s connection to the Sublime lets her experience the scene as spiritually significant: closer to heaven than to earth she takes in “a free view” that transcends the horror before her and projects a far more total scene, carefully framed by “the blue mass of the South Mountains banked up against the horizon” (473). Signaling a

 




 

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markedly modern “form of seeing that entails quiet contemplation” (ibid.: 115),40 the nurse resorts to a dreamlike (and nevertheless ecstatic) state, describing how “batteries seemed to spring up every where; and battle, like forks of flame in a burning town, kindling wherever a spark fell, flashed forth” (476). Amidst these fireworks of form and color, the dead and wounded form a geometrical pattern that has nothing in common with Timothy O’Sullivan’s famous and disturbingly brutal Gettysburg photograph “Scene where General Reynolds Fell.”41 On the nurse’s imaginary canvas, “long lines of men covered the space” (477) only to join somewhat beautiful explosions of light and color. By focalizing the war through the eyes of the nurse, the reader is encouraged to conceive of individual and collective suffering as a prerequisite to healing and renewal. Her womanly presence tells about beauty in destruction, about a new beginning that lurks in every ending. Yet if in this scene the nurse is the feminized symbol of recovery from a masculinized “wound,” the novel’s celebration of women’s defining power is markedly limited. Upon her return to Norwood, Rose finds herself in the company of other happy survivors, most of all her father, Doctor Wentworth. The physician, too, returns from voluntary service in a Civil War hospital and gains an almost divine status as the villagers’ mental healer. In anticipation of what about a decade later became known as New Thought, he optimistically promotes the “allsaving power of healthy-minded attitudes as such” (James 1929: 92-93). “Whatever rouses up the brain pleasantly,” he argues, “is apt to do the patient good” (219). It is only logical, then, that the village doctor’s treatment of his patients “consisted in persuading men to get well” (29), and that his philosophy praises “the endless placidity and adaptableness of this people” (5). While the novel does not explicitly refer such statements to the postwar situation, it wasn’t difficult for readers to draw a connection to that era of collective recovery. In what was essentially an advice for the readers of that era, Beecher proposes that pain can be regulated by the patient himself:

40

According to Lehmann, the spectator in a panoramic illusion practiced “various forms of self-control and perceptual restraint, particularly for forms of attentiveness that require both relative silence and immobility. The many ways in which this occurred included the self-disciplining of the spectator as an occupant of or visitor to interior spaces and institutions; in this sense the panorama exemplifies in a paradigmatic way the formation of modern audiences” (ibid.: 116).

41

The photograph was published in the first volume of Alexander Gardner’s Sketchbook of the War (1863), and shows the bodies of mutilated soldiers strewn to the horizon. Reprint (1959: 37).

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Sickness is very largely the want of will. Everything is brain. There is thought and feeling not only, but will: and will includes in it far more than mental philosophers think. It acts universally, now as open mind, and then just as much upon the body. It is another name for life-force. Men in whom this life or will-power is great, resist disease, and combat it when attacked. (29)

This kind of thought had its roots in the first half of the nineteenth century where it was associated with people like Phineas Pankhurst Quimby, who is now considered the father of the New Thought movement. Inspired by earlier movements like Transcendentalism and mesmerism (and also by Christianity), it only came to full bloom during the 1880s and 90s; as William James has argued, it was “a reaction against all that religion of chronic anxiety which marked the earlier part of our century” (ibid.).42 With its intertwined ideas of man’s self-curing powers, his divine nature, and the oneness of the world, Norwood sheds a light on the popularity of the “mind-overmatter theory” more than a decade before New Thought swept the nation,43 suggesting that the postwar sense of crisis spurred the idea of mental healing. What would later be criticized as the “Don’t Worry” attitude of the New Thought movement (cf. James 1929: 92-93 and Parker 1973: 3-21) may thus be seen as an early response to the physical, mental, and spiritual problems evoked by the war. Thus, it is no wonder that the previous quote from Norwood borrows from the military jargon that war veterans were so well acquainted with (“combat it when attacked”). To illustrate that the workings of “mind power” were compatible with the Civil War ideal of soldiering manhood, Norwood shows how its notorious “common man” character, Tommy Taft, emerges victoriously from a manly struggle over physical and psychological disease: “A wooden leg is a good thing […]; never have to cut my toe-nails on that leg,” said Tommy, with a chuckle. “Not much paid out for shoes neither. Go to a blacksmith for my shoes—ho! Ho! Ho! Never have rheumatism in that leg either. Don’t catch cold when I git it wet. Toes never cold on that leg—he! He! He! No corns. Nobody steps on my toes. Don’t cost much for blackin’. It’s a real convenience. Sometimes I think legs were a mistake; ain’t worth as much as it costs to keep ‘em up.” “I suppose, then, you regret having one well leg, Tommy?”

42

James himself was also a point of reference for the movement’s disciples.

43

Cf. e.g. www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/412169/New-Thought. Accessed 01 Aug. 2016. New Thought was strongly influenced by Transcendentalism. In fact, late-nineteenth-century representatives hardly mentioned the founder of New Thought, Quimby: “Instead they spoke of Swedenborg and Emerson (and, of course, Jesus the healer) as the chief sources of their new way in which the symptoms of disease could be relieved by purely mental processes.” Gail Thain Parker, Mind Cure in New England (1973: 5).

 




 

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“Of course I do. Often think of havin’ it taken off. Very odd, you see, to have one flesh leg and one wooden leg. Feller don’t like to be odd, ye know.” (151)

Offering short-term relief in an environment where amputations (often multiple) were the most visible reminder of the war, Tommy’s jokes were a favorite among the readership of Norwood. Significantly, however, he is not a war veteran but belongs to Beecher’s own generation, whose influence and authority the novel seeks to reestablish. One of the most disturbing aspects of Norwood, then, is its active denial of warrelated trauma. As Silas Weir Mitchell, who worked on nerve injury during the war, diagnosed in 1864, Civil War survivors would suffer physically and mentally.44 Imagined as a motor to the postwar mental adaptation process, the novel signals the beginning but also the end of an era: after giving “some recognition” to the muchcriticized group of army surgeons who “deserve to be ranked with the foremost soldiers” (502), Norwood presents readers with a symbolical monument inscribed, To / the heroic surgeons and the noble women / who Laid down their lives for the nation (502). Although it would take more than fifty years until women’s contribution to the war effort should be officially recognized through a Washington, D.C. memorial,45 these capitalized letters are a dutiful last tribute to female self-sacrifice. Thus Norwood reflects the dominant contemporary gender discourse in representing Agate,46 Rose, and Alice as talented medical helpmates during the war, but it carefully preserves an earlier, patriarchal ideology and militates against women who (like Hawks) wished to pursue a medical career: [Dr Wentworth] placed in [Rose’s] hands works or parts of works that would give her such general knowledge of physiology and of therapeutics as would furnish a proper basis for right nursing. In conversations, he gave her also much information upon gunshot wounds, surgery, and particularly on military surgery. […] She soon conceived a love of the study for its intrinsic interest, and brought to the study of medicine an enthusiasm, an apprehensiveness, a tact and delicacy which few medical students possess. […]

44

In Gunshot Wounds, an 1864 medical work on the treatment of Civil War veterans, Mitchell wrote that nerve injuries often disturbed the “correspondence between the visible wound and the interior pain,” a “hysterical” symptom that was taken as a feigning of roles and that often led to lasting insanity. Cf. Lisa Long, Rehabilitating Bodies (2004: 31).

45

Around 1924 the “Nuns of the Battlefield Memorial” was erected on DuPont Circle.

46

This prototypical elderly nurse has “lived long enough with Dr. Wentworth not to know what conscientious medical practice was.” Daly, Norwood (1867: 443).

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“Remember, Rose,” her father would say, “that you are to be a nurse, not a surgeon. For the active practice of medicine, or the performance of surgery, you know enough to be only a good charlatan! But with modesty and your good sense, you know enough to aid you materially in nursing.” (433)

Rose, after expertly performing surgery on a wounded soldier, turns her wartime occupation as a nurse into an antebellum virtue and nurses the wounded war hero, Barton Cathcard. Linking religious and moral issues with the discourse of individual and national healing (a discourse that has been shifted from the wartime hospital to the Reconstruction home), Norwood culminates in the image of the recovering hero, Beecher’s disguised alter ego. Besides telling us much about how the famous minister perceived of his own role as postwar wound-dresser,47 this development highlights the success formula of Norwood: through an alliance between popular fiction, liberal Christianity, and a discourse of mental healing, the novel seeks to “sell” its conservative political ideal. The narrative draws on romantic conventions since Barton can only overcome his war-induced suffering and his struggle with God under the care of a “true woman” in her traditional sphere of influence. What Rose provides him with, then, is something “more than medicine and better than food” (539), namely, romantic love. Ready to start a new generation of Norwoodites, together with his “soul nurse” (271), Barton is hyperbolized into a living image of the ideal, religiously secure, and manly postwar American citizen—an exemplary leader of a harmonious

47

Barton receives his theological education in Amherst, the location of the seminary in which Henry had been enrolled. Marked by an initial crisis of belief and a subsequent conversion experience (a leitmotif that reappears, in secular form, at a later point in the novel), the protagonist’s religious development follows Beecher’s own. Barton’s spiritual salvation can be read as an expression of Henry Ward Beecher’s grappling with his brother George’s suicide in 1843. According to Applegate, “George had become obsessed with the controversial doctrine of ‘perfectionism,’ which maintained that the Bible commands us not simply to obey God’s laws, but to strive toward actual perfection, in every deed, feeling, or thought.” She quotes the historian Joan Hedrick, who says that, “(t)urned outward on the world, perfectionism supported utopian communities and radical reforms like the abolition of slavery” but “when it turned inward, it placed almost intolerable pressure on individuals to repress every stray impulse that did not focus entirely on God, creating tremendous guilt and self-loathing when, inevitably, one’s mind strayed toward worldly matters.” Applegate, Most Famous Man (2007: 178). George suffered from what today would be called a manic-depressive disorder. His death caused a religious crisis in Henry, but Henry soon recovered and celebrated George’s entry into Heaven. (cf. ibid.: 179-80).

 




 

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community that is built on the consent of the governed. As will be shown in the course of this chapter, this model community includes almost all white Americans. If the “story of Rose” (as I choose to call it) serves as one example of how Norwood connects the discourse of healing with a symbolic downplaying of the Civil War experience, the “Heywood episode” is another. The only southerner in the novel, Tom Heywood emerges in a cross-sectional fraternal relation, that “central trope in what Benedict Anderson describes as a ‘vast pedagogical industry’ dedicated to ‘oblig[ing] young Americans to remember/forget the hostilities of 1861-1865 as a great ‘civil’ war between ‘brothers’ rather than between—as they briefly were—two sovereign nation-states” (Davis 2009: 140). Heywood is (as the second syllable of his name indicates) the son of a Norwood-born mother and “the heir of the Chandler property” in Virginia, and he “[takes] the place of a son” when he visits his aunt and uncle in Norwood (279). Apart from this, however, Heywood also figures as the male part of that other conciliatory alliance, the cross-sectional romance. The woman he falls in love with is Rose. A progressive New England woman, she encourages Heywood to read his “favorite authors aloud” and teaches him how to engage in public debate.48 In this secular version of the conversion narrative, the son of a feudal plantation owner is “infected with [New England] economy” (281) and embraces the East Coast art of critical discussion, which is itself a defining stylistic device in the novel.49 Historically, the Virginian’s voluntary affiliation with a (feminized) East Coast culture is implausible, given the state’s prominent role in the Confederacy. But again, Beecher avails himself of his earlier, stunningly pragmatic strategy: most of the “Heywood story” is set before 1861. Once more, the novel ignores the political conflicts that led to the war. As Heywood’s conversion suggests, the war could have been

48

Norwood reverses the traditional cross-sectional romance at this point. In Norwood the South is represented by a heroic son of Virginia and not, as usual, by a subordinate (and often tomboyish) female who is “tamed” when she marries a Northern gentleman—their wedding symbolically reconstructing the national Union. As Gregory S. Jackson has shown, the “traditional gendered binary between an aggressive, masculine North and a weak, feminine South” was more complicated than it may first seem. Cf. Gregory S. Jackson, “'A Dowry of Suffering': Consent, Contract, and Political Coverture in John W. De Forest's Reconstruction Romance” (2003: 283).

49

The lengthy conversations between the doctor, the minister, and the skeptical, rationalist lawyer, Bacon, revolve around a wide spectrum of secular topics (chapters are titled “Mental Philosophy,” “A Talk About Enjoying Money,” or “Varieties”), and the subject matter of these dialogues emphasizes that Christian faith and humanist bildung were not only intellectually compatible but also part and parcel of the “cultured” New England mind. Cf. Daly, Norwood (1867: 316).

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prevented if only the southern states had accepted their northern sister’s well-meaning advice. Yet arguments are only a small part of Beecher’s scheme. Heywood’s antebellum conversion to an antislavery position is, significantly, a matter of the heart. During a vacation in Norwood, the African-American servant of the Wentworth family, Pete Sawmill, saves the Virginian’s life. Heywood undergoes a healing process that restores him to the Norwood mentality. Then his cousins, Barton and Alice, and their friend Rose “began to work their natural effect upon Heywood” (307); when Lincoln is elected president, Heywood remains “free from those influences which were swaying so many of his friends in Virginia” and “enters warmly into [Abiah50] Cathcart’s feelings for the integrity of the nation” (355). “[W]on over to Northern views by his summer visits to Norwood” (McLoughlin 1970: 203), the prodigal son, in other words, is saved. This does not free him from his patriotic duty to the Southern cause. When he eventually joins the Confederacy, Heywood solves his ideological dilemma by filling page after page with reports of his intermediary role in the conflict, which he sends to the North. The story becomes even more improbable when its author has to somehow put an end to the Rose-Tom love plot (Beecher had reserved her as Barton’s future wife) and find Tom a substitute in Barton’s melancholy sister Alice. The potentially unhappy union between the two is ultimately prevented when Heywood dies a martyr’s death in Gettysburg. Attended by Alice, who volunteers as a nurse for the Union Army, and symbolically joined with Rose’s brother Arthur, who is killed in battle, Heywood has his last role in what may be called a cross-sectional “pain alliance.”51 And yet there is little in Norwood that should make readers cry. After all, history itself is buried here, under a sentimental healing fantasy complete with romance, cross-sectional death-scenes, and, most importantly perhaps, conversion. If with Heywood’s embrace of a Northern worldview conversion appears as a secular concept, its religious version is fully spelled out in Barton’s spiritual encounter with God. Featured very prominently, this individual experience de-historicizes the war and the emotions that went along with it, subtly eliding war-related experiences of personal crisis, emotional fragmentation, social alienation, and existential

50

Abiah Cathcart is Barton’s and Alice’s father.

51

Lauren Berlant uses this term to describe a “capacity for suffering and trauma” that lies at the heart of American conceptions of citizenship. "Poor Eliza," American Literature 70 (1998: 636). Heywood’s death is, of course, also an early example of the culture of mourning that was a crucial emotional anchor in Reconstruction veteran culture with its monuments of fallen soldiers and battlefield parks. Heywood’s heroic self-sacrifice anticipates that “brotherhood in death” that figures most prominently in D.W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation, the 1915 film version of Dixon’s novel, The Clansman (1905).

 




 

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doubt, through the normalizing rhetoric of a liberal Christian’s coming of age.52 Reminiscent not only of the young Beecher himself but also of the postwar generational conflict, Barton experiences a “gulf between himself and his home” (176). Later on he resembles an estranged war veteran who imagines that “men walk a hundred feet above [him]” (270). Yet Barton is not merely a mirror image of the postwar generation: in an echo of Christ, his fate provides an answer to their suffering. It is only logical, then, that when Doctor Wentworth muses that “(u)nskillful handling of his own case has made him morbid” (268), and Barton wonders “[h]ow much more is a soul and mind in disorder than a body?” (270), the solution lies in Barton starting a new life. He leaves Norwood to study in a nearby college town where his struggle for Divine Truth eventually “work[s] a cure” and thereby becomes a model narrative for healing the collective “illness” of war-related alienation (376). After long hours in the school’s library he realizes that the faith of his father was an earlier version of his own, and he develops a conciliatory vision of continuity and reform that culminates in Barton’s marriage to Rose, the daughter of the village patriarch.53 Considering that Beecher was in his fifties when he published Norwood, this was also a remarkable effort to bridge the generational divide between the antebellum generation that he belonged to and the postbellum generation of future leaders. In line with this imaginary approximation of the younger generation that (unlike Beecher) fought in the war, Barton’s departure to college resembles an initiation into military combat. Like

52

Barton’s symptoms are thoroughly described in Ann Taves, Fits, Trances, & Visions (1999: esp. part two, 119-250). Taves concentrates largely on revivalism and its links with Spiritism. Although Beecher was skeptical about both his descriptions of Barton’s “awakening” through a transcendental experience of the divine are surprisingly similar to how such experiences have been described by evangelicals. For an insightful introduction to the evolution of religious thought during the pre-war era, cf. Morone (2003). Regarding trauma and the Civil War, cf. Lisa Long (2004: 5).

53

As Lemeunier points out, “le personnage (est) comme son auteur, […] imprégné de philosophies conservatrices de la fin du siècle et il affirme ses prérogatives de bourgeois nanti avec une certaine agressivité, oubliant en particulier les impératifs calvinistes de retenue et de discrétion dans la consommation.” He is also right in pointing out that, unintentionally, Doctor Wentworth is not “un intellectuel de haute volée” but rather “un petit bourgeois.” “L’Etique Du Loisir Dans Norwood De Henry Ward Beecher,” Les Etats-Unis (1989: 115 and 19).

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thousands of patriotic soldiers in the war literature between 1861 and 1865, the student (who in this case is heading to the nearby town of Amherst) leaves his mother in a farewell scene that seems to come straight out of Civil War popular culture54: “I have a strange feeling, mother. I am glad and sorry both. But now that I am to go, I am impatient to be gone and to be at my work.” “It is best. Your father’s blessing and your mother’s heart go with you.” They sat near the door, holding each other’s hands. The evening scene, the song of the whippoorwill, the approaching separation, a vague shudder, as there arose for a flitting moment an impression of the great out-rolling future of life, an undefined and painful thought of Rose, and now his mother’s words, wrought in Barton such an intensity of feeling, that, when Rachel laid her hand upon his raven-black hair, he could no longer contain himself, but leaning his head upon his mother’s lap, he wept as if the floods were broken loose. Her tears fell with his. (167)

In equally stereotypical fashion his last encounter with the woman he loves (Rose) evokes “moments of sharp pain” and “flashes of love-pride” (167) that intermingle with “tears […] running down her cheeks” (169) as she “look[s] up to Barton with the most artless simplicity” (169). Also, when he returns from the seminary, Barton resembles a veteran soldier: initiated into the realities of life, the boy turned man is hardly recognized by his mother who proudly asks herself if “this, indeed, [was] her own son?” (239). Through a somewhat awkward narrative maneuver, Barton then becomes an actual soldier and commander. His true battle, however, which is a spiritual struggle, is already over. In a significantly toned-down episode the triumphant hero comes home wounded, but the narrative refuses to elaborate on the scene and does not describe it in any emotional depth.55 By representing the hero’s most existential crisis as a religious coming-of-age, Norwood rhetorically normalizes what in today’s vocabulary one might call war-related depression,56 and the novel suggests that self-culture and introspection must go along with the political reconstruction of the nation and the reordering of society.57 As I hope to show in the following subchapters, both self-culture and social reordering are not only basic ideological aims

54

In The Civil War and Popular Culture Alice Fahs mentions numerous examples of such sentimental scenes in popular Reconstruction poetry, music, literature, and visual art. See in particular Chapter 3 (“The Sentimental Soldier,” 93-119).

55

Barton forms a fictional contrast to Beecher’s son Henry, who was dismissed from the army because of “indecent” behavior.

56

To compare this with PTSD would not be adequate at this point.

57

The concept of self-culture was, of course, not new; it had been at the heart of genteel culture since the heyday of Transcendentalism. During the war, however, there had been

 




 

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of Norwood but also central practices in the novel’s program to help readers re-make themselves.







  
As we have seen so far, Norwood targeted a postwar readership that still suffered profoundly from the war and its aftereffects. Thus, the core question that preoccupied Doctor Wentworth at the beginning of the novel hit the mark among postbellum Americans: “If the body is sick, the mind can cure it; but if the mind itself is sick, what shall cure that? (29). One answer that the novel gives is that humor and hopeful narratives of spiritual conversion may enable valid coping strategies. The text also advises young readers to ignore the lectures of the past and turn toward the future instead. As the book assures its readers, such a move could be performed without sanction: it is, of all people, the book’s prototypical ancestor figure, Ebenezer Wentworth (the father of Dr. Wentworth), who imparts that American doctrine of continuous renewal: “(p)eople,” he laments, “use their children as registers to preserve the names of aunts and uncles, parents and grandparents, and so inscribe them with the names of the dead, as if tombstones were not enough” (22). Apparently, however, Beecher seems to have been very much aware that rational appeals like these would not suffice to cure America’s deeply disturbed communities. What they need, according to Norwood and its wise leaders, is a new text that is not inscribed onto readers but is actively and individually appropriated by them. As we shall see, Norwood claims to be just that new text—a story designed to cure the mind. Interestingly, Barton makes sure this collective remedy is not an intellectual endeavor. In a profoundly anti-intellectual fit he triumphs over the “(f)ascinations of skepticism! They are to me the fascinations of the torture-room, they are as attractive as nightmares in a fever!!” (279). The exclamation hints at the purpose of Beecher’s own, overly optimistic, and highly implausible, novel: Norwood is not only a piece of advice literature but a means, an instrument, of purposeful forgetting. By writing it Beecher let go of all his earlier scruples and declared himself an active shaper of postwar America as self-forgetful consumer culture. That the novel advertises its recreational potential is part and parcel of Beecher’s self-fashioning as Reconstruction spokesman. Taking up the cultural fad of postwar rural tourism, the novel’s very first page casts the reader as one out of “thousands of curious travelers” who “have thronged New England” “(s)ince the introduction of railways” (1). After dissociating itself (to a certain degree) from the nostalgic anti-

little room for introspection, with the significant exception of letter writing. Regarding self-culture, cf. Rubin (1992: 8).

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modernism of the wartime period,58 Norwood invites the urban reader to a place where communal bonds are intact, thriving, and suited to evoke what Joseph S. Wood describes as a “brimming future” (2000: 37). The textual village turns out to be a place worth living: parlor talks about God, nature, and money alternate with loveplots and life-threatening accidents. It turns out to be a parallel world construed not only to stage the shift “from an age of reform to an age of complacency, from an age of egalitarian simplicity to an age of conspicuous consumption and the leisure class” but also to provide an imaginary realm to reconstruct the post-emancipation American landscape.59 While it is impossible to say how many people actually read Norwood, the novel received much acclaim. Nineteenth-century reviewers were particularly enthralled by the book’s comic elements, (cf. e.g. 'Reviews and Literary Notices: Beecher’s Norwood' June 1868) and the short chapters and diverse narrative modes certainly enhanced the entertainment value of this novel. Importantly, however, Norwood avoids anything that could excite individual readers. Like other genteel texts of the era it relies on the concept of “Christian nurture”; “the entertaining ‘quick read’” simply “had no place” in this long and rather dry piece of postwar pedagogy (Rubin 1992: 19).60 This novel owes its popularity not only to its well-known author but also to its role in that ritual of middle-class self-fashioning, the home-circle, where the father reads to his family, or the mother to her children. A review that appeared in the New York Times illuminates this function by stating that the true way to enjoy ‘Norwood’ is to read it aloud in the home-circle; or, what is still better, to listen while some other person reads it. No sentence should be skipped—no thought overlooked. Thus studied, the story is likely to be read several times over by all thoughtful people who enjoy reading it once.61

58

Regarding Beecher’s views of modernization, cf. McLoughlin, The Meaning (1970: 10609). See also Ann Douglas: “Literally hundreds of nostalgic memoirs were penned in the Civil War period about vanquished rural ways, old New England farmsteads, and once abundant country Thanksgivings presided over by all-capable and generically hospitable housekeepers” (1977: 56).

59

The village of Norwood to some extent contradicts Beecher’s antebellum descriptions of rural life. Regarding his antebellum criticism of rural conformity, cf. McLoughlin, The Meaning (1970: 106).

60

Regarding Norwood’s postwar pedagogy, cf. Lemeunier (1989: 111-26), esp. 112.

61

“Review of Mr. Beecher’s ‘Norwood’,” New York Times (7 Aug. 1867: 5).

 




 

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What the critic describes here presents Norwood as an object that may be obtained to stabilize mid-Victorian ideals. Exemplifying what Lori Merish has described as “‘refined’ domestic artifacts [that] would ‘civilize’ and ‘socialize’ persons and awaken ‘higher’ sentiments” (2000: 90),62 the novel defies Beecher’s earlier Calvinist notion that the average reader possesses an “indolent mind.” Cast as an object for “pious consumption”63 that redefines leisure as self-cultivation, Norwood serves as an antidote to an increasingly materialist culture in which it plays, ironically, a defining part (Lemeunier 1989: 111-26, esp. 12). Symbolically set apart from the immoral scene of material and immaterial consumption, the novel suggests a different, ultimately more “profound” experience that enables readers to imagine a perfect, “organic” Second Founding based on the “healthy” values of New England village life. One of the book’s most memorable scenes is a literary tableau64 that advertises the healthiness and beauty of reading as a tranquil alternative to the postwar urban entertainment industry, and far removed from the very real traces of the war in postwar American lives. The scene centers on the epitome of an idealized rural lifestyle, an older farmer (Barton’s father Abiah Cathcart), taking a rest by his horses: He loved their company—loved to feed them—loved to take his book (he was ever and always a reader) at noon, after his frugal meal was done, and sit by his team, while the horses ground their oats, or cracked and crunched their Indian corn. Do you wonder, reader, at such pleasure? Then you know little of some scenes of life.” (8)

Excessively artificial and static, the image of the reading farmer has a mesmerizing quality.65 It seems highly probable that Beecher’s writing appropriated cultural fads

62

Merish relies on Thomas Richard’s concept of “pious consumption” (he used it in the context of British Victorian culture) to analyze the connection between female self-empowerment, consumerism, and literary texts.

63

Like Thomas Richards, who introduced this term (see my previous footnote), I wish to emphasize the “dual imagery” of such presumably “higher” objects. The “pious gaze,” Richards argues, “can always be pivoted to illuminate a lower realm replete with belongings.” Thomas Richards, The Commodity Culture of Victorian England (1990: 104). I thank Ruth Mayer for referring me to this context.

64

Augustin Daly’s stage version of the novel relies heavily on the tableau as a memorable

65

The reading farmer is an image that Beecher borrowed from his Plain and pleasant talk

scene at the end of each of the play’s four acts. Cf. Daly, Norwood (1867). about fruits, flowers and farming (1859). Yet while his chapters (in the earlier book) on “Educated Farmers” and “Portrait of an Anti-Book Farmer” were written to promote scientific methods in agriculture, in Norwood he meditates on the image of the reading

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such as hypnosis and the mind-to-mind concept of the emerging New Thought Movement (cf. Quimby 2008). Like Phineas Pankhurst Quimby, who is generally considered the founder of New Thought, Beecher aimed at inspiring his audience directly. Accordingly, Norwood is cast not as a medium, precisely, but as an invitation to readers to meditate on a harmonious state where book, work, and landscape merge into one. It is hardly surprising, then, that after the scene narrated above Abiah fades from the narrative. In keeping with this mesmerist theme, Norwood relies on narrative strategies that demand the reader’s voluntary and conscious submission to an otherwise completely artificial world of letters. In this sense the novel is pedagogical not only in its overt didacticism but as an exercise in “right reading,” a quasi-therapeutic intervention aimed at healing the individual. Again reminiscent of New Thought, it insists that by “right thinking, not just positive thinking, by understanding the great moral laws and following them, every individual […] ha[s] access to all the creative energy in the universe” (Parker 1973: 6). That such an exercise in “healthy reading” involves hard work is deliberately glossed over. The novel is staged as a journey under the lead of a native guide. Personally addressed as a “dear reader,” the audience “travel[s]” from Springfield, Massachusetts through Mount Holyoke to then “[l]ook through [the narrator’s] eyes […] upon the town of Norwood” (3), which readers enter through an avenue of elm trees. By the end of this trip through a pastoral landscape, the actual promise and highlight of the journey comes into sight and lets the narrator/guide triumphantly celebrate the presumed power of his narrative: “as one loves to approach a mansion through an avenue of elms, we have led you through a short discourse of trees, to our homely story” (5). This passage offers a first hint at how Beecher imagined the reordering of postwar society: by accepting a guiding figure’s “invitation” to the Second Founding of a “promised land,” the citizen/reader consents to the rules of the “host’s” presumably democratic game. The offer is attractive because the capitalist rules of this game explicitly allow a chapter to be “read or skipped,” as the table of contents announces66: advertised as a consumer good at the disposal of the buyer,67 Norwood cleverly downplays its strong ideological concerns. The concept seems to have been successful: at least some of Beecher’s contemporaries, including a reviewer from Putnam’s Magazine, welcomed the novel’s seemingly liberal concept of controlled participation and supported what he identified as the minister’s personal claim of leadership:

farmer (and it is by no means clear whether Abiah may be reading fiction) as an ideal way of life. 66

This statement is, significantly, added to the chapter heading “Mental Philosophy.”

67

Regarding the role of Henry Ward Beecher in the context of what may be called a “progressive consumerism” based on voluntary choice, cf. Moore (1994: 206-10).

 




 

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The opinions thus far printed about Mr. Beecher’s novel have often been merely preexisting opinions about him. […] But again, many of these opinions have been based on a certain theory of what a novel is; and these, so far as we have seen them, have all been wrong. The novel, for the purposes of to-day’s literature, is one of the freest and least formal of all compositions, so much so, that “Norwood” is a novel to all intents and purposes, in virtue of the arrangement of its materials along the threads of story. […] [I]nstead of seeking to interest merely by structure, character-painting, or society-sketches, or adventure, or description, “Norwood” utters with a large freedom whatever seemed fit, to communicate the author’s thought of what is the essence of characteristic New England life, together with any other thoughts and views of the author. So the book abides by no strict rule in form; and the careless flow of its style is like the free discursiveness of its thoughts. In mental and moral tone and color, however, it conforms to rules both strict and high; it is luminous and living throughout with kindly and noble feeling, and with the contagious cheerfulness of a happy nature; it is a thoroughly healthy and healthful book, which can scarcely be read in candor without imparting some of its own genial warmth. In what the book did seek to do, it is successful; and not to succeed in what it did not, is success too. 68

The reviewer’s emphasis on the “healthy” function of reading not only confirms the ideal of “Christian nurture,” but sums up the overall aim of Norwood, which goes beyond the mere promotion of “a highly centralized, carefully controlled, strongly institutionalized system based upon order, efficiency, duty, and sternness” that lay at the core of the “conservative revolution” that had taken place during the war years (McLoughlin 1970: 187); like Doctor Wentworth aiming to “rous[e] up the brain pleasantly,” the novel wishes to “do the patient good.” In the novel’s healing device lies an intrinsic contradiction: on the one hand Norwood thrives on an illusion of absolute power over its readers, and on the other hand it targets an enlightened readership whom it wants to actively choose from its ideas and critically engage with its philosophical suggestions.69 As a result of this unresolved tension the text is marked by a certain detachment. After entering Doctor Wentworth’s “homely” New Jerusalem, the reader remains a tourist rather than feeling like a welcome guest; he or she is a passive audience listening to the parlor-talks of Norwood’s wise inhabitants. None of these are figures to identify with; instead of

68

Significantly, this unspecified, independent critic, concentrated more on the reader than on the text itself. His review relates to the first printing of Norwood in serial form in the New York Ledger, and it celebrates Robert Bonner’s “ministry to the multitude.” Cf. “Review of ‘Norwood’” (June, 1867:5).

69

H. N. Smith emphasizes the latter when he perceives of Norwood as a formally innovative link between Romanticism and Realism, however “wooden” its outcome. Cf. “Scribbling Women” (Sept., 1974: 47).

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presenting complex human characters, the novel shows a cast of linguistic specimens—the blooming Rose, a Southern hero whose name signals Northern roots, a minstrel character called Pete Sawmill, and the future leader, Barton, whom Rose at some point calls, approvingly, “Sir Book” (184). Wavering between reasoning and seduction, open discourse and didactic control, Norwood seeks to dispel the evolving tension through Ralph Waldo Emerson’s concept of “Man Thinking.” Like the famous Transcendentalist the novel promotes the “right use” of books to inspire an “active soul” (cf. 1965: 67) and recommends that “thinking” men understand Norwood as inspiration, not instruction. As Barton learns from his tutor, Doctor Wentworth, “a full nature could not be reduced to terms of language,” and “moral truth” “must have an emotive inspiration, and comes first as an experience, and afterward if at all, as an analysis and deduction” (269). Reminiscent of Emerson’s distinction between “Man Thinking” and the “bookworm,” the ideal reader of Norwood (and the citizen of an ideal American community) cherish the “feelings, emotions, sentiments, and instincts” that are emphasized through the novel’s “romantic, irrational conception” of “organic nationalism.”70 Instead of inspiring discussions of Reconstruction lawmaking and political philosophy, Norwood suggests an immediate connection between textual representation and life itself and thereby lulls its readership into a hopelessly nostalgic, utterly unrealistic conception of the nation. Yet as Norwood points out, not everybody possesses this superior quality of recognition. Uncle Tommy, an uneducated, feminized, symbolically blackened71 representative of the working class, misunderstands books as “dead” because he lacks the skills that qualify the ideal citizen. Designed as a comic character, he laments “that babies weren’t born like books. Then they wouldn’t trouble any body—could put ‘em up on a shelf, have ‘em always dry—take ‘em down when you want to use ‘em—never grow any bigger—no trouble to anybody” (48). This, then, is the second hint at how Beecher imagined the social order of the ideal nation: elaborating on McLoughlin’s more general statements regarding the minister’s classist arrogance (cf. 1970: 215) it may be assumed that the concept of “Man Thinking” served as a prerequisite for Beecher’s dated vision of an egalitarian society. The leaders of Norwood are a rural elite who strongly identify with the concerns of their community. Resonating with classist and racist overtones, this concept of middle-class rule advocates fatherly leaders rather than state authorities. Tommy and those like him, both white and black, are not only unable to identify the civilizing function of the library but they also fail to recognize its role as a democratic marketplace of genteel ideas that Joan Shelley Rubin names “integrity, balance, and restraint”—ideas that advance “the task of freeing society at large from superstition, conformity, mediocrity, and

70

I am taking up McLoughlin’s argument here. Cf. The Meaning (1970: 241).

71

His name suggests a white version of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s black hero, Uncle Tom.

 




 

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debilitating economic competition” (1992: 11). Doctor Wentworth, of course, is particularly aware of this treasure room of inspiration. His library is not “an orderly study” where long rows of books [stand] stiff and stern on the shelves, like soldiers on parade. Some books were out visiting; some, in an affectionate mood, were leaning over on an accommodating neighbor; and some, tired of their heavy contents, had lain down flat and gone to sleep, as if to give their readers, should they have any, the proper cue. Some were splendidly bound, and flamed their golden letters from blue, and green, and crimson, or modest russet. Others stood in cloth; some, in paper. (71)

Reminiscent of Norwood itself there is “no strict rule in form” but instead an emphasis on “free discursiveness.” And yet the “rules of the democratic game” (Quigley) are clearly defined by a leader whose authority is based on the accumulation of knowledge. Significantly, however, what seems like an achievement of self-cultivation is cast as an act of nature. The profoundly civilian world of the doctor’s library indicates a natural order where everybody—including the community’s leader— knows his or her place. This, then, is the third implication of the novel’s concept of an ideal democracy: everybody can represent him- or herself—within clearly defined, natural limits. These limits secure the cultural and political hegemony of an educated, economical elite who own “civilization” because they have access to knowledge in its material dimension and can exhibit that privilege. Only those who can afford to buy books and have the leisure to read many of them can participate in the parlor talks that fill so many pages of Norwood and so many hours of life in that village. (It is no wonder that the doctor, the minister, and the lawyer, who regularly participate, never seem to be working in their professions.) It is only these “Men Thinking” who are capable of solving the troubles and conflicts of the present and past by drawing inspiration from that “true peace society” on the doctor’s shelves where [h]eretic and orthodox stood in silent truce. The men that kept the world in a racket, in their time,—Luther and they of the Vatican, Milton and Salmasius, Arminius and the whole Synod of Dort, Jesuits and Jensenists, the ancients, mediaeval scholastics, modern reformers—were patient with each other and with the rising fame of modern scientific authors. (71)

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This passage offers straightforward advice to an aspiring postbellum elite (and the novel’s readership that identified with this elite)72 who were confronted with varying political concepts, new findings in science, and alien immigrant cultures, and who found themselves wondering with Barton, “Where shall I begin? […] How shall I find it out? What book will tell me?” (145). Yet unlike Barton, who finds salvation in nature, the reader finds solace in the very activity he/she engages in: as a text that combines both nature (“wood”) and “Christian nurture,” Norwood suggests that spiritual wholeness is, first and foremost, a matter of the imagination. Significantly, however, the actual promise of this liberal approach to Christianity lies in its everyday applicability that is advertised by a woman—that one medium which until this very day is best suited to impart new products and ideas. Throughout the novel, “Rose” figures as what modern semiotics describes as a “floating signifier,” a linguistic phenomenon that Doctor Wentworth gestures toward in stating that words “in and of themselves” “mean whatever they have the power to make us think of when we look at them” (55). In line with the novel’s transcendentalist creed, “Rose” is a text come alive, open for continuous, individual interpretation. According to the nineteenthcentury language of flowers, the meaning of a rose depended on the individual flower’s color, the way it was carried, and whether the thorns and leaves were removed or not. Among its many meanings are its iconographic Christian evocation of innocence, purity, and wisdom, but it also stood for erotic love and the passion of Christ.73 All of these dimensions can be applied to the heroine of Norwood, who appears as a natural leader of all women but who means different things to all who know her: while “[t]he mother would call it Rose—for that was a favorite sister’s name,” her father “called it Rose, for that united her to the flowers he so much loved. Others called her Rose, because it was so sweet a name for a girl […]” (39). Claiming to enable a unique encounter among individual souls (exemplified in the relationship between Rose and her parents) and cast as a “natural” reading experience among real Christians, Norwood is meant to facilitate the individual’s spiritual connection to an omnipresent God. An easily digestible work of religiously minded fiction, it comes close (according to a dogmatic understanding of Christianity) to replacing what John Gutjahr has termed the nation’s “primary cultural anchor” (1999: 110), the Bible, through an ideology of pious consumption. And yet there is nothing scandalous or daring about this because the novel is embedded within a biblical frame of reference and insists on the protagonists’ deep Christian roots. After all, Barton comes to understand that “the Bible interprets nature, and that nature nourishes the

72

As Rubin has pointed out, this advice was antidemocratic at its core since it supported the effort of the educated elite to “juggle the needs of various interest groups, of which the gentry itself was one” (ibid.: 3).

73

Cf. www.rose.li/deutsch/rose4.html. Accessed 01 Aug. 2016.

 




 

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truths of the Bible” (274).74 As enunciator of such good news, Norwood anticipates rather than replaces the Holy Scriptures. A commercialized, public expression of postwar liberal Christianity, it privileges individual interpretation over religious dogma and seeks to inspire a new understanding of the famous Gettysburg address, according to which “this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom.”



    


 

 
The notion of freedom was, of course, not only central to liberal Protestantism but also to the American democratic credo. Norwood is in fact very much concerned with imagining an ideal American society and defining it as a post-emancipation human figuration. Interestingly, however, race-relations figure less prominently in this novel than gender relations. As we have come to understand earlier, the book’s ideal woman is conceptualized in terms of relationships: Rose is what others want her to be. And yet she is more than a mere muse. A strong-willed woman, Rose has studied with the famous American zoologist, glaciologist, and geologist, Louis Agassiz;75 knows all about music and art (198);76 and is in many ways the intellectual heir of her father. By elevating her to this superior status, Beecher adapted his mid-Victorian ideals to an era that could not deny the role of women at the Civil War “home front” and in army hospitals. This was of course a rhetorical concession rather than a full-fledged embrace of a feminist position. The following pages will further develop this argument and show that “Rose” (as a concept rather than a flesh and blood character) not only emblematizes social harmony but also figures as a warning against women’s

74

In a letter to Mrs. Emily Drury, written on April 20, 1859, Beecher had still suggested a hierarchical relationship between the Bible and nature: “After we have learned our letters there, and how to read, then the material world and human life reveal more of God than we can learn anywhere else—at any rate, the most dear and touching views of Divine Nature” (qtd. in C. E. Clark 1978: 188).

75

Agassiz also developed a racial classification system that was highly influential in the American South because it helped legitimize slavery. As this chapter will show later, Beecher’s reference to Agassiz is all but marginal.

76

As Stevenson has pointed out, a college education was no longer seen as fundamentally altering a woman’s God-given role in life in the time after the Civil War. See The Victorian Homefront (1991: 122).

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more active roles in society. Norwood, in other words, exemplifies the well-documented anti-feminist backlash of the postwar era77 by erecting a conservative bulwark against women’s involvement in the public sphere. As this book’s readings of Hawks and Bennitt have indicated, an open denial of such female activism would have been plainly suicidal for a liberal Protestant spokesman like Beecher. In fact, in the same year that Norwood was published, he publicly supported the increasingly radicalized feminist movement. On May 9, 1867, Beecher was one of the few “celebrities” who participated in the first anniversary meeting of the American Equal Rights Association, and he famously proclaimed that “If you have any radical principle to urge, any higher wisdom to make known, don’t wait until quiet times come, until the public mind shuts up altogether” (qtd. in Harper 1969: 276-77). Spoken around the time of his novel’s publication, this injunction may be interpreted as an effort to secure the favor of the progressive, feminist spectrum among his readers. Yet whoever read Norwood could hardly overlook its anti-feminist agenda—unfortunately we lack documented reactions that comment on that aspect. Only one year after the novel’s publication by which time the women’s movement was further isolated, and ridden by internal tensions—he opposed radical feminists like Victoria Woodhull78 and supported women’s suffrage only on the grounds that “great hearts and strong heads” were a prerequisite to make women’s rule within the domestic household a natural success.79 Known to have a keen sense for the right moment, Beecher realized that in order to maintain his reputation as a spokesman for the aspirational middle-class, it was the time to officially dissociate himself not only from the most radical branch of feminism but also from the women’s movement as a whole. It therefore seems all the more significant that he nevertheless catered to the taste of postwar women by introducing a new, excessively self-reliant female type. As public spokesman, Beecher was aware that the success of his book ultimately depended on its acceptance by a readership that consisted, in large part, of women. One of these women was Elizabeth Tilton, the woman with whom he had an affair and the wife of his associate in various reform projects, Theodore Tilton.80 Figuring

77

For a brief overview of this development cf. Simon and Danziger, Women’s Movements in America (1991: 1-5).

78

Woodhull advocated free love and insisted on a female sexuality beyond reproduction. She later became a personal enemy of Beecher when she criticized society’s double standard by referring to his extramarital affair. See “The Famous Brooklyn Scandal,” in C. E. Clark (1978: 197-232).

79

H.W. Beecher, Women’s Influence in Politics, pamphlet (Boston, 1870: 6) quoted in

80

The affair became public knowledge in 1875 in the course of the trial against the adulter-

(ibid.: 198). ers. Cf. Douglas (1977: 293).

 




 

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as his desired “somebody … that would not be critical, and that would praise [Norwood], to give me the courage to go on” (qtd. in Shaplan 1954: 33 and 53),81 she had approved the manuscript. This female target group then, plays into the complex drama of acknowledgement and denial, participation and marginalization that is enacted in Norwood82 and that this chapter will now turn to. By doing so it hopes to shed light on the tremendous changes in postbellum gender relations that Beecher could not—and did not wish to—ignore. Let us, then, return once more to the novel’s female ideal, Rose. When earlier in this chapter I discussed her occupation as an assistant Civil War surgeon, I left out one important observation: by introducing the nurse in the role of surgeon, Norwood was absolutely singular even among the nursing narratives of the time. Historically, such a case was unheard of. As Jane E. Schultz has pointed out, the tasks that women were permitted to perform in Civil War hospitals tended to be menial (Winter 1992: 370). It is against this backdrop that “Doctor” Rose signals a true revolution in gender relations: She went with the wagons of the Commission to Antietam, and hovered along that field wherever were [sic] wounded and suffering. It was here that she was inspired by danger and desperate necessity to take the surgeon’s knife. […] Seized with an inspiration, Rose, without an instant’s hesitation, put her hand to the saw, completed the severing, tied the arteries, joined the flaps, and bound up the wound. The man recovered. She had often been called the “Surgeon’s Daughter”; but now the men changed it, and called her the “Daughter-surgeon.” (448)

The episode is all the more memorable since the “danger” of immediate physical contact with men had been one of the major arguments against allowing women nurses in the beginning of the war. To sum up: that a “delicate” and “respectable” woman engages in operations that involve the severing of organic wholes, the joining of parts, and the binding up of wounds was absolutely unheard of at the time. That all of this happens in the name of national survival does not outweigh the latent scandal of the scene. As we have seen with regard to Esther Hill Hawks, resistance to women doctors ran high during the war, and even during Reconstruction the only known female doctor to receive a contract as an army (assistant) surgeon, “Private Mary Walker,” was denied the public recognition she deserved (Leonard 2006). In

81

Cf. also Ann Douglas (1977: 290).

82

As Douglas has stated in her analysis of the couple’s “parasitic” writer/reader relationship, Beecher “enacted the fantasy with which the male sentimentalists had flirted: exploiting the feminine reader and then excluding her.” This sums up a major aspect of the novel’s construction of gender relations. Ibid. (293).

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1867, in Beecher’s native state, the question of female physicians was especially controversial, since it was here that the famous German immigrant doctor, Marie Zakrzewska, held most of the decision-making power in the New England Hospital.83 Norwood clearly supports Zakrzewska’s belief that women were capable of obtaining “the rational faculties developed through training in the natural sciences,”84 and the novel commits itself to female higher education: Rose obtains a first-class college education under the famous zoologist Louis Agassiz (a figure we will return to later).85 Importantly, however, Norwood insists that such female talent is merely a form of female self-culture and should contribute to the benefit of husband and family alone. Such a withdrawal from the public sphere was in line with the dominant postwar middle-class ideology that “discourage[d] women from remaining in the workforce” to “counter the anxiety of those who feared employment competition” (Schultz, Winter 1992: 147-48).86 While women of Hawks’s caliber would not let themselves be marginalized, her fictional sister readily embraces the concept. What really makes Rose a new type of woman is that, unlike the heroine of sentimental antebellum fiction,87 she enjoys the privilege of living in harmony with a woman’s presumed nature. In accordance with the patriarchal logic of Norwood, it is precisely because of her extraordinary intellectual, artistic, and medical talent, that she actively promotes that she is nothing but a “pale reflection” of her father “who she claims as

83

In the late 1850s and during the Civil War years, Zakrzewska had become known through her lectures on women and medicine in which she claimed that female physicians did not practice medicine any differently from men and should thus be allowed to direct hospitals as well. Cf. Arleen Marcia Tuchman, Marie Zakrzewska, M.D. (2006: esp. chapter 8, 15676).

84

Tuchman, blurb on the back of the book.

85

While Rose’s elite training is uncharacteristic for women in her era, a college education for women was not unusual during the postwar period, and it was no longer seen as fundamentally altering a woman’s God-given role in life. Cf. Stevenson, The Victorian Homefront (1991: 122).

86

Schultz also points out that “the experience gained by women confident enough to write about their war service did not necessarily translate into workplace achievement;” only “few former relief workers sought training as nurses or physicians in the postwar period.” (ibid.). This was even true regarding “celebrants of female relief work”: most of them “insisted that after four years of intensive labor, women anonymously resumed the rhythms of domestic life” (ibid.).

87

As Henry Nash Smith points out, Norwood “presents Rose’s childhood not as a series of hardships and emotional crises but as a harmonious unfolding of faculties in the most favorable surroundings. She is not an orphan; she is not subjected to persecution; and she has no unruly passions to be subdued” (Sept., 1974: 62).

 




 

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‘[her] instructor in all [her] philosophy” (205). Rose comes to the full bloom that her name implies after the narrative has repudiated all possible allusions to a feminist logic of female independence: when she eventually marries Barton, she happily announces that from now on she will be “a naiad to every rill in your soul; and if your heart were deep as the ocean, I will be the sea-nymph, and gather white corals from the very depths, and bring out hidden treasures from its caves!” (542). I have discussed this scene at such length to maintain that for all its conservatism, the novel’s concept of gender relations is radically different from the antebellum model. In the postbellum national household the historicity of identity is recognized and celebrated as a major aspect of the nation’s cultural memory. Rose is not a selfdisciplining sentimental heroine but a self-reliant, intellectual woman who used to be an army surgeon. And Barton is a natural leader who has overcome the status of “patient”—a category that goes beyond its medical aspect and includes his mental oneness with the world). When these two finally marry, they reestablish Victorian gender relations but with qualification: they both have a history that qualifies them for that marriage—and for starting a new family/nation. However, the novel most emphasizes Rose’s youth and adolescence. A motherless child herself, she figures as the inspiring “mother” of an equally young, postbellum nation. As a literary convention, the adolescent girl has far greater liberties than a grown woman and makes extensive use of that opportunity. Yet contrary to the antebellum tradition, Rose even transgresses into a clear leadership role: in the first part of the book after a conversation with the all-knowing Rose, the village artist, a German immigrant named Frank Esel insists that he is “the girl and she the man” (197). Importantly, however, such reversals are only temporary, lasting only as long as they secure male hegemony. Even a naïve German named “Esel” is eventually remasculinized through the inspiration he derived from Rose’s reading of “God’s Book” (200). When Esel fills his easel with the form and color of America’s “domestic” nature, his initiation into America comes to a close: Nature rises before me in new aspects—it has a unity, a meaning, a fruitfulness of sentiment that I never dreamed of. Does she sharpen my wits? Or is it that she suggests new ideas? I don’t know, probably both. She knows every plant that grows in this region in the same easy and natural way that she knows all her neighbors. She can tell me the floral calendar of every month. She knows the structure of plants,—vegetable physiology, of course; but, in her way of conceiving things, plants have a domestic life,—and I find myself, insensibly, under her influence […]. (199-200)

By introducing a neo-Victorian concept of woman as muse, Norwood adapts the woman-as-moral-instance motif to the modern era. The men of that generation do not seriously challenge their fathers’ age group, but they openly acknowledge the contribution of women to their individual identities and to the nation’s identity. Yet while

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they represent an age group that was significantly younger than Bennitt, they are far more conservative than that old-fashioned Victorian: any concept of women’s active involvement in public life is washed away with the metaphorical rain that “poured abundantly” when Barton and Rose openly acknowledge their mutual love (499). Henry Nash Smith rightfully compares the novel’s obsession with balance to “the general complacency of public discourse in the North after Appomattox” (Sept., 1974). What he overlooks, however, is the underlying warning and moral threat that lurk beneath the meditative calm of the fictional village. Rose figures as an alternative to a path that many women of the era had already taken or were about to enter. Embodying the promise of female self-fulfillment, she is set against a sentimental version of female independence that entails not only moral death but also the loss of citizenship. It is this dual construction that we now turn to. In a chapter significantly titled “Lights and Shadows,” Barton’s little sister Alice is the opposite not only of her “free, frank, strong, and loving” friend Rose (ibid.) but also of the village community’s self-image. When her mother Rachel gazes upon baby Alice, she fears that inborn deficiencies might lead her astray: Is this child [is] like a dyer’s thread, whose colors, differently measured and laid in, shall in weaving form a prearranged figure? And what is the pattern? […] And what will be the weaving? […] Can one not hinder it? Or help it? Must it be? […] Must I let her go, as one would cut loose a skiff, and let it drift out into the wide ocean? It may founder or strand upon a desolate island, or monsters may seize it, or rough men, seeing it helpless on the sea, snatch up its little voyager into some ship of foreign tongue, on rude and dangerous voyages! (103-104)

Alice being a weak unimaginative child, her doom is aligned with a Spencerian adaptation of Darwin’s model of natural selection.88 When her education, too, proves inefficient, her destiny is sealed. Unlike Rose who had the privilege of a superior teacher (Doctor Wentworth), Alice’s father, Abiah Cathcart, turns out to be a solid yet uninspired reader who does not know how to make letters come to life. (That he was initially introduced as an ideal reader is one of the many logical inconsistencies

88

Beecher was evidently fascinated with Darwin’s Evolution of Species (1859) but even more with Herbert Spencer’s social theory. He confided to an unidentified friend in May 1867 that he was “entirely confident that the truths of the New Testament are perfectly at one with the truth of nature” and that they “will never collide in any such sense as to be interchangeably destructive.” Letter dated May 8, 1867. I am quoting from C. E. Clark (1978: 261). According to the novel itself, Doctor Wentworth incarnates this harmonious worldview when he combines his love of nature and chemistry with the task of being “everybody’s servant” (27).

 




 

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in the novel). A conversation between Alice and Rose addresses this difficulty: “Alice, you must make your father tell you stories.” “He does, sometimes, but they are always out of books, and almost always Bible stories, and I know them by heart already” (110). How this lack of imaginative power is connected to Alice’s tragic fate is never explained. What becomes clear, however, is that she has an “unhealthy” tendency toward extremes. Always on the wrong side of history, Alice falls in love with the Confederate Tom Heywood, who dies on the battlefield. She then embarks on that “rude and dangerous voyage” that her mother foresaw and ends up in the South, where she becomes a “school-ma’am” of the recently freed slaves and is never heard of again. Thrown “upon a desolate island,” full of monsters” and “rough men” who speak a “foreign tongue,” she is, on a symbolic level, lost to the future nation. Cast as a martyr rather than a “fallen woman,” Alice suffers a fate that borders on divine punishment. As Alice transgresses sectional, racial, and gender borders, her story delivers a narrative subtext of female disobedience, rape, and “miscegenation.” If her attraction to a Southerner forebodes tragedy, her teaching of freed slaves turns her into an other vis-à-vis the ideology and lifestyle of Norwood. As the tragedy around Alice exemplifies, race relations are an issue in Norwood although there is more concern regarding gender. In fact, throughout the novel, African Americans appear in direct relation to questions of white, female self-reliance and democratic participation. Unlike Bennitt, whose encounter with a white, female teacher of the freedmen encouraged his support for white women’s role in shaping an interracial society, Beecher seems to have been horrified by precisely this occupational venue. Rose, of course, immediately recognizes that teaching contradicts a woman’s nature: At one time she was seriously bent upon leaving home and seeking a place in the South or West as a teacher, and desisted from the purpose only on seeing how much pain it would give her parents. She also revolved plans on teaching at or near home, but found that she would do it only by dispossessing others who depended on teaching for their bread. (432)

Interestingly, however, the novel distinguishes between antebellum and postbellum teaching. In an episode set before the war, teaching is (condescendingly) considered an exclusively female occupation (this is Dr. Wentworth’s wise uncle speaking): “A man should never be a schoolmaster. That’s a woman’s business. Be a professor or nothing!” (26) By aligning the figure of the schoolmarm with Southern Blacks, Norwood takes a critical stance on that increasingly mobile generation of young, white, middle-class women who instead of marrying embarked on missions of social and educational “uplift” (cf. Blum 2005: 174-243; Floyd et al. 2010). Thus, the representation of African Americans as an underdeveloped, instinctive, intemperate race appears to be directly linked to the postwar gender crisis.

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It is all the more surprising, then, that the village’s one black inhabitant, Pete Sawmill, is an established member of the Norwood family and “was to live with Barton Cathcart for life” (544). Norwood, in other words, explicitly distances itself from colonization, a concept that had many followers throughout Reconstruction. What, then, is the part that “the negro” played in the social figuration of the ideal village/nation?


   





When Beecher wrote his novel he might very well have had a stage version of it in mind. Like his sister Harriet, he relied on blackface minstrelsy for comic effect. Combining a broad range of minstrel attributes, Pete is an excessively “visible” character who “tumble[s] over and over,” “roll[s] on the ground as an extremely merry and jolly dog,” and makes “two or three jumps which a deer might envy” (524). When he saves Barton’s life toward the end of the novel, he is rewarded with “a brand-new suit of broadcloth” decorated with “a red cord sewed the whole length of the side seams of his pantaloons,” complete with “military buttons on his coat and vest” (544).89 Augustin Daly, who in 1867 was at the beginning of his career as a playwright and theater manager, immediately jumped at the bait and staged the novel as an “Ethiopian” burlesque (Stokes 2015: 3).90 In keeping with his increasingly unashamed embrace of mass culture, the minister allegedly found “nothing objectionable about it whatever” after having it “read ‘very carefully’ to him.”91 He was careful enough, however, not to visit the play. Less sympathetic observers relied on the Pete character to ridicule its maker. In his 1868 satirical stage version, “Gnaw-Wood,” playwright Daniel Ottolengui, a native of Charleston and the son of a slave owner,92

89

He is a mixture between a self-sacrificial and slavish “Uncle Tom,” a “Gumbo Chaff” frontier character, a sinister “Rufus” type, and a with traits of the carefree, Jim Crow slave figure.

90

About the theatrical performances based on the book, see Stokes, The Art and Craft (2015: 3). This bibliographical information refers to a manuscript version of Stokes’s essay that is about to appear in the Journal of Hate Studies, published by Gonzaga UP, presumably in 2017-18. The guest-editor is Rebecca Barrett-Fox. I thank Sally Stokes for providing me with this recent information.

91

Quoted from Joseph Howard’s biography, The Life of Henry Ward Beecher (1887) in Marvin Felheim, “Two Views of the Stage; Or, the Theory and Practice of Henry Ward Beecher” (September 1952: 324).

92

According to Stokes, the Ottolengui family belonged to the first families of Charleston’s Sephardic Jewish community.

 




 

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reveled in the chance to join like-minded New York wits in jeering at Henry Ward Beecher’s ineffectual efforts as a novelist, and in unmasking Beecher as a hypocrite, for it could not have escaped Ottolengui’s notice that Beecher had cast Pete Sawmill in the mold of the bumbling, grinning negro (ibid. 12-13).

While it is certainly right that “Beecher was the most valuable soporific to Northern consciences that Southern apologists for slavery could have asked for” (McLoughlin 1970: 199), a close analysis of Pete Sawmill shows that this character has a far more crucial function within the narrative than comic relief. He appears as a somewhat contradictory mixture between child and monster—a man who both endangers the social fabric of Norwood (a “saw” in the “wood”) and serves it well (“mill”). Both parts of his personality are represented in blatantly racist terms. A “huge fellow, black as night” with gigantic hands and feet (84) and “a heart as big as an ox,” (544) he “giggles” and “gurgles” whenever he appears in the text. His inborn limits are intellectual as well as moral—he is a “half-wit” (78) whose “head don’t run on books” and who does not “know his letters” (84), “has no ideas,” “can hardly speak intelligibly,” (87) and clings to “his besetting sin,” intemperance (544). What makes matters worse is that Norwood authorizes its representation through the scientific racism of the day. This was not new, of course, but it was fueled by at least two historical events. First of all, it had become more difficult than ever to continue justifying the exclusion of African Americans from full citizenship after thousands of them had volunteered to fight for the Union army. As Ira Berlin has pointed out, “the prospect of arming slaves or even free blacks raised fundamental questions about the place of black people in American society, questions that went far beyond the immediate demands of the war” (Berlin, Reidy, and Rowland 1998: 7). The larger part of the white population chose to ignore the Black contribution to the war as soon as it was over. African Americans and their white supporters, however, referred to Black enlistment as a major argument in postbellum debates about black citizenship: enlistment “not only strengthened the bondsman’s claim to freedom; it also enhanced the freeman’s claim to equality” (ibid.: 22). Taking up an argument that had been around during the war, when blacks first enlisted, Norwood argues that Pete “had no conception of the construction of the army, nor is it probable that he could have been made to understand strategy, or tactics, in any proper and scientific way of stating them” (475). Norwood, in other words, replaces African- American heroism with the awkward image of a self-denying and devoted, stereotypical house-slave: “he almost lost sense of his own peril in his anxiety for his master” (503). The second historical event that plays into the representation of Pete is the mass anthropological examinations of corpses and skulls of fallen black soldiers that took place during and after the war and that were used to rationalize political exclusion and social marginalization

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on the grounds of “racial inferiority” (cf. Haller 1971: 21-29).93 The mentioning of Agassiz, who originally believed in the common origin of human races but changed his mind after he had met American slaves, points in the same direction: the zoologist developed a racial classification system that was highly influential in the American South because it helped legitimize slavery.94 The novel also relies on a then standard text for proponents of racial segregation, James Hunt’s 1864 essay, “The Negro’s Place in Nature.”95 A core “finding” of these two proponents of polygenesis (Agassiz and Hunt) was their position that black people were intellectually incapable of obtaining an education. A fictional embodiment of this theory, Pete remains on the level of a child, even under the care of white benevolence (cf. e.g. Hunt 1864: 8). Surprisingly, however, he possesses qualities that are absolutely crucial for the new nation’s short-term and long-term survival. Pete saves both Tom’s and Barton’s life, and he is Rose’s most important teacher. The imaginary village, in other words, would not have survived the war and would not thrive in the way it does if it had not been for the African-American “half-wit.” The “valuable” aspects of his character are, of course, as racist as the traits pointed out earlier. Echoing the self-sacrificial attitude and slavish attachment of an “Uncle Tom,” Pete helps the wounded “gin’ral,” Barton, escape from Confederate imprisonment and carries him over the raging waters of a wild river. Reminiscent of an animal mother rather than a man, Pete is driven by “an instinct derived from his pre-existent state”: remembering “that animals carry their young in their mouths,” he lifts an unconscious Barton “off the ground with his teeth” and carries him safely across the water (511). Driven by instinct, not courage, this animalistic creature arrives at Norwood with the “gurgles and laughing” of a witless child. He cannot even tell his story but instead “began to move his hands in the air, as if he was taking up a child, or patting and playing with some invisible dog.” Tommy Taft’s down-to-earth wife Agate grants him a maximum of recognition: “Why, you poor old soul, […] we are all as glad to see you, Pete, as if you belonged to us”. Although he is proud to be “a free nigger” (504), Pete immediately embraces this crude notion of “belonging” and defines himself as a voluntary slave: “He,he,he! I guess I do. I don’t b’long to nobody else, except the gin’ral” (472). Taking “good care of his own person” (503) but functioning as “a perfect machine” (83) under white supervision, Pete is a fictional declaration of war against the

93

I will say more about these autopsies in the last chapter of this project.

94

Agassiz was also a strict opponent of miscegenation and a precursor of South African apartheid theorists. For a critical account, see e.g. Hans Fässler, Reise in Schwarz-Weiss (2005: 145-53).

95

As J. H. van Evrie’s foreword to this publication put it in February 1864, a denial of Hunt’s ideas would “reverse the natural order, and […] reform the work of the Almighty.” Cf. “Introduction,” The Negro’s Place in Nature (1864: 4).

 




 

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light-skinned, highly educated, and refined African Americans who peopled the radical abolitionist novels of the early Reconstruction era.96 Why, then, doesn’t Norwood promote colonization, a solution to the “negro problem” that was very much en vogue at the time? McLoughlin has argued that “Beecher was so convinced that the AngloSaxon could, in the free climate of American democracy, compete and win against any race, that he saw no reason to exclude any group […]” (1970: 237).97 What about the statement, then, that a man like Pete is welcome to live close by but destined to stay separate—to “live, as marmots do, by burrowing, in the neighborhood of men, without living among them” (83)? While Norwood insists that he is “one of those peculiar natures that can never be organized into society,” Pete’s function in the novel outruns the comic effects of minstrelsy, and he is not only “the perfect foil for the hero and heroine” (ibid.: 228): he is, rather, an intrinsic part of Beecher’s postbellum social philosophy that was—at least rhetorically—remarkably more sympathetic to slavery than it had been before the war. Only through the black man can the village live up to its full capacities. Pete is, so to speak, the motor of its spiritual center, Rose. As Rose’s primary teacher he in fact figures more prominently than Agassiz, whose theories shield Rose from the “black contamination” (that Louisa May Alcott flirts with so openly). Contrary to McLoughlin, who has argued that “Beecher was not one of those who feared the mongrelization of the races” (ibid.: 194), this chapter suggests that at least in Norwood the minister took particular care to prevent even the slightest allusion to what was known as “miscegenation.” Pete is explicitly not cast as a man but figures as a mother-substitute to the motherless Rose; like a stereotypical tamed bear, he carried her on his enormous shoulders when she was a little girl and taught her about nature. Aware of the risk that inheres in the figures of the black guardian and the substitute mother, Beecher lets Rose’s father, Doctor Wentworth, point out

96

The most popular of these novels was A. E. Dickinson’s What Answer? (1869). This bestseller can be read as a reply to Norwood and an effort to remind abolitionists that their battle was not over yet. Read in conjunction, the two novels represent the two gendered views that dominated the public debate during Reconstruction, particularly in the South. While many male former abolitionists supported a free-labor ideology that stigmatized economically unsuccessful freedmen as innately dependent and therefore ineligible for citizenship, abolitionist-feminists, “[b]ecause of their own experience as women, […] interpreted freedpeople’s poverty and dependence as a result of specific historical circumstances, rather than as an innate racial characteristic.” Faulkner (2004: 7). Faulkner here reminds us of an important branch of the postwar women’s movement that did not support the racist rhetoric of NWSA (National Woman Suffrage Association, founded in 1869) leaders.

97

He speaks about “undesirable” immigrants here, but the remark implies African Americans as well.

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that “the contents” of the book of nature “do not depend for their value on the person who opens and shows them.” Pete, he argues, “is strangely alive to the facts of nature, and he will show Rose more things in natural history than any person in this town.” Ironically, however, it is precisely this talent that disqualifies him for a place in society (87). Pete is more quick to discern, and far more in sympathy with, the instincts and habits of animals than wiser men are. There is a political economy of the woods and fields, as well as of cities and towns—an animal economy as well as a civic economy. Men utterly devoid of the knowledge of property, production, wages, rents or values of any kind, have a clear insight of squirrels, foxes, marmots, fish, and birds, in all their variety. (89)

The figure of the black primitive links white civilization to its theoretical opposite, nature, and thereby secures the latter as a site of spiritual renewal. The “black savage’s” metaphorical touch enables the white girl to fulfill her ideal function as muse, while he serves as a human filter that shields her (and white society in general) from the evil influences of the wilderness. Her connection to nature, in other words, is morally pure, and therefore far superior to his. Reminiscent of Bennitt’s disgust vis-à-vis the soldiers’ misbehavior, Beecher’s model of society is driven by a particularly male fear of moral contamination. Yet Norwood proves to be by far more inflexible when it comes to race relations. Under the pretext that African Americans constitute the link between nature and culture, those same Americans are permanently excluded from the educational ideal that pervades Norwood. So it is that the white Northern schoolmarm, Alice, is condemned with particular harshness: by “uplifting” the freedmen she threatens to destroy the very basis of the Second Founding. According to the novel’s racist ideology, her endeavor is aborted long before it has even started. Even Pete, a free African American from the North who represents the elite among “his own people,” has proved unable to rise above the level of “half wit.” If African Americans from the North are represented as a “tamed” species, Southern freedmen are cast as the nation’s greatest enemy. Anticipating the notorious black characters in Thomas Dixon’s novels, a freed slave is programmatically placed “at a little distance” from the celebrating Norwoodites, “grinning and looking at Rose in the most extraordinary manner” (466). Fortunately for the heroine, however, he is placed behind a fence that shields her from his aggressive sexuality and metaphorically marks his status as “cattle.” By evoking the imagery of slavery, Norwood signals its author’s sympathetic relations with the former Confederacy and puts an end to speculations regarding Beecher’s views of race. The metaphor of the fence suggests segregation and surveillance of the black man as a solution to the “negro problem.” This “solution” was a clear stance against Radical Republicans who demanded the full equality of the freed slaves, including the rights to vote, hold office, own land, and enter into contracts. Coming out

 




 

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in 1867, Norwood supports President Johnson, who had been a slave owner before the war and whose veto of the second Freedman’s Bureau bill had just been passed over by the new Congress, making way for the Fourteenth Amendment.98 And yet the novel’s position differs from Johnson’s because it insists that the country’s black population needs some support by well-meaning whites. The Norwoodian alternative to the plantation household is, significantly, not a freedmen’s school but a Quaker farm that belongs to the Hetherington family. A tribute to one of the most famous chapters in Uncle Tom’s Cabin (“The Quaker Settlement”), Beecher’s “The Quaker Home” secures the material survival of hard-working freedpeople without promoting a culture of discipline and rigor that was so very much against Doctor Wentworth’s doctrine.99 Supervised by a handful of patient idealists, and under the lead of their “elite” Northern brother (Pete), the novel’s African-American community is a postbellum remake of a stereotypical plantation community complete with a black overseer. Posed as an intervention in the early Reconstruction debate on race, Norwood suggests a compromise between the absoluteness of Radical Reconstructionists and Johnson’s laissez-faire policy. Instead of arguing that the freedmen were entitled to support from a state that Beecher considered paternalistic, the novel treats freedmen as the responsibility of their Northern brothers. If this vision sounds highly implausible and vague, it must nevertheless be viewed as a crucial effort to define “the negro’s” place within the nation; Norwood does not even mention colonization as an option. African Americans played a prominent role in Beecher’s model of an ideal, inclusive nation.100 As Susan-Mary Grant points out in her discussion of DeForest’s Miss Ravenel’s Conversion, early Reconstruction novels tended to merge what seems best in both cultures to construct a better national whole. In Norwood this intercultural conversation is aimed at a joint embrace of precisely that lifestyle that the reading farmer suggested early in the novel. When Barton and his Southern cousin Tom discuss the meaning of leisure in both cultures, they

98

The Fourteenth Amendment is the law that guaranteed equal protection and due process of law to African-Americans. Johnson openly encouraged the states of the former Confederacy not to sign it. According to the President, it was “a bill of attainder against nine million people at once” and reduced the former Confederacy to “the most abject and degrading slavery.” Quoted in Douglas O. Linder, “Andrew Johnson’s Impeachment Trial,” The Civil War (2003: 168).

99

As Lemeunier puts it, “[d]iscipline et rigueur ne sont plus proposées comme modèles” by Doctor Wentworth. “L’Etique Du Loisir” (1989: 118).

100 This was, of course, a very Northern concept of inclusion, since “Northern values” clearly triumph over Southern “aristocratic” ideals here. For a discussion of this hierarchy, cf. Susan-Mary Grant, North Over South (2000).

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arrive at the conclusion that—while Southerners should learn from the frugal New Englanders—Northerners should treasure their free time to further refine the national ideal of individual freedom, which the preface described as the core of American democracy. To put it simply, America’s future lies in a white leisure class that knows how to manage time effectively. African Americans play two important parts in this scenario: first, their lack of control is a constant warning against a wrong understanding of leisure. Pete Sawmill, for example, is intemperate to the degree that he “seemed to have forgot every thing and every body” (516-517). And second, the AfricanAmerican workforce, which is safeguarded in the seclusion of a Quaker farm, ensures the survival of the entire country. Norwood’s catering to the plantation ideal, then, is more than a gesture of solidarity toward white Southerners: the home of Northerners and Southerners, Whites and African Americans, liberal Protestants and idealistic Quakers, the celestial New England village promotes a fixed social hierarchy with an African-American workforce at the bottom. “Wooden” and constrained as this novel is, Norwood’s ideology of race relations is absolutely stringent from the beginning. The huge “mansion” that appears at the outset takes the place of the plantation home, Doctor Wentworth figures as a paternalistic version of the slave owner, and his daughter Rose finds her southern equivalent in the slave master’s angelic daughter, Little Eva. Rose’s Uncle Tom (Pete) is a stereotypical house-slave who “good-naturedly, and as a matter indisputable, […] did as he was ordered” (128). Naturally devoted to the white “masters” from the North, Beecher’s Reconstruction “negroes” forget about their contribution to the war effort and happily resume their previous role under a more benevolent leadership.101


   
If for Bennitt writing home had been a remedy for male suffering at the front, reading at home was the postwar continuation of the cure in Beecher’s only novel, Norwood. America’s most famous minister at the time believed not only in the Bible but also in the transformative power of the written word in general. The controversies that had evolved around his contradictory political opinions, however, had also made him aware of the pitfalls of language. His novel, then, was a unique opportunity to explain

101 It is interesting to see how during and after the war the Southern plantation home spurred the fantasies of the North. Daniel Holt, one of the Civil War surgeons whom I mentioned in my chapter on Bennitt, has a rather different vision than Beecher when he imagines that the “baronial estates and mansions will become town halls and seats of villages in which true lessons of life will daily develop the growth and power of Northern freemen.” Holt (1994: 172).

 




 

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his views with all its nuances, and he worked to control its effect on the reader. Critical nineteenth-century reactions show that he was not entirely successful in achieving that control. And yet the debate that surrounded Norwood, and the lasting popularity of the novel, suggest that Norwood was by far more influential and “wholesome” than the satirical title “Gnaw Wood” suggests. By suggesting an absolute, metaphysical order based on an invented past that, as Joseph S. Wood remarks, “had never existed,”102 Norwood emerges as a textual oasis where the religious doubt and desperation of postwar survivors were part of a larger recreational—that is, reconstructive—experience. By focusing on Barton’s battle against theological skepticism, Beecher implicitly relegates war-related suffering and religious doubt to the category of adolescent crisis. Through a strange shifting of time-levels and an understanding of history as myth, the collective trauma of the Civil War years is individualized and cast as a step in a natural coming-of-age process. The novel links an optimistic concept of healthy attitudes with antebellum, genteel nostalgia. Unfolding before the backdrop of a wounded postwar nation, this agreeable mixture is presented as a very material “remedy” to cure both the individual who wishes (but fails) to forget and a society that struggles to live according to the rules of pious consumption. In a somewhat circular argument, the novel promises elite status to those who acquire genteel knowledge and arrange this knowledge according to mid-Victorian norms and values. Limited to those who define these norms in the first place, this precludes social mobility and defines the paternalistic status quo. Cast as a thoroughly natural human figuration, this ideal postwar society is based on a culture of combined self-improvement and relaxation (cf. Moore 1994: 5) that does not replace the Bible as society’s central anchor but cultivates a liberal Protestant stance toward it. The novel, then, becomes a sort of “key” to the Holy Scriptures: Norwood is cast as a showcase example for the presence of the Divine in all creation, including books that “breathe” religious fervor. Conceptualized as a fundamentally Christian, textual “mind cure,” Norwood is cast as a consumer-friendly exercise in reading-as-healing and enables an authentic, individual access to the Almighty. By shifting the focus from preaching to healing, and from religious dogma to leisurely choice and joyful interpretation, Norwood locates God not only in nature but in popular literature as well. In the novel the postbellum world of consumerism becomes the enabling structure for a return to antebellum, genteel values in a modern guise. By the end of a weekend in the harmonious village of words, the ideal reader-visitor emerges as a citizen of a

102 The sentence from which Wood’s quotation is taken is also illuminating. He writes that Beecher (like other authors of his generation) transposed the nineteenth-century center village “with a colonial instrument of land division and orderly settlement, inventing a past that had never existed.” Joseph S. Wood (March 1991: 37).

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nation whose conservative values rely on the consent of the governed. In achieving this effect the story itself fulfils its exemplary function. The protagonists’ individual pursuits of happiness (after all everybody in Norwood is seeking for the one place in society that fulfills their “natural” needs) are intrinsically linked to their intuitive acceptance of their “natural” limits. Women especially, who had tested the traditional limits of their role as “domestic angel” during the war, are instructed in “knowing their place.” To convince his large following of women, Beecher consolidated feminist impulses by acknowledging women’s moral authority and intellectual capacities in an unusually celebratory tone. Those who after the war continued on that path toward female independence, however, are cast as a menace to the new social order. By creating a neo-Victorian type of woman that translates antebellum female selfeffacement and self-restraint into an all-accepting idea of love, Norwood also brings the idea of “nurse” back to the home. Rose, a postbellum version of the Victorian “domestic angel,” is a self-reliant woman with a superior sense of intuition and spirituality. As a natural healer, whose work anticipates the central role of women in New Thought,103 she transfers the liberal Protestant “Gospel of Love” into the secular realm of her immediate surroundings. Devoid of the Puritan gloominess that Beecher fought against as a minister, this celebration of “woman’s” role in spreading religiously tinged ideas of community, society, and divinity signals an enormous social fear on the side of white, middle-class men. In her function of muse to crisis-ridden young men, the intellectual, postbellum woman helps appropriate Victorian gender relations for the Reconstruction era and becomes a veritable midwife to the country’s renewed relationship to God, science, and its racial others. The novel’s extremely racist representation of African Americans, in other words, is inextricably linked to a deep suspicion about the changed gender roles that had evolved during the war. To justify women’s relegation to the domestic sphere, Norwood represents black men as hypersexual, thereby actively contributing to the establishment of a racist formula that would become notorious toward the end of the century in what Gabriele Dietze has called the “rape-lynching complex” (cf. 2013).104 At the same time, the novel establishes a mutual, albeit hierarchical, dependency between African-American men and white women. This interdependency explains the suspicious absence of African-American women through the five-hundred pages of the text: their presence would have posed a conceptual problem with regard to an evolutionist scenario that demanded the African-American man’s unchallenged devotion to white women. Black men, however, are an indispensable part of Beecher’s imaginary America. Relegated to second-class citizenship, they are indispensable for securing American progress and effecting a successful sectional reconciliation

103 Cf. “Female Manhood,” in Parker, Mind Cure (1973: 81 ff.). 104 Cf. also James Allen, Without Sanctuary (2000).

 




 

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among whites; colonization is not an option. Walt Whitman also rejected colonization, but he believed neither in smooth solutions nor in textual magic. He chose to struggle instead, and spent his entire life doing so. That struggle is the topic of the following chapter.








 
  
 




  

 



  
Contrary to what the highly popular, personal narratives by female Civil War nurses suggest, the overwhelming majority of those who cared for the wounded were men; statistical sources speak about a ratio of 5:1.1 The most famous male nurse of the era, Walt Whitman, was thus an exception only in so far as most male nurses were younger men who served in the army. In 1861, Whitman was already forty-two years old, and unlike his co-workers he was not formally associated with the United States Sanitary or Christian Commissions. He was also merely a “bedside attendant” who, by his own admission, “benefited the bedridden by his presence and ‘soothing hand’” (Aspiz 1998).2 Officials from the United States Sanitary Commission disliked “his informal status, his unconventional religious beliefs, and his unpredictable habit of coming and going as he saw fit” (Morris 2000: 6). Whitman ignored such complaints; for him the hospital was, first and foremost, a space to adopt a new role as the nation’s “nursing father” (Chase 1957: 130). Moving among the (often fatally) wounded, the man who “had had Emerson’s praise, but [who…] had not had a chance to develop a public role” became the “public man” he had always wanted to be (Anderson 1971: 13).3 Starting with a couple of articles about his hospital impressions, he fashioned himself as the nation’s wound-dresser, and found words that made mass suffering 1

The scholarly research on female nurses has added to this impression. Scholars of nursing history tend to work on Union volunteers, most—yet not all—of whom were women. The situation in the South was quite different: there, thirty men per unit were responsible for the medical care of the wounded. See Freemon (1998: 54-60).

2

He quotes Whitman here.

3

Regarding Whitman’s aspirations to become “a beloved national poet,” cf. also Betsy Erkkila, et al., “Whitman’s Calling as a National Poet,” “Whitman’s Vision of America and Poetry” and “National Unity”, The National Poet. Regarding Whitman’s literary admirers, cf. Richard Chase (1955: 131).

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and death meaningful.4 Without losing what Gregory Eiselein has termed the “humanitarian sensibility sympathetically responsive to the suffering of others” (1996: 118),5 Whitman exercised what Quentin Anderson refers to as the poet’s “imaginative desocialization” (1971: 4):6 in Whitman’s writing, particularly after the armed conflict was over, the Civil War hospital became an extra-societal space where he tested his earlier ideals of universality and of incorporation into a larger national whole. His experiences among strangers were thus interpreted as an experiment in democracy. How he conducted this experiment is the topic of this chapter. First, however, some background information on the author and his postbellum endeavor shall be provided. Whitman referred to Reconstruction as the most political phase of his lifetime. Even after the end of “official Reconstruction” he saw himself sowing seeds of “endless Nationality” (LoG 1881/2).7 A focus on Whitman’s political musings is, of course, not entirely new. Betsy Erkkila finds Whitman to be at his “best and most interesting” not “as a personal” but rather “as a political poet” (1996: 7). Scholars such as Robert Leigh Davis, James Dougherty, and Gregory Eiselein have further explored the poet’s and writer’s “political project”, particularly in works such as “Drum Taps” and Memoranda During the War. What is still lacking, however, is a systematic, chronological investigation of Whitman’s Reconstruction project, a project that, as this chapter argues, was anchored in the paradigm of healing. Before unfolding this chronology, the following pages will briefly highlight the roots of Whitman’s paradigmatic turn to the hospital.

4

The first article, “The Great Army of the Sick,” features the sad story of Massachusetts Private John Holmes. It appeared in the Times on February 26 (1863). “In it Whitman gave a good picture of the new pavilion design of hospitals.” Morris (2000: 106). I disagree with Richard Chase, who argues that the poet’s “career of hospital visiting became a substitute for poetry and not an inspiration of it.” Cf. Chase (1955: 136). This does not do justice to the creative input the poet derived from his work in the hospital.

5

Regarding the self-interested tradition of nineteenth-century consolation literature see ibid.: 122-55.

6

His chapters “Consciousness and Form in Whitman” and “The World in the Body” are of particular interest for anyone interested in how the poet imagined the relationship between the self and society.

7

“Thou Mother With Thy Equal Brood,” LoG 1881/2. Cf. Betsy Erkkila, Whitman the Political Poet (1989: 278); and Sherry Ceniza, “Gender,” A Companion to Walt Whitman (2006: in particular 189). In the following I will use abbreviations for Whitman’s works in the main text of this chapter: LoG (Leaves of Grass), Memoranda (Memoranda During the War), SD (Specimen Days & Collect).

   


 

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For the “large gray man who passed through the wards with his knapsack full of candy, oranges, tobacco, writing paper, and stamps” (Chase 1955: 131), the wartime hospital was a place where he could establish a close connection to other human beings and restore his self-esteem. His idea of a metaphorical realm of unconditional love and servitude goes back to the year before the firing at Fort Sumter, when he routinely visited injured stage drivers in the New York Broadway Hospital. At that time, Whitman published several poems and texts about these visits, thereby overcoming, through his interactions with those patients, his “New York stagnation”8— he had been in a state of depression and mental paralysis after the unfavorable reception of his “Calamus” poems (LoG 1860).9 In his prewar private correspondence Whitman congratulated himself for his “presence & magnetism that which nor doctors nor medicines nor skills nor any routine assistance can give” (qtd. in Miller 1961-77: 159). It was in this mood that he wrote “To One Shortly to Die” (1860), a poem that anticipates his famous poem, “The Dresser” (1865)10 and contains his philosophy of nursing as immediacy and transcendence: Softly I lay my right hand upon you—you just feel it, I do not argue—I bend my head close, and halfenvelop it, I sit quietly by—I remain faithful, I am more than nurse, more than parent or neighbor, I absolve you from all except yourself, spiritual, Bodily—that is eternal […]. (LoG 1860)11

Firmly established before the war, this almost metaphysical patient-nurse relationship differs considerably from the fierce power struggles that preoccupied many female nurses who worked in the overfilled wards of America’s Civil War hospitals. While hospital officials were not enthusiastic about Whitman’s visits, he did not struggle with the same prejudice and obstacles his female colleagues did. The metaphors of standing nurses and reclining patients that abound in women’s nursing narratives is absent in his poetry. Whitman’s neighborly ideal, in other words, was based on an

8

Cf. the title of the respective chapter in Morris (2000: 9-47).

9

Regarding Whitman's emotional state during this time see Morris (2000: 29).

10

In 1865 the poem appeared under the original title, “The Dresser.” It was changed to “The Wound-Dresser” in the reprint of the 5th edition of LoG, in 1876. Regarding the publication history see Aspiz, “Wound-Dresser, The” (1998: 800-01).

11

Cf. Walt Whitman, “To One Shortly to Die” (1860).

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experience that was clearly gendered. Immediately after the outbreak of the war, the New York hospital was “filled with sick soldiers from the volunteer regiments passing through the city on their way to the front,”(Morris 2007: 44) 12 and he simply continued his daily rounds, without feeling the need to challenge the spatial order of “separate spheres” that marked the Victorian era. In the course of the war he expanded his sphere of influence and volunteered as a nurse and “‘consolant’ of the wounded” (Davis, “Civil War Nursing”, 1998) in a dozen or so hospitals in the nation’s capital.13 It was after the war that he became most popular as poetic chronicler of the sectional conflict and its losses and injuries. The poems that he published about this experience are firmly embedded in the larger context of his war-related oeuvre,14 as if to insist that the nurse’s poetic world was not a theoretical (and in many ways timeless) place but steeped in the larger experience of the postwar nation and its inhabitants.15 Aimed at connecting readers to what for him was a personal and collective ur-experience—invigorating, unifying, American—Whitman’s private engagement with the wounded, together with the public debates about the nation, were the very real material his writing thrived on. At the same time, Whitman relied on the hospital as a metaphor for the nation in a state of crisis. In an 1863 letter to Ralph Waldo Emerson he spoke of an “America, already brought to Hospital in her fair youth—brought and deposited here in this great, whitened, sepulchre of Washington itself” (1863).16 In his 1865 poem, “The Dresser,” and in his autobiographical Memoranda (1875) he continues by complaining that “it seem’d sometimes as if the whole interest of the land, North and South, was one vast central hospital, and all the rest of the affair but flanges” (5). To sum up: from the war throughout Reconstruction, Whitman focused on the sickness of the (whole) nation instead of speculating about who would win in the end. He was therefore one of the first to implicitly raise the question of the future of the United States. He who saw democracy as “a way of life and mode of being in the world—not simply a form of governance” (West 1999), believed that looking after and caring for the

12

Many of these men suffered from measles. (ibid.: 44-45).

13

Armory Square, Finley, and Harewood were among those Washington hospitals.

14

Regarding his wartime experiences, cf. John Harmon McElroy, The Sacrificial Years

15

Regarding Whitman’s poetry as a place where “ideal and actuality could meet only in

(1999). theory,” see James L. Machor, “Pastoralism and the American Urban Ideal” (October 1984: 355). 16

The letter is quoted in Katherine Kinney, “Making Capital: War, Labor, and Whitman in Washington, D.C.,” Breaking Bounds (1996: 174).

   


 

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sick and dying was more than an act of individual recognition and representation; it was a political vision against all odds. At the same time, the poet and transcendentalist was convinced that politics in general and democracy in particular had a strong aesthetic dimension; therefore any analysis of his democratic project must pay particular attention to the inseparability of textual content and form. Thus when in 1871 he stated that the most crucial question was not whether to democratize but “how, and in what degree and part, most prudently to democratize” (“Democratic Vistas” 26), he voiced a key concern of his poetic work (Whitman 2010).17 At the same time he committed himself to an openended political experiment. Whitman’s Reconstruction oeuvre fully unfolds when it is recognized as a multigeneric conversation that develops over time. Marked by constant shifting, negotiating, and repositioning, this conversation is not a linear process, however: the poet who time and again revised and restructured his Leaves of Grass wanted readers of his Reconstruction project to follow his textual negotiations and actively participate in the meaning-making process. This was well understood by his nineteenth-century critics: as one unnamed reviewer from the Boston Sunday Herald remarked in 1882, “Whitman himself considered ‘Specimen Days’ as the exponent and finish of his poetic work, ‘Leaves of Grass’; as that each of the two volumes is indispensable, in his view, to the other, and that both together finally begin and illustrate his literary scheme in the new world.”18 For the self-appointed bard who in “Song of Myself” had claimed to “contain multitudes,” Reconstruction was to a considerable degree an individual and collective “mental adaptation” process whose documentation was by necessity aesthetically inconsistent, politically contradictory, and ultimately open-ended.19 If the 1855 speaker of Leaves of Grass had described himself somewhat abstractly as “an American, one of the roughs, a kosmos, disorderly, fleshly, and sensual, no sentimentalist, no stander above men or women or apart from them, no more modest than immodest” (LoG 29), his Reconstruction successor turned to concrete, historical experience as the sole motor of his being. “Those three years in the Civil War hospital,” he writes, were “the greatest privilege and satisfaction [...] the most profound lesson of my life”: they

17

This is the 2010 facsimile edition that is a copy of the 1876 printing of the 1871 original. He significantly skipped the remains of the paragraph in the 1882 edition, so that the sentence—how, and in what degree and part, most prudently to democratize—concludes the paragraph.

18

“Whitman’s New Book,” The Boston Sunday Herald, 15 October (1882: 9). Leaves contains much of his earlier Civil War work, including “Drum Taps.”

19

Whitman had always accepted contradictions as a part of human nature. As he stated in “Song of Myself” (1855): “Do I contradict myself? / Very well then … I contradict myself / (I am large … I contain multitudes.)”

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“arous’d and brought out and decided undream’d-of depths of emotion” (Whitman 1982: 776). This chapter is based on the assumption that the emotional profundity of the event led to a radicalization of Whitman’s democratic thought. Unlike many of his contemporaries, he refused to imagine the political self in purely political and legal categories and emphasized the emotional, spiritual, and even physical component of the democratic enterprise. As Cornel West has rightfully stated, Whitman’s political project was singular because it “took up the exciting yet frightening risk of living, thinking and feeling democratically.” And it was exceptionally radical because with its “deep ontological, existential and social implications,” it risked philosophical failure (1999: 489). This chapter traces this risk-taking endeavor in the context of changing political, legal, social, and cultural constellations. By emphasizing the internal links between his works, the instability of his poetic stance, and the discrepancy between the latter and what Christopher Beach calls the author’s “extrapoetic political beliefs”,20 it carves out what it meant, according to Whitman, to be an American after all that loss and destruction, and what for him was the “glue” to bind the new nation. Whitman imagines this binding along the lines of national healing, and he relies on the hospital, and human relations therein, as gauges of America’s readiness for democracy. And yet he struggled with the metaphor where African Americans were concerned: whether and to what degree the democratic hospital should be open for all Americans was a question that preoccupied his entire Reconstruction project. Rooted in his hospital experience, Whitman’s Reconstruction oeuvre is an expression of an ongoing intellectual, and emotional, crisis, yet it is also geared toward the future and toward creative solutions. This chapter, then, analyzes the relationship between Whitman’s political ideals and his personal ambivalences, and it examines his strategies for solving this contradiction. This analysis starts with the poem “The Dresser,” the critical masterpiece of Whitman’s first “big” wartime project, Drum-Taps (1865).21 “The Dresser” was neither the first nor the only poem about Whitman’s encounters with the wounded.22 Yet

20

As Christopher Beach maintains, “the relationship between poetic stance and extrapoetic political beliefs remains highly problematic in Whitman’s work.” The Politics of Distinction (1996: 60). His poems, Beach argues, “display a degree of ambivalence that at times undercuts the poet’s stated conviction” (ibid.). As we will see, however, his postwar, non-poetic work tends to be laced with ambivalence too, and his stated opinions on political matters are anything but stable.

21

The 1865 version is the one I rely on in this chapter.

22

Cf. e.g. Walt Whitman, “A March in the Ranks Hard-Pressed, and the Road Unknown,” Drum Taps and “A Sight in Camp in the Daybreak Gray and Dim,” Drum Taps (1865).

   


 

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its peculiar position in his war-related oeuvre indicates its central function in his Reconstruction philosophy: as Huck Gutman remarks, “[t]here is general agreement that ‘The Wound-Dresser,’ which Whitman placed at the center of every version of ‘Drum-Taps,’ is the thematic center towards which the sequence moves” (1998). Originally published as part of Drum-Taps, “The Dresser” (as it was titled at the time) reappeared in the extended version, Sequel to Drum-Taps (1865-66).23 In 1872 all forty-three poems of Drum-Taps became part of the fifth edition of Leaves of Grass24 and also of the 1876 Centennial- or author’s edition of the collection. As Luke Mancuso has pointed out, Whitman dispersed the Drum-Taps poems throughout the fifth edition to underscore his “assertion that he owed the existence of Leaves to the creative energy he found in the war itself” (1998). “The Wound Dresser” is not only a part of this project of personal reinvigoration but functions as the benchmark for all human relationships, including interracial ones that Whitman explored in his work. Such interracial constellations form the topic of this chapter’s second analysis, which focuses on what Ed Folsom has called one of Whitman’s “strangest poems” (2000: 53), “Ethiopia Commenting”—a work that is, significantly, not set in a hospital. This poem is intrinsically connected to Democratic Vistas (1871), the author’s famous theoretical essay about democracy. The chapter will then turn to Whitman’s personal reminiscences, Memoranda During the War (1875), and his “life review,” Specimen Days, published in 1882, and discuss them in keeping with the assumption that Whitman’s Reconstruction project was as much about form as content. Both are celebrations of his “hospital days” but are also efforts to imagine a democratic nation in the tradition of Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address of November 1863, which had set the tone for a more hopeful representation of the past as the beginning of a better future.25 First of all, however, Whitman’s vision

23

Drum-Taps was “first published as a separate book of 53 poems in 1865, [and] the second edition of Drum-Taps included eighteen more poems (Sequel to Drum-Taps). Later the book was folded into Leaves of Grass as the sequence “Drum-Taps,” though many individual poems were rearranged and placed in other sections. By the final version (1881), “Drum-Taps” contained only 43 poems, all but five from Drum-Taps and Sequel” (Gutman 1998).

24

I leave out the fourth edition here that came out in 1867 and contained only six new poems. Termed “the most chaotic of all six editions,” the fourth edition has been read as a direct, “ragged” expression of the “social upheaval in the immediate aftermath of the Civil War” (1998).

25

As Wolfgang Hochbruck has pointed out, the Gettysburg Address was central to the postwar memory culture as it was increasingly seen as a re-interpretation of the Declaration of Independence (2011: 158-59 and 206-07).

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of the Second Founding will be placed within the concept of the citizen as helpmate of an ailing nation.


   
  
 
 
On March 4, 1865, Abraham Lincoln had famously concluded his second inaugural address with a plea to his “fellow countrymen” to “bind up the nation’s wounds” and to “achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves, and with all nations.” Whitman, who had once stated that the President was “nearer to [him] than anybody else” (Eiselein 1998), not only mourned the death of his personal leader in “Oh Captain, my Captain” (1865) but readily embraced the role of healer that Lincoln had called for: “Bearing the bandages, water and sponge / Straight and swift to my wounded I go / Where they lie on the ground, after the battle brought in” (“The Dresser”). By foregrounding a “first person lyric voice or persona […] as someone who is not primarily a poet but someone engaged in ordinary labor” (Fontana, Winter 1990: 105), Whitman thus managed to reconstruct his public persona as a fatherly version of the common man. This 1865 poem, in other words, features an ideal American citizen, a well-grounded, modest consoler and potential healer, who sits by the dying but also the survivors—maimed veterans, impoverished widows, and war orphans.26 That Whitman was “creating the illusion that he himself is speaking” is significant in this context: by turning “what we know to be a historical fact” (ibid.: 106) (his visits to the hospital) into a poetic experience, the wound-dresser claims a maximum of authority. Thus, although the speaker’s role of “hypnotist, clairvoyant, prophetic leader, or healer” was already firmly established in Whitman’s earlier poetic repertoire (Mills 2005: 165), the wound-dresser’s unconditional “way of knowing” went beyond earlier efforts of poetic intimacy and laid the foundation for Whitman’s postwar image as “good grey poet.”27

26

According to John E. Alvis, this ideal American citizen was inspired by the notion of Christian brotherhood but without its traditional, moral connotations. “Walt Whitman’s Civil Religion for America,” Challenges to the American Founding (2005: 225). While Whitman’s borrowing from theology is indeed an interesting feature of his postwar oeuvre, it is not central to the philosophical struggle this chapter centers upon.

27

Whitman attained the title in 1866 when his friend William Douglas O’Connor, who published a pamphlet under this title to defend his friend after he had lost his job as a clerk in the Department of the Interior. Cf. Ed Folsom, “The Vistas of Democratic Vistas: An Introduction,” Democratic Vistas (2010: xxii). For a skeptical view of Whitman’s selfpromotion in his wartime poetry and prose see Chase (1955: 130).

   


 

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This authoritative voice must be considered when “The Dresser” exceeds the conventions of consolation poetry by addressing another pressing issue, the responsibility of the witness: Years hence of these scenes, of these furious passions, these chances, Of unsurpass’d heroes, (was one side so brave? the other was equally brave;) Now be witness again, paint the mightiest armies of earth, Of those armies so rapid, so wondrous what saw you to tell us? (“The Dresser”)

Asked while the “dresser” watches over the dying, the question can only be answered by the living. What, then, stays with those who survived the war “latest and deepest” beyond stereotypical memories of “hard-fought engagements or sieges tremendous?” (“The Dresser”). As early as 1865, Whitman envisioned the emerging problems of the country’s public cultural memory. What should postwar Americans make of an experience that had left many of the veterans among them speechless? (As Wolfgang Hochbruck reminds us, the early postwar period was the era of the “memory gap”: diaries were firmly hidden in trunks and offers for publication turned down) (cf. 2011: 154). Yet by addressing the veterans’ trauma (“What stays with you latest and deepest? of curious panics / Of hard-fought engagements or sieges tremendous what deepest / remains?”), the poem does not call for an imaginary unearthing of repressed memories but triggers important questions regarding the future of the nation: What can America learn from survivors apart from their “dreams’ projections / Returning, resuming,” which threaten to undermine the nation’s healing process? Who is authorized to represent the past, and how? How could those “maidens and young men” of coming generations whom “The Dresser” addresses stop the musealization of the past and “bandage” (a term repeatedly used in the poem) the fragments of the ailing nation? This catalogue may be extended to include questions about the collective “we” that the President had so confidently evoked. Shouldn’t it also include former slaves, who according to Lincoln’s second inaugural address had been “somehow, the cause of the war?” What about the black soldiers? Refusing to answer any of the questions it provokes, “The Dresser” relegates the issues it raises to the reader, but also to the future work of the poet. Choosing different genres and perspectives, Whitman spent the following two decades asking these questions again and again, providing only preliminary answers.

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With its catalogue-like and open-ended structure, “The Dresser” aims to create what has been termed a “usable past.”28 By acknowledging the trauma of the war generation, the poem shows a way out of societal paralysis and denial.29 It creates a meaningful connection between past and present through an established, sentimental image and narrative formula: An old man bending, I come, among new faces Years looking backward, resuming, in answer to children, Come tell us old man, as from young men and maidens that love me; Years hence of these scenes, of these furious passions, These chances, Or unsurpass’d heroes, (was one side so brave? the other was equally brave;) (“The Dresser”)

The poem then takes a remarkably early and explicit stand against the culture of the “memory gap.” A lesson in compassion, self-sacrifice, and discipline, it turns against what would later be called the “gilded age”:30 unlike the world of “gain and appearance and mirth,” the imaginary tour through the hospital is an excessively “real” and (almost) metaphysical experience. An alternative Charon “with hinged knees,” the speaker/protagonist moves from “crushed” head to (scattered) foot, thereby leading his young listeners (and the reader) across the great temporal divide to the “sweet and sad” underside of battlefield heroism (all quotes from “The Dresser”). Here, in the extra-societal space of the wartime hospital,31 disillusionment and hope exist side by side; and, as will be explained in more detail at various points in this chapter, they become key experiences in the process of reading.

28

The term was coined by Van Wyck Brooks, “On Creating a Usable Past,” The Dial (11. April 1918).

29

As Aspiz has put it, “The Dresser” is “committed to performing his nation’s grief work; in his consciousness (as in the poet’s) a tragic past is projected as a dream-like continuous present” (1998: 800). Regarding Whitman’s aesthetic struggle with traumatic memory, cf. M. Wynn Thomas, The Lunar Light of Walt Whitman’s Poetry (1997: 205-51).

30

Regarding Whitman’s skepticism vis-à-vis what Davis refers to as the “leviathan” of postwar America, cf. Robert Leigh Davis, “Memoranda During the War [1875-1876],” Walt Whitman (1998).

31

For all its horror and sadness, the nurse’s ward emerges as what Lisa A. Long has termed “the imaginative repository of inner life, a surreal yet bounded place.“ Lisa Long (2004: 12).

   


 

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Importantly, however, “The Dresser” is geared toward the world beyond the hospital. Near the middle of the poem, having catalogued the severe injuries of several soldiers, the speaker suddenly demands an end to cultural amnesia: “On, on I go— (open, doors of time! open, hospital doors!)” This exclamation marks a departure from the hospital as an extra-societal space: what is called for here is the creation of a historically aware national community with a shared set of emotions and a common spirituality. A driving motivation for Whitman’s entire Reconstruction project, this authoritative “opening of doors” references the invigorating effect that the poem seeks to accomplish. By demanding that an end must be put to war-related memories and trauma, this poem, just like Drum-Taps as a whole, depends upon a “deeper spiritual aesthetics rather than the surface realism, of wartime life itself” (Thomas 1997: 210). Thus, before turning to the concrete, political dimension of this “opening” (in Whitman’s Democratic Vistas and elsewhere), this chapter takes a closer look at these “spiritual aesthetics.” For Whitman, politics and spirituality were, ideally, one thing. As Ed Folsom declares with regard to the 1860 edition of Leaves of Grass Whitman wished to create a multifaceted, self-contradictory, all-inclusive, American voice, and believed that by using this voice he would even be able to “prevent a civil war.”32 His wish to join readers to the “rhythm of the one to the many” was inspired by Franz Anton Mesmer’s theory of a “magnetic mind” able to create “a democratic (‘American’) poetic form” (Mills 1991: 168 and 67).33 With the dawning of the sectional conflict, his belief in the hypnotic power of writing became a certainty and remained a driving force for the postwar poet and prose writer. According to Mary McAleer Balkun, Whitman was personally convinced of being able “to recreate experience in authentic fashion” and assured readers that “when they touched his book, they touched him as well” (1999: 20).

32

“I think that Whitman believed that Leaves of Grass was going to prevent a civil war. I think he had that much faith in the 1860 Leaves of Grass” (Erkkila, et al., “Whitman’s Vision of America and Poetry,” The National Poet).

33

It is of little practical use here to discuss whether Whitman was a devoted follower of the fad of Mesmerism or not. According to Edmund Reiss, Harold Aspiz, Elisabeth HeckerBretschneider, and Bruce Mills, the poet was strongly influenced by the ideas, imagery, and roles that emerged with Mesmer’s concept of “animal magnetism,” and he made ample use of the idea of “magnetic” personalities and bonds between people. Yet although he referred to animal magnetism as both a theme and a poetic strategy, he was not necessarily a “believer.” Cf. Edmund Reiss, “Whitman's Debt to Animal Magnetism” (March 1963); Harold Aspiz, Whitman and the Body Beautiful (1980); Elisabeth HeckerBretschneider, Bedingte Ordnungen (2000: 334-39); and Mills, Mesmeric Arts (2005).

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Not surprisingly, then, there is a meditative dimension in “The Dresser,” a lamenting tone and rhythmic pace that Bruce Mills terms the “harmonizing pulse of the poetic imagination” (1991: 168). The mournful pace, the repetitive ritual that laces the narrative (example: “soon to be fill’d with clotted rags and blood, emptied, and fill’d again”), its sentimentality, the interplay between dramatic monologue and intimate conversation with the listener, the questioning mood, and the emphasis on vowels—all contribute to what Luke Mancuso has identified as the poem’s “nostalgic frame” (cf. 2005: 308). While some of these aesthetic choices were a concession to nineteenth-century taste,34 they served mostly to heighten the effect of an otherwise drastic poetic imagery. “The Dresser” turns against the “memory gap” by invoking moments of shock that suggest the “authentic experience” mentioned earlier (Balkun 1999: 20). The first shock announces itself with a “pang” that occurs when, toward the middle of the poem, the wound-dresser for the first time touches a patient: “I onward go, I stop / With hinged knees and steady hand to dress wounds / I am firm with each, the pangs are sharp yet unavoidable (“The Dresser”). Shortly afterwards, in the sixth stanza, the actual shock appears, as the poem’s most depressing and disturbing images are listed in short order: “The crush’d head I dress, (poor crazed hand tear not the bandage / away,) / The neck of the cavalry-man with the bullet through and through (“The Dresser”). The snapshot-like quality to these impressions is not accidental: Whitman was virtually obsessed with photography, a technological innovation of his era (Folsom 1998).35 This suggests that, contrary to what Ezra Greenspan and others have argued, he was by no means “unfitted” “for the changing society which emerged from the Civil War” (1990: 215),36 but keenly aware of the modernization processes that had

34

According to Dougherty, Whitman alludes to the sentimental formula to create a compromise between his own aesthetic instruments and “the emotions and situations of popular poetry,” a compromise that presents “objects and events […] as objectively real and as the occasion of true and widely accepted emotions.” James Dougherty, Walt Whitman and the Citizen’s Eye (1993: 97).

35

Whitman’s obsession with the new medium also shows in the many photographs of himself that, often taken annually, explored his identity. Cf. Ed Folsom’s 1986/1987 article “’This Heart’s Geography’s Map’: The Photographs of Walt Whitman”, and , by the same author, “Nineteenth-Century Visual Culture“ (1998).

36

For a more general statement regarding the important role of the reader in Whitman scholarship, cf. also Anderson, The Imperial Self (1971: 111-12).

   


 

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catapulted America into a new era.37 Photography’s effect on Whitman’s oeuvre derives from the medium’s theoretical potential—to grasp a fleeting moment in time, to capture the horror of the real—rather than from its usages, which at the time were marked by long exposure times and staged scenes. Fascinated by photography’s promise of objectivity, its leveling of experience, its openness to all subjects and themes, and its capability of capturing spontaneous scenes of recognition and emotionality (embraces, kisses), Whitman conceived of photography as “the harbinger of a new democratic art” (Ed Folsom),38 and he described his daily impressions in quasiphotographic sequences that denied social hierarchies between patients: “long rows of cots,” “clotted rags and blood,” “an attendant holding a tray.” “To each and all one after another,” he wrote, “I draw near, not one do I miss” (“The Dresser”). Importantly, however, Whitman exceeds the “democratic” possibilities of photography. The didactic framing of “The Dresser,” together with the onomatopoetic “pang” that accompanies the linguistic photographs do not provoke identification on the side of the reader but a combination of the synesthetic experience of shock and cognitive analysis (cf. 1998: 276).39 Unlike his contemporary Alexander Gardner, who in 1866 published his Photographic Sketchbook of the Civil War, Whitman neither documents nor exhibits human vulnerability but forces readers to fully recognize the agency and dignity of the dying: in what is essentially a gesture of mutual, democratic recognition, “The Dresser” allows the fatally wounded to capture the gaze of his beholder and embrace the witness before dying.40

37

In After all, not to create Only (1871) (later “Song of the Exposition,” 1876), he “represented industrial products as agents of rehabilitation from the trauma of the cultural vertigo induced by the Civil War” and sought to actively connect the war era with modernity. Mancuso, “Leaves of Grass, 1867 edition.”

38

According to Folsom, he “associated photography and poetry as key elements of an emerging democratic art, an art that would level experience, break down hierarchies, undermine discrimination, and foster equality” (1998: 275). In “This Heart’s Geography’s Map” Folsom further discusses the influence of photography on Whitman’s oeuvre. Regarding the role of photography in the first half of the nineteenth century, cf. also Barbara McCandless, “The Portrait Studio and the Celebrity,” Photography in 19th Century America (1991); and Richard Rudisill, “The Mirror of America,” Mirror Image (1973).

39

He argues that throughout his life Whitman aimed at giving his books a certain “look”, and that he was aware that we “hear and touch and smell it as well as view it, but the visual experience predominates” (Folsom 1998).

40

Regarding the differences between the poem and photography one may want to add that unlike Alexander Gardner’s tremendously expensive Sketchbook Whitman’s poem could be reproduced endlessly, and was also very affordable.

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Whitman goes beyond the possibilities of mid nineteenth-century photography on yet another level as the reader, too, is actively involved in the nurse’s visits: we follow the nurse’s hand as if holding a film camera, moving to the individual patient’s face and then—“cut”—switching focus to the amputation: From the stump of the arm, the amputated hand, I undo the clotted lint, remove the slough, wash off the matter and blood, Back on his pillow the soldier bends with curv’d neck and side-falling head, His eyes are closed, his face is pale, he dares not look on the bloody stump, And has not yet look’d on it. (“The Dresser”)

Both the hospital as poetic locale and the poem itself, as a linguistic realm, mirror what Susan Sontag, writing about war photographs, calls “the equivalent of a sacred or meditative space in which to look at them” (2003: 119). In light of Sontag’s observations, what I have earlier called the “nostalgic frame” emerges as a response to the changed circumstances of the nation at war: the gruesome scenes surface as linguistic “memento mori” that can be used “as objects of contemplation to deepen one’s sense of reality; as secular icons [. . .]” (ibid.). Whitman, in other words, was far ahead of his time when, in anticipation of an increasingly commercialized public sphere, he imagined a “[s]pace reserved for being serious” that otherwise was “hard to come by in a modern society” (ibid.: 119).41 Democracy, as Whitman saw it, is not so much a theoretical idea but an aesthetic experience, enacted by the dresser. Taking his steps from bed to bed, he takes in what is on display, resembling a visitor in a gallery. And yet his democratic experience is a yearning rather than a desire fulfilled. Crying out against fragmentation and loss, the poem fails to compose an entity from fragments as it moves from the “crushed head” and the “neck [...] with a bullet through” to another’s shoulder, to the “stump of the arm,” to an “amputated hand,” and, finally, to a “foot with the bullet-wound” (“The Dresser”). Unlike Alcott’s description of the amputated soldier, who managed to imaginatively re-collect his shattered limbs that were strewn across various battlefields and states, Whitman’s catalogue presents human bodies as incomplete, maimed, and disconnected. Foregrounding bodily fragments and death, the poem repudiates its maker’s antebellum repertoire, with its focus on health, longevity, and virility. For the postbellum Whitman, the healthy body is no longer a given but an “expression of national desire” (Burbick 1994: 129).42 All the wound-dresser can do

41

The sentence ends with “whose chief model of a public space is the mega-store”.

42

Whitman was not the only writer who thought about the consequences of physical fragmentation. Another famous example is S. Weir Mitchell, “The Case of George Dedlow” (1866) that will be discussed at the end of this book.

   


 

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in this situation is recognize the individual’s experience of pain and dying. While the poem linguistically vivisects the bodies of patients (listen to the syncopated sound of “from the stump of the arm, the amputated hand”), it pays tribute to each soldier’s personal self-sacrifice. Cast as a series of precious moments, “The Dresser” acknowledges the “appealing eyes” of one “poor boy,” remembers the “pale face” of a man just amputated, lets the “yellow-blue countenance” of a dead patient, resonate with the rattling breath of the dying, looks into eyes “quite glazed already,” and virtually “feels” a soldier’s last kiss.43 By commemorating “many a soldier’s loving arms about this neck,” the poem mourns them all—as individuals in a community of suffering. As recipient of these acts of intimacy, the wound-dresser as speaker/witness embodies the link between human suffering and death on the one hand and the notion of survival, healing, and life on the other. The poem not only calls to mind the brutality of the war but also addresses the topic of national recovery and social responsibility. Internally focalized through an old man who seeks to recruit a successor, “The Dresser” insists on the responsibility of those who are healthy and well to represent those whose physical condition limits their personal agency and access to power. Among those healthy ones is the reader, who in the footsteps of the nurse’s silent, undefined attendant “follows holding a tray,” carrying “a refuse pail / Soon to be fill’d with clotted rags and blood, emptied, and fill’d / again” (“The Dresser”). To preserve the self-sacrifice and dignity that threatens to be thrown away with this human debris, to make meaningful what is otherwise lost, is the task of the ones who come after—the poem’s primary target group, the next generation. There is an almost physical dimension to reading this poem that ties the recipient to the wound-dresser, his assistant, and the dying patient whose kiss touches all of us.44 “The Dresser” lends form and structure to associations and feelings that have formerly been without reference, and enables readers to be “both ourselves and someone else at the same time.”45 This simultaneity is not merely an aesthetic “trick,” but

43

Regarding Whitman’s use of a simple rhetoric and his use of stereotypical imagery, cf.

44

Cf. also Robert Leigh Davis, who has pointed out, in a 1989 article, that the “sense of

Dougherty, particularly “The Expanse of Consciousness” (1993: 39-75). being above and bending over the representation of a patient exactly matches the position of the nurse” “Wound-Dressers and House Calls: Medical Representations in Whitman and Williams” (136). 45

Winfried Fluck quotes Wolfgang Iser here (1989: 36-37). Fluck develops this idea of reference on the basis of Iser’s reader-response theory to explain the function of literature and its interpretation in modern democracies. Cf. “Funktionsgeschichte und ästhetische Erfahrung,“ Funktionen von Literatur (2005). Cf. also Wolfgang Iser, “Representation: A Performative Act,” Prospecting (1989: 244).

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a strategy that goes straight to the heart of modern democracy, triggering important and complicated questions: Who is recognized? Who has the right to speak? Who should be spoken for? What should be said? What are the prerequisites for being heard? Who decides? “The Dresser” answers these questions through a speaker who knows that democratic representation depends on the consent of those represented. He therefore translates the gratefulness of the patients into an authorization to speak their concerns; after all, “many a soldier’s kiss dwells on these bearded lips” (“The Dresser”).46 Essentially a poem about democracy, “The Dresser” is not so much about “a shame generated by the gap between the injured and suffering bodies and [the poet’s] own ‘well and whole’ body” (Eiselein 1996: 105)47 as it is about suggesting a pragmatic solution to this imbalance. Structured along the lines of insurmountable difference between the sick and the healthy, the dying and the living, the poem’s “pangs” refuse to drown the reader in a fantasy of endless spiritual connectivity but propose a radical redefinition of social relations in the face of profound inequalities. In preparation for this redefinition, the reader plunges into a direct encounter with human suffering, only to regain personal agency when he or she is led “on, on” to the next bed. Importantly, this stop-and-go is not the routine of maximal efficiency that helps Alcott’s Nurse Periwinkle gain the upper hand in the “topsy-turvy” hospital,48 but a cultural practice that contradicts the uniformity of the state institution (the hospital, the military) in the face of death. Prepared to interrupt his daily routine, the wound-

46

As Ted Genoways concludes, the use of the present tense in this scene (the soldier’s kiss “dwells” on the dresser’s lips) merges the figure of nurse and poet to secure the survival of memory. “Civil War Poems in ‘Drum-Taps’ and ‘Memories of President Lincoln’” (2006: 532). One may add that “The Dresser” is based on the transcendentalist ideal of the speaker: reminiscent of the Emersonian model of the “transparent eye-ball”, the wound-dresser “with his tidings, with his better knowledge, his larger view, his steady gaze at the new and future event whereof they had not thought” is way ahead of his audience, that the poem wants to inspire. This is where Emerson’s essay “Eloquence” comes into play. See The Collected Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson (2010: esp. 61 and 64). As Johannes Völz has argued, the concept of inspiration that emerges here describes “a limitless connectivity, and ultimately pure potentiality, triggered by a textual experience” that is marked by an associative style. This “sense of enlarged connectivity,” Völz concludes, generates a “particular type of self-recognition” based on both self-feeding and inspiration. Cf. “Ralph Waldo Emerson and the Dual Economy of Recognition” (2012).

47

Eiselein quotes from Whitman’s correspondence here.

48

One may object, of course, that the central deathbed scene in Hospital Sketches also serves to interrupt the general routine. And yet the situation there is marked as an exceptional one—contrary to what Whitman emphasizes in his poem.

   


 

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dresser acknowledges the individual’s right to be cared for and protected in moments of crisis, while the poem itself helps readers rehearse an understanding of time as constant adaptation to changing circumstances. To cherish the moment as meaningful for the future is represented as a substantial aspect of any true democracy. As Eiselein correctly points out, “it is not only an appreciation of the patients’ concerns nor only a profound identification with these young men that drive the patient-centered, eccentric, a-institutional benevolence represented in ‘The Dresser.’ It’s also love” (1996: 103). What Eiselein overlooks, however, are the political implications that inhere in this form of affection. Cast as reciprocal, the relationship between nurse and dying soldiers is structured similarly to the friendship between the “old man bending” and the young couple, whom the nurse addresses, significantly, as his equal partners in a contract based on mutual trust and connectivity: the line, “O maidens and young men I love and that love me,” establishes an emotional bond that precedes the alternative, interpersonal economy associated with the nurse. Staged as a crucial part of intergenerational learning and social exchange, this contract is deeply political because it addresses a necessary component of the democratic game, namely, that recognition and public representation of others’ experiences and identities can only be granted on the basis of mutuality, trust, and love. Over the years Whitman seems to have lost some of the original optimism of this “loving” approach. What James Dougherty has termed the speaker/citizen’s “satanic” impulses49 come to the fore more explicitly in subsequent editions of the poem. If the 1865 version is still very much focused on consolation, later editions emphasize the uncanny connection between a hellish past and a sinful present. The following lines first appeared as an epigraph to “Drum-Taps” in the 1871 edition of Leaves of Grass50 before they were incorporated into “The Wound-Dresser”: Arous’d and angry, I thought to beat the alarum, and urge relentless war; But soon my fingers fail’d me, my face droop’d, and I Resign’d myself, To sit by the wounded and soothe them, or silently Watch the dead (Non-standard font in the original)

49

Dougherty uses this term when he describes Whitman’s speaker as “a citizen whose democratic anarchism was affronted by the Union’s suppression of political dissent and by the elitism of its military leadership, and whose humane impulses were enraged by the suffering and human wastage he saw in the hospitals.” Walt Whitman and the Citizen’s Eye (1993: 82).

50

“The Dresser” itself appears many pages after these introductory lines, as the nineteenth poem in the cluster titled “Drum-Taps.”

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As an introduction to “Drum-Taps,” these lines bespeak a sense of trauma, helplessness, and the survivors’ suppressed aggression as central to the veterans’ general condition. In the following, 1881/82 edition of Leaves, the passage was added to the first stanza of “The Wound-Dresser” (a title that alludes to both the “wounded” nurse and his patients). In this new version, the angry impulses of 1871 appear toned down and are printed in bracketed form, signaling what the old man feels, “deep down,” when asked to tell his story (“The Wound-Dresser”). If the 1871 epigraph cast the emotional condition of the alienated veteran generation as a warning (and a potential threat) to a society in denial, the 1881/2 version (that served as an introduction to “The Wound-Dresser”) put the psychological injuries of that generation center stage. Following the idealistic notion of intergenerational trust (1865), a brief interlude of anger and frustration (1871) gives way to the veteran generation’s loneliness and defiance (1881/82). Admonishing his imaginary listeners to “be of strong heart,” the speaker himself, it seems, has lost some of his initial trust in reciprocity (“The Wound-Dresser”). And yet this new awareness of individual impotence provides the independent, democratic self with a humbling sense of the real. As shall be shown, the poet’s critical awareness of his very personal racist bias was part of this humility.


 
   
   
    


  

As Susan Sontag reminds us, even the most terrifying pictures of war “should not distract [us] from asking what pictures, whose cruelties, whose deaths are not being shown” (2003: 14). For all its expressive realism, “The Dresser” hides as much as it pretends to display. The wounds and feelings that it catalogues construe the Civil War hospital as a space of male, white bonding, and the “maidens” and “young men” who are invited to join the dresser are equally aligned with whiteness. Even the “poor boy” dying is most likely not an African American—in nineteenth-century America, sentimental deathbed scenes were largely reserved for whites.51 One might argue that “The Dresser” ignores other social markers as well, including social class, political opinion, region, religion, and ethnicity. Described in very general terms, bodily fragments and wounds replace individual persons, emphasizing human vulnerability and interdependence. At the same time the poet’s philosophy of the wartime hospital was deeply indebted to racialist thinking. As his friend Horace Traubel recalled, Whitman referred to his calling as a Civil War nurse as “his master”:

51

As Mancuso has noted, this is true for the entire Drum-Taps. Nowhere in this collection had the author “explicitly registered his concern for the competing claims of blacks.” The Strange Sad War Revolving (1997: 2).

   


 

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“It seized upon me, made me its servant, slave.”52 Most (but not all) critics have tended to downplay the concrete social dimension of such remarks, which can be found throughout the poet’s private and public writing. In a chapter titled “Whitman in Blackface,” Kenneth M. Price argues that while Whitman “found the roles of both masters and slaves repugnant,” he found “mastery and utter dependence powerful tropes” (2004: 21). Yet how naïve was Whitman, really? Did he merely refer to slavery and African Americans in order to explore his own identity through linguistic expeditions along the color line (cf. ibid.: 11)? This seems improbable if one considers his frequent, postbellum visits to Congress, where he eagerly listened to discussions regarding the future of former slaves (cf.Folsom 2000: 56). And contrary to what Eric Lott (among other, similar-minded scholars) has assumed, he in fact had more than “a brief engagement with race” (2013: 93). Historically concrete racial concerns appear throughout Whitman’s writing, particularly in his non-poetic texts, until shortly before his death. There is, then, ample reason to follow in the footsteps of Luke Mancuso and others,53 and examine the “good grey poet’s” changing views on race, and to discuss these views in the context of his imaginary nation-building. This chapter’s reading of Whitman’s Reconstruction project implies an ongoing, conscious adaptation process rather than occasional slippages into racist prejudice— a view suggested by Kenneth Price:

52

Traubel regarding a conversation with the poet in January 1889. With Walt Whitman in Camden (1914: 581). Fausset makes a similar point with regard to the antebellum Whitman: the self-proclaimed “poet of slaves, and the masters of slaves” “felt somewhat abstractly for the enslaved negro”; they interested him mainly as an antithesis to freedom. Hugh I’Anson Fausset, Walt Whitman (1966: 52). The quote from Whitman is from the “Notebooks” (in Uncollected Poetry and Prose, much of which has been but recently Discovered (1921: 69). Price brings up the same argument as Fausset in To Walt Whitman, America (2004: 10).

53

For a very short overview of the scholarship, cf. Beach (1996: 59-60). As Beach points out, most of this research “attempt[s] to define an ideological stance” (59). Beach himself analyzes the “relationship between poetic stance and extrapoetic political beliefs” (ibid.: 60). This is not what I am doing in this chapter: unlike Beach I do not privilege poetry as a linguistic space that “undercuts the poet’s stated convictions” (ibid.) but suggest a chronological narrative that involves various literary modes without privileging one of them. A selection of antebellum texts where Whitman explained his views of slavery can be found in Mason I. Jr. Lowance, A House Divided (2003: 195-203).

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a close look at Whitman and race reveals a complicated record. The egalitarian and inclusive impulse guiding his work, Leaves of Grass, is periodically disrupted by moments of insensitivity and racism. These shortcomings occur early and late in his career, and both within Leaves of Grass and outside of it. (2004: 7)54

Christopher Beach has argued in a similar vein by suggesting that Whitman’s poetic texts in particular “display a degree of ambivalence that at times undercuts the poet’s stated convictions” (1996: 60). Ambivalences and a multiplicity of possible meanings are, however, intrinsic features of poetry and may add nuance rather than merely contradicting other statements by a poem’s author. This chapter is based on the assumption that Whitman relied on poetry to keep his concept of racial difference fluid and flexible. He was, after all, a man who believed in constant transformation (while maintaining what Roy Pascal has termed, in the context of autobiography criticism, “a historical consistency of character,” a “personality as an entity” (1960: 13 and 185)55). In keeping with the wound-dresser’s vow to face even the most undesirable aspects of the real, Whitman staged his personal struggle with racial prejudice as a meaningful literary event. By displaying his own contradictory views and ambivalences, he emphasized the emotional prerequisites of a democratic, multiracial society. That scholars have already distinguished different phases in Whitman’s thinking about race helps to establish a backdrop for this analysis.56 Before the war, the “democratic bard” had been a nuanced and increasingly explicit critic of slavery57 to the

54

Regarding the reception of Whitman’s work and how it relates to the issue of racial inclusion, cf. Beach (1996: 59 ff).

55

A similar concept can be discerned in Whitman’s series of photographic self-portraits, as “Whitman’s ideal self lives through the constructed unity of his autobiographical frame: his daguerreotypes, photographs, and filmic procedures.” Graham Clarke, “To Emanate a Look: Whitman, Photography and the Spectacle of Self,” American Literary Landscapes (1989: 98).

56

As I mentioned earlier a short overview of the scholarship can be found in Beach (1996: 59-60).

57

During his various occupations as a journalist, he supported equal rights yet opposed the “unquestionable folly and wicked wrong” of abolitionist pressure on the slave-holding states. As a member of the Democratic Party he put state sovereignty above the “interference” of the central government. Whitman became more sympathetic to the abolitionist cause in the 1840s, when a split occurred within the Democratic Party over the so-called “Wilmot proviso,” which prohibited the introduction of slavery in new territories (all the quotes stem from Whitman and are summed up in Fausset, Poet of Democracy (1966: 51). Regarding Whitman’s evolution as an abolitionist in the context of “free-soil” and

   


 

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point of imagining himself as personally taking care of the “sweatened body and bruised feet” of a runaway slave (1855). A little later in the poem he described a black drayman in the same democratic terms that he also used to praise the self-reliant bodies of white working-class men.58 As Folsom has argued, “Whitman was, all in all, more supportive of blacks during the period when the issue was slavery than during the period after emancipation, when the issue became the access of free blacks to the basic rights of citizenship” (2000: 46).59 This is not to deny that even before the war his views of race had been inconsistent. Throughout the 1850s he frequently voiced fears of a slave revolt; after the war he was an opponent to “miscegenation” and confided to a friend that he “should not like to see the nigger in the saddle because he would only act when prompted to act.”60 Recognizing a difference in strategy but not in substance, Luke Mancuso warns against a simplification of the matter and claims that the postwar Whitman “had begun to camouflage his representations of blacks [...]. [B]ehind his furtiveness lay the ongoing cultural work of weaving ex-slaves into

the split in the Democratic Party (cf. ibid.: 50-52 and 62-65). For a general assessment of Whitman’s changing attitudes toward African Americans, cf. Martin Klammer, Whitman, Slavery, and the Emergence of Leaves of Grass (1995: 4); and Folsom (2010). 58

Regarding the relationship between the two groups, Beach argues that Whitman “makes the practical argument that the practice of negro slavery is incompatible with the interests of ‘White Workingmen’” because the “very fact of being put ‘on a par with the negro slave’ would degrade the ‘Northern American freeman.” Beach (1996: 74 and 75). While in view of Whitman’s political and private statements I find this assessment convincing I also think that on the level of description there are strong similarities between the two.

59

This was certainly true in 1874, when he told his friend William D. O’Connor that he was against the immediate enfranchisement of black men. Cf. Jerome Loving, Walt Whitman’s Champion (1978: 94-102). Cf. also Price (2004: 12).

60

Whitman in a letter he wrote to Horace Traubel in the 1880s. Quoted in Morris, The Better Angel (2000: 80). Regarding Whitman’s fear of a slave revolt in the poem “The Sleepers,” cf. Beach (1996: 55ff, 72ff, 90ff); and Erkkila, Political Poet (1989: 240). For an analysis of “The Sleepers” (in conjunction with “Ethiopia Saluting”), cf. Folsom, “Lucifer and Ethiopia” (2000). In an editorial written for the Brooklyn Daily Times in May 1858, Whitman also opposes what was later labeled “miscegenation” and asks, “Besides, is not America for the Whites? And is it not better so?” Cited in Emory Holloway and Vernolian Schwartz, eds. I Sit and Look Out (1966: 90). As Louise L. Stevenson has argued, while many Victorians “read glowing accounts in Harper’s Weekly of the achievements of the students in the freedmen’s schools, they also were looking at illustrations in the same periodical that questioned African Americans’ potential for intellectual growth.” The Victorian Homefront (1991: 98-99).

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the national household” (1997: 3).61 Unfortunately, Mancuso and other scholars fail to distinguish between Whitman’s public and private views. To shed light on the cultural work that the famous writer accomplished by negotiating a complex, and shifting set of ideas about race and democracy. In accordance with Whitman’s personal aim to put an end to collective denial, confront cultural anxieties, and acknowledge reality itself, it suggests a very particular, and ultimately radical, self-fashioning of the author as the brittle yet ultimately confident voice of a nation in crisis. Recognizing the glaring inconsistencies between his democratic ideals and his deep-seated negrophobia, Whitman made those inconsistencies a topic of his writing. His Reconstruction project, then, is not only a unique record of what Butler has termed a “mental adaptation process” but also a singular effort to confront readers with ambivalences that many of them shared with the poet. This does not imply that “what shall we do with the negro?” was the most central question of Whitman’s postwar oeuvre: that he does not once explicitly mention the abolition of slavery, and refuses to consider “the first constitutional amendment in over a half of a century,” suggests a certain lack of interest in the matter (ibid.: 3).62 And yet it is hardly imaginable that after emancipation and the subsequent debates regarding the Thirteenth (1865), Fourteenth (1868), and Fifteenth (1870) Amendments, the “democratic bard” should have circumvented any serious discussion regarding the future of race relations in America. And there is, in fact, one poem that confronts the matter: “Ethiopia Commenting.” Written two years after “The Dresser” had appeared in the first edition of Drum-Taps, it falls into a period when even the radical wing of the Republican party began to notice that black universal suffrage might cost them many of the white votes in both North and South (cf. Grant 2000:

61

In this largely deconstructive reading, “[t]he issues of emancipation” are “represented through images of disrupted blood ties, death, and comradeship among strangers” (6). The presumed “indirectness” of the poet’s rhetoric, Mancuso argues, has to do with “his investment in ‘a definite purport & idea’; that is, in a coherent democratic future rising out of the failed racial past. In his development of disrupted familial images, read as a cultural text, Whitman’s poetic investment in the Union cause forged representational connections with the ongoing emancipation debate over the fate of the ex-slaves throughout the Reconstruction period” (ibid.: 2). To unearth Whitman’s subversive strategy, Mancuso links his post-war poems and private remarks to Congressional debates about racial integration and public aftermath of those debates (cf. ibid.: 6).

62

According to Erkkila, during his stay with an abolitionist couple that had supported his work as a nurse in postwar Washington, he privately welcomed the constitutional amendments that guaranteed equal civil and political rights to all American men. Erkkila, Political Poet (1989: 284).

   


 

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158).63 The poem did not receive much attention; in fact, it “over the years has generally been met with embarrassed silence” (Folsom 2000: 72). Neither its topic nor its form nor the story it relates met the critics’ needs and expectations. And yet “Ethiopia Commenting” is a key piece in what this chapter defines as Whitman’s Reconstruction struggle. The poem originates in a site of national healing: its content goes back to conversations Whitman had had two years after the war with Union soldiers who were still being treated in Washington hospitals (ibid.). And yet “healing” plays no role in this poem (a fact that we will return to in the following sub-chapter): set during the Union’s 1864 “March to the Sea”, “Ethiopia Commenting” describes a profoundly disturbing, interracial encounter between a Union soldier and an old freedwoman whom he perceives as “ancient, hardly human.” Seldom discussed, the poem’s publication history tells us much about the special meaning it held for its maker. “Ethiopia Commenting” was accepted for publication by Galaxy magazine in 1867 but was not printed until it appeared in the 1871-1872 edition of Leaves of Grass under a new title, “Ethiopia Saluting the Colors.”64 “Ethiopia Saluting” then reappeared in the 1876 edition of Leaves (with the added subtitle, “A Reminiscence of 1864”). In 1881 Whitman included it in the “Drum- Taps” section of Leaves, where it figures as the only poem about an African American, making it, as Folsom asserts, “a key element in his radical poetic reconstruction” (2000: 55). The poem’s eventual insertion “into this group of Civil War poems in which he had, to that point, studiously avoided any comment on the topic [of race]” confirmed, once and for all, “the role of blacks in America’s future” (ibid.: 55-56, cf. also 75). Cast in the form of a dialogue, “Ethiopia Saluting” starts with a soldier interrogating a recently freed African-American woman, an apparition almost, “rising by the roadside” as a white Union regiment passes through. The poem continues with

63

If until 1865 “Northern nationalism had been predicated, to a great extent, on opposition to the South, on an enemy within, the former supporters of the Union Army now delved in fantasies of an all-white cultural overlap and mutual inspiration” (ibid.). This sense of unity may also be viewed in the context of a larger cultural discourse that sought to diminish regional differences in favor of a larger national whole. As Jay Martin points out, late nineteenth-century regionalism was preceded by a phase where such differences were downplayed. Harvests of Change (1967: 25).

64

This, then, is the version this analysis relies on. As Edward F. Grier has suggested, the widely accepted composition date of “Ethiopia Commenting” in 1871 must be corrected to 1867. We do not know to what extent Whitman has changed the original poem because it was not found in the respective letter to the Galaxy. Grier, “Walt Whitman, the Galaxy, and Democratic Vistas” (Nov. 1951: 337). Regarding the poem’s publication history, cf. Amy E. Earhart, “Ethiopia Saluting the Colors” (1998: 211).

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the woman’s explanation, is interrupted by a description of the entire scene by the poetic agent who observes it, and ends with a question that could be both the soldier’s or the poetic agent’s: Who are you, dusky woman, so ancient, hardly human, With your woolly white and turban’d head, and bare Bony feet? Why, rising by the roadside here, do you the colors Greet? (‘Tis while our army lines Carolina’s sand and pines, Forth from thy hovel door, thou, Ethiopia, com’st to me, As, under doughty Sherman, I march toward the sea.) Me, master, years a hundred, since from my parents sunder’d A little child, they caught me as the savage beast is caught; Then hither me, across the sea, the cruel slaver brought. No further does she say, but lingering all the day, Her high-borne turban’d head she wags, and rolls her Darkling eye, And curtseys to the regiments, the guidons moving by. What is it, fateful woman—so blear—hardly human? Why wag your head, with turban bound—yellow, red, And green? Are the things so strange and marvelous, you see or Have seen? (“Ethiopia Saluting”)

As Folsom maintains, Whitman’s choice of a female protagonist is significant since A young black man rising to salute the U.S. colors would have been a more politically charged image. Questions of suffrage, and of paternity, and of amalgamation would have entered into the formula of the poem, all questions that were blazing issues in 1867 but issues about which Whitman experienced paralyzing ambivalence. (ibid.: 65)

According to Folsom “Whitman adds no black figures to his poetry during the Civil War years” until he creates the “mysterious” and “hardly human” Ethiopia figure: “suddenly, in 1867, he begins to work on a single, black character who would enter Leaves of Grass in 1870 and stay there after Lucifer vanishes in the final editions and last issues of Whitman’s life’s work” (2000: 53). “Black Lucifer” is an angry young

   


 

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African-American man whom Whitman had featured in his 1855 poem “The Sleepers.”65 Yet while “Ethiopia” doubtlessly mutes this voice of black agency, this female apparition is anything but a harmless character; “rising by the roadside” she comes to stand as an uncanny reminder of America’s slaveholding past. This uncanny figure is as different as she could be from the idealized female slave whom Whitman had celebrated in the 1855 version of Leaves of Grass: “A woman at auction / She too is not only herself … she is the teeming mother of mothers” (LoG 1855)66 With emancipation, it seems, the poet replaced the “teeming mother of mothers” and the raging, highly vocal Lucifer with the racist representation of an alien, black woman long past her reproductive years. And yet “Ethiopia Saluting” is far more ambiguous, contradictory, and meaningful, than this first impression suggests. Folsom argues that “Ethiopia Saluting the Colors” was decisively “not a Civil War poem” because it was written “during the congressional debates that put the whole nation in the position of the soldier/narrator, asking of all black Americans exactly what the soldier asks of the old slave woman: who are you? What do you want? What have you seen? What do you think that we have to offer you”(2000: 73)? Following up on Folsom’s position, this chapter reads the poem as a complex, immediate response to the political climate of the day that forced readers to take sides.67 The time span between 1867 and the early 1870s, when “Ethiopia Commenting/Saluting” was first submitted and later published, has come to be known as “radical Reconstruction.” The three constitutional amendments that were adopted during this era, secured “the most far-reaching personal rights ever written into the nation’s

65

The “black Lucifer” figure is not the only embodiment of black agency in Whitman’s antebellum oeuvre. In the 1855 edition of Leaves of Grass, he also describes a black drayman’s “polish’d and perfect limbs” and inscribes him into his democratic catalogue. Cf. Dougherty, Walt Whitman and the Citizen’s Eye (1993: 66). As Folsom has pointed out, the antebellum Whitman was inspired by William Sidney Mount’s fairly sensitive and humanistic representations of African Americans (1998: 279). It must be noted, however, that he apparently had less difficulty representing a free black in the North than he did representing a slave: in “A Boston Ballad” (1855) Whitman condemned the fugitive slave, Anthony Burns, to cultural invisibility. As a representation of the “no longer [a slave] and not yet [a citizen] ,” Whitman could not imagine him as a full member of American society. Erkkila, Political Poet (1989: 63-65). Regarding “The Sleepers” see Alan Trachtenberg, “Whitman at Night: ‘The Sleepers’ in 1855,” Leaves of Grass (2007: 124-40).

66

Regarding the difference between the two figures, cf. Vivian R. Pollak, The Erotic

67

Unlike Folsom I am not interested in Whitman’s personal struggle with the issue of black

Whitman (2000: 176). suffrage, but in how he involved his readership in the political debate.

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charter” (Vorenberg 2006: 141). Crucially, Whitman wrote the first version of “Ethiopia” while he “watched the debates on the Fourteenth Amendment” in Congress (cf. Folsom 2000: 56). He was there when more and more Republicans became uneasy with their party’s radical program, when they realized that the black vote would cost them white votes in both parts of the country. The years that followed were marked not only by the impeachment of President Johnson (1868) but also by a fierce debate regarding black suffrage.68 Whitman responded to this by changing the poem’s title from “Ethiopia Commenting” to “Ethiopia Saluting the Colors,” thereby emphasizing the alienating, visual dimension of the encounter described in the poem. This reading of “Ethiopia Saluting” explicates Ed Folsom’s dictum that “we can hear within it some of the tensions at the heart of American history” (2000: 54). Set during the war, the poem reads as a critical yet open-ended comment on post-emancipation white Americans’ inability to recognize ex-slaves as different yet equal citizens of a nation in the making. Significantly, however, the sense of struggle that echoes through “Ethiopia Saluting” seems to be contradicted by the piece’s form: as Folsom points out, it is “the most patterned poem [Whitman] ever wrote” (ibid.).69 The poet, he argues, chose the “repetitive stability and predictability of conventional form” to sustain himself “through difficult times, offering him balance and cohesion when he most needed it” (2000: 54). Yet at close sight “Ethiopia Saluting” possesses anything but “balance and cohesion.”70 The poem’s speaker in fact makes his fundamental inability to interpret the woman’s behavior a central theme of his art: “Are the things so strange and marvelous, you see or / Have seen?” By ending with a question mark, “Ethiopia

68

This debate was fueled by the fact that after the introduction of black suffrage in the

69

Many scholars have lamented that Whitman’s poetry became more conventional. Ac-

South, Northern states remained free to choose whether blacks would be allowed to vote. cording to Ezra Greenspan, Whitman’s postbellum poems and texts turned toward “narrowing horizons, scaled-down ventures, and reduced risks—in short, of consolidation.” Walt Whitman and the American Reader (1990: 214). This chapter argues instead that he was more than ever searching for a new perspective on a changed reality and for ways to convey his insights to a larger audience. Choosing a less regretful, more appropriate tone, Richard Chase points out that “Whitman seems consciously to have striven for a more taut and often a more conventional versification, a less luxurious verbal texture, and a sharper more realistic imaginary.“ Chase, Walt Whitman Reconsidered (1955: 133). 70

Folsom in fact challenges his own argument when he points out that “through this insistent rhythm and rhyme, there are only questions and parenthetical pauses, interruptions and lingerings. Something external (the imposed structure) impels the soldier forward, but something internal fights the inexorable push and tries to pause and understand. The meter and rhythm are at once clear and unmotivated” (ibid. : 73).

   


 

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Saluting” highlights “the fissure between the white representation of the black woman and the black woman’s insistence on belonging to the metonymic ‘colors’ that she claims with her posture and her gaze” (Mancuso 1997: 86). Yet what exactly are those colors she greets? And who asks her these questions? Can we really be sure it is “one of Sherman’s soldiers,” as Folsom suggests (2000: 59)? Doesn’t the fact that the “guidons” are already “moving on” suggest that it is the unidentified observer figure uttering these concerns? Contrary to what its simple rhyme structure and meter suggest, “Ethiopia Saluting” questions the reliability of language and visual appearance and proposes that a successful Second Founding depends on the renewal of both poetic expression and human perception. The conversation we overhear leaves us (the readers) at a loss as we “watch” the woman “curtsey[ing] to the regiments” (“Ethiopia Saluting”). In the end it is the reader who wonders about the meaning of the spectacle. “Ethiopia Saluting” points to the significance of a historical moment that—although it is mentioned regularly in soldiers’ memoirs and letters—had never been given that amount of attention that it deserved. It was a moment when, shortly after the Emancipation Proclamation, Southern contrabands without civil rights began to follow the Northern troops. Zooming in on a somewhat absurd interracial encounter, the poem freezes an image of interracial speechlessness that calls for a meaningful narrative closure. This, then, appeals once more to the postbellum reader-citizen’s social responsibility to actively negotiate his or her antebellum norms and common perceptions. This anticipates the “process of reading” that Whitman describes in Democratic Vistas. According to this “landmark text in democratic thought” (West 1999: 489), the reception of a text is not a half-sleep, but, in highest sense, an exercise, a gymnast’s struggle; that the reader is to do something for himself, must be on the alert, must himself or herself construct indeed the poem, argument, history, metaphysical essay—the text furnishes the hints, the clue, the start or frame-work. Not the book needs so much to be the complete thing, but the reader of the book does. (DV 76)71

The undefined observer/reader of Whitman’s “Ethiopia” apparition, who wonders about the “strange and marvelous” things that have defined the old woman’s life, emerges as one of those “half-sleep[ers]” scorned by the writer. Somewhat ironically, the poem thus describes its own failure to make sense of the world. Five years after Lincoln had proclaimed “that all persons held as slaves [within the rebellious states] are, and henceforward shall be free,”72 the speaker openly exposes his inability to

71

Regarding this passage, cf. Folsom (2010: xix).

72

Abraham Lincoln, The Emancipation Proclamation.

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look beyond the stereotypical un-American-ness of a “Darkling’s” eyes rolling under a “woolly” head and “high-borne turban.”73 On a fundamental, self-critical level, “Ethiopia Saluting” is about the perpetuating power of the poet’s art which turns the nation’s latest citizens into timeless symbols of otherness. According to “Ethiopia Saluting,” the Emancipation Proclamation may have changed the law, but it did not change long-standing norms of perception. With its use of the term “darkling” and the image that remains tied to it, the poem does not merely recuperate established stereotypes but challenges the linguistic and visual signs that enable these clichés in the first place. As Christopher Beach reminds us, Whitman had faith in poetry as “a means to ‘denature’ the facts of everyday life even while presenting them” (1996: 20).74 At the same time, the poet wanted to appeal to a common body of “indirect” visual experience: to a pictorial world familiar to his readers through political oratory or through mechanical reproduction, printing, and engraving; or to sight itself, made self-conscious by the advent of photography (Dougherty 1993: 21).

As an effort to grasp the meaning of that deeply disturbing interracial encounter, “Ethiopia Saluting” relies on photography as an inspiration. It is not the medium’s “democratic” dimension that Whitman seeks to explore but its presumably magical power to reveal the truth about a person.75 Viewed through the lens of an observer

73

In his discussion of Democratic Vistas, Robert Leigh Davis points out “Whitman’s awareness of the way culture enters the body through barely visible habits of appetite, disposition, and posture: a certain way of holding one’s chest or eyes, a fondness for certain kinds of food or music or reading (and a distaste for others), a learned repertoire of physical gestures and expressions. These are forms of microcitizenship by which the nation ‘permeat[es] the whole mass of American mentality, taste, belief’” (“Democratic Vistas,”) A Companion to Walt Whitman (2006: 549).

74

According to Beach, Whitman became wary of this approach during Reconstruction. My

75

Regarding Whitman’s fascination and experimentation with this idea cf. Judith Freeman.

analysis contradicts this assessment. Clarke, Gentle Crusader (78-101). Whitman admired the new technology for its presumed honesty, yet when he—the most photographed American of the nineteenth century—staged himself with a butterfly on his hand, he actively conspired in the photographer’s act of manipulation. He may have been equally aware that some of Alexander Gardner’s famous Civil War photographs were staged to reach a certain effect of immediacy and depth. Whitman himself remarked that “there are as many views as there are people who take them.” Quoted in Folsom, “’This Heart’s Geography’s Map’: The Photographs of Walt Whitman” (Fall-Winter 1986-1987: 62).

   


 

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figure who switches between the onlooker-soldier and the looked-at woman, “Ethiopia Saluting” appeals to sight itself in a subtle and complex way. As a result the poem fails to adequately grasp the changed social reality of post-emancipation America, thereby analyzing the strange encounter as a troubling scene of interracial misunderstanding, and conveying conflicted communication and potential misperception across the color line. By both creating and challenging the very spectacle it represents, “Ethiopia Saluting” holds a unique status in Whitman’s Reconstruction project; no other work is designed to evoke the reader’s critical self-reflection to a similar extent. Significantly superior to an actual photograph in this respect, it plays with the difference between verbal image and dialogue: while the reader gazes at the woman’s unusual performance, he or she also listens to the stereotyped conversation between the two participants. Fascinated on the one hand and alienated on the other, readers are maneuvered into an almost Brechtian position from which to critically reflect on the scene, which is also fascinating, spectacular, and entertaining. It is no coincidence, then, that the spectacle aligns the poem with one of the era’s most popular forms of performance, the nineteenth-century blackface tradition. Whitman’s contemporaries could hardly miss the implications of the poem’s title: beginning in the 1820s, performers had called themselves Ethiopian delineators; a famous troupe from the mid-1840s were the “Ethiopian Serenaders”; and when at the height of the tradition performances took place in newly founded theaters, such a venue was often advertised as an “Ethiopian Opera House” (Toll April-May 1978: 73). Not only had Whitman been tremendously interested in minstrelsy; he was also highly sensitive to its racist implications. When “[b]y the 1850s the benign elements in minstrel shows had hardened into something more racist,” he allegedly “took a cue from earlier racial performances in his exploration of racial crossings” (Price 2004: fn. 7).76 Thus when the tradition peaked after the Civil War, it is highly probable that this caught the poet’s attention. Yet contrary to what might be expected, the spectacular show of bright colors, extroverted movements, and stereotypical speech that define Whitman’s “Ethiopia” figure hardly display any “benign elements” but echo the performances of the dancing, eye-rolling “plantation negroes” that peopled post-emancipation minstrel shows. Even her saluting of the Union colors belongs to the standard repertoire of the era: patriotic numbers were highly popular in postwar minstrel shows to counterbalance the depressed mood of the “old darkie” figure upon his return to the burnt-down plantation (Toll 1974: 117). One may argue, therefore, that Whitman’s turbaned and eye-rolling “darkling,” with her “rather crude attempt to imitate black dialect” (Erkkila 1989: 242),77 was never even meant to represent an

76

Cf. also Lott, Love and Theft (2013: 82).

77

She ignores the subversive dimension behind this “crude attempt.”

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actual freedwoman; a “savage beast” brought “hither” by a stereotypical “cruel slaver” (“Ethiopia Saluting”) she is cast as excessively theatrical and artificial. Her speech seems to mock the abolitionist linguistic repertoire. Basing her speech on conventional rhymes that are totally unnatural in the context of a conversation, yet unable to establish regular lines, the “Ethiopian” pokes fun in particular at Longfellow’s 1842 Poems on Slavery.78 Reminiscent of a stereotypically uneducated minstrel character, and laced with intertextual references, “Ethiopia Saluting” poses what were highly disturbing questions during the Reconstruction era: How much could individual and collective perception be relied upon? Did the image created in the mind match the complex reality of the day? Is there a truth that even a camera cannot capture, and that only the poet can point to by confronting the conventionality of the image with the disquieting unusualness of the encounter? “Ethiopia Saluting” deploys a double strategy to suggest a new way of seeing, listening, and thinking. On the one hand, Whitman’s Ethiopia is a blatantly artificial figure; described as “hardly human” and equipped with an Africanized headpiece, she embodies a white idea of blackness. Yet contrary to what Folsom suggests, “her voice” is not “all object instead of subject” because she “literally cannot speak an ‘I.’ (2000: 67).”79 Yet as Folsom himself concedes, her name invokes “a rich cultural tradition that those who see her in her current ‘hovel’ with her ‘bare bony feet’ cannot fathom (2000: 61).”80 Whitman wrote the poem during a time when Ethiopia filled American newspaper headlines (2000: 64), making it widely known as Africa’s proudest nation—one that had never succumbed to colonial rule and from which no slaves had ever been “brought hither.” In the course of events following the kidnapping of British citizens, the Ethiopian leader Tewodros “became a figure of international interest, a young and well-educated black African leader who had unified a

78

Cf., e.g., Longfellow’s “The Quadroon Girl” (1842): “The Slaver in the broad lagoon / Lay moored with idle sail / He waited for the rising moon / And for the evening gale.” Cf. Beach (1996: 80-84), for a comparison of Whitman’s and Longfellow’s poetry.

79

Mancuso makes a similar point in Strange Sad War (1997: 85). Regarding the historical dimension of this view see Frederick Douglass’ famous “Reconstruction” speech. Held in 1866, one year before Whitman sent “Ethiopia Saluting” to Galaxy, it argued that the “ignorance and servility of the ex-slave” was a major reason for the post-emancipation survival of the master-slave relationship and called for ongoing educational efforts. Cf. Douglass, “Reconstruction” (Dec.1, 1866).

80

While Folsom argues that Whitman’s figure expresses some pride in the Ethiopians’ resistance, he does not draw concrete conclusions as to what this resistance meant with regard to the very specific historical phase depicted in the poem and to Reconstruction itself.

   


 

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country torn by civil war and who had taken steps to end slavery in his country. In the United States, the comparison to Lincoln was inevitable” (ibid.). There is enough irony in “Ethiopia Saluting” to suggest that Whitman was deeply aware of Ethiopia’s historical resistance on the one hand, and of the complexity and subversive aspects of the minstrel tradition on the other, and that he used this knowledge to create a deeply subversive, ambiguous message. Reminiscent of the antebellum black impersonator William Henry Lane (whose stage name was “Juba”), Ethiopia may be seen as a black woman imitating a white person imitating a black one (cf. Lott 2013: 116-17).81 Significantly positioning the “Me” before the “master,” Whitman’s “proud Ethiopian” impersonates rather than represents blackness in a complex field of power relations that will not allow her to do otherwise. It is both her tragedy and her triumph that she can make herself understood in the master’s language: “Me, master, years a hundred, since from my parents sunder’d” (“Ethiopia Saluting”). These stylized lines differ from the way the black vernacular was usually represented at the time. Written by a man who in 1855 had “speculated that the sources of a truly American music might be found not in the transplanted accents of New England English but in Negro dialect” (Erkkila 1989: 86-87),82 the poem does not even pretend to imitate black speech but instead represents a woman who refuses to be “authentic” and offers a performance à la Longfellow. But again this is only one possible interpretation of this multiple linguistic signifier, Ethiopia. And while the poem clearly suggests such a reading, it would be overly simplistic to declare this multilayered and disturbing figure a subversive symbol of black agency. A highly ambiguous “apparition,” she “wags her head” between madness83 and pride, otherness and American patriotism, devotedness and threat. The poem’s cultural work, then, lies in providing an arena for the profound ambivalences that marked postwar America. By locating these ambivalences within one of the most popular forms of performance, blackface minstrelsy, it diagnoses a rather substantial cultural dilemma that has to do with unbalanced power relations, parallel audiences, and alternative stories.84

81

cf. also Toll, Blackening Up (1974: 239-40); and Mel Watkins, On the Real Side (1994).

82

Here she refers to Whitman’s “Primer of Words,” which remained unpublished during

83

The figure may have been inspired by the common sight of freedwomen who were men-

his lifetime. Cf. also Beach (1996: 64); and Lott (2013: 103). tally ill due to traumatizing experiences of separation, abuse, and poverty. See Downs (2006: 93). 84

Contrary to what Folsom suggests, Ethiopia is not “a person with shared and perhaps divided loyalties to her African past and her American future” but, first and foremost, the emblem of a deep cultural confusion on the side of the onlooker. Compare with Folsom (2000: 66).

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This does not imply that the woman’s story is irrelevant or, worse, false—on the contrary: instead of relating a simple-minded ex-slave’s unfortunate journey to the big city (a frequent feature of the postbellum minstrel show), the “Ethiopian’s” mantra-like poem recalls that other journey, one that was often deadly and that deprived Africans of their freedom rather than bringing them to a “promised land.” Starting with the Middle Passage, the poem may be seen as disrupting the 1863 narrative of emancipation and its underlying myth of universal freedom to [r]eveal the failure of America and the national literary imagination to assimilate the black race. The black woman appears as a kind of racial mother, an allegorical figure of black America, but as Ethiopia, she is the figure of another country, an exotic alien foreign to the native colors of America. (Erkkila 1989: 241)85

The woman’s inability to tell that story in words other than the oppressors’ does not invalidate it, however. One may in fact argue that, by using the “master’s” language, Whitman’s Ethiopia is not only a product of America but an active contributor to its culture. A cipher rather than a flesh and blood character, she follows the wounddresser’s earlier credo (“I onward go, I stop”) and reminds readers of what they would like to forget. The poem, in other words, keeps the wound open instead of dressing it; it asks uncomfortable yet central questions about the reconstruction of America’s national identity after the Second Founding: is there a place to commemorate slavery in the self-image of the newly constituted nation? Who defines the national self-image? How much dissent can the new nation bear? And will African Americans ever be able to represent themselves fully—will they find a language truly their own—to overcome the trauma of slavery? Interestingly, a positive answer to this last question seems to depend as much on the white majority’s ability to listen as on the black woman’s linguistic repertoire. After all, Whitman’s “Ethiopia” figure makes a serious effort of self-explanation by using the regular stanzas and rhyme-scheme that the soldier relies on when he introduces himself: “’Tis while our army lines Carolina’s shore and pines / Forth from thy hovel door, though, Ethiopia, com’st to me / As, under doughty Sherman, I march toward the sea” (“Ethiopia Saluting”). An “ordinary man,” he is unable to grasp the complexity and historicity of the woman’s performance. Instead of acknowledging the fact that a very old person struggles to her feet “by the roadside” to celebrate a moment she has been waiting for ever since, as “a little child, they caught” her, he freezes her as “dusky,” “ancient,” “hardly human.” Hypnotized by a colorful piece of cloth, he fails to grasp her deeply felt gratitude to the Union Army and asks, naively: “Are the things so strange and marvelous, you see or have seen?”

85

For a similar interpretation, cf. Beach (1996: 98-99).

   


 

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Unlike the “solitary singer” of the antebellum prostitute and criminal,86 the postwar bard of America’s Second Founding does not chant the old slave-woman back into the center of the nation. Choosing a speaker that is not the “omnivorous consciousness” of the writer’s poetic self (cf. Dougherty 1993: 106),87 Whitman has rhetorically removed himself from the widespread anxiety that is the topic of the poem. Because the poem lacks the orienting voice of the “good grey poet,” the focus lies fully on the fundamentally flawed interracial dialogue. The poem leaves it to the reader to decide whether, to what extent, and under which premises the freedpeople belong to the new nation. Most of all, however, it appeals to an opening of the “white mind” in the interracial context and demands a heightened awareness of one’s own established norms and expectations. Conventional and racist as it may seem at first sight, “Ethiopia Saluting” is, in other words, an aesthetically sophisticated and ideologically radical contribution to Whitman’s more general philosophy of democracy, which was based on the readiness to “suffer alienation from one’s particular attachments.”88 We of course do not know if the poem helped white nineteenth-century readers free themselves of their cultural preconceptions. What we do know, however, is that the poet who had always aimed at “the imaginative dissolution of every conceivable discrimination based on social, sexual, or generational role” (Anderson 1971: 123) never managed to overcome his personal prejudice.89 Importantly, however, he struggled to do so. Democratic Vistas is the most theoretically grounded effort in this struggle, which was personal as well as representative, and which contained a vision of democracy as an active process always in the making.

86

The nickname “solitary singer” derives from his 1859 poem “Out of the Cradle Endlessly

87

That he chose a female figure to do so adds to this imaginary self-distancing and objecti-

88

Michael Mosher, quoted in Luke Mancuso, “Reconstruction is still in Abeyance”

89

In an unpublished statement Whitman made toward the end of his life, he stated that “I

Rocking.” fication. (September 1984: 2) . do not wish to say one word against the blacks—but the blacks can never be to me what the whites are. Below all political relations, even the deepest, are still deeper, personal, physical, and emotional ones, the whites are my brothers & I love them.” Notebooks and Unpublished Prose Manuscripts (1984: 2160). I’ve decided to delegate this important quote to a footnote because my chapter focuses not on what Whitman believed personally but on what he decided to make public.

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What most critics are unaware of is that Whitman wanted “Ethiopia Saluting the Colors” to come out simultaneously with Democratic Vistas in the same publication, the weekly magazine Galaxy. What they have noted is the influence of Thomas Carlyle’s famous 1867 piece “Shooting Niagara—and After?” (1867) on Democratic Vistas: initially, the three-part essay was created as a direct response to the Scottish historian’s pessimistic view of the United States as “a country that was leading the way over the falls to utter destruction” by “freeing its slaves and then by giving them civil rights and the right to vote” (Folsom 2010: xxxix). Yet, as Folsom asserts, Whitman “set out to address the burning issue in America of black suffrage” only to end up reducing the problem “to a whisper in an after-note, where race was perhaps implied but not explicitly mentioned” (ibid.: xxxi). Democratic Vistas neither mentions the Black Codes nor the voting qualifications in the 15th Amendment (March 1870), and it also ignores Grant’s signing of the First Enforcement Act and the Ku Klux Clan Act of 1871.90 While Folsom correctly identifies the essay’s articulate silence about race he overlooks the connection between Democratic Vistas and Whitman’s most explicit postwar text on American race relations, “Ethiopia Saluting”: the essay and the poem were originally conceptualized as one project that was as much an experiment in form as content. Whitman wanted them to appear together, so they might complement and support one another. This chapter leaves most of the publication history to a footnote; suffice it to say that the editors of the Galaxy had agreed to publish the poem, yet for unknown reasons they never did. When the first part of Vistas (“Democracy”) came out in 1867, Whitman pressured the Galaxy’s editors to “publish the poem immediately” to ensure that the two texts were received in close temporal proximity.91 The editors, however, did not respond to Whitman’s urgings, and instead published the second part of Democratic Vistas (“Personalism,” 1868). The third part (“Orbic Literature”) never appeared in the monthly magazine.92 In 1871, Whitman took matters into his own hands

90

Regarding Whitman’s reservations about universal suffrage cf. e.g. Ed Folsom (2000: 79). Regarding the same issue, and scholarly responses to it, see Davis, “Democratic Vistas” (2006: 544).




The editors, the Churches, reportedly “wanted to ‘keep it back’” until after publishing “Democracy,” the first part of Democratic Vistas. Folsom (2000: 55). A letter from Walt Whitman to John Burroughs of September 21, 1867 discusses this as well. Cf. Walt Whitman, “Walt Whitman to John Burroughs .”

92

“Orbic Literature” was not accepted by the Galaxy—“possibly because of its length, possible because of what H.L. Mencken called ‘the gnarled and gasping style’ of Democratic

   


 

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and brought out the three essays in paperback, united for the first time under the title Democratic Vistas (1871). (This is the edition that this chapter relies on).93 In the same year, “Ethiopia Saluting” premiered in Leaves of Grass. This was not a coincidence: Whitman wanted readers to view of the two texts as separate yet interconnected. As he states in Democratic Vistas, I will not gloss over the appalling dangers of universal suffrage in the United States. In fact, it is to admit and face these dangers I am writing. To him or her within whose thought rages the battle, advancing, retreating, between democracy’s convictions, aspirations, and the people’s crudeness, vice, caprices, I mainly write this essay. (DV 4).

Starting from this avowal, this chapter takes the strange interconnection between the two texts as a defining part of Whitman’s Reconstruction project. What he was centrally concerned with during those years belongs to the realm of political philosophy and can best be described as a wavering movement between two principal modes of democratic justice: one that disengages the right of democratic participation from presumably “natural” norms (like class, gender, or race), and one that makes the recognition of social distinctions and “natural” differences a prerequisite of democratic participation—or a reason for exclusion. Significantly, neither the hospital nor the concept of national healing appears in the “Ethiopia” poem; it enters the picture again with Democratic Vistas, a piece that was written from the perspective of “a physician diagnosing some deep disease” (DV 11). Here comes an authority that bends over that “vast and more and more thoroughly-appointed body” of “these States,” an “enfeebled” society that is “canker’d, crude, superstitious, and rotten” (DV 11, 12). Moving from a young yet injured country at war to the postwar “life’s gymnasium,” (DV 20) the narrator assumes the wound-dresser’s role of guide and teacher, this time to construct the “skeletton” [sic]

Vistas, or possibly because of the lack of critical or popular acclaim for the two published pieces.” Harold Aspiz, “Another Early Review of Democratic Vistas” (1985: 31). Cf. also Folsom (2010: lv). Interestingly, Democratic Vistas was well received in the United Kingdom where it appeared in the popular Canterbury Series (cf. ibid.: lxi). 93

Originally intended to “expand and evolve over many years,” Democratic Vistas remained relatively unaltered over the decades. When the 84-page booklet was republished in the depression year of 1876 in Whitman’s centennial volume Two Rivulets, Whitman used the same templates as in 1871. When he reissued Two Rivulets a couple of months later he made some minor alterations. Cf. Joel Meyerson, Walt Whitman (1993). When he included it, in 1882, as a part of Specimen Days, he had inserted a new opening paragraph evoking John Stuart Mill, dropped a couple of paragraphs and the concluding notes, and altered some spellings. Cf Folsom (2010: lxii).

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of his democratic vision: America as “fervid and tremendous IDEA, melting everything else with resistless heat, and solving all lesser and definite distinctions in vast, indefinite, spiritual, emotional power” (DV 10). The extent to which this “IDEA” can be extended to the “Ethiopian” nearby is the topic of this analysis. Democratic Vistas references the Civil War hospital as key location for national recovery without mentioning the presence of black victims and personnel. When referring to race it significantly links it to region, not skin color: the wound, the amputation, the shatter’d face or limb, the slow hot fever, long impatient anchorage in bed, and all the forms of maiming, operation and disease. Alas! America have we seen, though only in her early youth, already to hospital brought. There have we watch’d these soldiers, many of them only boys in years—mark’d their decorum, their religious nature and fortitude, and their sweet affection. Wholesale, truly [...] I know not whether I shall be understood, but I realize that it is finally from what I learn’d personally mixing in such scenes that I am now penning these pages. One night in the gloomiest period of the war, in the Patent office hospital in Washington city, as I stood by the bedside of a Pennsylvania soldier, who lay, conscious of quick approaching death, yet perfectly calm, and with noble, spiritual manner [...] What have we here, if not, towering above all talk and argument, the plentifully-supplied, lastneeded proof of democracy, in its personalities? Curiously enough, too, the proof on this point comes, I should say, every bit as much from the south, as from the north. Although I have spoken only of the latter, yet I deliberately include all. Grand, common stock! to me the accomplish’d and convincing growth, prophetic of the future; proof undeniable to sharpest sense, of perfect beauty, tenderness and pluck, that never feudal lord, nor Greek, nor Roman breed, yet rival’d. Let no tongue ever speak in disparagement of the American races, north or south, to one who has been through the war in the great army hospitals. (DV 20-21)

While in this passage Democratic Vistas interprets the hospital as model nation for the country’s white population, it elsewhere suggests a cure that extends to the nation’s black minority. As shall be sketched out in the following, the essay reinforces the central message of “Ethiopia Saluting” by imagining national renewal as an aesthetic endeavor94 in line with the racial other’s “strange” greeting / salutation of the national flag. In line with the old woman’s gesture of gratefulness and recognition yet devoid of the scene’s military aura Democratic Vistas calls for an opening of the American mind95 through forms of discourse that are unexpected and thus challenge established conventions. Taking up the topic of expressive failure that is so central to “Ethiopia Saluting,” Democratic Vistas projects the model of a valid, democratic art:

94

Regarding Whitman’s struggle for a new form of expression cf. Beach (1996: 22) .

95

Regarding this concept in Democratic Vistas cf. Davis, “Democratic Vistas” (2006: 543).

   


 

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we see, fore-indicated, amid these prospects and hopes, new law-forces of spoken and written language—not merely the pedagogue-forms, correct, regular, familiar with precedents, made for matters of outside propriety, fine words, thoughts definitely told out—but a language fann’d by the breath of Nature, which leaps overhead, cares mostly for impetus and effects, and for what it plants and invigorates to grow—tallies life and character, and seldomer tells a thing that suggests or necessitates it. In fact, a new theory of literary composition for imaginative works of the very first class, and especially for highest poems, is the sole course open to These States. (DV 76)

According to the essay, the primary actors in this aesthetic healing process are a generation of writers Whitman hopes to inspire with his own multi-generic work. These “divine literatuses” of the modern will be writers in different genres who know how to reconcile “conflicting and irreconcilable interiors” and thereby help construct the “common skeleton” of a democratic American identity (DV 6, 10) (cf. Mack 2002: 140).96 Democratic Vistas possesses manifesto-like qualities but only to an extent: in order to create an inspirational text, Whitman wanted the text “to be read only in such oneness, each page and each claim and assertion modified and temper’d by the others” (DV 4). While such a framing of his work as preliminary and subject to change ties in with the transcendentalist’s larger philosophy, his Reconstruction oeuvre more actively and explicitly invites resistance and debate. “There are,” he argues in Democratic Vistas, “opposite sides to the great question of democracy, as to every great question” (DV 3). By making room for the “ancient,” “dusky woman” in “Ethiopia Saluting” Whitman acknowledges what, for him, was the most precarious “opposite side” to the Second Founding. Literally “rising by the roadside” of his more solid Democratic Vistas, “Ethiopia” (both the figure and the poem) haunts Whitman’s liberal project with its/her ambivalent salute. However, this poetic addendum to Democratic Vistas97 does not seriously undermine the enlightenment principles of Whitman’s democratic approach; it complicates rather than challenges the issue of universal suffrage. Because his essay rarely discusses race relations, the few times this happens loom particularly large: taking up the democratic theme of “The Dresser” Whitman emphasizes his support of the 15th amendment by “fully acknowledging the latest, widest opening of the doors” (DV

96

As Mack explains, Whitman does not aim at a “standardized personality type” to be brought about by the teachings of “Culture,” but envisioned a “selective synthesis of cul.tural and natural dimensions of selfhood in a democratic model of identity” (ibid. : 145)

97 The new header could be described as a foreword, an appendix, or a “comment” as the original title, “Ethiopia Commenting,” suggests.

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5).98 Interestingly, however, he links this “opening” to both the head and the heart. According to Whitman, democracy would never happen without a sincere devotion to principle; after sectional war and emancipation, loving one’s newly won neighbor was naïve and unrealistic: “Leaving the rest to the sentimentalists, we present freedom as sufficient in its scientific aspect, cold as ice, reasoning, deductive, clear and passionless as crystal” (DV 23). Importantly, however, neither “popular superficial suffrage” nor universal education, will lead to the desired results unless democracy “goes deeper, gets at least as firm and as warm a hold in men’s hearts, emotions and beliefs, as, in their days, feudalism or ecclesiasticism” (DV 9). America’s new democracy, in other words, has its roots in the “religious and moral character” of an earlier, national ideal (DV 6) that must be fed and reinvigorated with idealistic love and passion to inspire a truly democratic future. Whitman’s vision is a democracy against all odds—as he readily acknowledges, there is little to hope for when examining the state of the nation under the “moral microscope” of the present, its cities resembled an apocalyptic Babel, “crowded with petty grotesques, malformations, phantoms, playing meaningless antics.” Whitman laments a “pervading flippancy and vulgarity, low cunning, infidelity” everywhere, an “abnormal libidinousness, unhealthy forms, male, female, painted, padded, dyed, chignon’d, muddy complexions, bad blood”(DV 14).99 A notably racist undertone pervades this passage, alluding to “miscegenation” and moral disaster. And yet, racist undertones are an exception in this text. Whitman in fact removed a phrase that contained racist allusions to a “crowded, colored Carolina bush-meeting” when he published his essays in book form. As Folsom has pointed out, he did the same with “virtually all such statements” (2010: xliii and xlviii).100 When he mentions the “ignorant, and… those out of business,” “the specimens and vast collections of… the credulous, the unfit and uncouth, the incapable, and the very low and poor” (DV 2122), the race and gender of these people is left to the reader’s imagination. Yet many

98

According to the Fifteenth Amendment (1870) “the right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.”

99

Historically, Whitman here reacts to urban class conflicts and corruption. Cf. Quigley (2004: 120ff).

100 Folsom interprets this differently, suggesting that Whitman “left behind (...) enough traces that we can still glimpse the beginnings of his once bracing vision, his attempt to imagine a democratic subjectivity open enough to speak black experience in often subtle ways” (ibid.: xxxi). As this chapter suggests, Whitman never gave up his initial plan, but shifted his emphasis to the larger concept of democracy, and the personal struggles that were involved in this.

   


 

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of his seemingly vague remarks take on a far more concrete meaning when contextualized in the time they were created. The seemingly universal claim that “government” must “of course provide[…] for the police, the safety of life, property, and for the basic statute and common law” (DV 22) takes on a concrete political meaning when contextualized within the exceedingly fierce debates about the “Due Process” and “Equal Protection” clauses of the Fourteenth Amendment.101 These debates were still in full swing when “Democracy” was first submitted to The Galaxy.102 Democratic Vistas, in other words, is not disinterested in the future of American race relations—Whitman mentions Reconstruction as little as possible but as much as he found necessary.103 By doing so, he subordinates his personal reluctance to fully acknowledge the humanity of African Americans to his overriding love of democracy in its most open form. To imaginatively resolve the conflict between the “head” and the “heart,” Whitman establishes a fundamentally optimistic notion of what he calls “general humanity”: there is no evidence of an incurable collective “defect”—not even among those “ignorant,” “uncouth and unfit,” and “very low and poor” who, significantly, may “aspir[e] for independence” (DV 22).104 Whitman, in other words, believed the ulterior object of political and all other government […] to be among the rest, not merely to rule, to repress disorder &c., but to develop, to open up to cultivation, to encourage the

101 “We believe the ulterior object of political and all other government, [having, of course, provided for the police, the safety of life, property, and for the basic statute and common law (…)].” 102 After the first draft had appeared in December 1865 it was first repealed by southern congressmen and later became a much disputed legal issue among northern republicans as well. It was finally adopted on July 9, 1868. It overruled the Dred Scott decision by declaring that all men born in the United States (with the notable exception of Native Americans) were considered U.S. citizens. 103 It hardly seems coincidental that this method resembles homoeopathy, an unorthodox medical approach that Whitman admired for its holistic concept of the body, spirit, and mind. Cf. Thomas Sanfilip, “Health,” Walt Whitman (1998). 104 The quote comes from “Personalism,” the part of Democratic Vistas that was written in Washington, D.C., around the time when the policies of Radical Reconstruction were most noticeable. In 1866, Congress had “passed a new voting statute for D.C., giving all males over the age of twenty-one who were not ‘infamous’ criminals or Southern sympathizers the right to vote.” One year later, African Americans in D.C. voted for the first time in an election for “some aldermen and assorted minor offices.” And from 1868 to 1870 Sayles Jenks Bowen, a man who vehemently sought to integrate public schools in D.C., served as mayor of that city. Folsom (2010: xxvii-xxviii).

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possibilities of all beneficent and manly outcroppage, and of that aspiration for independence, and the pride and self-respect latent in all characters. (Or, if there be exceptions, we cannot, fixing our eyes on them alone, make theirs the rule for all). (DV 22)

Whitman does not suppress the sense of doubt that pervades his thoughts yet he explores how much of this is reasonable, and how much is based in racist “superstition”. In an exemplary “test case” he introduces an illiterate (white) grandmother “of happy and sunny temperament” who “was uneducated, but possess’d a native dignity” and was a natural “regulator, judge, settler of difficulties, shepherdess, and reconciler in the land” (DV 45-46). Given the fact that black illiteracy was a central topic in Reconstruction debates, and that twenty years earlier Whitman had described an “aged black widow woman” in remarkably similar terms,105 Democratic Vistas once again subtly acknowledges the racial dimension of the Second Founding without mentioning African Americans. This episode decisively criticizes, not the racism of an antiimmigrant and anti-black political elite (that pressed for literacy tests to legitimize political exclusion106), but the underlying, undemocratic principle of such lawmaking. Only after this somewhat sentimentally tinged mind-game about the dignified illiterate grandmother does Whitman address the legal dimension of black suffrage: To be a voter with the rest is not so much; and this, like every institute, will have its imperfections. But to become an enfranchised man, and now, impediments removed, to stand and start without humiliation, and equal with the rest; to commence, or have the road clear’d to commence, the grand experiment of development, whose end, (perhaps requiring several generations,) may be the forming of a full-grown man or woman—that is something. To ballast the State is also secured, and in our times is to be secured, in no other way. (DV 23)

A functioning legal system emerges as a prerequisite to individual self-reliance and self-realization, both of which are fundamental to a democratic society. And there is another prerequisite for being “equal with the rest”: the essay argues (by only hinting

105 In one of several antebellum representations of older, physically “large” black women, he describes an “old creature” who “was quite remarkable every where for her agreeable ways and good humor.” Walt Whitman, “Some Fact-Romances,” The Early Poems and the Fiction (1963: 321). 106 By 1860 more than 90 percent of native-born white citizens of the United States could read, but many immigrants were illiterate. Cf. Stevenson, The Victorian Homefront (1991: 30). In 1869, when the Fifteenth Amendment passed Congress, literacy tests were, significantly, not interdicted. As Quigley has shown with regard to New York City, suffrage restriction was not only a topic in the postwar southern states. Quigley (2004: 148).

   


 

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at the contentious question of African-American landownership) that “[t]he true gravitation-hold of liberalism in the United States will be a more universal ownership of property, general homesteads, general comfort—a vast, intertwining reticulation of wealth” (DV 27). Remarkably similar to present-day theorists like Axel Honneth and Nancy Fraser, Whitman aligns the public recognition of an individual to full economic participation and a voluntary alienation from one’s “particular”—in this case cultural—“attachments.”107 Ready to alienate himself from the European-bred norms of his culture, Whitman invites a mixture of Egyptian hieroglyphs, Hindu chants, Hebrew spirituality, Greek “esthetic proportions,” Roman satire, German enlightenment, and the iconographic image of “Christ, with bent head, brooding love and peace” to breathe their “breath of life into our New World’s nostrils” (DV 52). Most of all, however, the author of Democratic Vistas believes that in order to enable social justice and a functioning (capitalist) economy, a liberal democracy must recognize the moral right of the individual to be considered and treated as equal. As Fraser puts it, “only a category that defines individual autonomy as dependent on intersubjective consent would be capable of grasping many of the moral issues of our time” (in ibid.: 32).108 Nowhere does it become more clear how serious Whitman was about this culture of democratic consent and moral recognition than in the essay’s combination with “Ethiopia Saluting”: by describing and evoking a deep-seated fear and distrust of the racial other, poetry fulfills the function of an imaginary, democratic, and therapeutic realm where white cultural anxieties are first acknowledged, then managed. Before examining the genesis of this fundamental concept in Whitman’s later works, this chapter juxtaposes the “Ethiopian” against the other, equally feminized concept that threatened the postwar renewal—the lady—thereby adding a gendered component to this analysis. Unlike the crazed woman at the roadside, these educated and literate city dwellers could, as the essay implies, attain the status of citizens par excellence if they did not waste their potential in a world of “toys and fiction” (DV 32) that, according to Whitman, was as un-American as the “Ethiopian’s” African heritage. A victim of the “pride and centripetal isolation of a human being in himself,” the author’s prototypical lady defies the moral credo of the Second Founding because she embraces a self-centered concept of individuality that does not flourish

107 While Fraser and Honneth disagree on the status of economical redistribution (“Umverteilung”) within the concept of recognition (“Anerkennung”), they both agree that individual (and group-) recognition do not exist independently from the issue of economical justice. Cf. Nancy Fraser and Axel Honneth, Umverteilung oder Anerkennung (2003). 108 My translation. She takes up Hegel’s Phenomenology here. Unlike Whitman, who embraced universal suffrage with remarkable hesitancy, their debate is of course based on the legal prerequisite of universal suffrage.

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within “the compensating balance-wheel of the successful working machinery of aggregate America” (DV 35). Significantly, Whitman blames not only the women themselves for this failing, but also the men who support their frivolous lifestyle, and thereby actively prevent them from furthering the nation’s spiritual perfection: Coming down to what is of the only real importance, Personalities, and examining minutely, we question, we ask, Are [sic] there, indeed, men here worthy the name? Are there athletes? Are there perfect women, to match the generous material luxuriance? (DV 13)

It is here that the pessimism of Democratic Vistas peaks. Whitman’s “unworthy” urban couples replace their “genuine belief” in the “underlying principles of the States” and in “humanity itself” with a “spectacle” that is “appalling”; they lack public spirit and contribute to “an atmosphere of hypocrisy” that in the end leads to a gendered crisis, as “men believe not in the women, nor the women in the men” (DV 11). Whitman clearly criticizes white society far more harshly than the disoriented freedpeople: the white lady personifies the case of a mental-educational endeavor gone fatally wrong. In its most didactic section, “Personalism,” which is centrally about “a balancing of individuality with camaraderie” (Folsom 2010: xx), Democratic Vistas encourages America’s female population to “become the robust equals, workers, and, it may be, even practical and political deciders with the men” (DV 32). The text once more suggests that this change of mind be rehearsed through the written word. Female readers, Whitman argues, should turn their backs on the “scornful superciliousness” that “rules in literature” (with its “imported models of womanly personality,” DV 46), and find inspiration in a “new kind of representation to fit the new political facts” (Ceniza 1998: 228). Whitman anticipates that this “democratic literature” will “bring forth, cultivate, brace, and strengthen” a truly democratic spirit in the individual and collective mind: A strong mastership of the general inferior self by the superior self, is to be aided, secured, indirectly, but surely, by the literatus, in his works, shaping, for individual or aggregate democracy, a great passionate body, in and along with which goes a great masterful spirit. (DV 70)

As Sherry Ceniza has argued convincingly, Democratic Vistas replaces urgent postbellum demands for women’s suffrage with a plea for the re-education of the “ladies” (cf. 1998: 223). Thus although Whitman urges women to mingle “amid the arenas of practical life, politics, suffrage, &c.” (DV 46), his plea remains strangely abstract, vague, and theoretical. Democratic Vistas is far more concrete when it comes to suggesting “ways in which literature could inscribe images of women in a democratic country” (ibid. : 228). Moving away from Whitman’s antebellum emphasis on individual women, the essay promotes a set of fixed types, all of which belong to the

   


 

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category Ceniza terms “the Mother of All (ibid.)”—a category that emphasizes individual responsibility and community-orientation, and that Whitman labels “healthy and bracing” (DV 44). Democratic Vistas promotes several possible biographies to make its point: there is the single working woman who finances her sisters’ education, there is the one who owns her own business and “dashes out more and more into real hardy life” (DV 45), and a third is a married mother of two who reserves time for her own improvement. The aforementioned old peacemaker whose illiteracy does not limit her contribution to society is the fourth model. Whitman, in other words, did not simply recall the ideal of the “Cult of True Womanhood,” but negotiated its terms in the context of the Second Founding: these women act within the framework of cultural conventions, but they are also self-reliant, working, and not necessarily married.109 Only a narrative tradition that celebrates such women, Whitman argues, will achieve “the entire redemption of woman out of these incredible holds and webs of silliness, millinery, and every kind of dyspeptic depletion—and thus insuring to the States a strong and sweet Female Race, a race of perfect Mothers” (DV 15). Whitman’s notion of the motherly citizen ignores the situation of actual women with children in nineteenth-century America (Ceniza 1998: 224-25):110 not one of his ideal, female citizens is able to combine motherhood and financial independence.111

109 For a detailed discussion of these “Mothers of All” (cf. ibid.: 220-40). The “cult of true womanhood” has, of course, always been a discourse rather than a fixed definition, and Whitman’s empowering, and yet quite “Victorian” vision of American women can be seen in the tradition of stories and novels by (e.g.) Catherine Sedgwick. (I thank Ruth Mayer for reminding me of this). And yet the four concepts in DV differ from such earlier ones because they coexist in a larger framework of female choices. Cf. also Erkkila, Political Poet (1989: 259) ; and Mancuso (1997: 1 and 11, fn 2). 110 Her observation that the mechanic’s wife has only two children and may therefore be read as an “implicit message of birth control” does not solve the problem Whitman refuses to discuss. 233. In 1860 the average birth rate for white women had been five children, down from seven in 1800. After the war an unusually high number of women remained childless, partly because of a lack of men, and partly because they preferred to remain single. About the changing size of families and the restrictive role of the mother after the civil war see Stevenson, The Victorian Homefront (1991: xxxiii-xxxi). 111 Women who do work (like the one who “from taste and necessity conjoin’d, has gone into practical affairs, carries on a mechanical business, partly works at it herself, dashes out more and more into real hardy life”) remain childless. A test case of cultural modernity, this childless, working, woman becomes the guardian of established gender norms even as the separation of spheres becomes more and more blurred. Finding herself in the company of “superior carpenters, farmers, and even boatmen and drivers,” the female

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And yet there is no clear evidence that he “feared the change” (as Ceniza put it) (1998: 233) that he knew would result if women, including mothers, entered the workplace:112 for all its conceptual shortcomings, his concept of American womanhood was aimed at a further “opening of doors” (cf. “The Dresser”). While it is true that Whitman “reassures his society (and himself) that women, are, after all, women, thus suggesting a notion of essentialism” (ibid.: 232), it is also true that according to Democratic Vistas it not a woman’s actual motherhood that privileges the female gender as ideal citizen but her physical capacity for giving birth.113 Because of this biological capacity even the “rugged presentation” (Ceniza 1998: 232) of a childless female mechanic possesses “the charm of the womanly nature” (DV 45). In “Personalism” the “natural” female capacity to nurture is significantly redefined as a set of cultural skills like “inclusiveness, cohesion, and nurturance” (ibid.: 233). When Whitman criticizes his female contemporaries for not fulfilling the role of “perfect Mothers” to “insur[e] to the States a strong and sweet female Race” (DV 15), he does not criticize them for remaining childless but for neglecting a talent that he expected women in particular to contribute to the Second Founding. This, then, allowed Whitman to “see beyond the boundaries attributed to the body and on some level see that ‘motherhood’ was not gender-bound” (ibid.: 226).114 As we have seen in “The Dresser” (and will see in the autobiographical texts, too), Whitman expands his definition of motherhood to include men. In these very personal writings, he stresses and authenticates a man’s motherliness as a behavioral option that, if cultivated, would secure male moral leadership in the new family-nation. The male nurse figures as counter-model to the corrupt politicians that threaten to destroy a new America in the making. In the dresser’s compassionate, personal letters to the mothers of wounded or deceased sons, his considerate listings of the names of the

mechanic fully “preserves and bears” “the charm of the womanly nature”: she “knows how to be firm and silent at the same time” (DV 45). 112 Ceniza suggests that the poet “feared the change” that he knew would result when women would leave the private sphere, but she gives little evidence of where he expresses these fears. See 1998: 233. 113 One could also say that according to Whitman “woman” is entitled to what Nancy Fraser has termed “participatory parity”—to have the same rights as the majority and to be able to exert them (without having to) because one shares the same fundamental prerequisites. The concept does not necessarily imply a universalist view of society. Cf. Fraser and Honneth (2003: 54, fn 39). 114 For a different interpretation cf. Beach (1996: 25). He argues that Whitman’s work enforces biological standards rather than sociocultural ones.

   


 

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wounded and dead, and his approving gazes at other caring mothers in the ward, the Victorian ideal of motherhood becomes an option for all.


  
 
 
   
 
 


Whitman’s ideal of American womanhood remained the same throughout the postwar years, yet his views of race were unstable. Time and again he touched on the issue of racial integration, but it never again became the topic of an entire poem, as in “Ethiopia Saluting,” or a main point of reference, as in Democratic Vistas. His wartime reminiscences, Memoranda During the War, almost ignore the issue. Published in 1875 and based on his wartime journals, they focus on Whitman’s occupation as a nurse.115 Whenever Whitman refers to African Americans, it happens in a very subtle and well-thought-out manner: placed in the extra-societal rehearsal space of the Civil War hospital, with its principles of humanitarianism, unconditionality, solidarity, and individuality, the African-American “case” is imaginatively tested for its eligibility for citizenship. An important political text in Whitman’s oeuvre, the Memoranda may be said to re-examine their theoretical predecessor, Democratic Vistas, from a decisively personal viewpoint. A look at the publication history sheds light on the text’s cultural work in the service of abolition and national healing: the Memoranda were first submitted for publication during the year of the Emancipation Proclamation, which suggests that Whitman wished it to be read in an abolitionist context. He offered his “impromptu jottings” (Memoranda 3) to James Redpath, the famous abolitionist and editor of Alcott’s Hospital Sketches.116 Redpath turned the manuscript down (for financial reasons, he maintained), and Whitman waited another ten years to publish parts of it in the New York-based Weekly Graphic (1874) before finally bringing out the full version, at his own expense, in 1875. Representing “[f]our years compressing centuries of native passion, first-class pictures, tempest of life and death” that would influence

115 I rely on the 1993 reprint of the original edition: Walt Whitman, Memoranda During the War (1875), reprint (Whitman 1993). 116 Whitman in fact tried to align his manuscript with Alcott’s best selling narrative: in an October 21, 1863 letter to Redpath, Whitman promoted his Memoranda as “a book of the time, worthy the time, something considerably beyond mere hospital sketches.” Redpath, The Correspondence (1961-1977: 171). This remark may well be read as a comment to the nursing narrative as a genre. As Daneen Wardrop has shown, Whitman relied on the popularity of these books to stage his own, eroticized, version of hospital care. “Civil War Nursing Narratives, Whitman’s Memoranda During the War, and Eroticism,” Walt Whitman Quarterly Review 23 (summer 2005).

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the “Histories, Drama, Romance, and even Philosophy of centuries to come” (4), the Memoranda are—unlike Democratic Vistas—targeted at a predominantly male readership, and (given the topic of the Memoranda) to veterans in particular. In the mid 1870s this group sacrificed the issue of racial equality on the “altar” of sectional reconciliation, which may explain, at least in part, why African Americans are relegated to the outer margins of Whitman’s reminiscences. Betsy Erkkila is one of the few scholars to comment upon the constructedness of the Memoranda.117 Stating that Whitman’s “reporter-narrator, like his poetic persona, is a fictive creation“ and identifying numerous scenes that are clearly invented, she identifies the autobiographical tone of the Memoranda as a strategy to suggest immediacy and authenticity (1989: 207).118 Viewed in the light of Whitman’s larger Reconstruction project, this strategic intimacy is another intervention into the cultural amnesia that “The Dresser” had already explored. The Memoranda, in fact, take up where “The Dresser” left off. If in the poem “a refuse pail / Soon to be fill’d with clotted rags and blood, emptied, and fill’d again” serves as a metaphor for what is left over from the war (most of all the painful question of what had been gained after so much suffering), the Memoranda literally re-inscribe those “rags” to make them meaningful as they help bandage the ailing nation: I have perhaps forty such little note-books left, forming a special history of those years, for myself alone, full of associations never to be possibly said or sung. I wish I could convey to the reader the associations that attach to these soil’d and creas’d little livraisons, each composed of a sheet or two of paper, folded small to carry in the pocket, and fasten’d with a pin. I leave them just as I threw them by during the War, blotch’d here and there with more than one bloodstain, hurriedly written, sometimes at the clinique, not seldom amid the excitement of uncertainty, or defeat, or of action, or getting ready for it, on a march.” (Memoranda 3)

117 Martin G. Murray is another exception when he points out that “Whitman did take some liberties regarding the chronological placement of a few sketches” and thereby Whitman glosses over the fact that he was actually “recuperating in his mother’s Brooklyn home from emotional and physical exhaustion brought on by his hospital work.” Such “lies” were strategic because he did not want to undermine his “projection of ‘ordinary cheer and magnetism’,” Murray argues. “Specimen Days,” A Companion to Walt Whitman (2006: 556). 118 Framed by a foreword and a conclusion and containing material not to be found in the original notebooks (such as a list of the wounded and the dead), it in fact departs considerably from the original notebooks that were themselves fashioned along programmatic lines: titled “Walt Whitman. Soldiers’ Missionary,” they highlighted the author’s superior intentions.

   


 

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By figuring these “soil’d and creas’d little livraisons” as sacral, wartime relics, the Memoranda contributed to the culture of public memory that during the late Reconstruction years included the collection and marketing of “hair jewelry” (locks of hair taken from a fallen enemy) and of buttons cut off from the enemy’s military uniforms.119 It thereby suggests an immediacy that transcends both time and the boundary between text and life experience: by fashioning his Memoranda as fetishistic souvenirs of the inexplicable (=war), Whitman imbues them with both realism and mystic potency, and suggests that there may “arise active and breathing forms” (Memoranda 4) from them. Prone to create “some pang of anguish—some tragedy, profounder than ever poet wrote” (Memoranda 3), the passage once more relies on the shock of recognition that was mentioned earlier, and once more the reader is invited to follow a well-known figure in order to reconnect with the nation’s past: “As you advance through the dusk of early candle light, a nurse will step forth on tip-toe, and silently but imperiously forbid you to make any noise, or perhaps to come near at all” (Memoranda 25). More audible here than in “The Dresser,” the nurse is not a mere witness, but an authority that actively defends the rights of the patients to a knowledge that belongs to them alone. Before returning to this point, I want to remind readers that this analysis of the Memoranda refers to its publication date, not the time it was originally drafted. Read in 1875, the text symbolically linked postbellum America with a legacy of destruction and disease: Memoranda shocked postbellum readers into realizing that theirs was a nation of survivors, and forever lacking a crucial part of itself. The text thereby crucially diverges from “The Wound-Dresser,” where the failure to re-assemble shattered body parts turned the idea of a unified whole into an “expression of national desire.” In the Memoranda this is replaced by a powerful linguistic still life that appears toward the end of the collection. Here the narrator meditates on “skeletons, bleach’d bones, tufts of hair, buttons, fragments of clothing” that belonged to those “taken from us—the son from the mother, the husband from the wife, the dear friend from the dear friend.”120 Refusing assembly into the meaningful whole of a Memento Mori or Vanitas motif, the image captures the sense of fragmentation and dissolution

119 Regarding the transformation of the American landscape into a “Sacred Ground” as a part of the postwar nation-building process see Edward T. Linenthal, Sacred Ground (1993: 87-125). 120 For a comparison of Whitman’s descriptions of the Civil War dead with Alexander Gardner’s famous photographs (especially with “Harvest of Death”) cf. Folsom (1998: 283). Another example in Memoranda can be found toward the end of the text: “there they lie, strewing the fields and woods and valleys and battle-fields of the South (…) Gettysburg, the West, Southwest (…) the dead, the dead, the dead—our dead—or—or East or West (…)” (56-57).

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suffered by many postwar families (of whatever age, race, or religion) and by the nation as a whole. Laced with imagery of smoke and destruction, Memoranda ends with a vision of the “land entire” as “saturated, perfumed with the impalpable ashed’ exhalation in Nature’s chemistry distill’d” (Memoranda 57).121 Memoranda reminded postbellum readers that any social vision would have to be based on the legacy of the dead as well as on coming to terms with the nation’s imperfections. At the same time, however, the text insists that such a “second founding” is indeed possible as long as it begins on the personal level. Hope emerges in the form of “a Mississippian—a captain—hit badly in the leg” who turns into a postwar icon of physical imperfection: “I saw him three months afterwards in Washington, with his leg amputated, doing well” (Memoranda 6). As living proof of personal agency in the face of irreversible loss, the veteran comes to stand for a scarred yet hopeful postwar nation. As exemplified by the amputee’s story, Whitman’s 1863 reminiscences took on a new meaning when they were first read in the socio-historical context of the mid 1870s. During those years America was hit by an economic depression (also known as the “Great Panic” of 1873-1878) that fueled the desire to leave the sectional tensions that still existed behind; after all, the one-hundredth anniversary of the Declaration of Independence was approaching (1876). Refusing to address those issues directly, the Memoranda return to the war to conjure up a consoling vision of cross sectional brotherhood and shared suffering: when Northerner and Southerner meet there emerges a “strange confidence and love between (them), welded by sickness, pain of wounds, and little daily, nightly offices of nursing and friendly words, and visits (Memoranda 3). Whitman, in other words, once more fashioned himself as a nurse and a writer, offering his “verbatim renderings from such pencillings on the spot” (Memoranda 3) as a remedy to the new ills of a nation that had yet to fully recover from the war. In line with Whitman’s larger democratic vision, the “patient” is both individualized and universal. The text chooses “the significant word UNKNOWN” (Memoranda 57) to represent this seeming paradox: written upon gravestones in every corner of the country, it commemorates either a single man or “thousands or tens of thousands.” The “significant word” signals the limits of language for expressing the unspeakable but at the same time comes as close as possible to adequately commemorating the many unknown soldiers buried in the seventy or so Civil War cemeteries:

121 “Whitman’s mass dead are still in motion as nature’s chemistry casts a nimbus around them, then transforms them into our bloody nutriment, our future, just as the chemistry of photography takes present moments and transforms them into a vision available to the future, but a vision of a moment forever dead (…)” (ibid.: 283).

   


 

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(In some of the Cemeteries nearly all the dead are Unknown. At Salisbury, N.C., for instance, the known are only 85, while the Unknown are 12,027, and 11,700 of these are buried in trenches. A National Monument has been put up here, by order of Congress, to mark the spot— but what visible, material monument can ever fittingly commemorate that spot?) (Memoranda 57)

In passages reminiscent of Edmonds’s Nurse and Spy, Whitman uses the language of death and illness to flatten out all social differences. At the same time, Memoranda— again like Nurse and Spy—emphasizes the variety of those still alive and that form the basis of his future vision. Whitman relies on the form of the catalogue here, a technique he had used ever since “Song of Myself,” and that now helps him maintain the revolutionary ideal of e pluribus unum. Memoranda presents a vast range of Americans who are distinguished in terms of politics, region, gender, nationality, age, and religion. There are “interesting cases” (8) like the “good Secesh” (Memoranda 9), “a good sample of the American Eastern young man” (12), “a regular Irish boy, a fine specimen of youthful physical manliess” (Memoranda 16), and, once again, the motherly female, cast as “a redfaced, illiterate old Irish woman” who “take[s] the poor wasted naked boys so tenderly up in her arms” (40). Memoranda takes a stand against anti-immigrant sentiments, particularly the common prejudice against Irish and Jews, both of whom were badly persecuted during the recession: the prominence in Memoranda of “an intelligent looking man” with a “foreign accent, black-eyed and hair’d, a Hebraic appearance” (Memoranda 9), as well as a “very fine nurse” who is “red-faced, illiterate” and of Irish descent (Memoranda 40), are only two examples here. African Americans, however, are suspiciously lacking in the democratic catalogues of Memoranda. This void is all the more significant if one considers the nurse’s personal evolution, which drives the exemplary “story” of the Memoranda: the reader witnesses a process of individual growth that can be practiced by everybody, and that is the prerequisite for a functioning democracy. Adequacy, dignity, and practice are the key components of this learning process that emerges through the nurse’s confrontations with the needs of others. At first we see him strolling aimlessly through hospitals and camps until he learns the first lesson of democratic self-perfection: “I do not see that I do much good, but I cannot leave them.” A quick learner, he then takes measures to ensure that he is “always well used” (Memoranda 7). Significantly, however, and more explicitly than in “The Dresser,” the nurse’s efficiency relies on mutual recognition. In the course of his daily routines the wound-dresser comes to practice a mindful attentiveness when he approaches his patients; he carefully registers their wishes and cravings and only acts when he is sure that the patient “wishes it” (Memoranda 7, and numerous similar examples); and while he “encourage[s] the men to write” (Memoranda 9), he never presses his ideas on them. The exemplary nurse, in other

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words, practices democratic citizenship by fully recognizing the invalid other’s individual difference: In these Wards, or on the field, as I thus continue to go round, I have come to adapt myself to each emergency, after its kind or call, however trivial, however solemn—every one justified and made real under its circumstances—not only visits and cheering talk and little gifts—not only washing and dressing wounds, (I have some cases where the patient is unwilling any one should do this but me)—but passages from the Bible, expounding them, prayer at the bedside, explanations of doctrine, & c. (I think I see my friends smiling at this confession, but I was never more earnest in my life). (Memoranda 31)

This deeply humanitarian approach to individual needs and desires recognizes religious differences, but not cultural ones. This was of course not unusual at the time, but there were other nurses with a different take on the issue. Emily Parsons, e.g. wrote in her journal that The colored female nurses (…) have a table to themselves, and this morning I was quite amused to find a wail coming up because they did not have corn bread and fried meat; the frying pan and corn bread are necessaries of life to the negroes. I reported to Dr. Russell who desired me to draw up a bill of fare in accordance with their peculiar dietary views and have it carried out in the kitchen. (1984: 145)

It may be expected, then, that the needs of black patients (whom Whitman claims to have tended) differed from whites. Yet unlike Parsons, Whitman had difficulties acknowledging such differences. Ignoring the issue, he instead emphasized the routine aspects of his hospital endeavor. Contrary to Democratic Vistas, the Memoranda are entirely non-theoretical and focus entirely on the daily practice of democratic citizenship: in order to secure the survival of the whole, Whitman’s healthy citizen must “emanat[e] ordinary cheer and magnetism” by exercising due care, respect, and responsibility in the face of strangers: My habit, when practicable, was to prepare for starting out on one of those daily or nightly tours, of from a couple to four of five hours, by fortifying myself with previous rest, the bath, clean clothes, a good meal and as cheerful an appearance as possible. (Memoranda 18)

The passage may be read as a plea against self-forgetfulness as the democratic citizen recognizes his own needs as a prerequisite to his place in the larger community. Imaginatively rehearsed in a situation of national crisis, the nurse’s path to self-perfection highlights what for Whitman was the deeper meaning of democracy: through a “habit” of mindful self-cultivation, the nurse “succeeded and help’d more than by medical nursing, or delicacies, or gifts of money, or anything else” (Memoranda 18).

   


 

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At the same time, however, the narrator/nurse tests potential limits of democratic inclusion by discussing the place of national enemies and traitors. In line with its pluralist credo, Memoranda explicitly embraces the rebellious, dangerous, patient as well: “Some of the wounded are rebel soldiers and officers, prisoners. One, a Mississippian—a captain—hit badly in leg, I talk’d with some time; he ask’d for papers, which I gave him” (Memoranda 6). There is, in other words, a right of dissent that must be recognized at all cost.122 In the course of the Memoranda Whitman moves beyond the extra-social space of the hospital and the category of the patient to make his point. In a move reminiscent of Edmonds, the metaphor of nursing serves as a prelude to a more risky embrace of strangers: Deserters—Saturday, Oct. 24.—Saw a large squad of our own deserters, (over 300) surrounded with a strong cordon of arm’d guards, marching along Pennsylvania avenue. The most motley collection I ever saw, all sorts of rig, all sorts of hats and caps, many fine-looking fellows, some of them shame-faced, some sickly, most of them dirty, shirts very dirty and long worn, &c. They tramp’d along without order, a huge huddling mass, not in ranks. I saw some of the spectators laughing, but I felt like anything else but laughing. These deserters are far more numerous than would be thought. Almost every day I see squads of them, sometimes two or three at a time, with a small guard; sometimes ten or twelve, under a larger one. (Memoranda 34)

By referring to these theoretically impossible citizens in a surprisingly neutral and yet personal tone Memoranda challenges the common definition of deserters as traitors and encourages readers to ask why, during the sectional conflict, thousands of “fine-looking fellows” had arrived at the same shameful conclusion.123 Were they really unworthy of society’s compassion and support? Was their behavior not covered by the same Declaration that granted a right of rebellion whenever the “[f]orm of Government becomes destructive of these ends?”124 Wasn’t the recognition of dissenting voices a defining aspect of a true democracy? On a more basic level—does what we see mean what we think it means? What is the other person’s motivation, perspective, experience? Who is responsible? Who has the right to judge?

122 Regarding Whitman’s visits to the hospital as “humanitarian reform” cf. Eiselein, Literature (1996: 115-33). 123 Regarding deserters during the Civil War cf. www.civilwarhome.com/desertion.htm. Accessed 1. Aug. 2016. 124 “That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it […].” From “The Declaration of Independence.”

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It is a fundamental weakness in the politics of Memoranda that it fails to answer the last question. Although it eventually acknowledges that recognition may lead to exclusion, it shies away from taking responsibility for such an act: in a scene describing Confederate “guerillas, a demoniac crowd, each member of which was stabbing them [‘their prisoners, even the wounded’] in different parts of their bodies,” the narrator takes recourse to a pronoun without referent and the use of the passive voice: “it was decided there and then that they should die” (Memoranda 35). Contrary to the deserters’ scene, we learn, the witness remains calm and undisturbed; while he does not actively support the verdict, he does not challenge it either. Memoranda defines democracy as a collective readiness to recognize vastly different opinions and behaviors, potentially including those that oppose existing laws and norms. The text’s struggle with the role of African Americans is therefore even more remarkable. Whitman does not acknowledge black soldiers’ self-sacrifice in the same warm tone with which he describes the wartime contribution of “some unconscious Indianan, or from Ohio or Tennessee—on whose birth the calmness of heaven seems to have descended” (Memoranda 27).125 African-American soldiers are merely listed as a minor part of the “vast hospital” that stands for the “wounded” nation. Titled “Three Years Summ’d Up,” the following passage appears only three paragraphs before Memoranda culminates in the celebration of the (afore mentioned) “UNKNOWN”: While I was with wounded and sick in thousands of cases from the New England States, and from New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania, and from Michigan, Wisconsin, Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, and all the Western States, I was with more or less from all the States, North and South, without exception. I was with many from the Border States, especially from Maryland and Virginia, and found, during those lurid years 1862-1865, far more Union Southerners, especially Tennesseans, than is supposed. I was with many rebel officers and men among our wounded, and gave them always what I had, and tried to cheer them the same as any. I was among the army teamsters considerably, and, indeed, always found myself drawn to them. Among the black soldiers, wounded or sick, and in the contraband camps, I also took my way whenever in their neighborhood, and did what I could for them. (Memoranda 56)

125 Memoranda here echoes the rhetoric of self-contained manliness that had dominated the reconciliatory speeches during the 1876 Centennial Exhibition, when the “thoughtful, patriotic, self-sacrificing men” were aligned with the heroes of the American Revolution, “who built this great temple of civil and religious liberty.” Reverend Morgan Dix in a speech on the Fourth of July, 1876, quoted in Stevenson, The Victorian Homefront (1991: 219).

   


 

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Summing up “those three years” that were “the most profound lesson and reminiscence” of Whitman’s lifetime, this carefully constructed paragraph absorbs the entire nation except the black soldiers, who by the end of the passage are placed in the rhetorical waiting-room of the republic, a racially segregated by-product of the nurse’s humanitarian routine.126 In keeping with Whitman’s postwar antipathy vis-àvis the racial other,127 the dominant paradigm here is duty, not “comradeship” or “adhesive love,” terms that he uses interchangeably.128 The “latest, widest opening of doors” that Whitman had claimed in “The Dresser” seems strangely muted in the Memoranda. We can only speculate that while revising the manuscript he was under the spell of the 1875 Civil Rights Bill, which had been pending in the Senate for several years before it eventually passed. A late product of Radical Reconstruction, it strongly challenged white privilege: The Civil Rights Bill, as it was called, was supposed to secure to the Negro the privilege of riding in Public conveyances, of entertainment at hotels, of attending the theater or places of amusement without discrimination on account of color or previous condition of servitude. The

126 In Whitman’s 1862 representations of a Brooklyn hospital, “Brookyniana,” there is a much stronger claim that one part of the hospital must be “allotted to colored persons.” While racial segregation as such remains unchallenged, there is a far stronger emphasis on the hospital as open for all people. See “Brooklyniana” No. 16 (1862) in Henry M. Christman, Walt Whitman’s New York (1963: 133). The above quoted passage may be read as a confirmation of Blight’s argument that Whitman was one of the most important voices to construct a mythical reunion by silencing the African-American experience of the war. See Blight (2001: 20-23). As my analysis shows, however, Whitman’s “case” is more complicated than this. 127 Regarding Whitman’s personal, largely derogatory remarks that he made about free blacks and African-American soldiers cf. Beach (1996: 98). 128 Cf. Leaves of Grass: “It is to the development, identification, and general prevalence of that general comradeship, (the adhesive love, at least rivaling the amative love hitherto possessing imaginative literature, if not going beyond it,) that I look for the counterbalance and offset of our materialistic and vulgar American democracy, and for the spiritualization thereof.” (DV 61). Both preliminary and conditional, this sense of duty contrasts sharply with the narrator’s attitude toward the black drayman celebrated in the 1855 edition of “Leaves of Grass.” With his “glance” that “is calm and commanding,” “crispy hair and moustache,” and “polish’d and perfect limbs,” this early “negro” figure was the black version of the full man and American: “I behold the picturesque giant and love him” (LoG 1855). On “adhesiveness” in Whitman’s democratic vision see Donald E. Pease, “Walt Whitman and the Vox Populi of the American Masses,” Visionary Compacts (1987: 111).

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last section of the bill granted the Negro the right to sit on grand or petit juries. (Murphy 1927: 110)129

It is in this legal and political context that Americans read the following lines from Whitman. Authorized as a Union veteran’s description of the former Confederate states it is, significantly, the only other passage in the main text (besides the one discussed above) that mentions African-American men (as will be shown later, gender matters here as well): all the old families used up—the rich impoverish’d, the plantations cover’d with weeds, the slaves unloos’d and become the masters, and the name of Southerner blacken’d with every shame—all that is Calhoun’s real monument” (Memoranda 55).

In 1875 white Americans had a very clear idea of “unloos’d slaves” and “blackened Southerners”: the country was in the middle of a new, militaristic phase of anti-black violence. White paramilitary groups like the Ku Klux Klan controlled many areas of the former Confederacy, terrorizing the black population. On Easter 1873 the “White League,” had brutally killed more than seventy African Americans.130 By ignoring these historical facts and even blaming southern blacks for violence in the region, Whitman refuses to recognize the victimization of African Americans during this era. On top of this, Memoranda represents slavery as a condition independent of race: in what is, significantly, the only passage that describes the trauma of slavery in any detail, the nurse encounters one John Mahay, a white “boy” who “never knew the love of parents, was placed in his infancy in one of the New York charitable institutions, and subsequently bound out to a tyrannical master in Sullivan County, (the sears of whose cowhide and club remain’d yet on his back”) (Memoranda 37). By severing slavery from race, Memoranda thus challenges the moral right of Reconstruction blacks to claim political participation on the basis of collective trauma. Through both the figure of the white slave and the patriotic African-American soldier, the author of Memoranda suggests that full democratic citizenship depends on the metaphorical “Ethiopian’s” readiness to forget the history of her race and “greet the colors” like everybody else.

129 He forgets to mention that the law prevented racial integration in the public school system. 130 The much-publicized and bloody Colfax, Louisiana massacre is often seen as the initial start of this violence, but it hardly the first incident. Since the late eighteen-sixties antiblack violence had terrorized black communities in Memphis and New Orleans, to name just two of the most publicized events of this kind. Cf. James K. Hogue, Uncivil War (2006: esp. chapter 4); and Richard W. Murphy, The Nation United (1987: 34f).

   


 

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Such idealized self-forgetful black figures do exist in Memoranda; Whitman lists some “excellent clean old black women” who would have made “tip-top nurses” (Memoranda 40). Having met “plenty” of them in the Civil War hospital, the author objects to the Sanitary Commission’s racist agenda, which prevented these women, because of their gender, age, and race, from doing what (in his eyes) they did best: serving the nation by caring for the sick. While mentioned only briefly, they are noticeably more tangible and inspire more hope than Whitman’s earlier “Ethiopia” figure. Orphaned by the dealings of slave traders, this turbaned other is a “Sapphire” figure,131 a black female avenger. As “mother of the race,” she represents the legacy of the disrupted black family during slavery and at least implicitly demands atonement. Whitman’s description of “tip top” black nurses, however, almost conveys a post-racial logic: their motherly qualities put them beyond the paradigm of slavery. Reminiscent of the white, middle-aged mothers whom he celebrates among the nurses, these elderly black women are “always best” (Memoranda 40). By privileging women’s reproductive capacities over all other aspects of identity Whitman (who had once admitted his personal “desire to be nursed by an old black woman”) (Folsom 2000: 66) thus obviated his own racist bias. However, he refused to see AfricanAmerican women as “useful” in any context outside the hospital. Contrary to the many options he expressed regarding white women in the “Personalism” section of Democratic Vistas, the “old black nurses” in Memoranda remain as sketchy and undefined as their sons in uniform. Here universalism merges with disinterestedness. Consequently, Whitman ignores other models of black womanhood like the fiftyyear-old Frances Watkins Harper who in 1875 publicly criticized the state of American democracy, demanded equal rights, and called for “a public sentiment in favor of common justice and simple mercy.”132 Viewed in the light of the political activism of this prominent African-American abolitionist, feminist, and writer (who was also a mother), Whitman’s celebration of potential black nurses appears escapist at best. In the context of 1875, Whitman’s mixed reactions to black patriotism mean something quite different than they might have during the war years, with their general hesitancy to welcome the formation of black regiments. This new, postwar meaning fully unfolds in the eight pages of “Notes” that Whitman attached to the main text. He is far more outspoken here about the nation’s black population than in the main text:

131 Regarding this black stereotype cf. www.ferris.edu/htmls/news/jimcrow/sapphire. Accessed 01 Aug. 2016. 132 Frances Harper on April 14, 1875, in her address titled “The Great Problem to be Solved,” held in Philadelphia at the Centennial Anniversary of the Pennsylvania Society for Promoting the Abolition of Slavery. Frances Harper, “The Great Problem to be Solved,” ed., Alice Moore Dunbar, Masterpieces of Negro Eloquence (NY: Bookery (1914).

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– The present condition of things (1875) in South Carolina, Mississippi, Louisiana, and other parts of the former Slave States—the utter change and overthrow of their whole social, and the greatest coloring feature of their political institutions—a horror and dismay, as of limitless sea and fire, sweeping over them, and substituting the confusion, chaos, and measureless degradation and insult of the present—the black dominion, but little above the beasts—viewed as a temporary, deserv’d punishment for their Slavery and Secession sins, may perhaps be admissible; but as a permanency of course is not to be consider’d for a moment. (Did the vast mass of the blacks, in Slavery in the United States, present a terrible and deeply complicated problem through the just ending century? But how if the mass of the blacks in freedom in the U.S. all through the ensuing century, should present a yet more terrible and more deeply complicated problem?). (Memoranda 66)

By talking about “black dominion” in a time of terror for southern blacks, Whitman takes a stand in favor of sectional reconciliation at the cost of racial equality. And yet this “note” also serves another function: in what he calls the “confusion, chaos, and measureless degradation and insult of the present,” Whitman finds a way to retroactively justify his refusal to extend his notion of “adhesive love” to black soldiers. If his inability to love America’s newest citizens had preoccupied the “democratic bard” in “Ethiopia Commenting” and in Democratic Vistas, the racial tensions during late Reconstruction relieved him of the dilemma of learning how to love (black) strangers. Why, then, did he insert this important passage in the appendix instead of integrating it into the main text of Memoranda? The answer is simple: by severing his past “jottings” from the immediate present, Whitman manages to preserve a maximum of authenticity. Cast as afterthoughts, the former slaves who had been “unloos’d and become the masters” become a postwar institution that “of course is not to be consider’d for a moment” (Memoranda 66). The poet who once “sang America” would have betrayed his democratic principles had he openly advocated second-class citizenship and Jim Crow segregation. Yet for the man who once admitted that “I contradict myself, I am large, I contain multitudes” (“Song of Myself”), modifying his 1871 commitment to racial equality conformed to his idea that ideologies must be adapted to historical transformation. And yet Memoranda was not the last word Whitman wrote on the subject: only one year later, in 1876, he republished Democratic Vistas as part of Two Rivulets133 where— as if to inspire controversy—it appeared together with Memoranda. Six years later he returned once more to Memoranda, this time incorporating it into his lifelong reminiscences, “Specimen Days” (1882). Published as the first part of a collection that also includes Democratic Vistas and some shorter essays under the title “Collect,” and “Notes left over,” the book suggests a hierarchy that is neither accidental nor

133 Two Rivulets is the companion to the author’s edition of Leaves of Grass.

   


 

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pragmatic: as this chapter shows in the following, the “good grey poet’s” recollections were also a last effort to define Southern blacks as a meaningful part of the American nation.


   
  
   
 
Democratic Vistas is Whitman’s most profound philosophical text, but during his lifetime it was one of the least read among his works. This lack of popularity let him design “Specimen Days” as “the closest thing to a conventional autobiography” (Hutchinson and Drews 1998), ironically, however it became one of the least studied of his works. Erkkila describes it as a brief account of his youth and manhood […]; an account of the Civil War, which is largely a reprint of Memoranda During the War, a series of meditations on nature based on Whitman’s Timber Creek notes; and a final sequence of reflections on social and literary matters, including an extensive account of his trip West in 1879. (1989: 294)

Whitman himself promoted his text as “the most wayward, spontaneous, fragmentary book ever printed” (SD 8).134 Yet as Hutchinson and Drews rightfully object, this “casual mood that conveys authenticity,” also “veils the seriousness of [its] structure and the carefully constructed nature of [its] pose” (Hutchinson and Drews 1998). Far from its presumed unorthodoxy “Specimen Days” is far more structured than the Memoranda. If the latter had been marked by a “shifting chronological structure,” “Specimen Days” “straightened the war chronology, starting with Ft. Sumter in April 1861 and ending with the Grand Review of troops in May 1865” (Murray 2006: 560).135 Whitman’s latest version of his wartime memories turns the disquieting events of the war into neatly distinguishable, rounded anecdotes with titles such as “Hospital Scenes and Persons” or “Patent-Office Hospital,” and surrounds such stories with a soothing framework of thoughts and recollections from the Reconstruction era. Whitman’s years as a nurse are now for the first time represented as an integral part of a rich and varied life; the hospital is no longer the extra-societal space it used

134 I rely on the 1995 unabridged republication of the 1882 edition, Specimen Days & Collect (Toronto, Ontario: General Publishing Company). In line with the title this book includes not only “Specimen Days” but also a number of other texts (among them “Democratic Vistas”) that I also refer to in this subchapter. 135 Murray convincingly compares Memoranda with Maya Lin’s Vietnam Veterans’ Memorial that also creates a “sensation of unending—the ‘strange sad war revolving’.” Ibid.

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to be.136 This spatial, conceptual change made African Americans an integral part of the author’s democratic vision. Far from bringing himself to actually welcome full black citizenship, Whitman refused to let it dim his spirits: “Specimen Days” comes closer than any of his other works to solving his struggle with “real” African Americans by proposing a different, mental approach to the “negro problem.” Again, this approach emerges as part of a narrative of healing. As Murray has pointed out, the narrator of “Specimen Days” symbolically frees himself from the wound-dresser’s self-proclaimed responsibility to keep the past unaltered and alive: in 1882 Whitman was “ready to move on and minister to his own wounding” (ibid.: 560 and 62). His textual recreation leads him from the war to new themes like nature, travel, philosophical musings, and “Pieces in Early Youth.”137 What readers witness is a quest for his inner self that took him from the hospitals of Washington, to Timber Creek near Camden, to the American West, and also through an “amalgam of genres—biography, war account, travelogue” (Balkun 1999: 17)—all of them personal, “authentic,” expressions of the self-as-writer. This quest is, significantly, not only a “move away” from the past, but also from the present. As he writes in an essay in the “Collect” section of Specimen Days, the nation is still in need of a cure: The slavery contest is settled—and the war long over—yet do not those putrid conditions138, too many of them, still exist? Still result in diseases, fevers, wounds—not of war and army hospitals—but the wounds and diseases of peace? (“Origins of Attempted Secession,” SD 260)

The remedy, however, no longer lies in the “active and breathing forms” that tortured the writer of the Memoranda. In line with the most famous statement in “Specimen Days”—“The real war will never get in the books. And so good bye to the war” (SD 80)—Whitman refuses to “reproduce reality” and insists on providing “a genuine facsimile of experience for the reader to share” (Balkun 1999: 15).139 It thereby turns

136 Whitman’s text itself remarks about its re-scripting of the writer’s self and the nation: “crossing the t’s and dotting the i’s of certain moderate movements of late years—I am fain to fancy the foundations of quite a lesson learn’d” (“New Themes Entered Upon,” SD 82). 137 As Beach has pointed out this seeming randomness was not without culturally elitist overtones. Beach (1996: 29-30). 138 He refers to the “deform’d mediocre, snivelling, unreliable, false-hearted men” of the Fillmore and Buchanan administrations in the 1850s; Whitman blamed these men for the Mexican war. SD 260. 139 Balkun references Miles Orvell’s The Real Thing, which argues that the late nineteenthcentury was marked by “a reaction against the earlier aesthetic, an effort to get beyond mere imitation.” Cf. Orvell (1989: xv).

   


 

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away from wartime nostalgia with its (partly fake) “reminiscences,” public monuments, and battlefield parks,140 and contributes to a widespread reaction against the culture of the Gilded Age, a culture that Whitman (like Beecher) perceived as suffused with imitation and alienation (cf. Balkun 1999: 15).141 The alternative that he posits to this culture of nostalgia and alienation comes from that absolute other of late Reconstruction culture, the population of ex-slaves. This is rather surprising when one considers that Whitman removed his note about the “widest opening of the doors” from the 1882 “Democratic Vistas,” and “buried it deep in his ‘Notes Left Over’ section of Collect (Folsom 2010: xxxi and xliv). Importantly, however, “Specimen Days” ignores the actual situation of the freedmen. Published five years after the withdrawal of Union troops from the states of the former Confederacy, it refuses to mention the racist terror that turned the lives of thousands into a daily nightmare. And yet African Americans become the defining presence in the final phase of Whitman’s Reconstruction project. In one of the better-known chapters from “Specimen Days,” “Spring Overtures—Recreations,” the reader is confronted with an aging poet who had ruined his health during the “daily rounds” at the hospital142 and moved to Camden to recover from a paralysis that was more than physical: Feb. 20.– A solitary and pleasant sundown hour at the pond, exercising arms, chest, my whole body, by a tough oak sapling thick as my wrist, twelve feet high—pulling and pushing, inspiring the good air. After I wrestle with the tree awhile, I can feel its young sap and virtue welling up out of the ground and tingling through me from crown to toe, like health’s wine. Then for addition and variety I launch forth in my vocalism; shout declamatory pieces, sentiments, sorrow, anger, & c., from the stock poets or plays—or inflate my lungs and sing the wild tunes and refrains I heard of the blacks down south, or patriotic songs I learn’d in the army. I make the echoes ring, I tell you! As the twilight fell, in a pause of these ebullitions, an owl somewhere the other side of the creek sounded, too-oo-oo-oo soft and pensive (and I fancied a little sarcastic) repeated four or five times. Either to applaud the negro songs—or perhaps an ironical comment on the sorrow, anger, or style of the stock poets. (SD 98)

The scene of course parallels Barton Woodworth’s spiritual salvation: too old to be shapers of the new nation, both authors shared a sense of paralysis that they overcame

140 In the 1880s the latter were rapidly forming all over the country, and in 1885 membership in the veteran association of the Grand Army of the Republic (G.A.R.) reached an unsurpassed peak. Regarding the public cultural memory of the 1880s cf. Hochbruck (2011: 255ff). 141 See my previous remarks regarding Orvell. 142 See “An Interregnum Paragraph,” SD 81.

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by seeking refuge in Transcendentalism and the evangelical tradition. The unfolding spectacle of blackness, however, clearly distinguishes Whitman’s persona from Woodworth, that other, self-proclaimed spokesman: acknowledged by a symbol of ancient wisdom—the owl—the “negro song” in Whitman’s account emerges as a superior form of expression. Taking up the author’s antebellum concept of black reinvigoration143, and thereby anticipating the modernist fascination with “primitivism,” the passage describes a moment that is authentic and true, interracial, patriotic, and therapeutic all at once: by “turning black,” Whitman metaphorically incorporates an “Ethiopian” foreignness into the recovering body of the representative American and, by extension, the nation. In the textual version of the recovering nurse, the “wild tunes” of the African-American musical tradition restore the paralyzed singer to his authentic, cultural self. Through this incorporation of black culture into the white body of the self-proclaimed American bard, Whitman moves significantly beyond the notion of the “Ethiopian’s” inassimilable otherness. Yet through the symbolic incorporation and far-reaching aestheticization of blackness, African Americans must by definition remain other. In 1882 Whitman merely allows African Americans a space at the margins of the nation’s culture while completely ignoring the so-called “compromise of 1877”144 that had led to de jure segregation and abandoned former slaves to intimidation and terrorism. To celebrate the beginning of his personal Second Founding, the nation’s democratic poet replaces the paradigm of past suffering by the paradigm of a white man’s spiritual recovery and renewal. To link their “sorrow and anger” to the sorry “style of the stock poets” and not to the emotional state of southern blacks is—to say the least—remarkable. As the crowning element of what is, after all, the grand finale to Whitman’s Reconstruction project, this seeming homage to black Americans appears utterly inadequate: in 1882, Whitman’s personal Reconstruction ended, not with an expanding social vision, but with his regression into a non-political, self-absorbed state of identification with blackness. And yet the problem of social and political Reconstruction continued to worry the author of “Specimen Days”: since African Americans were needed for this “semirenewal of the lease of life” (SD 82) that was both personal and national in scope,

143 In 1855 Whitman had “felt compelled to sketch a modification of English pronunciation, suitable for a ‘native grand opera in America,’ to be based on what he called ‘nigger dialect’.” Lott (2013: 103). 144 “Over the previous month, party political operatives had worked out an agreement behind closed doors, the Compromise of 1877. Tilden and the Democratic Party accepted a GOP victory, while Hayes pledged to withdraw federal troops from the states of the former Confederacy, effectively ending Reconstruction.” Thomas H. Neale, “The Compromise of 1877,” North Carolina Digital History Project.

   


 

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they had to be granted a place to develop their skills within the social world of the Second Founding. Whitman confirms this right of belonging with an imaginary tour through America during the late eighteen-seventies. His view resembles the nurse’s impressions of suffering soldiers; the wartime hospital has, sadly, become the state of the nation. There is the “queer, taking, rather sad picture” of a tramp family (SD 115), a wife whose “figure and gait told misery, terror, and destitution” (SD 116), and “a real hermit, living in a lonesome spot, hard to get at, rocky” who cannot discover “his life, or story, or tragedy, or whatever it is” (SD 131).145 African Americans appear as a part of this kaleidoscope of misery. In a passage titled “The First Spring Day on Chestnut Street” Whitman describes a street in central Philadelphia: peddlers on the sidewalk… the handsome little fellow with canary-bird whistles—the cane men, toy men, toothpick men—the old woman squatted in a heap on the cold stone flags, with her basket of matches, pins, and tape—the young negro mother, sitting, begging, with her two little coffee-color’d twins on her lap—the beauty of the cramm’d conservatory of rare flowers, flaunting reds, yellows, snowy lilies, incredible orchids, at the Baldwin mansion near Twelfth street…. (SD 128)

Cursory as it may seem, this scene is carefully crafted. Symbolically placed at the lower end of an impoverished society and wholly dependent on the support of others, the “young negro mother” of twins is the exact opposite of Whitman’s idealized concept of the older black woman who, as a natural nurse, serves the (white) community. Vaguely reminiscent of the “Ethiopian,” the emblematic family of three oscillates between belonging and marginalization. The greenhouse of the Baldwin mansion is key to analyzing this metaphorical scene. While on one hand it helps stage the poor and disadvantaged as the true beauty of the city, it also suggests a racial dimension that complicates this seemingly harmonious picture of multifaceted poverty. In a metonymic shift, the image of the black mother and her twins is captured along with all the others in the metaphorical “conservatory,” waiting to be admired just like the “incredible orchids” of the wealthy. Color has always played an important role in Whitman’s works,146 and as the dual meaning of “Ethiopia Saluting the Colors” (my emphasis) has shown, there is also a

145 This reads as a corrective to Alonzo Hill’s bestselling novel, John Smith’s Funny Adventures on a Crutch (1869). This narrative journey through the geography of the Civil War was told from the perspective of a one-legged veteran and was a part of the culture of denial that emerged in the first part of Reconstruction. At the same time, Whitman’s descriptions also anticipate James Agee’s and Walter Evans’ journey into the “other America” in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. 146 See, e.g. Beach’s chapter on the “Black Wale” (1996: 55ff).

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strong racial dimension to such metaphors. Immediately linked to the black mother and her “coffee-color’d twins,” the “rare flowers, flaunting reds, yellows, snowy lilies, incredible orchids” invoke popular definitions of the shades of blackness that circulated in 19th century America and that (like the antebellum folk song “The Yellow Rose of Texas”147) were often associated with the names of flowers. In the street scene, however, Whitman moves from the black mother to a display of flowers that signals beauty and abundance but also exoticism and a sexualized lack of constraint. The metaphor is dense and multilayered: cast as an exhilarating spectacle of otherness, the black family beautifies the new, pluralistic America. And yet the ensemble is strangely removed from the bustling street scene: “cramm’d in” the conservatory of the rich white man’s mansion, these are also the “rare flowers” of slavery and miscegenation. Reminiscent of a nineteenth-century tableau vivant, or a display in a shop window, the scene leaves it to the reader to decide whether the sight is worth its price. The conclusion, however, is irrevocably pessimistic since the woman embodies long-term dependency: young and with twins signaling her fecundity, she fully relies on the benevolence of others. In the decades after the Civil War, and especially after the closing of the Freedmen’s Bureau in 1872, such a fate was unfortunately not at all improbable: the racially and sexually charged atmosphere of the post-Reconstruction era made the daily lives of black women particularly precarious.148 Whitman abstains from analyzing what he describes, and yet, by contemplating blackness as dependency he fuels the dominant discourse of his era, which blamed the freedpeople for their presumed lack of “improvement” (cf. Faulkner 2004: 132-45; HowardPitney 2005: 52). This discourse. ignored both the black female work force in the cities (who often supported large families in rural areas), and also the public engagement of the emerging black urban elite.149 Additionally, Whitman relegates those

147 There's a yellow rose in Texas, that I am going to see / No other darky [sic] knows her, no darky only me / She cryed [sic] so when I left her it like to broke my heart / And if I ever find her, we nevermore will part. University of Texas Archives, quoted in en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Yellow_Rose_of_Texas. Accessed 20 January 2018. 148 Regarding the situation of African-American women during Reconstruction see Faulkner (2004); Laura F. Edwards, Gendered Strife and Confusion (1997); and John David Smith, Black Voices from Reconstruction 1865-187 (1998). As the latter reminds us, the closing of the freedmen’s bureau in 1872, the lack of federal protection after 1877, and a government that “refused to compensate them for two centuries of unrequited toil” gave southern blacks “little to cheer about by 1880.” J. D. Smith (1998: 150). 149 Regarding class tensions within the African-American community both within the South and between southern and northern blacks cf. Faulkner (2004: 132-47). Regarding the lives of middle class and elite blacks in the urban centers cf. Peterson (2012). For an

   


 

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“186,000 color’d men” who “fought under our flag against the rebellion and for the Union” and the 90,000 of them who “were from the States which went into rebellion” to a footnote, literally moving them to the margins of the story? (SD 45). Whitman’s pedagogy of witnessing rather than analyzing (through quasi-photographic documentation) leaves it to the reader to form an opinion about what should be done, both in the face of widespread poverty and also with regard to “the negro.” Should white America wait for generations until “the grand experiment of development” is successfully accomplished? What if the—largely unsheltered—black population continued to bear many children and live in poverty and ignorance? Shouldn’t the former slaves and their offspring be shielded from the larger society in the metaphorical greenhouse of a huge (white) mansion? And wouldn’t such a paternalistic system allow “the negro” a protected place where they could serve the white nation as an invigorating asset—as exotic others singing “wild tunes”? Ultimately, Whitman “documented” seemingly neutral observations in a manner that appealed to the cultural fears of the white majority.


   
Whitman thought of democracy as both a theory and an experience that changed over time and demanded constant renegotiation. His Reconstruction oeuvre navigates between universalism and particularity, embracing Americans from the North and South, immigrants, and religious outsiders, as a part of the postwar nation’s democratic “multitudes.” Women hold a privileged place in the evolving society: as emblems of motherliness they become the role model for a modern American citizenry. Yet Whitman knew that something less abstract was needed to serve as a model. Skeptical of Gilded Age materialism and consumer culture, he criticized urban women for the “wrong consciousness” they derived from reading the wrong kind of books, especially reading literature that failed to meet the needs of the era. His own writing, however, severed the concept of motherliness from biological reproduction: figures as diverse as the compassionate, and deeply caring, wound-dresser, the childless female laborer, the older black woman, make modern democracy meaningful because they understand themselves as social and caring beings. That a young mother of twins personifies the idea of black dependency in “Specimen Days” signals a pessimistic strain in Whitman’s democratic logic: if democracy depends on self-reliant yet motherly types, the “negro mother” fails to fulfill the basic prerequisites of an American citizen.

overview on the debate about African- American agency and the role of America’s foundational myths cf. Rodrigue, “Black Agency After Slavery” (2006).

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While the emblematic mother of twins and the turbaned “Ethiopia” are very memorable images of black alienation and marginalization, African Americans remain underrepresented in Whitman’s Reconstruction project: for most of his postwar life, the “democratic bard” could not bring himself to “open the doors” of his art to the nation’s newest citizens. This weakened his democratic project of e pluribus unum— and he knew it. This awareness may be the reason why he concentrates on more abstract topics like democratic leadership, recognition of the fundamental worth and dignity of each and every person, the relationship between reason and feelings, and the role of literature after the war. In his effort to symbolically heal the nation Whitman refused to let race dominate his considerations yet was too much of a realist to consistently ignore the issue. He occasionally complicated his credo of recognition, and returned to what for him was the core dilemma of racial integration: could, and should, white Americans recognize the former slaves as full citizens if they felt unable to welcome them as friends and comrades? Whitman relies on the extra-societal space of the Civil War hospital to explore this question: after establishing the nurse’s unlimited humanitarianism (“The Dresser”), he tests the limits of democratic recognition (Vistas), and ends with a social vision of African Americans in the theoretical waiting-room of the Republic (Memoranda). After Reconstruction was officially over, he slides into the seemingly neutral attitude of indifferent observer in order to envision the black “patient” as a spiritual remedy for the poet in crisis; blackness becomes meaningful, but merely as a romantic abstraction (“Specimen Days”). Whitman’s Reconstruction project, with all of its limits and its potential, pits itself against the political debates and the cultural climate of his era. Yet his work does not merely mirror those concerns: it negotiates them. Therefore, Democratic Vistas should be analyzed alongside “Ethiopia Saluting” and in the context of the racial anxieties that surrounded Whitman. At the same time, he seems to have been keenly aware of the changing historical contexts through which his earlier works took on new meaning: reappearing in later editions of Leaves of Grass, or in Specimen Days & Collect, Whitman’s earlier Reconstruction work reminds readers that the past can only remain meaningful when it is adapted to the present and its changing discourses and debates. This is, after all, what Whitman’s repeated plea to “open doors” calls for: an opening of the (white) American mind to the ever interpretable lessons of the past. Undeniably, however, Whitman’s entire Reconstruction work displays a sense of personal and philosophical doubt regarding the role of blacks in post-emancipation America; the textual ambiguities, contradictions, and seeming lack of narrative development that resulted from this indecisiveness have been lamented ever since. Yet there was also something extremely fruitful in this endeavor: Whitman’s struggle for ideological closure and emotional balance is the driving force behind his aesthetically and generically multifaceted tour de force which, taken together, represents a democratic consciousness in-the-making. Fashioning himself as the father of a new type

   


 

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of national literature that would reorder the individual citizen’s mental, emotional, and spiritual aspirations, he strove to inspire a revolution of the American mind. Importantly, however, Whitman leaves it to the reader whether he or she should accept the legacy of slavery as a meaningful part of national history or not. It is, ultimately, the reader who either imaginatively permits black soldiers into the Republic or who removes the begging freedwoman to a segregated, marginalized locale. Instead of reconciling his political ideals and personal negrophobia, Whitman’s Reconstruction project is torn between the two, and thereby emphasizes democracy’s constant struggle for solutions, innovation, and change. The 1881-1882 edition of Leaves of Grass illustrates this struggle at its best: joining both “The Dresser” and “Ethiopia Saluting” in its “Drum-Taps” section, it juxtaposes the two foundational poems of Whitman’s Reconstruction project without offering a conciliatory middleway. The most interesting aspect of Whitman’s postwar oeuvre is perhaps precisely this indecisiveness: it refuses to resolve a fundamental and emotional dilemma in an enthusiastic yet dishonest vision of “endless nationality.” What the reader, then, learns about democracy includes its difficulties as well: democracy thrives on an “alienation from one’s particular attachments,” but the readiness to let go of such personal attachments is a learning process that may never be completed. Whitman, in other words, does not deny being a prisoner of his time; but what he writes is always geared toward the future. It should not surprise us that he eventually did make up his mind: in 1888, when Whitman had reached the age of the “old man bending” of his 1865 poem, he “opened the doors” of his imaginary hospital to black patients too. Published in the October issue of The Century Illustrated Monthly Magazine, “Army Hospitals and Cases” is a six-page compilation of the “wound-dresser’s” most memorable encounters with the nation’s multitudes. A celebration of individuality, solidarity, and the love of strangers, its central issue is sectional reconciliation. Yet it also aspires to “give a few special words—in some respects the typical words of all, and the most definitive— of the army hospitals and samples of those that filled them” (“Army Hospitals” 825). In passages that do not appear in either Memoranda or “Specimen Days,” Whitman describes a wide spectrum of “Southerners” (the term itself is a notable departure from Memoranda, where he referred to them as “secesh”), including a Catholic and a “dark-skinned” uneducated “fellow” (“Army Hospitals” 829). As if to correct the tight-lipped references in his earlier works, the text ends with a note on “blacks, some with wounds, some ill, two or three with limbs frozen” (“Army Hospitals” 830). The piece then elaborates on the individual wishes of his black patients and how the nation’s most famous wound-dresser fulfilled them. One of his individual “cases” is Joseph Winder, a likely boy, aged twenty-three, [who] belongs to the 10th Colored Infantry (now in Texas); is from Eastville, Virginia. Was a slave; belonged to Lafayette Homeston. The master was quite willing he should leave. Joined the army two years ago; has been in one or

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two battles. Was sent to hospital with rheumatism. Has since been employed as cook. His parents at Eastville; he gets letters from them, and has letters written to them by a friend. Many black boys left that part of Virginia and joined the army; the 10th, in fact, was made up of Virginia blacks from thereabouts. (“Army Hospitals” 830)

By linking the universalism of Democratic Vistas with the recognition of group-specific and individual particularities, the text comes close to describing the mechanisms of “democratic justice” that Nancy Fraser introduces in her discussion of modern democracies, including post-Apartheid South Africa: the passage recognizes African Americans as a natural part of a universalist whole and as different due to a particular historical constellation; at the same time it treats them as individuals.150 This also includes a notion of black leadership: in 1888 the mention of “Virginia blacks” evoked John Mercer Langston, “a nationally recognized leader and spokesman for black rights.”151 In 1888, during the year of the Presidential election, Langston organized an impressive and ultimately successful campaign to become the first African American from “the Old Dominion” in Congress.152 While it is quite obvious that Whitman had changed his mind, what brought this about can only be speculated upon: as Xilao Li reminds us in his article about “Walt Whitman and Asian American Writers” (Spring 1993: 181), the poet rejected the anti-immigrant and anti-Chinese sentiment among both Democrats and Republicans; the ensuing debate surrounding

150 “Daher hängen die Formen der Anerkennung, nach denen die Gerechtigkeit verlangt, im jeweiligen Fall von den Formen mangelnder Anerkennung ab, denen abgeholfen werden soll. Wenn mangelnde Anerkennung dazu führt, dass einigen Beteiligten die allgemeine menschliche Natur abgesprochen wird, sorgt universalistische Anerkennung für Abhilfe; daher war die erste und grundlegende Handhabe gegen die südafrikanische Apartheid die universale, nicht ‘rassisch’ bestimmte Staatsbürgerschaft. Wo hingegen mangelnde Anerkennung bewirkt, dass einigen Beteiligten ihre Besonderheit abgesprochen wird, könnte als Handhabe die Anerkennung der jeweiligen Besonderheit fungieren; daher behaupten zahlreiche Feministinnen, dass man das einzigartige und besondere Vermögen der Frauen, zu gebären, anerkennen müsse, um deren Benachteiligung zu überwinden. Auf jeden Fall sollte die Gegenstrategie auf die jeweilige Ungerechtigkeit zugeschnitten sein.” Fraser and Honneth (2003: 67). 151 Langston was the first African American ever elected to political office in the United States (as early as 1855 he was town clerk in Brownhelm, Ohio). His popularity among African Americans was surpassed only by Frederick Douglass. Cf. Hahn (2003: 408). 152 Regarding Langston’s campaign and his political opponents cf. Hahn (2003: 408-11).

   


 

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the 1882 exclusion act153 resonated with allusions to African Americans and emancipation. This, together with the much-publicized lynchings in the former Confederacy (the Tuskegee Institute started documenting this practice of murder in 1882154) may have caused the “democratic bard” to eventually embrace the black stranger as both a man and an individual.155 It was to remain his last public statement about the issue: Whitman died four years later, in 1892.

153 An 1882 article in Harper’s Weekly, “The Chinese Bill,” is an example for this particular rhetoric. 154 An incomplete list of names and incidents can be found online at www.autopsis.org/foot/ lynchdates1.html. Accessed 01 Aug. 2016. 155 According to Beach, who like most scholars focuses more on the poet’s postwar oeuvre, Whitman never managed to do so (cf. 1996:87). This chapter disagrees, at least slightly.

 





 
  





   
  

  
Ten years after Whitman called for a “race of perfect mothers” Mary Bradley Lane, a schoolteacher from Ohio, centered her serial Mizora. A Prophesy1 on a very narrow notion of this ideal. The narrative features a protagonist named Vera who is also the narrator of this utopian fantasy about an all-female country that is “the beneficent mother” to all its citizens (23). This is how George Dodds sums up the novel: Vera Zarovitch, an outspoken Russian noblewoman, is exiled to Siberia, from whence she escapes north by ship. She reaches the inner world of Mizora through an opening in the pole, where an enlightened female society exists in perfect harmony. They are blessed with advanced technologies, which permit leisure for continuous education, genetic manipulation of crops and the chemical manufacture of “pure” foodstuffs. But eventually, Vera becomes homesick and returns to the outer world. (2000)

What Vera longs for are the son and husband she left behind: like the Mizorans her sense of self is relational. Yet unlike the blondes of Mizora she sees motherhood as a personal task: the utopians have delegated both conception and childcare to female professionals, using their additional time to work tirelessly to perfect the nation. A surprisingly early contribution to the nineteenth-century debate on evolution and eugenics, Mizora has received little scholarly attention to this day: although it was republished in 1975 and again in 1999, it is not even mentioned in recent publications such as Evolution and Eugenics in American Literature and Culture, 18801940 (Cuddy and Roche 2003). The novel is also interesting in its emphasis on communal ownership and on institutions that guarantee equal access and equality to all citizens, suggesting a quasi-socialist community. Mizora is headed by a strong central 1

I am using the edition titled Mizora: A Prophecy: An 1880s Radical Feminist Utopia, edited by Jean Pfaelzer (2000).

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government represented not by a dictator but by the mild and understanding Preceptress (director) of the National College. The gentle daughters of this all-female matriarchy are an awkwardly Victorian brand of women of the sixth millennium who teach, research, and perform experiments in order to further their race. And contrary to Whitman’s “perfect mothers,” the monumental utopians are a race indeed: hyperhealthy, white, and female, they are presented as creation’s crowning glory, products of a system that “might prove beneficial to other countries” (25), as Vera “confesses” to herself.2 To better assess the novel’s feminist message and its cultural significance as a whole, one needs to understand how it both sprang from and spoke to the author’s generation. Among the few things we know about Lane3 is that she was born in 1844; she was a young woman during the Civil War and thus able to reflect on its complexities. Her father had been a staff physician for the Union Army, and it is likely that through her father’s reports she developed a more nuanced concept of army men than the heroic stories of veterans’ associations suggested. Lane was over twenty years old when the war ended and remained unmarried until 1878. She was thirty-four years old when she married the forty-four-year-old Civil War veteran Thomas A. Lane. (Lane passed away in 1908). Although she had known him since childhood, the marriage was not a particularly happy one, as the strong anti-male undercurrent of her novel suggests; the fact that she concealed her authorship from her husband is also telling. The couple had no children of their own, and though they both worked they seem to have struggled financially. The publication of Lane’s sensationalist, utopian tale in a major daily newspaper with a Republican slant, the Cincinnati Commercial (1880-1881), may have represented a calculated effort to supplement her scarce income as a schoolteacher. The book betrays an exceptionally well-read author who closely followed the scientific and political debates of her time. Published anonymously, the initial four installments, titled “The Narrative of Vera Zarovitch,” were immediately successful. When the paper’s editor Murat Halstead suggested that Lane publish a book-length version of her story shortly after its initial appearance, she declined, possibly because she feared that she would be forced to disclose her identity. In 1889 Mizora was gathered into a 150-page novel and published by G.W. Dillingham; Lane preferred to remain anonymous but held the copyright. The novel itself is introduced in typical Victorian fashion: claiming to have “little knowledge of rhetorical art, and possessing but a limited imagination,” the narrator announces a “simple narration of facts” and

2

Regarding the critical potential of such visits to utopias, see Jessica Burwell, Notes on

3

All the information provided comes from Jean Pfaelzer, “Introduction,” Mizora: A

Nowhere (1997). Prophecy, ed. Jean Pfaelzer (2000: xiii).

 
  

  

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threatens, with a wink of the eye, that “others who come after me will be more aggressive than I” (7).4 The story itself is surprisingly thin: apart from the adventurous journey into the center of the earth and the heroine’s eventual departure to the United States, the novel is far more static and repetitive than its sensationalist title suggests, dwelling for the most part on descriptions of a technological wonderworld. What makes Mizora such an interesting work is not literary elegance but its theme and time of publication: appearing more than thirty years before Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Herland (1915),5 Mizora anticipates the famous feminist’s views in surprising detail as it wavers between an ideal of human equality and the presumed biological superiority of women.6 A similarly separatist feminist tale, Herland relies on the same socialist underpinnings that are part and parcel of the Mizoran blondes’ lifestyle (Gilman 1997).7 This does not imply that Mizora was ahead of its time but, rather, that the themes and debates that animate Herland were already in circulation shortly after Reconstruction came to its official end. As Stevenson reminds us, “the two prominent disagreements of the 1860s and 1870s” were “the ‘problem of modern science’ and ‘the woman question’” (1991: 148)—issues that figure prominently in Mizora. Yet Lane also turns to racial issues far more explicitly than Gilman, whose feminism was, as Gail Bederman has asserted, “at its very base racist” (1995: 122).8 Emerging from a region that had been actively involved in both the Underground Railroad and proslavery activism (Cincinnati), Mizora is in fact centrally concerned with the racial future of the post-slavery nation. Like all utopias, then, it is closely tied to the era in

4

In 1895 Lane published a second novel, Escabana (named after a town in Michigan). Though the copyright is registered with the Library of Congress no extant copy has been discovered.

5

Duangrudi Suksang’s “A World of Their Own: The Separatist Utopian Vision of Mary E. Bradley Lane’s Mizora”, analyzes Mizora as a precursor to Herland. Redefining the Political Novel, ed. Sharon Harris (1995: 128-48).

6

Regarding Gilman’s life after divorcing her husband in 1888 cf. Bederman, Manliness

7

Like Lane before her, Gilman rejected class struggle and emphasized cooperation. Draw-

and Civilization (1995: 131-33). ing on Charles Darwin, Herbert Spencer, and Karl Marx, she formulated an uncannily similar feminist evolutionary concept of progress based on the professionalization of childcare and housework, much of which, she argued, could be taken over by professionals and technology. All of this suggests that Gilman had actually read Mizora: her theoretical work Women and Economics (1898) resonates with the very same discourses Lane had relied on more than a decade earlier. 8

Regarding the interdependence between race and gender in Gilman’s writings see Dietze, Weiße Frauen (2013).

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which it was written. As Ernst Bloch asserted, utopias envision a future that always maintains its ties to the present; they are, simultaneously, an intrinsic part of the ideologies that surround the reader and an allegorical push forward (“Vorwärtsimpuls”) that relies on dreams and desires in order to think beyond dominant ideologies, or at least to comment on what Kant called the “conditions of possibility” (cf. Herz 1999: 35).9 As we will see, Mizora takes this effort to think beyond established patterns further than do most utopias. Merging the two basic aims of the genre (one that anticipates a better future and one that confirms the status quo), the novel time and again destabilizes its own prerequisites. This simultaneity is, to some degree, a basic feature of the genre as such, since “[e]very utopia always comes with its implied dystopia— whether the dystopia of the status quo, which the utopia is engineered to address, or the dystopia found in the way this specific utopia corrupts itself in practice” (Gordin, Tilley, and Prakash 2010: 2). In Mizora, however, the two seem strangely mixed up, suggesting a “third way” that the reader struggles to define. It is, in other words, a “critical utopia” in which “the alternative society and indeed the original society fall back as settings for the foregrounded political quest of the protagonist” (Moylan 1986: 45). And yet such works, too, seek to alter the social order on a fundamental, systemic level. They address root causes and offer revolutionary solutions.[…] By foregrounding radical change and by considering utopia and dystopia as linked phenomena, we are able to consider just how ideas, desires, constraints, and effects interact simultaneously. Utopia, dystopia, chaos: these are not just ways of imagining the future (or the past) but can also be understood as concrete practices through which historically situated actors seek to reimagine their present and transform it into a plausible future. (Gordin, Tilley, and Prakash 2010: 2)

Representing the author herself by generic implication, the narrator and protagonist of Mizora, Vera, is such a “historically situated actor,” negotiating various aspects of her present against the backdrop of an imagined future. As will be shown in the course of this chapter, however, her story refuses to provide philosophical closure. While it dwells extensively on the utopian “un-space”10 of the Mizoran matriarchy, it ultimately withdraws from its ultra-feminist vision. This of course does not prevent this chapter from elucidating the novel’s implied philosophy, but instead suggests that whatever “message” the novel contains it is, first and foremost, a “fictional rendering of political history [that] derives from the author’s analysis of the origins of the contemporary social malaise” (Pfaelzer 1984: 15).

9

Herz offers a thorough analysis of theories of utopia, starting with Ernst Bloch’s Das Prinzip Hoffnung (1959).

10

The “u” in “utopia” stands for “nothing” whereas “topos” means “place.”

 
  

  

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Medical metaphors such as this one are particularly apt because Mizora is a literary utopia based on a principle of healing. The novel’s own excessive use of a vocabulary from the (female) realm of health and the (male) realm of disease is hardly coincidental considering the frustration experienced by Lane’s generation: while Lincoln’s promise to “bind up the nation’s wounds” was taken up by countless institutions, popular media, and the public at large (offering consolation and a sense of national belonging to male veterans above all), American feminists still found themselves in what I called in an earlier chapter the “waiting room of the republic.” In Mizora this waiting room is replaced by a park-like pastoral idyll, a separatist utopia that replaces the wartime hospital as a metaphorical site for national healing. Significantly, however, what appears to be an extended version of a late-nineteenth-century sanatorium surrounded by recreational grounds is soon revealed to be “a College of Experimental Science” (19) peopled by busy white women: the whiteness of a nurse’s uniform, one could argue, has virtually been absorbed into the flesh (and blood) of these ultra-healthy females. It would be only be logical if the main protagonist of Mizora were a patient to be eventually cured and released from this site of healing. Importantly, however, this is not the case: Vera flees from rather than simply leaves this female idyll. A crucial moment in the novel, this departure deserves to be analyzed in more detail. At this point it is important to register the integrative gesture that inheres in this decision: by leaving the blondes, Vera not only chooses a diseased environment over a sanitary Eden11 but reconnects the secluded Mizora12 with the world at large. Claiming to be A Mss. Found Among the Private Papers of Princess Vera Zarovitch. Being a True and Faithful Account of her Journey to the Interior of the Earth, with a Careful Description of the Country and its Inhabitants, their Customs, Manners, and Government (subtitle)13 Mizora is staged as a quasi-anthropological account or a travel narrative. Importantly, however, the novel not only describes the heroine’s view of the blondes but also dwells on her growing self-awareness: “[e]nveloped in garments of fur that had seen much service,” the Russian heroine “present[s] a marked contrast”

11

Sanitation is a major issue in Mizora. In America, institutionalized sanitary reform set in somewhat belatedly after the Civil War, and it was only during the early twentieth century that there was some coordination on the national level. Cf. Richard A. Meckel, Save the Babies (1990: 17).

12

As Pfaelzer points out, the etymological meaning of the term “utopia” is an “unplace.” “Mizora: A Prophesy,” Dictionary of Literary Utopias (2000: 395). Regarding the necessary detachment of utopian spaces cf. Thomas Peyser, Utopia and Cosmopolis (1998: 5).

13

Unfortunately, the 2000 edition does not indicate the full title of the original edition.

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(16) to the all-encompassing perfection of the Mizorans. Yet though she is a “barbarian” among more “civilized” hosts, the female intruder poses a threat to the ideological basis of the “enchanted country” (94): as her name suggests, there may be more “truth” in Vera than in the mechanisms and beliefs that define the land of the blondes. And yet the protagonist’s/narrator’s own “truth” is open to scrutiny: she is a transitional figure that cannot identify with either the past or the present, with its multifaceted political, anthropological, religious, and feminist debates. Seeking rather than finding the truth, Vera occupies a critical position that ultimately leaves the novel ambivalent and open-ended. Wavering between an enlightened, politically moderate ideological middle ground and uncritical, enthusiastic admiration of a country whose ideology is (as the narrator readily admits) highly problematic, Mizora is a twisted and fundamentally ambiguous work. While it openly flirts with genocide, at the same time it exposes the moral and conceptual weaknesses of a society built on science alone. The following chapter, then, is not about rehabilitating Mizora as an anti-totalitarian novel—there is a strong proto-fascist slant here that does not go away when Vera chooses the everyday nineteenth-century American mix of immigrants and social classes over the culturally and socially uniform society of the blondes. Mizora in fact ends where Progressivism started, complete with fantasies of genocide, social hygiene, and a new army of women who care. It is with this in mind that Mizora can be viewed as a cultural intervention in the late Reconstruction nation’s struggle to imagine an ideal future. This chapter, then, seeks to analyze the fundamental ethical ambiguity of Mizora and the ideological tensions that go along with it in the historical and cultural context of a prolonged Reconstruction. What at first sight seems like a version of the “citty upon a hill” adapted to the Progressive Era is actually depicted (in the novel itself) as an outcome of the Civil War and Reconstruction. This chapter considers Mizora in the light of this legacy, but also as an expression of the American identity crisis that began in the late 1870s and lasted to the end of the century (cf. Banta 1987: 192-93). By reading the novel against both its Reconstruction context and the philosophical and scientific debates that contributed to this crisis, this chapter wishes to examine the book’s subversive dimension. Mizora not only critiques the “Gilded Age” but also challenges contemporary—largely secular—discourses of collective salvation as well as post-1877 veteran culture. A feminist response to an intergenerational crisis deeply entangled with debates about race, class, and human agency, the novel defines the real as a state of imperfection. By pursuing this insight, it enacts a paradigm shift from a position that values absolute, collective health (embodied by the blondes) to one that calls for collective healing (needed in the real world): at the end of the novel, America’s cure is still in abeyance. This skepticism can be traced back at least in part to the massive social problems that emerged in America in the course of rapid urbanization and immigration. Yet to reduce it to the immediate present of the early 1880s

 
  

  

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overlooks the novel’s roots in the mindset and feelings of an author who was a product of the Civil War and the tumultous decade and a half that followed. This chapter, then, treats Mizora as a rare expression of the ideological doubts that persisted throughout Reconstruction and beyond, reminding readers that individual, particularly female pain could not be glossed over by the dominant ideology of sectional reconciliation and that race remained a crucial issue if the nation wished to successfully manage its democratic evolution. Mizora interprets both past and present from a particularly female and racially ambiguous perspective, thereby disrupting the celebrations of national unity that marked the early 1880s. At the outset, however, it significantly aligns its utopian vision with a national event designed to fill Americans from both the Northern and Southern states with “a thrill of patriotic pride”: the 1876 Philadelphia Centennial (Howells, July 1876: 96).


  

  
 
 


 
 
Utopian wonderworlds are “often presented as a kind of gallery in which the residents act simultaneously as exhibits and cicerones, for utopia inherently tends toward the treatment of the world as an object whose very reason for being is to be at the disposal of the observer” (Peyser 1998: 39). Vera’s stay among the blondes is thus presented as an aesthetic experience: the visitor’s view—and subsequently her story, too—is dominated by her admiration for the Mizorans and for the objects of art and technology they have created. Mizora treats the “enchanted country” and its inhabitants as fascinating objects on display, thereby encouraging readers to approach the text as a thought experiment. This experiment emerges in a gendered context: by focusing on the beauty of Vera’s new surroundings the novel contributes to the feminist pressure against the “materialism, science, and ‘male’ reasoning” that at the time “reduced to insignificance the shattered, second-rate examples of idealism, art, and ‘feminine’ feelings” (Banta 1987: 190). When Vera first encounters the blondes she is struck with the “feminine” beauty of the scene. Stepping off a fish-shaped pleasure-boat she enters their “mighty city” via a flight of marble stairs and views the country’s spatial (and ideological) organization from a panoptic perspective: “upon the lawn, directly before us, a number of most beautiful girls had disposed themselves at various occupations. Some were reading, some sketching, and some at various kinds of needlework. I noticed that they were all blondes” (16). More static than Rose’s somewhat metaphysical experience of Gettysburg, Vera’s description delineates Mizora as one would a picture. An idealized, miniature version of a harmonious and unified country, the landscape of Mizora offers “a beautiful view and the privilege of the whole ground” to every citizen of the nation: “In this way, cascades, fountains, rustic arbors,

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rockeries, aquariums, tiny lakes, and every variety of landscape ornamenting, could be supplied at a comparatively small cost to each family” (41). I wish to emphasize the sense of post-Civil War forgetfulness that goes along with this love of picturesque detail. Reminiscent of Beecher’s New England village, the land of the blondes suggests a sense of order and harmony that was as far removed from the bloody battlefields of the Civil War as could be. As the most prolific scholar of Mizora, Jean Pfaelzer, has argued, the blending of nature and culture, art and technology, projected a recovered, reinvigorated, and progressive America.14 One may in fact argue that by taking up a very particular descriptive mode that prevailed during the 1876 Centennial,15 Mizora aimed at retrospectively appeasing critics of the Centennial who had berated visitors as “an over-confident, procrastinating people, less appreciative of education—than proof of their material progress and power”:16 by arranging its utopian landscape around a centrally located “National College” (2324), Mizora imagines a renewed nation whose mission is, first and foremost, educational. Importantly, however, this heavily feminized educational ideal corrects the impression that had emerged in debates surrounding the 1876 event: as Martha Banta points out, at the Centennial “males” had “won hands down over females in terms of symbolic force” (ibid.: 523): the Women’s Building, which housed an exhibition in which “mechanical inventions for the home were interspersed with samples of women’s porcelain and embroidery,” failed to live up to the overwhelming impression left by the great Corliss engine. Mizora, then, celebrates the absence of masculinized engineering and instead displays “richly colored mats and rugs” (33) that are cleaned by “a little machine, with brushes and sponges attached” (44). In contrast with the 1876 Centennial, where the Women’s Building expressed a utopian dream rather than the status quo, the fictional workshop of the blondes is a feminist future materialized: where the stamens of a “tiger lily made of gold” support “a tiny figure carved out of ivory” playing music on its miniature instrument, “female” design and an advanced “male” technology are harmoniously merged (ibid.: 526).

14

For a comparison between the land of Mizora and actual technological innovations in postwar, post-Reconstruction America cf. Pfaelzer, “Introduction,” (2000: xvii). Lane, she argues, would have known that much of the machinery that appears in Mizora already existed but that “most of these inventions were too costly and too large for working-class and middle-class families” (ibid.).

15

Brenda Hollweg schreibt in Ausgestellte Welt: “Der Blick von oben dient nicht nur der Erfüllung einer Illusion—nämlich der, die Welt würde beherrschbar—sondern stellt auch eine effiziente Technik zur Erkennung, Markierung, und Verteilung von Räumen, Individuen und Gruppen dar” (2000: 95).

16

Report published by the Centennial Commission in 1877-78, quoted in Banta, Imaging American Women (1987: 523-24).

 
  

  

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Interestingly, Lane anticipated what would become a central aspect of the century’s second grand fair, the 1892 World’s Columbian Exhibition. As Pfaelzer points out in her introduction to Mizora, [a]mong the ‘real things’ that had come into being by 1892 when the later Exposition was in its planning stage was the recognition that American culture ought to be a balance between business and the arts; between what the masculine endeavor symbolizes and what the female image represents. That recognition was made official by the design of the Exposition’s grounds and displays. (2000: xvii)

For all its far-sightedness, however, the novel keeps a critical distance from this modern Eden. The fair ladies of Mizora are significantly not familiar but in fact are a thoroughly different species: I discovered that they kept no cattle, no animals of any kind for food or labor. I observed a universal practice of outdoor exercising; the aim seeming to be to develop the greatest capacity of lung or muscle. It was astonishing the amount of air a Mizoran lady could draw into her lungs. They called it their brain stimulant, and said that their faculties were more active after such exercise. (20)

Arranged within an artistically designed parkscape with temple-like buildings, the blondes are no flesh and blood characters but animated versions of their equally monumental allegorical sisters “Liberty,” “Victory,” and “Columbia,” who decorated American squares to remind citizens of the country’s foundational ideals. As the novel maintains, “statues of women, noble looking, beautiful women” are equally en vogue in the utopian land of Mizora. Interestingly, however, the blondes hardly differ from their immobile sisters. With their large waists [“not one was less than thirty inches in circumference” (20)] and ageless beauty, the Mizorans are cast as abstractions from the beginning. While Vera studies them, learns from them, and builds friendships, she carefully maintains an onlooker’s respectful distance. Marveling at the Mizoran objects of art and technology like a connoisseur, Vera describes her journey as a fundamentally aesthetic experience that might inspire the real, but will never be of it. The unattainability of the Mizorans’ lifestyle creates a sense of uncertainty and potential alienation on the part of the reader that subtly contradicts the futureoriented optimism of the genre. Instead of replacing the “essential unknownness” of things to come with a “definite shape” that “set[s] in motion a process that will bring […] about” the future, Mizora resonates with a sense of caution. That there is a dark side to the “enchanted country” becomes most obvious when after fifteen years among the blondes Vera shows symptoms of museum fatigue. The reader gratefully accepts her subsequent return to the real: one grows tired of the novel’s endless descriptions of scientific, social, and artistic perfection. As a personification of the

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“truth” that resonates in her name, Vera eventually privileges a sense of human-ness over the abstract concepts that shape the land of the blondes. Mizora shares principal features of the coming-of-age-novel: during her journey Vera moves from conflict (Russia) to fascination (the land of the blondes) until she realizes the misery(!) that clings to the name “Mizora.”17 When she travels to America she recognizes herself for the first time as an individual, separate from the oceanic unity/quasi-socialist collective of the blondes. Her personal philosophy is still not entirely clear, but there seems to be no doubt that America is where she belongs. Psychoanalytically speaking, her departure resembles a symbolic birth: she is carried across undefined waters before reaching the real world, where she takes up her pen to express her newfound identity, which she contrasts with an overly harmonious, dreamlike past in the womb-like center of the earth (cf. 14). Yet once we move beyond the psychoanalytical dimension of this departure18 and consider its ideological dimension, new questions appear: what does it mean, for instance, that once Vera settles down in America she finds herself in a profoundly unhealthy and potentially contagious environment where there is no hope for change? Significantly, her escape from the dystopian downside to utopia19 does not imply that she finds individual happiness in the land where its pursuit is a central part of the national credo. It is at this point that Mizora is at its most radical: happiness, the novel maintains, is what individuals and societies strive for, but its accomplishment signals the beginning of posthumanity. To better understand the genesis of this philosophy (and it is this genesis that Mizora is centrally about) we should pay attention to Vera’s past: she is, significantly, not an American by birth but a Russian whose last name, Zarovitch, calls to mind the Russian anarchist (and later Marxist) Vera Zasulich (1849-1919), who in 1878, after a much-publicized trial, fled to Switzerland where she became a Marxist.20 While Mizora does not argue along anarchist or communist lines, its main protagonist is vaguely modeled on the extraordinary life, courage, and individual independence of the Russian revolutionary.21 For the purposes of Lane’s narrative, however, Zarovitch

17

Pfaelzer highlights this double signification in her introduction to Mizora (xv).

18

For an analysis of this dimension cf. ibid. (xii).

19

As Pfaelzer points out, Lane’s tale eventually “teeters on the edge of dystopianism” (ibid.:

20

Regarding Zasulich’s political views see ibid. (xiv).

21

Like Zasulich, Vera supports the Polish rebellion of 1831. (In the novel she enjoys “the

xxxv).

cheering air” of Poland, where she develops a deep “sympathy for her oppressed people” and joins a Polish friend in a mourning ceremony that is soon broken up by the appearance of the Russian army. See Lane 9. Regarding the historical Zasulich’s life cf. Jay Bergman, Vera Zasulich (1983).

 
  

  

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is also cast as a noblewoman. She has fled persecution after attending “the anniversary of the tragedy of Grochow.” (The historical reference for this ceremony is the 1831 November uprising of Grochów, which at the time was the most severe political and military conflict in Europe and caused a major wave of emigration to the United States.) Lane’s protagonist is arrested for treason and—contrary to historical fact— deported to Siberia. While Lane’s choice of historical backdrop may not be entirely comprehensible,22 what counts here is the novel’s clearly anti-monarchic stance. This, then, makes Vera an ideal potential American, and it is hardly coincidental that her first-person account is patterned after the literary mode of the American immigrant autobiography. Moving from her arrival in an “enchanted country” to her first contact with the natives and her admiration of their superior society and culture, Vera develops an increasingly nuanced view of the imaginary “citty upon a hill” in which she has been stranded. In keeping with the tradition of the (sub)genre, the novel reminds American readers of America’s ideals including, in particular, individual freedom and the pursuit of happiness for all. The land of the blondes, in other words, is not the clear antithesis to America that it purports to be. When Vera refers to the “loving, lingering touch” of the weather in Mizora she compares it explicitly to “the Indian Summer of North America” (15); she also maintains that Mizora’s politics resembles those of the United States, whose “form of government” she has admired since her childhood in Paris (9). Like all literary utopias, Mizora is both “a place we already know very well” and an enthusiastic “message from the future” (Peyser 1998: 8). It is helpful to view the “new and beautiful country” of the blondes (14) from a different generic perspective as well, since Mizora shares a common feature with many immigrant autobiographies: the dream anticipation. Usually set in the country of origin or during the passage to America, the “dream anticipation” describes the newcomer’s high hopes and expectations (which later undergo a correction process). Yet contrary to the generic tradition of the immigrant autobiography, Mizora lets Vera’s high-piled hopes materialize.23 The focus is not on a late-nineteenth-century newcomer’s disillusionment (which might be expected in view of the great railroad strike of 1877 or of American workers’ distress over wage cuts, unemployment, and impoverishment) (cf. Peyser 1998: 8),

22

That the novel refers to the battle between Polish forces and the Russian army and not to the anti-Czarist movements of the late 1870s (the assassination of Czar Alexander II happened shortly after the last installment of Mizora was published) may have been a pragmatic consideration on the author’s part.

23

Regarding the immigrant autobiography as genre see William Boelhower, “The Necessary Ruse: Immigrant Autobiography and the Sovereign American Self” (1990); and William Boelhower, Immigrant Autobiography in the United States (1982: 11-52 and 219-30).

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but on Vera’s unending amazement vis-à-vis the Mizoran wonderworld of technological, social, and cultural progress. It is only toward the end, when Vera settles in the real America, that she experiences the frustration that is the typical turning point in most immigrant autobiographies and one of the main features supporting the claim of social transformation: after fifteen years in the dreamland of the blondes, Vera finds America to be lagging “many ages behind the civilization of Mizora” (146). Typical for the subgenre, this discrepancy has a sobering effect and calls for (imaginary or actual) closure. Mizora, however, goes one step further: instead of merely lamenting the unfulfilled illusion of a perfect life, the dream thereof is itself heavily scrutinized, turning Mizora into a somewhat twisted utopia.


 
  
  



 


If Mizora were an “ordinary” utopian novel it would wholeheartedly embrace the sense of “conscious organization that characterized the United States after the Civil War,” when modernity was not necessarily a threat but a project to be perfected (cf. ibid.). And throughout the first two thirds of the novel this is certainly its core message: most of Mizora celebrates the end of social heterogeneity, compromise, and ambivalence, replacing these presumed weaknesses with technological progress and large-scale social engineering. That this might be a problem is eventually laid bare by that personification of truth, Vera, who is, significantly, a stranger to the history of the blondes. When in the course of her stay she finds out about that history and its dark underside she grows alienated and eventually returns to a time in history when a different development was theoretically possible. This imaginative “point zero” is the end of Reconstruction. As Pfaelzer remarks, in her introduction to Mizora, it is no coincidence that American utopian fiction reached the peak of its popularity in the era that began with the collapse of radical reconstruction. The return of plantations to their original owners and the rise of terrorism in the shape of organizations like the Ku Klux Klan had quickly undermined the hopes for radical equality held out by the surrender of the Confederacy. (2000: xxx)

Pfaelzer relates that “radical equality” to the Mizoran fantasy of an all-female, allwhite state. She convincingly reads the novel as a moral-feminist response to latenineteenth-century social transformations, as “the utopian practice of celibacy” that regulates Mizoran demographics imaginatively “distanc[es] the white woman, the mother of the utopian race, from hypersexuality, a proclivity frequently assigned to

 
  

  

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working class, immigrant, and African-American women” (ibid.: xxx-xxxi).24 According to the Mizorans their own hyposexualized behavior is natural: celibacy is intrinsically linked to whiteness, and “race” is a moral category rooted in biology. Thus when the Preceptress argues that “[m]any ages ago this country was peopled by two races—male and female” (95) she not only shifts the category of race onto a gendered plane but binds racial and sexual anxieties together. A significant part of the novel’s cultural work lies in the alternative historiography that it proposes. As the Preceptress confides to Vera, the happy utopia of the blondes is made up of survivors who outlived the hereditary illness of their forefathers, whose “first Republic had been diseased from its birth. Slavery had existed in certain districts of the nation” until “a portion of the country refused to admit slavery within its territory.” The Preceptress’s historiography is a step-by-step narrative of liberation that tracks the dominant story of American independence and democracy. Beginning with a feminist version of the Revolution, which overthrew a “feudal” system under male leadership only to produce another, equally patriarchal system where slavery continued to thrive, the Preceptress’s tale then alludes to “[e]mnities” “between the two sections” caused by the fact that “[s]lavery had resolved to absorb more territory, and the free territory had resolved that it should not” (96). The evolving war “severed forever the fetters of the slave” but was also “the primary cause of the extinction of the male race” (96). At this point the story departs radically from historical fact. According to the chief Mizoran’s historiography, the war brought about another major change (besides the end of slavery): the coming to power of women, who until then had been “the beast of burden” (95). What follows is a remarkable attack on the culture of mourning, trauma, and prewar nostalgia that dominated American public culture in the early 1880s:25 published during a time when membership in Civil War veterans’ organizations grew to unprecedented numbers (Hochbruck 2011: 255), Mizora suggests an alternative, reconciliatory historiography according to which the true winners of the Civil War were white women from both

24

While this chapter draws on Pfaelzer’s inspirational work, it goes considerably beyond it in many respects. Positioning Mizora in a Reconstruction context and linking it to the discourse of health, I focus more specifically on the novel’s ambivalences and logical contradictions in order to better understand what I interpret as its generationally specific “cultural work.”

25

Drew Gilpin Faust describes and analyzes America’s “new relationship with death” in This Republic of Suffering (2008: xi).

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parts of the nation. They—and not the men—successfully boosted the desolate economy and established an Edenic lifestyle in an imaginary garden here machines serve to perfect nature.26 In post-Reconstruction Mizora [w]ealth was everywhere and abundant. The climate as delightful as the most fastidious could desire. The products of the orchards and gardens surpassed description. Bread came from the laboratory, and not from the soil by the sweat of the brow. Toil was unknown; the toil that we know, menial, degrading and harassing. Science had been the magician that had done away all that. (21)

By referring to the “toil that we know” the novel alludes to the economic situation of the (post-)Reconstruction era, when sharecropping, an agricultural alternative to the plantation economy, had grown to formerly unknown proportions, but instead of bringing positive results had left both poor whites and freed slaves impoverished and dependent (see, e.g. Sutch 2001). The Chief Mizoran traces the agricultural, economic, and social disaster of her “very remote ancestry” (95) back to a quintessentially male approach to community, technology, and ownership—a civilization, as she adds with an unmistakable wink to the reader, that “resembled the present condition of your own country as you describe it” (94). According to the Preceptress’s feminist version of artificial selection, this flaw was eventually overcome by way of a scientific revolution supervised by motherly women who put their talents to use in the service of their community. In keeping with Blight’s and Blum’s analyses of the white postwar Republic, African Americans are glaringly absent from Mizoran history. According to the Preceptress’s revisionist historiography, Reconstruction was a successful, anti-feudal endeavor brought about by the concerted homogenization of society rather than a failed, halfhearted effort to officially recognize Whitmanesque multitudes. After a revolt of “the people,” so the story goes, the corrupt government under a former general who had once been “lauded so greatly” (he is easily discernible as Ulysses Grant) was brought to an end (99). What follows is an interpretation of the 1876/77 transition from Grant’s presidency to that of Rutherford Hayes, who had paved the way for a new phase of white reconciliation.27 Once she has described the political situation of

26

The country of Mizora differs from Leo Marx’s idea of the garden in that it does not reconcile the rational and the wilderness but, rather, the rational and the dreamlike. Regarding the nineteenth-century paradigm of the “machine in the garden” see Marx, The Machine in the Garden (1964).

27

Hayes personally supported equal rights regardless of race but started a new phase of cross-sectional “compromise” to save the Union.

 
  

  

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the year 1880, when “innumerable factions sprung up all over the land,” the Preceptress’s interpretation of American history is freed from historical evidence as we know it and the narrative develops into an alternative fantasy of matriarchal rule. In the context of the story’s publication this may very well be read as an appeal to female readers to “take matters into their own hands”: the last installment of Mizora was published in February 1881, only a few months after Grant had failed in his quest for a third presidential term (cf. Joens, Winter 2004) and just one month before the end of Hayes’s presidency. The imaginary Age of Mizora begins with a phase of male self-destruction: “They fought until the extermination of the race became imminent, when a new and unsuspected power arose and mastered” (99), bringing about “this wonderful change” (94). In a radical feminist rewriting of the post-Reconstruction present, the Preceptress announces the beginning of what became known as the “woman’s era”—in the narrowest sense of the term. From the Mizoran perspective, the Presidential crisis of the early 1880s enabled women to “gather the reigns of government in their own hands” (100). At this point the specter of violence disrupts the otherwise harmonious image of the “enchanted country”: to “secure strength and avoid confusion” (101) the Mizorans’ wise foremothers (100) founded a female army that “‘discreetly’ seized control of the state” (Pfaelzer, “Introduction”, 2000: xiii). Before further analyzing the Mizorans’ vision of female subversion (I am purposely avoiding referring to the novel’s vision) this chapter wishes to elaborate on the context from which it emerged. In the course of Reconstruction educated women in particular had formed social and educational societies that also figured as vehicles for female self-empowerment. By far the largest and most successful of these societies was the Women’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU), which is clearly alluded to when Vera shows a critical concern about alcoholism: [I]n my own country and others that, according to our standard, are highly civilized, a beverage is made from the juice of the corn that is not only drank in public places, but its effects, which are always unbecoming, are exhibited also, and frequently without reproof. (52)

According to Edward Blum the WCTU was the American institution that absorbed women from all parts of the country and thereby contributed decisively to sectional reconciliation at the price of racial integration (cf. 2005: 174-208).28 There is a very concrete historical reference point in the paradigm of cross-cultural sisterhood and whiteness that organizes the story of Mizora: Vera shares many of the stereotypical

28

The WCTU reformer and suffragist Frances Willard admitted to having been “reconstructed” in the love of her Southern sisters. See Willard, Glimpses of Fifty Years (1889: 373-74); quoted in Blum (2005: 190-91).

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features of postwar Southern women. Born into an “aristocratic” family she travels to the North (pole) to eventually find inspiration with her more advanced “sisters” (whom she eventually finds overly rationalistic). Given that the Mizorans’ lingua franca bears similarities to a “southern drawl” (“Accustomed to the harsh dialect of the North, my voice was almost intractable in obtaining their melodious accentuation,” Vera claims) (19), the novel can be said to playfully mix established attributes of Northern and Southern womanhood to create an unorthodox cross-sectional sisterhood. Ironically, the intrusion of the (“southern”) brunette into “northern” territory introduces a darker element among the blondes, challenging the all-white consensus not only among the Mizorans but, implicitly, within the historical WCTU.29 Before we turn to this racial aspect, however, let us briefly return to the Mizoran revolution: Formerly denied political representation, educational opportunities, and economic independence, an enlightened elite among the Mizorans’ Reconstruction foremothers formed a central government grounded in moral principles. They abolished states’ rights and the underlying “assumption of State sovereignty” and passed a national law ensuring “that criminals could be arrested in any State they might flee to” (100). Essentially an application of the Fugitive Slave Act to the issue of crime, this was an important step in an all-encompassing, absolutist moral cleansing: To secure strength and avoid confusion was the aim of the founders of the new Government. The Constitution of the National Government provided for the exclusion of the male sex from all affairs and privileges for a period of one hundred years. “At the end of that time not a representative of the sex was in existence.” (101)

29

As Blum points out, the WCTU was used to “comment[ing] upon and shap[ing] debates over racial issues” (2005: 178). Its discourse resounded with racial rhetoric (alcoholics were described as “slaves,” the figure of the slave-driver was recast as a saloon-keeper, etc.) and its leaders made excuses for anti-black violence in the South (cf. ibid.: 174-208). Instead of racial integration the WCTU promoted “colonization” and voting qualifications based on educational standards and claimed that alcohol and rape were the main causes of interracial sexuality and the creation of a “‘mixed’ and ultimately powerless race” (cf. ibid.: 179 and 205). As the diary of one Southern activist, Belle Kearney, suggests, the WCTU also enabled a crucial re-signification of the Southern stain of slavery. In her diary, significantly titled A Slaveholder’s Daughter, Kearney describes the WCTU in quasi-abolitionist terms: for her it was a “golden key that unlocked the prison doors of pent-up possibilities. It was the generous liberator, the joyous iconoclast, the discoverer, the developer of Southern women.” Kerney, A Slaveholder’s Daughter (2000: 49-52); quoted in Blum (2005: 175).

 
  

  

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This artificial selection through political marginalization is later specified as a biological process. This is how the story evolves: during the one hundred years of female leadership mentioned above, the “disfranchised” men were “resolved to secure their former power.” “In order to prevent another civil war” the women resolved to give them “an equal share at the ballot” only to regret their democratically-minded generosity soon after: They had no sooner obtained that than the old practices of the former Republic were resorted to to secure their supremacy in government affairs. The women looked forward to their former subjugation as only a matter of time, and bitterly regretted their inability to prevent it. But at the crisis, a prominent scientist proposed to let the race die out. Science had revealed the Secret of Life. (103)

By representing the “extinction of the male race” as a process that leads from a denial of public recognition to artificial, biological selection, Mizora walks an extremely thin line between political marginalization and genocide. It is the very thinness of this line, and the implications of its thinness, that interest me in this analysis. Apparently, they interested Lane as well.



   
  
Like the Mizorans, Vera is a feminist pioneer. Her flight from European feudalism is also a woman’s escape from a life that would have been comfortable but insignificant—had she “lived, loved, married and died a Russian aristocrat” her “narrative would not have been written.” Vera makes a point of insisting that hers is “a journey no other of my sex has ever attempted” (8). This vehement desire to transgress the limits of Victorian gender norms ties in with the feminist debate of the era. A heroine who takes matters into her own hands and joins a radical matriarchal society of the future takes Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s 1867 separatist dictum to an extreme: Woman must lead the way to her own enfranchisement, and work out her own salvation with a hopeful courage and determination…. She must not put her trust in man in this transition period, since while regarded as his subject, his inferior, his slave, their interests must be antagonistic.30

30

First published in Stanton et al, History of Woman Suffrage (1881: 451); quoted in Nancy Woloch, Women and the American Experience (1984: 89). Stanton’s response was a reaction to the Kansas referendum of 1867 that aimed at removing franchise restrictions on the grounds of both race and sex. The latter failed. Cf. Simon and Danziger (1991: 2).

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These lines were published in 1881 when the first installments of Mizora had already appeared in the Cincinnati Commercial. But as the publication of Mizora itself indicates, the call for female self-empowerment was very much the battle cry of the time. After all, the novel was written (and read) while Stanton and her liberal feminist supporters were stoically working toward the same goal: in “every session of Congress from 1878 until its passage” (in 1920), Stanton demanded the introduction of the nineteenth amendment guaranteeing women’s suffrage (cf. Simon and Danziger 1991: 3). Importantly, however, the cultural significance of Mizora emerges in the broader context of a feminist debate that was geared toward America’s future in general and that therefore was also very much about the role of race and (to use terms employed by Stanton) “caste and class” (2007: 192). The novel goes further than Stanton by anticipating socialist ideals (exemplified in communal kitchens and a collective work ethic) that would later be voiced by Frances Willard (who headed the WCTU when Mizora was published), (cf. Gusfield 1955: 226, note 17).31 Like female activists in general, Lane’s hyper-intelligent protagonists contradict the Comtean idea that “woman” could only “inspire science but was not herself a scientist” (cf. Satter 1999: 46). Taking Stanton’s 1868 claim that women’s natural affinity with science should make them “the governing power of the world”32 to its logical end, Mizora depicts a female state enabled by chemical engineering and technological progress. The novel had absorbed the discontent of thousands of American women who reacted to the anti-feminist backlash expressed in the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments by “herald[ing] themselves as the epitome of Anglo Saxon racial development, claim[ing] science as a womanly spiritual discourse, promot[ing] cooperation over capitalism, and strategiz[ing] toward the final eradication of devolutionary male desire” (Satter 1999: 27). And yet it would be a misunderstanding to view Mizora as a mere fictionalization of such ideas: the most interesting aspect of this novel is its critical exploration of abstract concepts that it puts, if only imaginatively, into practice until their dark and ugly sides come to the fore. And yet there is no final dissolve: the novel’s ideology is almost impossible to pin down. The scientific origin of the (Mizoran) species, for example, is not something the blondes are openly proud of. It is, in fact, their best-kept national secret; although officially “nothing in Mizora is concealed” (91) there is “no record of a more primitive race” in their excellent libraries, and in their dictionaries “no word existed […] that was equivalent to the word ‘man’” (38). It takes more than half of the novel and several years of Vera’s stay for the Mizorans to answer the one question that haunts their visitor: “Where are the men?” (22). Touching upon the one taboo in

31

As I hope to show with regard to Mizora’s racial project, the novel did not follow Willard

32

Stanton in an August 13, 1868, article in Revolution, quoted in Woloch.

in all matters.

 
  

  

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Mizoran society, her question is first met with “loathing and abhorrence” (90). Being told that there is “no mention of a race of men” (85) because “no lesson can be learned from their lives” (91), she is eventually and reluctantly led to a hidden picture gallery in a “remote part of the National College” (90). Storing the portraits of the forefathers, these archives show that Mizora is a society rooted in denial. Vera’s reaction to the portraits is remarkably mixed. She is immediately struck by the variety of the men on display: “Some had noble countenances; and some bore on their painted visages the unmistakable stamp of passion and vice” (90). What is even more significant is that she identifies with them: I am not complimentary to myself to confess it, but I began to feel an odd kind of companionship in this assembly of good and evil looking men, such as I had not felt since entering this land of pre-eminently noble and lovely women [….] I seemed to breathe the same moral atmosphere that had surrounded me in the outer world. They had lived among noble and ignoble deeds I felt sure. They had been swayed by conflicting desires. They had known temptations and resistance, and reluctant compliance. They had experienced the treachery and ingratitude of humanity, and had dealt in it themselves. They had known joy as I had known it, and their sorrow had been as my sorrows. They had loved as I had loved, and sinned as I had sinned, and suffered as I had suffered. (90-91)

Vera’s visit to this de facto graveyard is the turning point in her life among the blondes. She now fully lives up to her name: “I wept for the first time since my entrance into Mizora, the bitter tears of actual experience” (91). Vera (and the reader) now become painfully aware of what had struck her from the very first day: the Mizorans’ country is beautiful but inauthentic, and its post-human artificiality inhibits a multifaceted, multisensual experience of self and other. When she first set foot on Mizora, Vera had wondered about the “weird stillness” that emerged from the landscape unfolding before her: “no sound greeted me from the ripening orchards, save the carol of birds; from the fields came no note of harvest labor. No animals were visible, no sound of any. No hum of life.” While “[w]herever the eye turned it met something charming in cloud, or sky, or water, or vegetation” (15), the experience is sobering at best: Vera soon discovers that even the “fragrance of tempting fruit” (14) is chemically produced, and when she spots a “granite rose” the description echoes with a sense of reservation. For all her lasting admiration for the Mizorans, Vera feels uncomfortable with the complete technological control that rules in their land. When she learns that the beautiful blondes have replaced heterosexual reproduction with scientific parthogenesis33 independent not only of men but of sexual desire tôut court,

33

A form of (natural) reproduction in which the ovum develops into an embryo without fertilization.

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and that they produce only daughters, skepticism turns to revulsion, and Vera is shocked to recognize the truth behind their condition: “I trembled at the suggestion of my own thoughts. Was this an enchanted country? Were the lovely blonde women fairies—or some weird beings of different specie, human only in form? Or was I dreaming?” (94). At this point the story undergoes an interesting switch: while in principle the novel seems to cherish the idea (derived from Auguste Comte) that woman’s natural disposition to motherhood associates her with the moral principles at the basis of a good society, the professionalization of motherhood poses a threat. If to this point the novel seems to have largely subscribed to the ideas of John Wesley Powell (the famed anthropologist who distinguished cultural evolution from animal evolution by emphasizing the role of science, art, and cooking as indicating a “conscious effort for improvement in condition”34), it now highlights the moral limits of this discourse. With the transformation of motherhood into a national ideology, a given society will eventually destroy its emotional basis: Mizoran women have rid themselves not only of men but also of passion, sex,35 and “selfish” love. In their celibate sisterhood, “grand” feelings are significantly muted and efficiency rules supreme—even a woman’s daughter is educated by an expert rather than her “natural” mother.36 Vera “almost regret[s]” “[t]he revelation” she “had so longed for”: “It separated me so far from these beautiful, companionable beings” (104). The revelation has consequences for the reader as well: what first appeared as the epitome of a higher civilization now betrays an uncanny, alienating otherness. If in the earlier part of the novel the blondes had ascribed Vera’s behavior to her lack of refinement (they study

34

Powell, “Barbarian to Civilization,” American Anthropologist (1888) 103-104, quoted in Haller, Outcasts from Evolution (1971: 109). Powell’s influence is also present in one of the infrastructural innovations in Mizora: the establishment of communal irrigation systems to secure the supply of water for everyone. This was precisely what Powell had demanded when he served as an advisor to the government for Indian affairs. In 1878 he had published a widely admired Report on the Lands of the Arid Region of the United States. In this manifesto he linked the control of water with the zoning of the West and with necessary changes in homestead laws. Mizora shows a deep familiarity with the evolving debate that connected the availability of water with the advancement of “civilization.” Regarding the influence and status of the report see Thadis W. Box, “The Arid Lands Revisited: One Hundred Years After John Wesley Powell,” USU Faculty Honor Lectures (1977).

35

Pfaelzer argues that in Mizora “chastity is seen as a refuge from both male-dominated

36

A “lesbian reading,” of course, opens up an alternative interpretation; a utopian alterna-

sexuality and from the pain of childbirth.” The Utopian Novel (1984: 92). tive to Mizora—one that includes same-sex passion—is within the novel’s scope.

 
  

  

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her as extensively as late-nineteenth-century anthropologists studied the behavior of apes), it is now Vera who challenges the desirability of an “overcivilized” country without men. The novel thereby suggests a middle way between the two heavily gendered concepts of “civilization” that had influenced American society since the late 1870s. Spurred by social problems and tensions in urban centers and bolstered by a new wave of anthropological thinking, a multifaceted, semi-professional debate had sprung up after the war regarding women’s “natural” place in society. While many women insisted on their sex’s essential role in social “uplift,” G. Stanley Hall’s concept of “civilization” as a product of male energy took hold of the U.S. mainstream.37 This is how Satter sums up the situation: [B]eginning in the 1880s, many middle-class men became eager to prove that they still embodied the primitive daring that had enabled their ancestors to win primordial battles between the races. If middle-class men no longer embodied the virtues of economic independence, perhaps the public’s strength could be grounded in male virility. (1999: 39)

What Mizora recommends in this situation is a new type of womanhood that is significantly not entirely identical with the Mizoran lifestyle and beliefs. The novel therefore spends much time discussing the Mizorans’ quasi-fascist concept of a “purified” society. Contrary to what readers of the early-twenty-first century associate with artificial breeding and population control, however, what most bothers Vera is the difficulty of drawing a line between natural and artificial species. During the last decades of the nineteenth century this was not primarily a scientific or philosophical question but a religious one and had been most audibly expressed by the American theologian and former principal of Princeton Theological Seminary, Charles Hodge (1797-1878). Publishing widely during the years immediately preceding Mizora, Hodge intervened in a public discourse in which evolutionism was widely accepted (even among religious leaders and thinkers) but its concrete mechanisms and relation to the Biblical genesis remained controversial. Influenced by Louis Agassiz’s (18071873) view of spirituality as the one trait that distinguishes humans from animals, Hodge conceived of the Darwinian concept of “natural selection” as fundamentally atheist and therefore unacceptable. Yet he also made it clear that he was not an anti-

37

Although he had published and lectured extensively before, it was not until 1904 that Hall published his major work, Adolescence. Regarding the development of Hall’s career from the mid-1880s cf. Bederman (1995: 88-92 and 109).

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evolutionist but a critic of scientific models that lacked the notion of a superior, metaphysical design.38 Hodge, in other words, offered a middle ground in the controversy between evangelicals and proponents of evolutionary thought that emerged between the late 1870s and the late 1880s. Following Hodge’s (and Agassiz’s) logic, then, the Mizorans cannot be counted within the multi-faceted family of man but instead constitute an entirely different species because they have fully replaced religion with science. Vera implicitly sides with Hodge when she turns against the Preceptress’s demand that she “get rid of it [religion] as we have got rid of the offspring of lust.” Although she admires the Mizoran leader, Vera insists on her Christian heritage and is “resolved not to be convinced” (131). Deeply disturbed by the Mizorans’ lack of spiritual guidance, she begins “to feel anxious to convince them of the danger I felt they were incurring in neglecting prayer and supplication at the throne to continue them in their progress toward perfection of mental and moral culture” (130, 131). Implicitly taking a critical stance against the anti-Christian concerns of Stanton, Mathilda Gage, and other influential American feminists, the narrator sides (at least in this respect) with Christian feminist voices such as Frances Willard’s,39 and the seemingly “natural” hierarchy between Vera and the blondes begins to deteriorate. From this point on the initial impression that [t]he Mizoran woman is the True Woman, the ‘angel of the house’ carried to her logical extreme, still contentedly submissive, but strong in her inner purity and religiosity, queen of her own contained realm, which is really the extension of her home […]. (Pfaelzer 1984: 148)

no longer functions. The Mizorans have perverted the Victorian ideal by challenging its religious basis: instead of remaining society’s “conduit to God,”40 their attention

38

Here is what Hodge writes in one of his major works, Systematic Theology (1872-1873): “In saying that this system is atheistic, it is not said that Mr. Darwin is an atheist…. Nor is it meant that everyone who adopts the theory does it in an atheistic sense. It has already been remarked that there is a theistic and an atheistic form of the nebular hypothesis as to the origin of the universe; so there may be a theistic interpretation of the Darwinian theory.” Quoted in David N. Livingstone, Darwin’s Forgotten Defenders (1984: 104-05). Regarding Hodge’s role in the more general cultural controversy see 100-112; the ongoing influence of Agassiz on the late-nineteenth-century American debate is discussed on page 79 f.

39

As I will show later in this chapter, Mizora does not adopt Willard’s racist convictions. Cf. Amy Hackett, “Cloaking an Apology for Lawlessness: Ida B. Wells, Frances Willard and the Lynching Controversy, 1890-1894.

40

See my chapter on John Bennitt.

 
  

  

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is fixed on self-absorbed perfectionism. Their worldview even challenges established religious explanations for the Civil War: Two nations at war with each other, and believing in the same Deity, would pray for a pestilence to visit their enemy. Death was universally regarded as a visitation of Providence for some offence committed against him [God] instead of against the laws of nature. (135)

By redefining Protestant religion as superstition Mizora (or at least the “lighter” side of the story) shares the “extraordinary faith” that marks all literary utopias, believing “in the ability of the word, of logos, to order the real.”41 This signals just how much had changed since the “most religious war in American history”: by the 1880s, atheism was not commonly accepted but had become a very real option in America, particularly due to the success of Robert Ingersoll, “the most noted of English-speaking infidels,”42 whose 1877 transcontinental lecture tour had attracted large crowds. Unlike the blondes, however, Vera is not an atheist; she in fact turns against the “crucible of Science” (139) according to which modern societies must choose between secularization and superstition. Occupying a middle ground between evangelicalism and atheism, she opts for a conciliatory, Christian alternative: religion, she states in her somewhat functionalist explanation, is her “only consolation” (139) in the face of human mortality, and to her mind an ideal “civilization” is not thinkable without the “desire to believe it had a spiritual eternity” (135). This was quite in line with the more general climate of the day: as David N. Livingstone has pointed out, late-nineteenth-century Americans tended to accept the concepts of evolution and the secular state without shedding religion as the primary source of social values (cf. 1984: esp. 51). Yet while during the early 1880s pre-Darwinian developmentalists, Neo-Larmarckians, Christian creationalists, and Darwinists developed nuanced and individual views on the relationship between science and religion (cf. e.g. ibid.: 80),43 Vera’s “theology” remains notably vague: combining a watered-down version of Christianity with tolerance for the unbelieving but “civilized” blondes, it sheds a favorable light on the female adventurer’s “unwomanly” independence, intellect, and politics. With her nuanced, eclectic view of contemporary ideologies (including feminism)

41

In other words, they share the “extraordinary faith” of all utopias, believing “in the ability

42

About the role and arguments of Ingersoll and American atheism in the late 18th century

of the word, of logos, to order the real.” Peyser (1998: 40). see Peter M. Rinaldo, Atheists, Agnostics, and Deists in America (2000). The quote is from page 94 and stems from the report of his death in the New York Times, July 21, 1899. 43

Regarding the position of American Neo-Lamarckians see Livingstone (1984: 54-55).

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and systems of (religious and scientific) thought, Vera promotes a new type of womanhood that is individualistic, community oriented, and informed by contemporary debates. Mizora, then, calls for the recognition of precisely this new type. This feminist desire for recognition structures the further development of Mizora: to share her insights with her contemporaries the protagonist has to leave the “sweet ideal land of [her] Soul, of Humanity” (139) for the land of the “wretched” and write “the story of [her] wanderings” (147). To secure the personal narrator’s authority, however, the story emphasizes the exclusively emotional basis of Vera’s decision— her alienation among the asexual, atheist blondes and her “intense longing to return to [her] own country” (140), a land she falsely believes is “smiling in universal comfort and health” (142). Significantly, however, this “home country” is not the one she was born in but “that universal asylum for the oppressed of all nations” (144), the United States. Yet the immigrant’s dream anticipation fails the reality test: as a widow in America, Vera lives in an economic, political and social limbo, is threatened by lawless criminals “with the horrible capacity for murder,” and “await[s] the issue of universal liberty” (147). Rhetorically, in other words, Mizora “returns us to history” (cf. Pfaelzer, “Introduction”, 2000: xxxvi) in a very concrete sense: by evoking the discourse of abolition it reminds post-Reconstruction American readers that for women the struggle for freedom has not yet come to an end. It is, significantly, not Vera, but her Mizoran companion, Wauna, the Preceptress’s daughter, whose “prophesy” (according to the novel’s subtitle) authorizes the eventual fulfillment of the immigrant’s dream:44 When we arrived in the United States, its activity and evident progress impressed Wauna with a feeling more nearly akin to companionship. Her own character received a juster appreciation. “The time is near,” she said, “when the New World will be the teacher of the Old in the great lesson of Humanity. You will live to see it demonstrate to the world the justice and policy of giving to every child born under its flag the highest mental, moral, and physical training known to the present age. You can hardly realize what twenty-five years of free education will bring to it. They are already on the right path, but they are still many centuries behind my own country in civilization, in their government and modes of dispensing justice. Yet their free schools, as yet imperfect, are, nevertheless, fruitful seeds of progress.” (145)

In its effort to project true social progress and national renewal Mizora comments on America’s underdeveloped educational system and the popular belief that a “more demanding mental activity […] drained [women’s] capacity to be healthy mothers” (Bederman 1995: 87). Although “the years extending from about 1870 to 1900

44

This vision, however, is that of the historian who views the past from the vantage point of later developments.

 
  

  

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marked the first general period of gender equality in the history of American secondary education” (Altenbaugh 2003: 234) and although an increasing number of women’s colleges were founded, there were still comparatively few of them and their programs were conservative.45 Mizoran artificial reproduction, of course, has not only nullified the problem of female higher education but also the ideological arguments that encouraged women’s exclusion from the university system. As will be explained in more detail later, Mizora was inspired by Francis Galton, the famed anthropologist and cousin of Charles Darwin. Mizoran educational principles not only go together with the era’s more general interest in educational reform but can be traced back to Galton’s concept of an ideal society in which “every lad had a chance of showing his abilities, and, if highly gifted, was enabled to achieve a first-class education and entrance into professional life, by the liberal help of the exhibitions and scholarships which he had gained in his early youth” (1869: 362). By eschewing Galton’s exclusive focus on men and suggesting a political framework that makes individual self-realization possible, Mizora formulates its vision of a participatory culture: Those who possess musical predilections, seek musical associations; those who are purely literary, seek their congenials. This is true of all other mental endowment or tastes; that which predominates will seek its affinity; be it in science, literature, politics; music, painting, or sculpture. (65)

This wonderworld is enabled by machines that have taken over what the novel calls “the toil that we know, menial, degrading and harassing.” Since their “bread [comes] from the laboratory, and not from the soil by the sweat of the brow” (21), the blondes are free to concentrate on their individual talents. In a remarkable neglect of economic processes, their work happens to always correspond to the needs of society, to whose further perfection they automatically contribute. Thriving on an ideology of progress, the blondes have no need to retire, and when they eventually pass away they welcome death because they have done all they could for national perfection. And yet the total equation of citizenship and work will hardly have convinced readers. It is to counterbalance the Mizoran work ethic that the novel inserts a passage about the joys of a charity fair in this land of plenty. Staged as a mock version of the original, this classical nineteenth-century field of female (self-)empowerment emerges in a significantly new light: compared to the Mizorans’ folk appropriation,

45

Where coeducation existed, women “commonly outperformed their male classmates in academic subjects, particularly in the sciences.” This, however, was a middle-class phenomenon since “immigrant and working-class girls rarely attended high school” (ibid.: 234). Cf. also Stevenson, The Victorian Homefront (1991: 101-36).

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American charity fairs appear shallow and self-serving. Vera herself is highly critical of traditional fairs of this kind, as she finds them degrading to all involved: women of “refinement” “assum[e] the lowlier occupations of others. They [stand] behind counters, in booths, and [sell] fancy articles,” and even gather and remove empty dishes (63). This masquerade, she complains, has no impact on poverty but instead stabilizes the status quo: “One fact was apparent to all; they were gentlewomen still. The refinement of their home education, and the charm of nourished beauty were, perhaps, more prominent in contrast with their assumed avocation” (63). The Mizorans, by contrast, are beyond such rituals of class-specific aggrandizement. Contrary to what one might expect they, too, have their “Charity Fair[s]” complete with “clerks and waiter girls and flower sellers” (63). Yet what looks like a social hierarchy à la Americaine turns out to be a conception of difference particular to the Mizorans: “That there were really no dividing lines between the person who superintended the kitchen and the one who paid her for it, that, I could plainly see; yet there were distinctions, and sharply defined ones too” (63). The Mizoran Charity Fair then emerges as a masquerade of a different kind: “distinctions” are a necessary part of what is essentially a ritual of mutual acknowledgement. Since all the women share the same “language, refined tastes, dignified and graceful manners,” their occasional participation in presumably “lower” activities is acknowledged as an individual contribution to the universal progress of the race. In this ritual of recognition, the country’s social elite “deserves a special mention” because it is of “so peculiar and amiable a kind.” That such a “highest society” exists of course demands an explanation; in a hierarchy no longer defined along the lines of class and social standing but by “the differentia of mind,” one type of woman, the chemist, is particularly exalted. She whose laboratory is “the focus that [draws] the attention of all minds” (63) is the posthuman queen bee in the technological beehive. Importantly, however, that status is open to everybody. Membership in the Mizoran “aristocracy” is a universal right and possible at every stage of a woman’s life: “This aristocracy was never arrogant, never supercilious, never aggressive. It was what the philosophers of our world are: tolerant, humane, sublime” (65). In the absence of social hierarchies the joys of the Charity Fair present (as Vera herself observes) “a miniature picture of the actual every-day social life of Mizora” (63), projecting a counter-image to the social divide among American feminist circles and organizations. Recast as a ritual of secular worship, the Mizoran event subsumes class and social caste under the common habitus of refinement, also termed “custom” among the blondes (28). These “customs” are national law internalized. Oddly enough, though laws thus do exist in Mizora, they are never consulted but rather “simply established [as] legal advice.[…] In a country like ours, where civilization has reached that state of enlightenment that needs no laws, we are simply guided by custom” (28). A metaphorical wink of the eye to Galton, who held women to be “servile followers of custom” (1869: 196), this phrase takes the civilizing process to its

 
  

  

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highest theoretical level. In a country in which everybody is happy anyway, the pursuit of happiness has outlived itself as a concept. Where large-scale individual happiness secures the happiness of the whole, democracy is no longer an option to strive for. And yet Vera’s feminist quest for an ideal, egalitarian society removes her as far from the Mizorans’ all-female ideal as could be: to escape political persecution in Russia she dresses like a man, abandons her child, shares raw food with a “savage” tribe and, when she arrives in Mizora, wears the furry dress of a male “esquimo” sailor. Vera—and this is a meta-message of the text—would never have been able to tell her unconventional story if she had not been as “daring” as a man. In this way, Mizora promotes an alternative female lifestyle that transcends established boundaries of gender, space, and time—and that is not identical with the lives of the blondes. Significantly, however, the radical feminist ideas that Vera stands for are never introduced explicitly; on the contrary, the narrator retreats to the Victorian formula of female modesty when she refers to herself as one of those beings “born for the sole purpose of becoming the plaything of Fate—who are tossed from one condition of life to another without wish or will of their own” (8). By delimiting herself against a “male” economy of imperialist zeal and desire, Vera is fashioned as a naïve visitor rather than a somewhat aggressive explorer; her skepticism vis-à-vis the blondes makes her appear less radical than she actually is—a highly unconventional woman with a socialist agenda. While she claims the role of participatory anthropologist [“I mingled among them for months, listening to a musical jargon of conversation” (19)], she actually maintains the intrusive position of a spy whose viewpoint is often explicitly male and heterosexual, differentiating Vera from the celibate blondes. Thus when she first sets foot on Mizora she is intoxicated by what she twice calls “a paradise for man” (21, 88): None but the fairest of fair women graced the scene. Is it strange, therefore, that I should have regarded with increasing astonishment and uneasiness a country in all respects alluring to the desires of man—yet found him not there in lordly possession? (29-30)

As Pfaelzer rightly argues, “whether Mizora, as a text, inscribes lesbian or heterosexual relations in the all-female world depends on how we read the narrator” (“Introduction”, 2000: xxxiv). What can undoubtedly be observed, however, is the novel’s conspicuous play with same-sex desire. Besides voyeuristic scenes like the one just quoted, Vera’s fondness for the beautiful Wauna is clearly eroticized. Yet their lesbian romance remains on a subtextual level, powerfully counterbalanced by Vera’s longing for her husband and son and her silent identification with the male portraits. On the narrative level, both her real and imaginary cross-dressing and her seemingly ambivalent gender preferences are major means to drive the novel forward. And they preoccupy the reader even after she or he finishes the book. Although

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Vera’s heterosexual longing for her husband eventually drives her out of Mizora, this seeming resolution is not altogether clear: in the end both Wauna and Vera’s husband have “found a grave,” and it is hard to decide whom Vera mourns most. Ironically, then, the Mizorans’ history seems to repeat itself in America: “In this refuge of oppression” Vera is metaphorically freed from patriarchy and yet she is not the happy widow one might expect (given the vanishing men in Mizoran historiography) but a lonely writer who watches the spreading of crime in her immediate surroundings. Claiming that crime is “as hereditary as disease” (147), she maintains the evolutionary logic of the blondes. Yet what are we, as readers, to make of this afterthought that confirms a core ideology among the blondes? Seen in its entirety the novel refuses to answer the question of heredity but instead infuses its narrative with contradictory information and opinions. By inviting readers to consider the logical consequences of what at the time was called “hereditary science,” it intervenes in the prolonged Reconstruction debate regarding the hereditary transmission of disease, intelligence, and moral behavior and their connection to race and gender. The complex relationship between Vera and her posthuman friends is key to better grasping the cultural significance of this interference.


   
  
  
 
  
Wavering between sentimental notions of family and community and more contemporary concepts of population control, Vera’s journey marks the transition between Civil War commemoration (with its emphasis on national wholeness and brotherhood) and Progressivism.46 A traveler in space and time, she is far from representing a fixed worldview but instead is bent on exploring unknown and yet strangely familiar territory. Her outsider status among the blondes allows her to not only compare their lives with her own society but to test the limits of sociological and anthropological theories that had begun to pop up during the late 1870s and early 1880s and that later became the basis of Progressive reform. Mizora seeks a middle way between those new theories and the intellectual, religious, and moral framework of the wartime generation. To grasp the novel’s cultural work we must bear in mind that it was

46

According to Christoph Henning, Progressivism began far earlier than is usually assumed. He dates its beginnings to the 1879 publication of Henry George’s Progress and Poverty and to Ward’s 1883 Dynamic Sociology. Both very much influenced the turn away from Gilded Age “rugged individualism” and toward directed cultural and social change. Cf. Christoph Henning, “Naturalistic Values and Progressive Politics: A Missing Link Between Pragmatism and Social Theory,” European Journal of Pragmatism and American Philosophy IV (2012: 86-87).

 
  

  

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published when an earlier, scientific debate surrounding the issue of cultural superiority and national progress had become more nuanced and taken on new urgency. In the 1880s the controversy between polygenists (who “held that different races came from different species” (Broad, Fall 2009: 256)47) and monogenists had come to an end, making way for evolutionary theory and a public debate regarding the role of biology versus culture in an increasingly pluralistic society experiencing an age of transnational expansion. Lane, it seems, was very well informed about the state of these discussions, with the result that her novel sometimes anticipated rather than following particular trends.48 While we do not know whether Lane had actually read the work of Galton, who in 1883 introduced the term “eugenics,”49 she clearly struggled with similar questions and engaged critically with them. At the heart of this criticism lies Hereditary Genius, a book that Galton published in 1869 to prove that human intelligence is hereditary. If throughout the 1870s his thesis “seemed poised, to many readers, on the frontiers of science” (1869: 8), by the early 1880s the statistical methods that his work relied on had been thoroughly scrutinized by the academic community. As a consequence, Galton watered down his basic claim that “heredity is nearly all, and environment almost nothing in the making of individual intelligence” (ibid.: 2) and conceded “that social forces had been retarding the production of English scientists” (ibid.: 17). Published just at the beginning of this critical debate, Mizora contributed a particularly feminist viewpoint to the discussion. The Mizorans may be said to embody what some of the critics of Hereditary Genius termed Galton’s “superiority doctrine,” according to which “dependably good intelligence inheres to the superior social classes” because “a natural biological sifting had already occurred, with the cream settling naturally, effortlessly, at the top” (ibid.: 11). Contrary to this concept, however, the inhabitants of the Mizorans’ “enchanted country” believe (contrary to what Beecher insisted) that “nature” can and must be assisted. As the novel emphasizes, the Mizorans have worked to bring about their society’s

47

I do not share her view that Mizora holds a polygenous view of race and insists on abso-

48

The world Vera travels through bears resemblances to W.J. McGee’s model of human

lute racial differences. social evolution, first published in 1899. McGee suggested four instead of the established three stages of human development: “savagery,” “barbarism,” “civilization,” and “enlightenment.” In Mizora the “esquimos” embody the first of these categories, Vera the second, the Mizoran foremothers the third, and the blondes themselves the final stage of human accomplishment. Regarding McGee’s intellectual development cf. Haller (1971: 105). 49

Regarding the influence of Galton on the eugenics movement and hereditarian psychology see Gerald Sweeney, 'Fighting for the Good Cause:' Galton’s Legacy To American Hereditarian Psychology (2001).

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progress: their “priceless heritage of health and perfect bodies” is the product of artificial breeding that “has required patience, observation and care on the part of their ancestors” (105). It is, thus, by actually using their superior “brains and mental stamina” that they have managed to fulfill “the needs of centralization, communication, and culture,” thereby confirming Galton’s optimistic credo that “the most intelligent variety is sure to prevail in the battle of life” (1869: 392). For all the subtle differences that distinguish the Mizorans’ gendered version of social Darwinism from Galton’s principles, the two concepts resemble each other on the whole. Galton may have cast natural selection as effortless, but he, too, promoted a concept of artificial breeding: according to a paper he published near the end of the Civil War, the elimination of “‘inferior blood in […] a family’” would require “‘a few generations’ of wise breeding.”50 When three years later he reinforced his idea of population control he relied on comparisons from the familiar worlds of fish farming and domestic labor to downplay the moral pitfalls of artificial breeding: [T]he power of the director of the establishment for breeding fish is of exactly the same quality as that of a cook in her kitchen. Both director and cook require certain elements to work upon; but, having got them, they can create a fish or a dinner, as the case may be, according to a predetermined pattern. (1869: 375)

The narrator of Mizora chooses a strikingly similar tone and imagery to describe the close alliance between domestic work and science in Mizora, albeit with a different focus: as Vera tells the reader, the blondes have established “schools where cooking was taught as an art to all who applied.” In this equally democratic and sophisticated space “[e]very cook” is recognized as “a chemist of the highest excellence” since the preparation of food is “[p]laced upon a scientific basis” and thereby becomes “respectable” (45). In this feminist appropriation of Galton’s concept and rhetoric there is almost no difference between a kitchen (where “machinery [does] the coarse work”) (45) and a “Chemist’s Laboratory” (103). Both spaces are under the care of women who have separated natural reproduction from the reproductive organs of their gender: “‘Daughter,’” the Preceptress says “solemnly” as she shows Vera the laboratory for chemical reproduction: “you are now looking upon the germ of all Life; be it animal or vegetable, a flower or a human being, it has that one common beginning. We have advanced far enough in Science to control

50

“Hereditary Talent,” Second Paper, 326, Macmillan Magazine (August 1865): 318-327; quoted in Sweeney (4). In Mizora the “advancement” of society takes place “between one generation and the next” (67).

 
  

  

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its development. Know that the MOTHER is the only important part of all life. In the lowest organisms no other sex is apparent.” (103)

According to the Mizorans’ historiography, the culture of their forefathers deteriorated because it was “diseased from its birth” and had “lacked the wisdom to remedy” slavery (95). Besides alluding to the early republic the statement establishes a direct link between individual and collective emotions, moral ideals, and the notion of health in the Mizorans’ ideology.51 Such rhetoric is perpetuated in the Preceptress’s interpretation of the Civil War as a presumably “healthy” reaction against the “canker that eats into the vitals of any nation that harbors it” (96). In accordance with such metaphors, national healing is eventually accomplished when a corrupt postwar government—reminiscent of the Grant presidency, 1869-1877—collapses, making way for women who “formed a Republic, in which they remedied many of the defects that had marred the Republic of men,” particularly the idea of states’ rights (100). With “the exclusion of the male sex from all affairs and privileges for a period of one hundred years” (101), the Mizorans have taken the project of “feminizing” American culture to its radical symbolic end. This clears the path for a progressive reform that fully measures the value of women’s scientific findings and technological inventions, bringing about “some remarkable changes in living, especially in the prevention and cure of diseases” (103).52 Described via images of nursing, healing, and survival, the Mizoran race stands as the imaginary endpoint of a development—according to the Preceptress “all reforms are of slow growth” (104)—that can be traced back to the concept of patriotic nursing during the American Civil War and the definition of Reconstruction as an effort to heal the nation. Yet instead of representing women as patriotic helpmates in the nation-as-hospital Lane’s novel projects a clash of civilizations (a homogenous, “healthy” female one and a fragmented, “diseased” heterosexual one) that can only be resolved (“healed”) by updated, “scientific” means. Adding a feminist slant to the idea that “science offered the remedy,” Mizora imagines freedom from a housewife’s daily toil: the happy blondes “di[p] their pretty hands in perfumed water” while “a little machine, with brushes and sponges attached” goes “over the floor at a swift rate” (44). This belief in scientific salvation was very much in line with the secular optimism of the era. Mizora often sounds like an echo of the early American sociologist Frank

51

In America, of course, moral notions of illness and contagion had been around since the early colonial era. See, for example, Sheldon Watts, “Die Globale Geschichte der Pocken: Von den Anfängen der Kolonialisierung bis heute,” Virus! Mutationen einer Metapher, eds. Ruth Meyer and Brigitte Weingart (2004).

52

If a minor case of illness occurs, it naturally “never threaten[s] to affect the larger community” since “every mother is a family physician” (109).

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L. Ward (who helped establish the discipline in America during the early 1880s), who stated that “[t]he real object of science is to benefit man. A science which fails to do this, however agreeable its study, is lifeless” (1883: xxvii)53 and who advocated “a planned, or ‘telic,’ society (‘sociocracy’) in which nationally organized education would be the dynamic factor” (cf. “Lester Frank Ward”, Encyclopedia Britannica Online). Since Ward’s approach was published two years after the first installment of Lane’s narrative, the influence can hardly be direct. Yet Lane’s idea of a “land of brain workers” (45) who through “careful study, and experiment and investigation” (121-122) have found a formula to live very long, healthy lives54 had been “in the air” for quite some time—I have already mentioned Stanton’s 1868 claim for women’s natural affinity to science. And yet the novel is wary of recommending the country of the blondes as a model for America. The reasons are primarily scientific: according to the Mizorans’ eugenicist ideology, real progress depends on a strict (sexual, racial, cultural) segregation akin to quarantine. As the Preceptress advises her visitor, “control[ling] Nature’s processes of development” not only preserves the “race” but is the only way the United States can realize its national credo, the “pursuit of happiness.” “Would not your own country,” she asks, “be happier without idiots, without lunatics, without deformity and disease?” (104). This is the logic that lies at the heart of the Mizorans’ protofascist state ideology of contamination and contagion, according to which survival in a “barbarian” environment would, “in a few generations to come, perhaps even in the next,” lead to “coarse features and complexions, stoop shoulders and deformity” (105). The Mizorans, in other words, must separate themselves from the larger world in order to win the race for global survival. This gender-specific paranoia goes so far that when Wauna dies (she returns to the “Great Mother,” the earth) (147) she anxiously asks Vera to “promise […] that her [the Great Mother’s] dust shall cover me from the sight of men” (146). And yet Wauna’s vulnerability to the male gaze is somewhat surprising since the hyper-healthy blonde had been praised as particularly “well adapted to the service [Vera] required” (140). Her untimely death contradicts the blondes’ usual “practice”

53

Quoted in Henning, “Naturalistic Values,” (2012: 88).

54

Mizoran cooks have also “eliminated” all “deleterious earthy matter” from their traditional cuisine and the chemically produced fruit of their “art” is now available to all the citizens of the nation (45). Taking up the spirit of the “New Woman,” this healthy diet is accompanied by a sports program that involves “[a]ll kinds of out-door sports and athletic exercises” (108). Staged as a test subject for this physical self-cultivation, Vera, too, enjoys the “beneficial effects“ of a government that truly “cares” for its citizens: “a healthier tone of body and an increase of animal spirits, a pleasurable feeling of content and amiability” turn her (at least temporarily) into a member of this happy, female nation (45).

 
  

  

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of dying: signaling the suicidal consequences of an ideology that promotes hyperpurity and social homogeneity, she lacks the stamina required to live among a more varied, and less advanced, heterosexual people. Transplanted to the real world, in other words, the civilization of the blondes proves inapt. Significantly, the event that tips the scales and signals the end of Wauna’s life is the sight of dysfunctional mothers: “I am not suited to your world,” she said, with a look of deep sorrow in her lovely eyes. “None of my people are. We are too finely organized. I cannot look with any degree of calmness upon the practices of your civilization. It is a common thing to see mothers ill-treat their own helpless little ones.[...] I cannot mention the half of the things I witness daily that grates upon my feelings. I cannot reform them. It is not for such as I to be a reformer.” (146)

In America the woman whose name, Wauna, translates as “happiness” in the language of the blondes (147) is symbolically conquered by the “vanitas” and “vanity” that echoes through that name. Checked against everyday reality, the Mizoran success formula seems wanting: the antiseptic environment of Wauna’s home country has dispossessed her of the natural immunity that allows Vera to resist the common “vice“ of city life. Turning utopia into dystopia, the Mizoran’s death signals the vulnerability of a concept of health that is, essentially, based on the denial of the real. It is highly ironic that Wauna’s untimely “fading” from the earth corresponds to the “natural selection” of those whom her foremothers once deemed “undesirable”: “All of these things combined, made a great improvement in the health and vigor of our race, but still hereditary diseases lingered. There were many so enfeebled by hereditary disease they had not enough energy to seek recuperation, and died, leaving offspring as wretched, who in turn followed their parents’ example.[…] As the science of therapeutics advanced, all diseases—whether hereditary or acquired—were found to be associated with abnormal conditions of the blood. A microscopic examination of a drop of blood enabled the scientist to determine the character and intensity of any disease, and at last to effect its elimination from the system.” (108)

The passage is particularly significant because it exemplifies the somewhat blurry discussion of racial topics in Mizora. In the early 1880s, however, attentive readers may well have observed the analogy. At that time blood was seen as both “the carrier of character traits” and “a metaphor of race,” and it is by merging the two that Mizora anticipates the “one drop rule” characteristic of early-twentieth-century lawmaking.

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In the 1880s this regulation was a common ideology rather than a legal device.55 Particularly when discussing hereditary disease, the passage above highlights the role of eugenic thought in the linguistic mainstream of late-nineteenth-century America and bears racial connotations as well: as a cultural and political incarnation of perfection, the “healthy race” of the blondes is based on the elimination not only of men but also of the racial other. During Vera’s visit to the hidden picture gallery the novel emphasizes her uneasiness upon realizing the practical consequences of the Mizorans’ ideology: I had observed that dark hair and dark eyes were as discriminately mingled in these portraits as I had been accustomed to find them in the living people of my own and other countries. I drew the Preceptress’ attention to it. “We believe that the highest excellence of moral and mental character is only attainable by a fair race. The elements of evil belong to the dark race.” “And were the people of this country once of mingled complexions?” “As you see in the portraits? Yes,” was the reply. “And what became of the dark complexions?” “We eliminated them.” […] I had the consolation of secretly disagreeing with her. I am still of the opinion that their admirable system of government, social and political, and their encouragement and provision for universal culture of so high an order, had more to do with the formation of superlative character than the elimination of the dark complexion. (92-93)

That little attention has been paid to the last paragraph of this quotation says more about the scholarly desire for ideological unambiguousness than about the novel’s textual politics. Katherine Broad, for example, views Mizora in the pre-Plessy v. Ferguson context of its making. Published before 1896, when that decision stabilized the legal definition of whiteness, the novel signals (according to Broad) an “attempt to counter and condemn the unregulated sexual practices that adulterated the races and

55

Heidi Ardizzone in a personal email of November 27, 2012. She is one of several respondents who answered my November 2012 inquiry regarding the evolution of the “onedrop rule” on the h-Net discussion list for African American Studies. I hereby thank (in alphabetical order) Adele Alexander, Heidi Ardizzone, Richard I. Agran, Tonya S. Braddox, Grey Gundaker, Paul Finkelmann, and Marta Mack-Washington. I also consulted Joel Williamson, New People (1955); James F. Davis, “Who is Black? One Nation’s Definition” (2009); and Kevin R. Johnson, ed. Mixed Race America and the Law (2003). Barbara Holden-Smith, “Lynching, Federalism, and the Intersection of Race and Gender in the Progressive Era” (1996: 31-35), is of particular interest for this chapter.

 
  

  

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made whiteness biologically and phenotypically ambiguous” (Fall 2009: 248). Vera’s reaction to the portraits, however, suggests something else, as it expands rather than limits the notion of whiteness. And yet the meaning of race in this novel remains unclear because Mizora refuses to deliver a clear-cut opinion, ideology, or theoretical framework. The longer passage just quoted is steeped in ambiguity as Vera insists on her admiration for and even love of the blondes. She significantly severs the Mizoran concept of civilization from its racial component and justifies what is essentially her personal “opinion” by privileging universal education over a theory of artificial breeding and genocide.56 Put in simpler terms, she believes that progress results from education rather than race. The narrator thus believes, but she knows little, and makes that a point. The reader who struggles to make sense of this vagueness will recall the physical traits of the focalizer: Mizora suggests that its narrator is biased by nature; she never makes it a secret that she is “a brunette” (17) and stresses that her “dark hair and eyes were such a contrast to all the other hair and eyes to be met with in Mizora” (79). The woman who admires Mizoran progress, in other words, is just as “imperfect” as many of the novel’s readers, and like them she shrinks from the scientific racism that lies at the roots of the “enchanted country.” Interestingly, this ambivalence suggests that the Mizorans may be fundamentally erring. This, then, is the moment of truth (“vera”): in a gesture of conspiracy with the reader, the brunette who appears “degenerate” (105) in the eyes of the blondes proves surprisingly capable of keeping up with her superior sisters’ scientific theorizing. Her critical distance causes her to castigate the Mizorans for their narrow-mindedness (as she “secretly disagrees” with them) and offer an equally rational alternative: what if education was the only key to their success? The “what if” clause, of course, signals the hopeful reader’s unresolveable dilemma. What are we to make of the Preceptress’s remark that Vera’s society could attain Mizoran standards if it would only secure “the priceless heritage of health and perfect bodies” (105)? What makes this statement less crucial than the quote from Francis Bacon that precedes the novel’s following chapter, featuring the philosopher’s “principal doubt” of the “physical causes” for a certain “temper” or “genius” (106)? Entangled rather than embedded in early eugenicist thinking, Mizora refuses to take a clear stand on the issue, leaving it to the reader to form what Vera calls an “opinion.” It is, then, not the “enchanted country” alone that figures as the imaginary new frontier of the American mind: to either approve or reject the ideological abstractions of the blondes, nineteenth-century readers had to consider what these ideas entailed

56

Here I depart from Broad, who reads Mizora as an “essentialist celebration of female biology” that is “inexorably tied to a fantasy of purification” (ibid.: 249).

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for a visitor who was so very much like themselves. Identification, in other words, helps establish a critical view of this seeming utopia. Had Lane chosen an African as narrator her white nineteenth-century readership would hardly have challenged the Mizorans’ racist status quo. And yet—and this is crucial for our understanding of the novel—there is something “wrong” with the Mizorans that is absolutely independent of ethical considerations, as it unfolds in a very narrow sense on the textual level. For all its perfection the Mizoran wonderworld soon appears static—and it is not only Vera who senses that but the reader as well. All the detailed descriptions heaped upon the imaginary landscape cannot resolve the narrative’s deepening stasis nor can they suffocate the reader’s desire for individuality, excess, and extravagance on the part of the protagonists and for true development at the level of the plot.57 The philosophy Vera sets against Mizoran totalitarianism combines the notions of assimilation, difference, experience, and individualism, all of which are inscribed in her “robust” (10) and darker body. Ideally suited to survive in the hostile urban environment of modern America, she embodies the triumph of assimilation over artificial breeding. In the competition between Vera and the blondes, the Darwinian logic of human survival eventually trumps the notion of directed civilization. This is at least one way of reading Vera’s flight from paradise. Before returning to qualify this somewhat reductive reading this chapter wishes to further explore what makes Vera one of the “fit.” Her resilience, it seems, challenges the Mizorans’ concept of overarching health as it is the result of an education based on experience (a common ideal among nineteenth-century educators) and a lifelong exposure to difference. Before being sucked into the oceanic swirl that brings her to Mizora, Vera has already travelled through several cultures, political systems, and geographies, from her Russian homeland [the “coldest climate of the temperate zone” (11)] to the North Pole. The novel thus describes the shrinking of the globe, a process that took on new speed in the late nineteenth century with the settlement of the American West, an increase in missionary activities and international trade, and anthropological research. In view of Vera’s repeated acculturations and acclimatizations to various environments, the utopians appear strangely anachronistic: isolated and self-absorbed, they are a surprisingly nostalgic outgrowth of Victorian ideals. Reminiscent of those “celibate monasteries or sisterhoods“ that Galton imagined as a possible refuge for individuals who were “civilized” but “weak” (1869: 362), the racially homogenous blondes lack the stamina of the “robust” Vera. Yet if Galton’s “celibate sisterhoods” are ultimately doomed to extinction, Mizora is spared this fate: too civilized to be transplanted to America in a one-to-one correspondence, the country nevertheless maintains its crucial function as laboratory for a new social vision.

57

Regarding a similar commodification of difference in Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward cf. Peyser (1998: 54).

 
  

  

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Somewhat paradoxically, then, the Mizorans are more “American” than Vera: tied to the familiar catastrophe of a civil war, even their logic of racial superiority connects well with the “Jim Crow” segregation of the United States. Vera, by contrast, is the product of historical developments that exceed a national framework and are marked by increasing mobility. For the refugee the multi-faceted nature of the human family is not only a self-evident given but a prerequisite to survival. Vera knows that in order to live she must befriend those who—according to the evolutionary thinking of the day—stand below her on the evolutionary scale: when she leaves the sunny pastures of Mizora and travels to America, she depends on a tribe of “esquimaux” (11) who help her make the trip. From this viewpoint, then, the novel joins the growing chorus of those late-nineteenth-century Americans who argued that exceptionalism was not isolationism and that “global and national consolidation” were not only “proceeding side by side” but “mutually constitutive” (Peyser 1998: 9). Again, this is only one way of reading Mizora, whose heroine never ceases to celebrate the land of the blondes. And yet there is much that supports this interpretation, as Vera herself embodies a “prophesy” in the guise of a new, vigorous type of American woman: an obscure immigrant of Eastern-European heritage, she spent a part of her childhood in France where her family were close friends with a group of American expatriates. She sympathizes with the “oppressed people” of Poland (9) and commits treason in the name of “American” revolutionary ideals. Adding an American dimension to the historical Zasulich’s biography, Vera manages to “escape in disguise to the frontier” (10) where she hopes to find a “form of government and some revolutionary opinions” (9) like the ones her American friends told her about. When she eventually settles down in the United States she fits in easily. The epitome of a politicized nineteenth-century (American) woman, Vera combines the softer qualities of the heart (her love of husband and son) with curiosity, courage, and a desire for freedom. These qualities prove crucial for her survival: Vera doesn’t mind being “tossed from one condition of life to another without wish or will of [her] own” (8). This readiness to accept life the way it is goes beyond fatalism: celebrated as an adventurous trait, it differs considerably from what, according to Thomas Peyser, was a central feature of late-nineteenth-century literary utopias: although Vera seems to partially share “the enthusiasm for the move toward conscious organization that characterized the United States after the Civil War,” in the end she resists “the desire to place a grid over reality, to rationalize experience” (ibid.: 8). By refusing to diligently follow a philosophical, cultural, or religious script, Vera secures not only her survival but her growth as an individual and is able to contribute a major insight to international politics. When during her flight to Western Europe she loses her way and is shipwrecked in the Arctic, she welcomes the chance to broaden her

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experience: “Had I started out with the resolve to discover the North Pole, I should never have succeeded” (8). In the immediate context of the United States, however, Vera’s pragmatism and optimism also advertise the potential contributions of newcomers, many of whom were coming to America from Southern and Eastern Europe at the time of the novel’s publication. Lane’s self-reliant, widely traveled Russian revolutionary represents an invigorating influx of flexibility and renewal that was lacking in the veterans’ generation (represented in the portrait gallery) with its outdated patriarchal norms. Published almost a decade before the Immigration Restriction League commenced its concerted effort to stem the tide of immigrants from Eastern and Southern Europe (among them many Catholics and Jews), Mizora blurs the line between immigrant stranger and American native and emphasizes the familiar in the seemingly foreign. Vera’s hunger for liberty, her progressive views, and her wish to make herself heard all rely on the concept that Americanness is a matter of choice, independent of a person’s national and ethnic background. She thus figures as a counter-image to the late-nineteenth-century stereotype of Eastern European women, who were commonly perceived as backward and traditional and whom American feminists saw as silent supporters of European-style patriarchy and as threats to their political project (cf. Ross 1914: 235 and 37). Open-minded, politically aware, and a fast learner, the cosmopolitan Vera projects a different type: eagerly embracing the educational chances offered to her through the state college of the enlightened blondes, she figures as a model immigrant catering to American feminist dreams. In the course of the novel she thus appears far more suited to bring about social change than do the ideologically constrained Mizorans, who live as happy prisoners in a totalitarian society of their own creation. Choosing “the wild, rough scenes of [her] own nativity” over the “golden cage” (115) of Mizora, Vera is an expert in the multifacetedness, relativity, and simultaneity of contemporary realities. Though Vera does challenge the Mizorans’ philosophy of racial purity, degeneration, and hereditary genius, her critical engagement with the blondes does not suggest a smooth transition from social determinism to individual learning. The novel, in fact, refuses to offer concrete political solutions, fails to decide whether social progress depends on racial purity, and abstains from answering the question of whether and to what extent eugenic ideas should influence state actions. This vagueness persists until the very end of the novel, when the narrator suggests an alternative program of elimination based on moral behavior rather than race or gender: Though we cannot hope to attain their [the Mizorans’] perfection in our generation, yet many, very many, evils could be obliterated were we to follow their laws. Crime is as hereditary as disease.

 
  

  

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No savant now denies the transmittable taint of insanity and consumption. There are some people in the world now, who, knowing the possibility of afflicting offspring with hereditary disease, have lived in ascetic celibacy. But where do we find a criminal who denies himself offspring, lest he endow posterity with the horrible capacity for murder that lies in his blood? (147)

What sounds like a call for harsher laws and persecution (anticipating eugenic and punitive sterilizations in early-twentieth-century America) is promptly attenuated a few lines later when Vera demands “UNIVERSAL EDUCATION, FREE AS THE GOD-GIVEN WATER WE DRINK” (147). By the very end of her narrative, then, Vera seems to reject what the blondes consider the only “remedy” against crime: where they had explained that only “annihilation” would stop the “inherited molecular structure” of a criminal’s brain from reproducing in subsequent generations (109), Vera’s call for free schools suggests the opposite. Is this, then, the crowning message of Mizora? Or merely a broad-lettered slogan to protest the all too obvious decline of “civilization”? After so much indecision on the part of the narrator it is too late for ideological closure: wavering between determinism and educational reform until the final lines of the narrative, Mizora weighs bland “Social Darwinist” positions (which had become popular via the theories of Spencer and his “American complement, William Graham Sumner”58) against neo-Lamarckian ones (a school of thought that believed that acquired traits could be inherited). By the end of her story, Vera still refuses to fully embrace the more optimistic, Lamarckian approach, merely hoping (!) that human intervention will give “a dynamic impulse to the chain of being” (Livingstone 1984: 54).59 This anti-laissez-faire approach to government anticipates Lester Frank Ward’s influential 1906 concept of “telesis”60 but leaves open the question of what to do with the ignorant, poor, diseased, and criminals, who (according to Vera’s observations) prevent or slow the process of collective self-perfection. By the end of the novel any potential “solution” must be given close scrutiny: after all, readers have been alerted

58

Sumner believed that the “survival of the fittest” was a natural law that could be interrupted by human intervention without ultimately being stopped in its course. A society that implements programs to support the “unfitted,” he suggested, may produce equality but contradicts the notion of liberty. Henning, “Naturalistic Values” (2012: 87); and Dorothy Ross, The Origins of American Social Science (1991: 85 ff).

59

The Lamarckians felt that “a laissez-faire approach to social issues was tantamount to a denial of human creativity and the very principle of evolutionary development. Convinced that they could change the future course of social evolution, they supported policies for improving social conditions” (Livingstone 1984: 55).

60

Ward first elaborated this concept in 1903 (in the last chapter of Pure Sociology) but developed it more systematically three years later, in Applied Sociology (1906).

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to the high personal costs of a society designed by man, not God. Thus when Vera opts for “UNIVERSAL EDUCATION” she does so somewhat defiantly and against all odds.


    


  
  

  
 
Seen from this angle, Mizora is less about ideology as such than about the role of human agency in what may be called the early 1880s “culture of doom.” The fact that Vera chooses to tell her story (which is, significantly, a story of individual survival) disrupts the pessimistic rhetoric that was being propagated in academic and public discourse. Moving beyond its own racist agenda, Mizora intervenes in debates about racial hierarchies and gender roles and suggests a different story. As has been suggested previously, the valences of the story can be chosen by the reader. Its points of reference, however, are clearly laid out in the novel itself: as shall be elaborated further, the meaning of Mizora unfolds against the decline of the American middle class, which in the early 1880s was suffering from severe economic depression and the first signs of labor unrest (cf. Bederman 1995: 12-16) and struggling to “solve” its manifold conflicts with strangers through acts of restrictive lawmaking. Anti-immigrant xenophobia, Jim Crow legislation and anti-“miscegenation” regulations, the violent marginalization of Native Americans, and early debates about Chinese exclusion were the symptoms of this power crisis among the white, native-born establishment. As Gale Bederman has shown, this crisis also involved an erosion of middle-class ideals of manliness that eventually resulted in a virtual “obsession” with manliness and racial dominance (cf. ibid.: 1-44). Mizora was published when this cultural turn was well under way (cf. ibid.: 15) but not yet central to how America defined itself as a reinvigorated culture. In the age of Mizora the “feminization” of American culture reached a new peak, especially in the field of education. Lane, a schoolteacher, played an active part in this movement and seems to have discovered writing as an additional outlet for her educational zeal. Mizora emerges as a manifesto by an early “new woman” who—relatively late in life—struggled to be recognized as an equal capable of solving the country’s conflicts with strangers. Of course Mizora does not allude to American race relations in any direct way. While their political, social, and economic exclusion was highly visible and debated, neither African Americans, Native Americans, nor Chinese immigrants are ever mentioned in the novel. Mizora deals in more abstract issues instead—including citizenship, voting rights, and the distribution of land—all of which were steeped in racialist considerations. The text is organized in such a way that nineteenth-century readers

 
  

  

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could easily make connections and draw their own conclusions. Since Vera’s fluid racial ambiguity is instrumental to this process, it is here that I wish to begin. Throughout the novel Vera’s darker heritage symbolically helps her establish closer relationships to strangers than if she had been racially “pure” like the selfsegregating blondes. She therefore not only spends time among the “esquimaux” (today referred to as Inuit) but is adopted into their tribe, sharing with them meals of raw flesh and fat (which according to Claude Lévi-Strauss signals a lower level of “civilization” in many cultures).61 It is by no means far-fetched to read this encounter as commenting on reservation-era hostilities between white Americans and Native American tribes: during the late nineteenth century the “esquimaux” were commonly described as an “Indian tribe” that lived near the Arctic. Vera’s relationship with the natives is primarily one of material exchange: while the “esquimaux” help her adapt to the cold climate, she in turn furnishes them with a (supposedly) Western innovation, a compass.62 Yet when (a few pages later) she sets foot on Mizora, she is transformed into an inferior to the culturally superior tribe of blondes. Significantly, the novel stages her arrival through imagery with which American readers were deeply familiar: “I uncovered my head, shook down my long black hair, and falling upon my knees, lifted my hands in supplication” (15). The scene, of course, mimics American representations of Native American joy at the sight of white conquerors, settlers, and missionaries.63 Read in conjunction with the heroine’s previous encounter with the “esquimaux,” this stereotypical image relativizes the concept of “Indian-ness”: three thousand years in the future (counting from the early 1880s) even the most progressive among Lane’s readers will appear as members of a vanishing race. Somewhat subversively, however, the newly arrived “Indian” is not incompatible with the Mizorans; in fact, she absorbs all the knowledge she can get from them and establishes a very close friendship with their leader’s daughter, Wauna. As should have become clear, Mizora does not challenge the hierarchical concept of different “states of civilization” as such.64 But it takes a decisively critical stand in the post-Reconstruction scientific debate regarding the future of the “Indian.” Louis

61

Vera, in other words, goes “one step down” on the ladder of civilization. Cf. Claude LéviStrauss, Mythologica I: Das Rohe und das Gekochte (1964), reprint (2000: 428-38).

62

The Chinese, of course, had been the first to describe the technology.

63

The scene may also be aligned to the pose on the seal of the British Antislavery Society: the kneeling black man with raised hands imploring, “Am I not a man and a brother?” The “long black hair” of the narrating persona, however, explicitly delimits the description from this iconographic image.

64

At the time it was the anthropologists Louis Henry Morgan and John Wesley Powell who promoted the idea that all human groups were striving toward enlightenment. Cf. Haller (1971: 110).

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Henry Morgan, the “father of American anthropology” (Bieder 1986: 194),65 comes to mind here. Three years before Mizora was first published he had warned progressive reformers, teachers, and missionaries that cultural “uplift” among the Natives would take too long to be worth the effort: “We wonder that our Indians cannot civilize but how could they, anymore than our own remote barbarous ancestors, jump ethnical periods?”66 By repeatedly crossing and blurring the line between “barbarians” and “civilization,” and by adapting to the Mizorans’ lifestyle (she even learns their language), Vera “proves” that “jumping” is in fact possible, thereby engaging in that anthropological debate that was very much en vogue during the early 1880s. Much of her narrative seems to be directly influenced by the ideas of John Wesley Powell, the famous American anthropologist who in 1880 was appointed director of the Bureau of Ethnology, and who also served as second director of the U.S. Geological Survey (1881 to 1894).67 “[I]nspired and lifted to higher planes by the shock” of the Civil War,68 Powell had developed his theories of human progress on the basis of what he expected to see in America’s postwar multicultural mix. While he believed in the ability of all humans to progress, including the darker races, he posited that different groups would progress toward perfection at different speeds: for some groups, he thought, it would take generations to arrive under the roof of “civilization” (cf. Bieder 1986: 234-46).69 Significantly, however, he believed that this speed could be accelerated. It was around the time Lane published Mizora that Powell took up Morgan’s evolutionary anthropology and the Darwinian concept of evolution and promoted (as one of the few of his era) concepts of evolution by endeavor and progress through cooperation.70 By adapting somewhat effortlessly to changing “ethnical” periods, Vera far exceeds this optimistic notion of collective evolution. As this chapter will discuss later, however, her case remains unique. Vera’s evolutionary flexibility is of course also a narrative device enabling her to examine the lives of others and to imaginatively “test” her own compatibility with them (and vice versa). While references to the Reservation Era were a rather obvious context for the late-nineteenth-century reader, the novel’s allusions to America’s so-

65

Bieder’s book is a good introduction to early American ethnography and how it prefigured the debates of the post-1880s.

66

Morgan on “The Indian Question” (1878), quoted in (Bieder 1986: 242).

67

Powell contributed to various infrastructure projects and held much popular appeal.

68

His successor as director of the Bureau, William John McGee, “The Foundation of

69

Regarding Galton’s view of the matter cf. Galton, Hereditary Genius (1869: 226-350).

70

This makes him an important bridge between Morgan’s classical cultural evolutionary

Science,” The Forum (April 1899: 172-73).

ideas and the school of Franz Boas (who opposed the idea of a progression from savagery to civilization). Cf. Haller (1971: 110).

 
  

  

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called “immigrant aliens” disclose themselves far less readily. The only direct connection between the blondes and America’s Chinese immigrants emerges in an earlier paragraph that describes Mizora’s trees with their “smooth, straight trunk[s] and flat top[s]” as bearing “a striking semblance to the Chinese umbrella” (16). Yet there is more than mere orientalist imagery marking the “enchanted country” as a somewhat Chinese enclave. With their hyper-white skin, fair hair, monumental bodies, and celibate lifestyle, the Mizoran sisterhood represents (both visually and morally) an antipode to the stereotypical bachelor societies of late-nineteenth-century American “Chinatowns.”71 The American Chinese were considered the nation’s absolute other, as they seemed to differ not only in terms of race but—due to the era’s rigid immigration policies—also in terms of gender: after the so-called Page Act (1875) it had become virtually impossible for Chinese women to enter the U.S., and the gender ratio between Chinese women and men stagnated at 1:14.72 Associated with prostitution, gambling, and hierarchical and “un-American” “tong” structures, the Chinese were the least welcome among the era’s many immigrants. Anti-Chinese sentiment had become very strong during the 1870s; to take just one example, Frank Pixley represented the Municipality of San Francisco before a Congressional Committee in

71

At the beginning of Chinese immigration to America it was predominantly male “sojourners” who came to the US; women remained behind for a variety of reasons. After immigration restrictions were implemented, these “bachelor societies” became institutionalized. It must be remarked, however, that the much circulated idea of these all-male spaces was also produced by the media: as Sucheng Chan has discovered, the number of Chinese women in nineteenth-century America was considerably higher than commonly assumed. “Against All Odds: Chinese Female Migration and Family Formation on American Soil During the Early Twentieth Century,” Chinese American Transnationalism, ed. Sucheng Chan (2006).

72

The Page Act was not the only reason for this situation; it was not deemed “respectable” for a Chinese woman to emigrate to America. Thus in 1852 the ratio had been even worse (one woman for 1685 men). At that time, however, many Chinese considered themselves sojourners. When, due to political events in China, many of these men decided to stay in America, the Page Act served as an early measure to prevent the founding of Chinese families in the U.S. Generally aimed at the exclusion of “undesirable” immigrants (a category that included prostitutes) the Page Act was aimed particularly at female immigrants from Asia. From that point on Chinese women had to prove their “innocence” as part of the immigration procedure. Cf. George Anthony Pfeffer, “Forbidden Families: Emigration Experiences of Chinese Women Under the Page Law, 1875-1882,” Journal of American Ethnic History 6 (1986); and Chan (2006).

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1876, stating that the Chinese were “inferior to any race God ever made.”73 In the early 1880s anti-Chinese sentiment had reached unprecedented levels, culminating in the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act—the first American law to restrict immigration on racial grounds. Mizora appeared at precisely this time, when the topic filled the headlines and pages of American newspapers and drew agitated crowds. It is hardly conceivable, then, that readers did not draw parallels between the presumably “degenerate” Chinese bachelor societies and the equally segregated, racially homogenous females of Mizora. In light of the “Chinatown” stereotype, Mizora can be said to have shifted the debate about race relations onto a more abstract level, thereby interrupting, rather creatively, the established discourse surrounding racial segregation and preservation. For all its orientalist charm, the Mizorans’ homosocial, racially purified society appears as just another awkwardly static and hopelessly disconnected community of self-reproducing freaks. If one reads Mizora as a commentary on the “misery” of racial segregation, what comes to mind is, of course, the era’s Jim Crow legislation and the general atmosphere of anti-black phobia. Imagined and recorded during a phase of considerable population growth among the African-American community,74 the cross-racial friendship portrayed in Mizora between the white proto-feminists and their darker visitor challenges the politics of “compromise” between the former states of the Union and what used to be the Confederate South. Beginning with an addition to the 1875 Civil Rights Act, the North had made concessions to the South, for example by permitting racially segregated schools. In 1881 Tennessee passed the first “Jim Crow” law segregating public transportation; soon similar regulations “spread on both the municipal and government level,”75 climaxing with the 1883 Supreme Court decision to declare important paragraphs in the 1875 Civil Rights Act unconstitutional.76 Thus when in “one of those day dreams” (68) she has among the blondes Vera envisions an American “Temple of Learning” “grand in proportion, complete in detail, with a broad gateway over whose wide-open majestic portal was the significant inscription: ‘ENTER WHO WILL: NO WARDER STANDS WATCH AT THE

73

Frank Pixley in 1876, quoted in Stuart C. Miller, The Unwelcome Immigrant (1969: 3),

74

Between 1850 and 1900 the African American population more than doubled. Cf. “Afri-

quoted in Li, “Walt Whitman and Asian American Writers” (Spring 1993: 181). can American Population.” Pearson Education, 2000-2013, www.infoplease.com/ipa/ A0922246.html. Accessed 01 Aug. 2016. 75

Lori Schuyler, “Post-Reconstruction through 1920,” Virginia Center for Digital History.

76

The 1875 Civil Rights Act was the first to support forced integration by desegregation.

 
  

  

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GATE,’” she moves beyond the educational ideal of Mizora where, after all, only fair women enter the college.77 By emphasizing the possibility of cross-racial friendships and inspiration Mizora implicitly criticizes late-nineteenth-century America’s obsession with whiteness and challenges the politics of white sectional reconciliation that came at the price of racial segregation. What is unusual about this intervention is the level of abstraction at which it takes place as well as its significant shift from race to gender: “But one eminent distinction exists between us as a people,” I added in conclusion. “We are not all of one race.” I paused and looked at the Preceptress. She appeared lost in reverie. Her expression was one of solicitude and approached nearer to actual pain than anything I had ever noticed upon it before. She looked up and caught my eye regarding her. Then she quietly asked: “Are there men in your country?” (89)

When the Preceptress tells Vera that “[m]any ages ago this country was peopled by two races” she defines the latter as “male and female,” with the men as “rulers in public and domestic life” and the women as “beast[s] of burden” performing labor that was “more arduous than men’s and their wages lighter” (95). The country of the blondes, in other words, is a land ruled by those who had once been economically exploited. On a positive note, then, the Mizorans exemplify how an economically deprived group can become the “masters” of a new society built on justice and equality. The land of Mizora is, at least on one level, a post-racial society based in what Asha Nadkarni has termed “eugenic feminism,” a pseudo-Darwinian concept aimed at female self-purification for the purpose of furthering the national whole.78 With

77

While after the Civil War some new educational options emerged for blacks, their chances were anything but equal. Many schools and universities remained limited to white men (and sometimes religious denomination was an additional obstacle). Black schools were notoriously underfinanced, making it extremely difficult for African Americans to attend one of the few universities that were open to them. See Stevenson, The Victorian Homefront (1991: 101-36).

78

As Asha Nadkarni has pointed out in her spring 2006 discussion of feminism in the US and India, there is an uncanny connection between feminism and racism: “I use the phrase ‘eugenic feminism’ to refer not only to U.S. and Indian feminism's historical engagement with the eugenics movement but also to the rhetoric of feminism itself. Eugenic feminism is a self-purifying and self-perfecting rhetoric that works to create a feminist subject who, free of race, guarantees the reproduction of the sovereign nation”. “Eugenic Feminism: Asian Reproduction in the U.S. National Imaginary” (221). She further develops her thoughts in Eugenic Feminism. Reproductive Nationalism in the United States and India (2014).

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Vera’s arrival, however, the underlying logic of Mizoran ideology emerges as a particularly monstrous “alternative”: the Mizorans’ seemingly spotless society is based on the most violent and inhumane version of racial othering. While promoting a theory of racial relativity and opposing post-Reconstruction racial segregation, then, Mizora does not challenge the biological principles underlying the concept of race. Importantly, however, she also turns against racial absolutes, thereby subverting the racist fears that found their most extreme expression in the long tradition of American anti-miscegenation laws. I have already mentioned the significance of Vera’s adaptability to the Mizoran ways; her darker features prove irrelevant to her learning progress. What is even more significant, however, is the racial “impurity” of her blonde hosts. Wauna, the Preceptress’s daughter, differs significantly from all other Mizorans in her outer appearance: “Her eyes were so deep a blue, that at first I mistook them for brown. Her hair was the color of a ripe chestnut frosted with gold, and in length and abundance would cover her like a garment” (31). While the reader is struck with this description the Mizorans themselves are surprisingly unconcerned about the aberration: the novel refuses to discuss the matter, and while it leaves the reader wondering, it further severs the conditionality between racial appearance and cultural perfection. For all her obvious differences, Wauna is “vivacious and fond of athletic sports. Her strength amazed me. Those beautiful hands, with their tapering fingers, had a grip like a vise“ (31). On a symbolic level this grip links the brunette earthling (Vera) with the utopian blondes, signaling the shared origin of all humans. Significantly darker than her hyper-white sisters yet fairer than her worldly friend, Wauna signals an evolutionary continuum rather than a racial absolute. Featured prominently, her chestnut-colored hair mocks her mother’s evolutionary concept, which narrowly aligns phenotype and civilization. On a more immediate, political level, the shades of darkness that connect rather than sever Vera from Wauna and the blondes cast ridicule on late-nineteenthcentury fears of “miscegenation”: even chemical reproduction has failed the Mizorans in their effort to eliminate their darker origins. It is somewhat ironic if not openly provocative that the one woman who accompanies Vera into the world as it is not only the Preceptress’s direct descendant but the darkest among the Mizorans. An embodiment of the future, only she proves strong enough to survive for at least a short period of time. Once again this can be read as a direct commentary on post-Civil War evolutionary theory. By arguing that the mild climate and harmonious society they were born in has left the blondes ill-equipped to survive in America, the novel subversively appropriates Nathaniel S. Shaler’s Januar 1873 concept of “intense race individuality” (162-3)—an anthropological theory that had served to legitimize black

 
  

  

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exclusion in America: it argued that because of their tropical origins African Americans were naturally unfit to meet the challenges of modernity.79 In Mizora, however, it is the all-too-whites who are destined to vanish from American soil. And yet the message Mizora holds in store is not as clearly scientific as this suggests. The novel is in fact nowhere as self-contradictory as when it comes to biologybased arguments of gender and race. While it first seems that the two women make it to America because both are not “pure,” what ultimately kills Wauna is her refinement and moral culture, both of which—according to Vera—have nothing to do with “the elimination of the dark complexion” (92-93). On the other hand, however, bodies do matter considerably when it comes to gender: like the entire tribe of the blondes, Wauna is physically superbly prepared to survive in the harshest of surroundings. In contradiction to Darwin’s 1871 argument that “man” is physically stronger and therefore “more courageous, pugnacious, and energetic than woman, and has a more inventive genius,”80 the biological feminism of Mizora claims an immediate connection between the Mizorans’ respiratory and brain functions. Using an argument taken, interestingly, from the realm of Civil War scientific racism,81 Vera reports that “It was astonishing the amount of air a Mizoran lady could draw into her lungs. They called it their brain stimulant, and said that their faculties were more active after such exercise” (20).

79

See also Haller, Outcasts from Evolution (1971: 176).

80

I argue in line with Grit Vandermassen here who quotes Charles Darwin’s The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex (1871) in her book Who's Afraid of Charles Darwin? Debating Feminism and Evolutionary Theory (2005: 69).

81

During the Civil War and after, a series of anthropological examinations and autopsies of dead soldiers resulted in an unprecedented pool of statistical data that helped legitimize the continuation of racist policies on “scientific” grounds. The widely publicized theory that emerged from these data claimed that white men of whatever class had far larger chests than “Indians,” “full negroes,” and, finally, mulattoes, whose “natural” feebleness therefore doomed them to extinction. Cf. Haller, Outcasts from Evolution (1971: 21 and 29). Anthropologists saw “the creation of the Sanitary Commission, and the induction of Negroes into the Union Army” as “an opportune means of investigating race differences never before achieved” (ibid.: 21). “The records of the commission report compared and contrasted various nationalities, college students, Indians, and Negroes according to body dimensions, head size, strength, teeth, vision, respiration, and pulmonary capacity” (ibid.: 28). Instead of tracing the high mortality rate among African Americans dying from pneumonia, tuberculosis, and other lung diseases to their poor living and working conditions, anthropologists linked their findings to a racially motivated belief in blacks’ lack of stamina (cf. ibid.: 51).

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It is tempting to conclude by arguing that the biological essentialism of Mizora is limited to gender alone, while race (in the sense of skin color) tends to be a more fluid category. Yet as was mentioned earlier, the novel claims that there is a narrowly racial difference between Vera and the Mizorans that is grounded in their atheism and post-human reproduction methods. If Lane wished to sever the ideological link between progress and race, she was ill advised to spend three-fourths of her book celebrating the beauty, perfection, and “pure” lifestyle of a hyper-white tribe of blondes. Thus if on one level Mizora may be interpreted as promoting a post-racial society, its deep structural and ideological contradictions give it away and profoundly undermine its potential.


   
A multilayered negotiation of the relationship between body and mind, evolution and education, race and civilization, Mizora remains ambivalent, contradictory, and inconsistent to the end. With its various strategies of ideological destabilization, the novel undermines its own often problematic assumptions, shedding light on that rarely visible period of ideological consolidation between Reconstruction and Progressive Reform that started during the last decade of the nineteenth century. Mizora anticipates a few concepts and ideas that would become subjects of discussion shortly after the novel was first published: Lester Frank Ward’s demand for a strong central government (1883)82 and his emphasis on education and science, Jane Addams’s 1889 Hull House project, Gilman’s technological feminism, William J. McGee’s evolutionary model of 1899,83 and post-1890 American “nativism” are all already present in Mizora. The book remains the most disturbing among the Reconstruction works that I have chosen to analyze: a story situated halfway between genocidal fantasy and reform, it elucidates the questions that preoccupied Lane and her contemporaries. By flirting with eugenics the novel anticipated practices put in place two decades later in Alabama by physicians who wished to fight the “criminal tendencies”

82

Ward’s influential Dynamic Sociology promoted government intervention to relieve pov-

83

The four evolutionary stages in Mizora—savagery, barbarism, civilization, enlighten-

erty as well as the centrality of science for social progress. ment—resemble McGee’s model and he, too, emphasized the role of technological progress. Drawing upon a comparison between the cranial development of different races, he concluded that whites were the superior race.

 
  

  

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they believed were “transmitted from […] one generation to another.”84 Through a playful intellectualism that makes one shudder in historical retrospect, Mizora leaves it to the reader to decide whether—and more importantly to what degree—human progress depends on biological factors and whether everyone must look the same in an egalitarian society. In doing so, Mizora takes core issues of Reconstruction to a different, more philosophical level and pinpoints the questions that lay at the heart of the post-Civil War public conflict: what would American society look like if the idea of white supremacy was carried to its logical end? What if white American women were fully in control of society, as some white postwar feminists demanded? What happens to individual freedom in a planned society under a central government? Under what conditions could there be something like long-term social progress in a multiracial, multicultural society? Besides triggering such questions, however, the narrator has some deep convictions that she is not ready to give up, even if they are not moral absolutes. The ultimate “truth” about Vera is her faith in feelings; her “Victorian” value system keeps her from embracing the thoroughly rationalist lifestyle of the blondes. She is, in other words, not morally opposed to their beliefs but merely feels uncomfortable with what she experiences as artificial. Yet as if to further complicate matters, her Victorian “heart” is cast as a cultural construction. As the narrator tells us somewhat mockingly in the early pages of the narrative, it is “hard to get human nature out of the ruts it has moved in for ages. To tear away their present faith, is like undermining their existence” (7). If this is on the one hand what Mizora aims to do, it is also what defines its limits. Vera’s decision against what Sherryl Vint has called the alternative economy of “all-inclusive bliss” that governs utopian lives is not heroic but marks the triumph of “human nature” over post-humanity (2007: 4). And yet it also marks the victory of individual self-reliance, resistance, and change over stasis. Suggesting a middle ground between tradition and revolution, “the story of [her] wanderings” (147) promotes a new, “advanced” type of American woman, a self-proclaimed truthseeker who, if necessary, can shatter social norms and conventions in the name of truth/Vera. This, then, and nothing less, is what the book Vera writes is all about. Apart from her defense of sentimentalism there is also a forward-looking “lesson” that Vera distills from her life among the blondes. Dwelling among actual humans

84

“Dr. William Glassell Sommerville, Trustee of the Alabama Insane Hospitals, declared it a proven fact that ‘the moral disposition for good and evil, including criminal tendencies… are transmitted from… one generation to another… and is as firmly believed by all scientific men as the fact that parents transmit’ physical qualities to their children.” Cf. Lutz, Kaelber, “Alabama” (online). See also Deborah Barrett and Charles Kurzman’s October 2004 article, “Globalizing Social Movement Theory: The Case of Eugenics” (505).

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with various “defects,” she envisions a universal education, “the highest mental, moral, and physical training known” (147). This is not only what Vera wishes America to invest in but also what the Preceptress wanted her to “demonstrate to the world” (145) when she stated that “the New World will be the teacher of the Old in the great lesson of Humanity.” But what is that Mizora wants to be known globally? The Preceptress’s prophesy is not without irony. Throughout Mizora the term “education” refers to science as well, a field that according to the blondes provides secular salvation. Still committed to Christianity, Vera abhors the mere thought of this. By linking “education,” morality, and religious spirituality, the novel touches upon a surprisingly modern topic: emerging from an age when religion lost much of its binding character, Mizora questions the ethical limits of science and the social responsibility of Enlightenment thought. As this chapter has shown, however, the novel then undermines its own critical potential. While its ethical problems cannot be resolved, Vera’s thinking is progressive in so far as it sides with Morgan’s 1877 attacks on Spencer’s conclusions regarding “the efficacy of human endeavor” (Haller 1971: 110). Facilitated by the changes the discipline went through in the early 1880s, Vera’s essentially unorthodox anthropological narrative supports Powell’s concept of an individual’s active role in reaching a higher level of civilization. And yet it is here that Mizora reveals its most dystopian side—that which moves Vera closer to the blondes. When the heroine returns to live—husband-less—among downtrodden Americans, we can easily recognize her as a muted, reformist version of the radical blondes. And yet the self-reliant cultural ambassador is soon utterly disillusioned. The cause of her frustration is neither race, national origin, nor heterosexuality but a lack of fortitude in the individuals around her: “The criminal has no restraints but that the law enforces. Ignorance, poverty, and disease, huddled in the dens of wretchedness, where they multiply with reckless improvidence, sometimes fostered by mistaken charity” (147). Referencing Thomas Malthus’s arguments against charity as insufficient to prevent the reproduction of poverty (2008: 39-45) and refusing to accept economic, social, and political factors as causes of social decline, Mizora insists on individual responsibility as a crucial factor in human progress. It is an insight Vera has brought with her from Mizora, where she was told that “Your country will never rise above its ignorance and degradation, until out of its mental agony shall be evolved a nature kindled with ambition that burns for Humanity instead of self” (111, cf. also 146).85 As the Mizoran example implies, the moral society that the upwardly mobile Vera has in mind cannot be the product of laissez faire politics but requires strict laws and severe punishments. Once such a system is installed, so the story goes, moral perfection becomes a people’s

85

The Mizorans’ foremothers had introduced a set of strict laws to enable moral invigoration, furthering the internalization of moral norms (e.g. 35).

 
  

  

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second nature, resulting in a happy, uniform collective.86 The sight of America’s “wretched,” in other words, causes Vera to shed at least some of her doubts about the successful application of science and rational planning. Located on the very last page of the novel, this pessimistic passage departs from those “ruts” of tradition that Vera anticipated when she adhered to religion as a marker of humaneness: “the contracted forces in which I had been born and reared could not be uprooted or expanded without pain” (139). When in America she yearns for the Mizorans and “their laws” and suggests, albeit tentatively, that her earlier moral scruples represented merely a failure to adapt, Vera undermines the basis of her earlier critique of the blondes. By struggling to rid its heroine of the moral baggage of Victorian America and shifting that heroine’s conflicting ideological ideas onto the reader’s shoulders, Mizora illustrates that during the early 1880s what Leslie Butler has called the “mental adaptation” process of Reconstruction America was far from over. Yet what was the nineteenth-century reader to conclude from all of this? Should she (or he) deny or welcome Vera’s ambiguous hope to overcome the past and initiate necessary changes? Brought to the imaginary threshold between old and new, veteran nostalgia and eugenic reinvention, patriarchal paralysis and a dynamic, feminist state, readers were rushed to make up their minds by consulting their hearts and the “contracted forces”87 that had made them. But who were those readers? We only know whom the book wished to address. Facing a troubled world, Vera seeks to inspire a “nature kindled with ambition” by “giving encouragement to those progressive minds who have already added their mite of knowledge to the coming future of the race” (8). Vera imagines this progressivist American elite working against the resignation and cynicism that haunts her own “pursuit of happiness” and that threatens to take over American society as a whole. Deprived of societal illusions (socialist/anarchist as well as utopian) she postpones her active commitment to social uplift and instead narrates her story, celebrating the individual’s potential to think and the thinking elite’s capacity to inspire (and force) necessary change. Stating that “[l]ife is a tragedy even under the most favorable conditions” (147), Vera offers the elite reader consolation in the face of disaster: while even happiness, that foundational American ideal, is moved from its ideological pedestal, hope remains with the writer of her book.

86

Regarding the notion of individual interchangeability in other utopias of the time cf. Peyser (1998: 29-61). Although it is partly concerned with similar debates, Mizora differs from novels like Bellamy’s Looking Backward; its dystopian subtext and radical feminist perspective make it unique.

87

See the quotation earlier in this passage.



  



The previous chapters have elucidated some of the unresolved contradictions, awkward tensions, involuntary ambivalences, and unsatisfactory endings that have made Reconstruction one of the least attractive and most under-researched phases of American literary history. By taking these flaws as symptoms of a prolonged historical moment that anticipated later developments in the culture, this book interprets this critical neglect as a serious mistake. To explore the meaning of what I take to be an essential phase of cultural consolidation, I chose from a large number of oftentimes mediocre, sensational, or aesthetically imperfect texts, and eventually decided on a selection that mirrored the aesthetic diversity of popular Reconstruction writing while representing a broad range of viewpoints. Instead of glossing over the obvious conceptual and aesthetic flaws in much of this writing, I took them as material traces of the mental adaptation process that Leslie Butler has ascribed to the era. As Drew Gilpin Faust put it in This Republic of Suffering, the generation that lived through the Civil War “had been changed […] by what they had seen and done, what they had felt, and what they had lost” and “searched in anxiety and even ‘phrensy’ to provide endings for life narratives that stood incomplete, their meanings undefined” (2008: 267 and 68). This, then, was the climate that made the nursing narrative the literary success formula of its day. Providing countless scenes of compassionate care and love among strangers, these stories helped readers cope with the trauma of loss— particularly the loss of the optimism and innocence they had been accustomed to before the war. Together with a glorified image of the antebellum past, the figure of the motherly nurse could not only “bind the wounds” of the divided nation but join together the limbs of a society that found itself, literally, but also ideologically and politically, in a state of fragmentation and despair. Yet neither the discourse of healing nor the nostalgic longing for a bygone racial order has stood at the center of this project. This book also offers little to those who are interested in the metaphorical uses of the Civil War hospital, nursing, and doctoring. In this regard it even lacks an important perspective—the patients’—to provide a more balanced, complete picture of a democracy in the making. There certainly is

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no dearth of narratives written from that angle: soldiers who reported on the conditions in Civil War hospital wards lent their voice to others who could not speak, and popular Reconstruction writers such as Alonzo F. Hill, the author of John Smith’s Funny Adventures on a Crutch (1869), recoded the figure of the amputee as model citizen. While such veteran narratives evidence a certain trend, it is equally true that the humanitarian content inscribed in the wartime rhetoric of healing was used to multiple, sometimes very different pragmatic ends. When at the outset of this project I searched through the Wilmer Collection of Civil War Novels at the University of North Carolina I was surprised to find that metaphors of physical recovery and nursing were often merely the starting point for discussions of far more contradictory— und unrelated—themes and tropes, including a female economy of exchange, crossdressing, or racial ambiguity. This, then, made me eschew the fairly established field of Civil War scholarship focused on nursing and turn to these promising themes, which took their cultural legitimacy from the Civil War hospital as humanitarian fantasy and intercultural contact zone. As a result of this early research, the book nevertheless recognizes Civil War narratives of motherly care and national healing as playing a superior role in the nation’s Second Founding. All the works that have been analyzed here rely on the established mode of the nursing narrative to authorize their view of societal organization and political leadership. The example of Esther Hill Hawks reveals that this sentimental concept for female self-realization was embraced from an early point in the war. Her diary also reminds us that Civil War nursing was never limited to the actual hospital. Later publications such as Sarah Emma Edmonds’s, use the nursing trope strategically, as a sort of entry ticket to the world of men and the military. Of all the texts examined, Norwood reacts most directly to that feminist provocation, relegating women’s nursing to a footnote in history. The deep tensions and disagreements that mark these intertextual conversations reveal an emotionally charged, postwar battle centering on the nation’s newly admitted black citizens, its new immigrants and New Women, and its conflicts surrounding urbanization, Western settlement, and technological progress. Audibly and often explicitly, these diaries, letters, novels, and poems aim at furthering the process of adaptation to a changed present and enabling visions of a meaningful future. This book rests on the assertion that America’s democratic Second Founding failed not only because sectional reconciliation won out over racial justice but because there existed so many factions within factions. Even among the ostensibly racially, regionally, and ideologically unified subgroup of white northern abolitionists, there prevailed immense ideological diversity and dissent. To reflect and represent this diversity, Anthony Wallace’s findings regarding social subgroups prooved to be a good starting point and applicable to the field of culture. The result has been a deep and highly diversified analysis of the ideological transformation and psychogenesis

 

 

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of an era that did not end with the retreat of northern troops from the former Confederacy. It is on the basis of this extended definition of Reconstruction that these past chapters have sought to inspire new scholarship on late-nineteenth-century culture that will take the legacy of Reconstruction into deeper consideration than has commonly been the case. In striving to depict the complex whole of Reconstruction, the overall structure and chronology of these chapters was designed to grasp and analyze the overlap between memories of the war and postwar modernization. Beginning with two very early Reconstruction texts of a more private nature, the book has acknowledged the conditions that led to the emergence of Reconstruction writing. Reflecting the growing diversity of wartime and postwar literary representations, it then turned to a broader selection of genres, including poetry and utopian literature, that nevertheless maintained the personal and intimate voice of earlier Civil War letters and diaries. Because the form and ideological content in all of these works depended to a considerable extent on the individual writers’ life situations, generation, and position within society, it was necessary to position each text within the historical and legal context of its creation. Starting with the Union’s early victory in South Carolina and continuing beyond the official end of the Second Founding in 1877, this book turned into an eventful scholarly journey into a country in the process of reinventing itself. The result of that journey is a loosely connected narrative centered on seven non-literary and literary texts and poems that, while treated separately, convey a multivocal and controversial conversation about an ailing nation and its possible recovery, about who deserves to be “treated” and how. Over the course of this conversation, the wartime paradigm of the military hospital as tension-ridden contact zone and symbolic site of reconciliation subtly shifted to other locations of healing, only to eventually reemerge in a concept of the nation as a racially segregated, all-female health resort. But the country of the Mizorans to which I refer here was merely an extreme example of this prolonged adaptation process: the monumental blondes were rhetorically descended from nurses who chose to become spies in blackface and Civil War doctors who claimed the place of spiritual leaders, to name just two examples. Amid all these historical dynamics the crisis of gender remained a constant issue throughout the extended Reconstruction period and only increased in intensity. White female leadership is a recurring topic, beginning with Hawks’s fantasy of cross-racial sisterhood under white leadership and culminating in the Darwinian vision of the hyper-healthy blondes. Struggling against a patriarchal order that was successfully reclaiming lost ground by the time the war ended and problematically entangled in racist thinking, Hawks, Alcott, Edmonds, and Lane called for women’s recognition as active players in the public sphere. Experimenting with narrative traditions, tropes, and tones, their works betray a concern with alternative visions of a female future, taking the Civil War as their starting point and then branching into the ideological and scientific paradigms of a changing era. This sense of renewal applies to men’s

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Reconstruction writing as well: it seems safe to say that the war contributed to a more enlightened understanding of marital togetherness and encouraged alternative visions of female agency in the public realm. Importantly, however, such alternative visions remained largely symbolic: while John Bennitt depended on his wife Lotti’s imaginary presence to secure his “conduit to God,” both Beecher and Whitman idealized women as the motherly centers of the Second Founding but carefully avoided representing them as active agents in political meaning-making and leadership. Significantly older than the female authors mentioned, these self-proclaimed American spokesmen tried to uphold the cultural authority of the antebellum generation by making concessions to women without seriously challenging Victorian gender ideals. Such sweeping claims call for an important qualification: the aforementioned “crisis of gender” refers to gender relations among northern whites. When it comes to African-American women and to race relations in general, most of the texts display a strangely undecided, indefinite attitude; even female abolitionists like Alcott were reluctant to imagine a cross-racial sisterhood. Whitman, who addressed the gendered aspects of emancipation most explicitly, completely ignored the role of black women in post-emancipation community building and instead chose the figure of the black woman (as “Ethiopia” or as impoverished mother of twins) to embody the threatening underside of the Second Founding. In Mizora the ideal of a sisterhood that might cross the color line is undermined by an ugly racist twist. Even Hawks, who had personally struggled against the workings of male power networks and who was one of the few white women to actually witness sexual violence against black women, fails to imagine a truly democratic model of interracial sisterhood. Importantly, however, her struggle to invent an alternative economy of interracial relations evidences a historical moment when antebellum cultural resources were successfully used to challenge established norms and behaviors vis-à-vis the racial other. Racial prejudice cut across gender and generation, though female authors were far more aware than male authors of black women’s defining role in the reconstructed nation’s human figuration. They also focused less on the military realm to authorize their ideals of society than did Bennitt, Beecher, and Whitman. Bennitt was the only one of the three men who openly admired the freedmen for their self-sacrifice and political discipline. As postbellum veteran culture advanced, this admiration would soon be replaced by sentimental images of cross-sectional brotherhood and nostalgic tales of antebellum plantation life. It was this veteran audience to which Norwood clearly catered. Although the novel’s author, Henry Ward Beecher, grudgingly acknowledged black men’s right to citizenship on the grounds of their having fought on the side of the Union, he distinguished sharply between full democratic recognition and mere tolerance: in his eyes, black men were destined to perpetual segregation. While from today’s point of view Whitman’s model seems to differ only in degree, at the time it marked a significant departure from Beecher’s: by referring America’s black male population to the symbolic waiting room of the recovering

 

 

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Republic, Whitman left the door to full black citizenship open. And yet he, too, refused to make long-term concessions: non-cautionary but subtly didactic, both Democratic Vistas and “Ethiopia Saluting” encourage the subordination of racial doubts to the superior principles of democratic faith. But the poem, especially, does so with strong reservations: there is no welcoming of the racial other but, at most, a very cold embrace for the Ethiopian who intrudes into the poet’s egalitarian territory. This was very much in keeping with the reluctance that many northerners showed when Reconstruction came to an end: like Whitman, they tended to believe the time was not ripe for a multiracial democracy—and they doubted that this would ever change. Choosing authors from one time period but with different ideological and aesthetic programs has been crucial for distinguishing the individual “mazeways” or “mental images” (Wallace) that were the backbone of the surprisingly fragmented, and deeply contradictory, northern Reconstruction mind. For all of their individuality, each of these interpretations of the real reached its audience because it relied on a culturally established set of codes and values and on a communication style that was both (to varying degrees) familiar and exciting. Sales numbers and positive reviews confirmed the achievement of these culturally embedded strategies: each of the five writers who actually published his or her work was popular, or at least fairly successful. This book has emphasized both the cultural embeddedness that facilitated the reception of a particular work and the strong, monadic element that made each text unique. There was a marked tension between the normative and the highly individualized aspects of the texts under examination—a tension that eventually led to the failure of Reconstruction as a project of the collective imagination. It was not only that northern abolitionists disagreed on the “rules of the democratic game”: the deeper problem, it seems, was that their conversation was undermined by the very different experiences and expectations of both writers and readers. Thus while Beecher’s Norwood can certainly be read as a critical response to the feminist literature of the day, it also expresses a profound inability to relate to feminist ideals: Beecher very obviously could not get himself out of the “ruts” (as Lane has put it) of antebellum patriarchy just as Lane refused to even imagine the traumatic aftereffects of the war and their impact on society. It is against this general understanding of an extremely fractured society that this book claims the existence of a particularly northern Reconstruction state of mind. To approximate this mindset and the conflicts that define it this book ends by highlighting some surprising continuities and alliances between works as well as some of the resistances, hostilities, and distinctive features that secure the individuality of each text. The concluding pages abstain from providing an extensive summary of that network of cultural allusions and intertextual connections that distinguishes Reconstruction literature from antebellum or late-nineteenth-century works. Much of that work was done in the previous chapters: Hawks’s experimentation with Stowe’s Topsy

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figure and her return to a pre-revolutionary economy of intercultural exchange; Bennitt’s reinvigoration and subtle modernization of the Victorian gender contract through the cultural practice of letter writing; Alcott’s testing of the limits that defined white Victorian womanhood by appropriating both the male formula of patriotism and established narrative modes like the (male) adventure story, all filtered through a girlish variety of understatement; Edmonds’s critical homage to Hospital Sketches, which emphasizes both the performative quality of gender and race and the application of evangelical religiosity to the needs of a democracy; Beecher’s borrowings from America’s racist repertoire, his conjuring of the pastoral picturesque and plantation grandeur, and the important concessions he made to the coming generation of white women; Whitman’s many tormented returns to the blind spot in his democratic project—race relations—and his shifting relationship to the topic, which he moved from margin (“The Dresser”) to center (“Ethiopia”), from a natural ingredient in the democratic dish (Vistas) to the waiting-room of the Republic (Memoranda), from a mere footnote to the core of American identity and back again (Specimen Days); and, finally, Lane’s generic mix of adventure story, slave narrative, and immigrant autobiography, with its many ties to the culture of the late 1870s and early 1880s—the Centennial, modern anthropology, racial exclusion, and so forth. All of these texts, in other words, tried to create something new out of the narratives, cultural tropes, and emotional norms of the American past. For all of the interconnections that exist between these texts (including the widely accepted authority of sentiment, the minstrel tradition, and frequent references to the Civil War hospital), there is an extraordinarily high degree of dissent as to who should participate in the “democratic game” and who should be involved in defining its rules. Often overlooked in Reconstruction scholarship, one of the issues here is social and educational status. The seemingly harmonious national vision of Edmonds’s Nurse and Spy combines the idea of collective and democratic salvation with a strong antiintellectual and anti-hierarchical strain: in the Canadian’s imaginary Second Founding the heart triumphs over the intellect. (Whitman’s struggle shows that this was an issue until well into the late nineteenth century.) Interestingly, that other evangelical participant in the project, John Bennitt, had no understanding whatsoever of such sentimental nation-building. His letters display a degree of individual piety equal to Edmonds’s but express support for an interdenominational competition to determine right leadership. If for all of his antebellum conservatism Bennitt proves to be surprisingly flexible when it comes to racial equality and women’s role in society, he also insists on the privilege of his class and social status: for him, education and middle-class behavioral norms are fundamental elements of national renewal. The discrepancy between these letters and Nurse and Spy suggests a power struggle among evangelicals that fell along the lines of gender, social status, and country of birth: for an immigrant and cross-dresser like Edmonds, the concept of an all-loving Almighty was bound to be attractive because it defied all of the social distinctions that would

 

 

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prevent her self-inscription into American citizenship. Yet apart from such personal motivations, Edmonds’s universal prayer is an important node in and corrective to the postwar evangelical scene described by twentieth-century historian Daniel W. Stowell. Even if Stowell is correct in arguing that Reconstruction failed because “evangelicals did not forge bonds of gender, class, or denomination that transcended the cleavages of race and region” (1998: 8), the public success of Nurse and Spy attests to a cultural counter-narrative that posited religion as the force that would spiritually unify the fragmented nation. Another equally important postwar conflict emerged with the growing impact of a scientific worldview. During his life in camp John Bennitt had no problem reconciling his religious convictions with his friendship with an atheist or with his interest in science, as neither challenged his middle-class behavioral norms. In a similar vein, the largely secular Esther Hill Hawks seems to have moved freely among the missionaries she joined in the Port Royal experiment. A few years later, however, Beecher spotlighted a religious crisis when he centered his only novel on a successful consolidation of America’s Christian legacy with the increasingly mass-mediated, market-driven culture of the postbellum era: Barton overcomes his spiritual crisis by replacing the Puritan belief system of his youth with a mixture of transcendentalism and liberal Christianity distilled from his conversations with an alternative father figure. Thus authorized, Barton qualifies as leader of a society that, according to Drew Gilpin Faust’s analysis of postbellum America, was haunted by “[d]oubt [that] threatened to overpower faith—faith in the Christian narrative of a compassionate divinity and a hope of life beyond the grave, faith in the intelligibility and purpose of life on Earth” (2008: 267). Colloquial in tone and overly pragmatic in its religious approach, Norwood anticipated future developments in America’s larger Christian community1 while solidifying Beecher’s position as spiritual leader in an increasingly politicized world. And yet the novel remains singular in reconciling the conflict between religion and secularism: by the time Lane negotiated the role of religion in an age of science in the early 1880s there was little that could dissolve the antagonism between those two positions. There is another crucial difference between Norwood and Mizora: while Beecher aimed to wield the fullest control over readers’ meaning-making processes, Lane relegated this task to her audience. Whitman, for his part, explicitly aimed at creating an active reader; his writings sought to involve his (white) audience in an imaginary

1

Norwood was published only a few years before a committee of thirty-four religiously diverse American scholars came together to once more discuss the revision of the King James Bible and the linguistic scope of its necessary modernization. Cf. Kenneth Kennetz Cmiel, “Democratic Eloquence: The Fight over Popular Speech in Nineteenth-Century America“ (1990).

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democratic decision-making process with national dimensions. Significantly, all the Reconstruction texts examined insist on the power of writing and a driven by the almost missionary impulse of their authors who hoped to inspire their readers with a new and invigorating vision of America. All of the works discussed in this book, including heavily didactic novels like Norwood, playful experiments with popular genres like Nurse and Spy, and even Hawks’s and Bennitt’s private forays into the realm of literary expression, share a sense of struggle resulting from the political and social crises of the day. These textual imbalances are so numerous and extreme that they constitute a unique expression of the Second Founding: ideologically irreconcilable as they may seem, all of these texts convey a desire to face a changed world and a readiness to invest in its reimagination. It was fascinating to see that the process of reimagining began long before the war had been decided in favor of the Union: the 1861 liberation of the slaves in the Sea Islands and the 1863 Emancipation Proclamation had an enormous impact on abolitionists like Hawks and Bennitt—those two chroniclers of early Reconstruction who both in their own way understood that the building of a new nation depended to a large extent on an individual reconstruction of the mind. Bennitt’s letters and Hawks’s diary remind us of a prolonged historical moment that is crucial to understanding many of the emotive undercurrents of the Second Founding: the distrust of male authority spurred the postwar women’s movement, the awareness of class differences among whites drove many postbellum reform activities, and an understanding of the limits of established categories of racial distinction influenced both Radical Reconstructionists and their opponents, who supported their views via the racist proclamations of postwar anthropology. Emerging from wartime diaries, letters, and nursing narratives, Reconstruction writing was, on a fundamental level, a cultural strategy that helped Americans come to terms with the changes in their society, discuss the importance of legitimate leadership, and define the “rules of the democratic game.” When I say that none of this was easily accepted I do not refer to the actual legal and political tensions that divided even those liberal Americans who had once shared a common abolitionist agenda. Rather, these chapters have investigated the troubled minds of these people. All of the works that this book has analyzed share an obsession with ideological disillusionment, mental suffering, and/or religious doubt. Whitman offers the most extreme example of this: by staging his democratic endeavor as a fierce and unending battle between the heart and the mind he surpassed all of his fellow writers. The most significant results of his struggle are his underlying definition of democracy as a participatory, never-ending process and a concept of literature as rehearsal for a true Reconstruction of the American heart and mind. While the reasons for the aforementioned sense of crisis differed, all of the texts studied here sought to inspire a readiness to change one’s life as well as the course of events: although she ends up a prisoner in her father’s house, Nurse Periwinkle is

 

 

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able to develop a radical vision that involves the mingling of black and white bodies. There is a sense of need and urgency in Alcott’s Reconstruction writing that many of her contemporaries shared, a “sound” that marks a unique Reconstruction style of voicing political, social, and cultural concerns. In what is essentially a textual rehearsal for Reconstruction, Hawks, Alcott, Whitman, and Lane wrestle with tradition in hopes of finding an alternative way of grasping experience. Bennitt and Edmonds, by contrast, rely on frantic prayer to evoke “His” presence, and Beecher’s narrator never loosens his grip on the reader while reconfiguring the societal order of antebellum New England. For all of the colloquial, light-hearted tone that echoes through some of these narratives, they are all told from the perspective of a survivor, or at least of a historical witness, with a serious ideological agenda: legitimized by the individual suffering caused by wartime assaults on their ethical and spiritual integrity (Bennitt) or their personal sense of justice (Hawks), the narrators of these stories all display an urgent desire to represent themselves fully, as citizens of the democratic nation. Some of these narrators could rely on the author’s position of authority to support their agenda (Alcott, Beecher, and Whitman were well known members of the New England transcendentalist and/or abolitionist movements), while others (Hawks, Edmonds) spoke from the position of self-appointed missionaries. The resulting imaginary conversation was unusually intense and competitive because it rested, not on better arguments or individual eloquence of speech, but on the question of existence itself—both the individual’s and the nation’s. Reaching beyond a sentimental heritage, Reconstruction became a personal and collective emotional endeavor, a struggle for mental adaptation under the leadership of literary women and men. Taking a decisive step toward a new understanding of Reconstruction has made me realize how much more light needs to be shed on this phase of mental adaptation and cultural consolidation. With every text I examined, new questions came to the fore: was Hawks’s vision of interracial material and cultural exchange part of a larger Reconstruction discourse? Can my findings about letter-writing and changed gender relations be generalized to authors beyond Hawks and Bennitt? What was the relationship between evangelicals and Radical Reconstructionists? Did novels like Beecher’s, which offered a secluded resting place from a disquieting and unsatisfactory reality, share or even give rise to the sensibilities of an emerging realist tradition (which, as Winfried Fluck has argued, was also “an attempt to draw new materials into the text in order to integrate and control them”)? (2009: 194). How systematically was the figure of the black woman used to legitimize white supremacist positions? How crucial was postwar veteran culture for the emergence of New Womanhood? To answer these questions one would have to single out a particular paradigm (like gift giving or letter writing) and explore it thoroughly by considering a wider range of texts, including the writings of white Southerners and African Americans. This, then, would be a very different project from the one you are holding in your

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hands now. While this book has covered a diachronic development while reacting flexibly to the discourses in which each text was singularly involved, such a followup project would have a strong theoretical bent and would focus on synchronic events and phenomena. In view of the complicated adaptation process that this book has traced so far, it hopes to inspire more scholarly work that contributes to a multi-layered history of the multiform Reconstruction mind. More research is especially needed to connect the postbellum phase of (political, legal, social, and cultural) consolidation with the transformation processes that eventually led to what is known as the Progressive Era. What happened to the dreams and fears that accompanied the Second Founding? Did they all vanish into thin air? Once we allow ourselves to think beyond the immediate effects and implications of these dreams and fears, Reconstruction appears as a preparatory phase for things to come: more direct interracial interaction and growing fears of the post-emancipation racial mix, changing communication between husbands and wives and a generation of outspoken, self-reliant women, deep changes in religious thought and practice, and ideological tensions between those who rallied for social change and others who believed in natural determinism—all of these preoccupied Americans during Reconstruction before they became core characteristics of late-nineteenth-century American culture. There is evidence that America’s late-nineteenth-century New Women were the direct heirs of that earlier generation that nursed the sick during the war. Some of these women became “schoolmarms” in the postwar rural South before “making themselves useful” in the country’s urban areas. Cornelia Hancock, who was born around the same time as Edmonds and Lane, is a model case for such a biography; known today for her posthumously published nursing narrative,2 she remained active in social work until her death in 1926. The charitable organizations that she founded after successfully building up a freedmen’s school in South Carolina3 attracted a generation of younger women who had grown up reading Alcott’s Little Women (18681869) and Hospital Sketches. Did this younger generation, who eagerly joined not only charitable organizations but also missionary groups, rely on Nurse Periwinkle and Nurse Dane as fictional role models? Were they directly or indirectly inspired by Alcott’s image of white female control over “other” bodies? How strongly were they influenced by an alternative evangelical dictum like Edmonds’s that saw religion as the great leveler in American society while challenging any essentialist notion of identity? Or did they identify with Whitman’s “race of perfect mothers” who effortlessly merged professional careers with family responsibilities? And what about the

2

In 1937 Hancock’s letters about life on the battlefield became a bestseller under the title

3

Cf. www.nps.gov/resources/person.htm?id=152. Accessed 01. Aug. 2017.

South After Gettysburg.

 

 

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role of their fathers in their educational and professional choices? After all, these were men from Bennitt’s generation, and also from that group of up-and-coming businessmen who once listened eagerly to Beecher’s liberal sermons. And what about these women’s brothers and husbands? Were they haunted by that fear of cultural failure that made men the dirty secret of the Mizoran portrait gallery? Or did they in fact support their sisters’ and lovers’ attempts to influence the course of society? There is early evidence that the war changed American masculinities profoundly and lastingly: in 1866 the Atlantic Monthly published a story about an amputee who lacked both arms and legs. Written by an anonymous author, “The Case of George Dedlow” was later identified as the work of Silas Weir Mitchell, the “beloved patriarch of modern neurology and even of American psychology” (Long 2004: 30). Taken as truth by many readers, this utterly grotesque story marked a break with the postwar illusion that technological progress in the field of medicine would restore the maimed veteran body to its antebellum capacity and manliness (cf. O’Connor 1997: 759). And yet George Dedlow, this “fraction of a man,”4 has something to contribute to the society that he burdens with his presence: claiming that his story has been “declined on various pretexts by every medical journal” (Mitchell 1866), he now “speaks up” (as we would say today) to publicly ponder the quintessential question of a Reconstruction American identity: “how much,” he asks, can “a man […] lose and yet live?” Would “an almost vegetative existence,” lacking almost everything that usually defines a body as human, “possess the sense of individuality in its usual completeness,” and would this creature be “capable of consciousness?” (ibid.). Mitchell addressed typical male, postwar anxieties regarding the loss of agency in the face of personal trauma and legal restructuring. But these were also the fears of a society that could no longer rely on the past to construct a meaningful future. Extremely limited in his daily options and totally dependent on the help of others, Dedlow incarnates the zero point of America’s postwar search for an alternative sense of community and society. At the level of Reconstruction nation-building his philosophical questions are fraught with ideological content: what defines a full human being in the aftermath of a war that had challenged and destroyed much of what America was built upon? What are the physical prerequisites needed to be fully recognized as an individual in a democratic nation? What is the relationship between those who depend on the help of others even to voice their concerns and those who have access to the institutions that will recognize those concerns? Mitchell’s disillusioned amputee eventually delays his hope for an unbroken form of manliness: “I am eager for the day when I shall rejoin the lost members of my corporeal family in another and a happier world” (ibid.). He writes this, ironically,

4

All quotations from the story are drawn from the Project Gutenberg online version, that has no page numbers.

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from his new “home in the West” (ibid.), where Mitchell—in anticipation of his famous advice to Owen Wister—eventually sent his sorry protagonist. Yet unlike the Western hero of Wister’s The Virginian (1902), the limbless torso remains in the grip of a woman who takes down his words as so many nurses had done during the war: “I dictated these pages, not to shock my readers, but to possess them with facts in regard to the relation of the mind to the body” (ibid.) For the Reconstruction scholar, this relation between limbless torso and writing nurse is a constellation worth examining. Without doubt, such an analysis would quickly identify that other narrative that lies beyond the established story about Reconstruction healing—sitting at the edge of the nation’s territory and in full control of a pen that is not her own, the nurseturned-secretary heralds the end of America’s story of itself. Read against the backdrop of that mental adaptation process that has been traced in this book, Mitchell’s long and multi-generic oeuvre takes the shape of an ongoing comment on the new— and in many ways confusing—sense of loss that had come with the war. Starting with his discovery of phantom pain during the eighteen-sixties and his medical writing about rattlesnake venom and nervousness, and leading up to his 1884 novel In War Time, with its emphasis on an incompetent Civil War doctor, Mitchell knew more about the pathologies of his era than most of his contemporaries. And yet the long narrative that he created over his lifetime is just one of the many that are waiting to be intertwined with the cultural struggle that has been traced over the course of the previous chapters. This book, in other words, has only just begun.

 
 


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