In War Time was composed during the heyday of female hysteria and at the height of Mitchell’s popularity; yet it is his fictional men who are permanently enervated, either by their wartime service or by their inability to serve in the war fully. Edward Morton, the invalid son of one of Wendell’s hospital patients, claims, “All the man in me is going to shrivel up by degrees,” for he has no opportunity to “die man-like in some wild rush of battle” (War Time 98). Conventionally, Mitchell initially posits that although both disease and battle diminish a man’s body, disease emasculates that body, whereas battle lends potency to the body’s impending dissolution. Prohibited from joining the army, Edward immerses himself in what Theodore Roosevelt termed the “strenuous life” to restore his manhood. In contrast to the “infantilazation and enforced debilitation” imposed upon female neurasthenics, men were sent to “hike in the Alps,” engage in the sporting life at resort spas, or take “rough-riding camp cures,” preferably “out West” somewhere.43 Mitchell had prescribed such cures for neurasthenic friends and engaged in them himself. Yet Edward’s exertions in Texas leave him permanently diminished, “unnaturally sensitive and nervous” (War Time 225). The masculine camaraderie and primitive conditions of such Western excursions were meant to replicate the invigorating deprivations of camp life at war. However, Mitchell reveals that the injuries that result from war are not ennobling or transforming either; rather they reduce men to hyperaesthesia. Edward’s father, Major Morton, who has been manfully injured in battle, “can’t think, for torment. [He] can only feel” (War Time 10). The long-term drain of his grave wound accentuates “all that was worst in Morton”: he is increasingly “irritable and nervous” and ultimately undergoes the “moral degradation,” as Mitchell calls it, that so often accompanies chronic illness (War Time 85).
Mitchell’s most extended portrait of nervous disease is that of his main character, Dr. Wendell. Wendell is overemotional, one of the “unhappy people who are made sore for days by petty annoyances” (War Time 8). He is also hyperaesthetic, “exquisitely alive to the little annoyances of social life”; with eyes like “microscopes” and ears like “audiophones,” his life is “one long misery” (War Time 89). And he is morbidly self-absorbed, using his “considerable intelligence” and imagination as funds for “self-torment” rather than as means of improving himself. Finally, he is violently moody. Mitchell claims that the shifting climate of Wendell’s mind left him “without much steady capacity for resistance, and [he] yielded with a not incurious attention to his humors,—being either too weak or too indifferent to battle with their influence” (War Time 16). His “frequent changes of opinion” in diagnosis and treatment not only lose him clients, bur they also reveal Wendell’s “mental unstableness” (War Time 235). Thus the doctor who suffers from the nerve injury he seeks to treat is bound to spread disease rather than cure it.
Most damning is Wendell’s inconstancy, which costs his patients their lives. In the opening episode of the novel, one of Wendell’s patients, a young officer, dies abruptly. Mitchell tells us that Wendell vaguely perceives that his moody impatience that day had prevented him from offering sufficient advice that might have made the young man more careful (War Time 17). Although he at first excoriates himself for his laziness, the realization that none of his colleagues notice his malpractice encourages Wendell to abandon his uncomfortable self-scrutiny. Thus Wendell’s neurasthenic self-indulgence goes unchecked, and his negligence continues to kill people. Near the end of the book Wendell’s hysterical self-involvement leads him to hastily administer the wrong medication to Edward Morton, killing him instantly. Wendell is dimly aware of the way that his nervousness skews his world view, aware enough to notice with a dawning sense of “disturbing horror” that the “material importance of his favorite pipe,” which he breaks, is “as important as the young officer’s life” (War Time 18). The broken pipe also serves as a convenient and conventional metaphor for the compromised state of white masculinity.
Interestingly, given Mitchell’s own vexed relationship to his literary work, he attributes Wendell’s egomania to his aesthetic sensibilities: “The poets who live in a harem of sentiments are very apt to lose the wholesome sense of relation in life, so that in their egotism small things become large…. They call to their aid and comfort whatever power of casuistry they possess to support their feelings, and thus by degrees habitually weaken their sense of moral perspective” (War Time 18). In distinguishing poets who are seduced by the erotic and exotic headiness of a “harem of sentiments,” Mitchell implies that there are literary types who are not weak and self-indulgent. Yet in making Wendell both a doctor and a poet, Mitchell explicitly links the literary and medical temperament. Mitchell’s fascinating harem of sentiments even evokes the nature of his 1880s practice, when the famous rest cure doctor spent his time in the bedrooms of many women, attending to their overwrought sensibilities and vulnerable bodies. Regardless of the character of that temptation, Mitchell posits that not only a nervous injury but also a literary proclivity can reduce one’s relation to the world and skew one’s feelings. The afflicted poet/doctor has no “wholesome” sense of the world, but rather a partial or exaggerated relationship to it.
In describing the therapeutic protocol that Mitchell employed with his nervous patients—and that we might use to discover the source of Wendell’s “moral measles”—David Rien suggests Mitchell’s affinity for Freud’s notion of the subconscious (although Mitchell would later publicly denounce Freud’s theories as immoral).44 In Wendell’s case, the secret ailment that both typifies and triggers his nervousness is an early show of battlefield cowardice. When serving on the front lines in West Virginia, Wendell’s regiment had come under heavy fire. “Dr. Wendell very soon showed signs of uneasiness, and at last left his post,” abandoning hundreds of injured men; Wendell is lucky that he is permitted to leave the army quietly (War Time 303). This brief but key incident contrasts sharply with George Dedlow’s thoughtless heroics, while illustrating that battlefield scenes provided concise, resonant shorthand for late-century audiences. The legitimacy of self-concern is relative; what is an instinct for self-preservation under normal circumstances is understood as pathological in wartime. The Civil War becomes the source of subsequent diseases for Wendell. He frames his second immoral act—lying about the cause of Edward’s death—in terms of his previous “failure to meet professional obligations” on the battlefield (War Time 393). The discovery of his moral wounds, and the necessity of exposing them to the view of those he loves, eventually destroys Wendell. We last see him in an opium daze, shunned by his former society and proclaiming his imminent death.
Yet In War Time does not allow itself to be resolved in a neat way. Critics who see Mitchell’s fictions as prescriptions for a morally corrupted culture contend that he “gave his stories happy endings because he saw them as cases he refused to let suffer, situations he had rescued from reality.”45 In War Time insists that Civil War disease resists both medical and literary therapeutics. Indeed, the novel’s most notable malingerer is the Civil War doctor. It is perhaps understandable that the young, unknown Mitchell who worked in Civil War hospitals would have revealed Wendell’s disease, just as he had exposed army surgeon George Dedlow’s foibles in 1866. One critic locates neurasthenia precisely “at the intersection of personal insecurity about a career and the unsettled and transitional status of the professions open” to young men of Mitchell’s generation.46 Mitchell’s authorial aside on the great number of “hapless persons” who were “more or less competent” and glad enough to extend their “feeble tentacula” to grasp the eighty dollars a month offered them as contract surgeons indicates that the tremendous number of casualties sustained during medical treatment may have been due to a compromised medical corps (War Time 3). And according to Mitchell, the exigencies of wartime medicine only encouraged laxity. “It is difficult not to become despotic,” Wendell reflects, for when