But by the 1880s, Mitchell was an internationally renowned neurologist, seemingly secure in his rest cure and his profession. Presumably he had conquered his war-era ghosts. And yet they intrude upon his psyche, invading his fictional worlds. Perhaps Mitchell suspected what an 1892 survey of wounded veterans would confirm: an army of neurasthenic, insomniac victims denied his curative powers. The erratic success rate of nineteenth-century doctors, their susceptibility to mood swings that might affect their work—in short, their humanity—is interpreted by Mitchell as the disease still plaguing modern Americans. Mitchell’s professional reputation rested upon the forcefulness of his character, the certainty of his diagnosis, and the rigidity of his cures. However, in 1884 as he composed In War Time, he had been treating neurasthenia for two decades with, at best, mixed and, at worst, disastrous results.47 Scholars of neurasthenia note that doctors themselves were frequent sufferers of the disease. Mitchell wrote often of his own erratic nature to intimate correspondents. In one letter he confesses to his young son John: “I have on me my Sunday mood which is grim enough & has been so for years—Yet why I can hardly tell—since on the whole life ought to satisfy me—but does not—Indeed I have had great luck to have had to work always for otherwise the sensitive side of me would have so grown that I might have come to be a morbid sort of man.”48 Though neurasthenia would remain a viable diagnosis well into the 1920s, in the 1880s scientists searched in vain for the organic source of neurasthenic symptoms and behaviors.
Certainly, Mitchell’s fictional alter-ego, Wendell, engages Mitchell’s personal demons and professional ambivalence. Yet Wendell’s incompetence, his halfhearted efforts at doctoring, relieves him of the responsibility of curing his patients and ultimately explains his failures. Ironically, although the doctors’ disease makes rehabilitation impossible, it also makes rehabilitation possible. To clarify, in this circle of logic, rehabilitated Civil War doctors could act with an objective, robotic precision and potentially effect their patients’ rehabilitations—which would then ensure the patient/doctors’ cure, and so on. Thus the Civil War can represent both the potential for sure corporeal knowledge and the tragedy of lost chances. Mitchell’s fictional doctors admit that watching the sick leaves “vague but lasting mental impressions which may wear out with time, or be deepened by future circumstance and which are, as it were, memorial ghosts that trouble us despite our unbeliefs in their reality” (War Time 53). The bodies of their unrehabilitated patients—the reflections of their own inherently diseased subjectivities—linger around the doctors like amputated appendages. The experience of the Civil War hospital becomes representative of the persistence and inadequacies of medicine and of memory itself. Though time may rub away the sharp edges of trauma, they continue to “trouble,” generating a surreal, interior world of half-truths and self-doubts. Even scientific pursuits reiterate this new lawlessness. When Wendell looks in his microscope searching for cures and answers, he sees
a wild world of strange creatures; possibly, as to numbers, a goodly town full of marvelous beasts, attacking, defending, eating, or being eaten: some, merely tiny dots, oscillating to and fro; some, vibratile rods; and among them, an amazing menagerie of larger creatures, whirled hither and thither by active cilia too swift in their motions to be seen. (War Time 165)
Mitchell suggests that medical research only confirms that the “invisible” worlds that he knew defined Civil War disease reflected, and more important, naturalized, the frenetic, combative nature of wartime and postbellum worlds. Like ghosts, these microscopic beings are alien, “strange” and “beast[ly]” “creatures” that come and go at will. Their constant, chaotic motion reinforces the idea of a reality too impalpable and elusive, always slipping away before one can get a fix on it.
The brief episode concerning Wendell’s hysterical confederate patient, Captain Gray, dramatizes the war’s incessant, ghostly return. Gray is brought to the Union hospital as a prisoner-of-war. As an officer, he is treated with respect and housed with a Union officer, Major Morton. Although Gray’s prognosis is initially bright, he soon becomes convinced that he will not pull through. He explains to Wendell that he has a “queer sensation of confusion in my head, and—then I can’t change my ideas at will. They stick like burrs, and—I can’t get rid of them” (War Time 31). Frances Gosling notes that men’s hysteria was most often characterized by such “obsessions or ‘fixed ideas.’”49 Those relentless thoughts eventually begin to eat away at Gray. After a conversation between the rebel and his Northern roommate about the battle at which they were both injured, Gray becomes convinced that Morton is the very man who shot him. At first, Gray claims that he is comforted by the fact that it is a “gentleman” who has been the cause of his misfortune. However, a new disturbing idea takes hold of him, a “brain echo” that, like a “silent song[,] comes and goes a thousand times” (War Time 41). The inarticulable pain of Civil War injury became an endless repetition—not the repetition of scientific cure, but the recurrence of Civil War trauma. Mitchell’s Civil War texts return to the site of failure, where the only thing consistently produced is disease. The doctors insist that only Gray’s silence will cure him; but Gray continues charging, “He shot me!, he shot me!” Unable to quiet the voices, dispel the ghosts, or stop the continuous loop of his moment of injury, Gray develops a fever that ultimately kills him. Like Shakespeare’s Macbeth, who utters the phrase Gray repeats in his final delirium—“To-morrow, and to-morrow, and tomorrow”—Gray has “supped full of horrors,” too glutted to move on to the future.50
The Civil War was a lifelong obsession for Mitchell, a gnawing wound, a persistent ghost, an incurable disease. In January 1914, the year Mitchell died, a colleague wrote of his life’s work after the war, “Whatever his thoughts henceforth deep down was that memory perpetual. His tales and poems, no matter what be their subjects, all come from a spirit over which has passed the great vision; every drop of ink is tinctured with the blood of the Civil War.”51 Mitchell’s work illustrates what becomes apparent in the work of others—that the Civil War is itself “memory perpetual”: it is not necessarily a one-time, fixed event, but rather a trope that embodies the notion of memory as a constantly reoccurring but unpredictable presence. Writing itself for Mitchell and his contemporaries becomes Civil War writing—a rewriting, a constant return, an obsession with the corporeal. The bodies of war and text mingle here in the bloody ink that inscribes Mitchell’s texts. That those bodies proved as tenacious and ephemeral as the memories they summoned and the texts meant to account for them is the legacy of the trope of the Civil War.
Chapter 2
Dead Bodies: Mourning Fictions and the Corporeity of Heaven
’Tis not that Dying hurts us so—’Til Living—hurts us more—But Dying—is a different way—A Kind behind the Door—
The Southern Custom—of the Bird—That ere the Frosts are due—Accepts a better Latitude—We—are the Birds—that stay.
The Shiverers round Farmers’ doors—For whose reluctant Crumb—We stipulate—till pitying SnowsPersuade our Feathers Home.
—Emily Dickinson, #335
“A man would seem to be out of his senses deliberately to doubt what the world thinks to be simple truths,” wrote C. F. Sprague in an 1867 Atlantic Monthly article entitled “What We Feel.”1 Yet as the Civil War drew to a close, more and more Americans not only began to question “simple truths,” but they also discovered that they were, indeed, “out of [their] senses.” Sprague reveals to his audience that even “greenness, the sweetness, the fragrance, the music, are not inherent qualities of the objects themselves, but are cerebral sensations, whose existence is limited to the senses” (“We Feel” 740). In doing so, he charts an alarming crisis of self-consciousness that had emerged during the previous half-decade of fighting. During the Civil War a fissure became perceptible between “what we feel”—what average Americans had taken to be the commonly experienced physical realities of their daily lives—and “cerebral