Most disturbing is that Sprague’s observations indicate that sensory stability had never existed in the first place, only that people had been unaware of the multiple realities that existed beyond the grasp of human sense. As this chapter demonstrates, mourning fiction novelist Elizabeth Stuart Phelps was just one of many writers who similarly imagined a world beyond sense, a reality outside the reach of human perception that would hold the promise of individual coherence and of stable knowledge broadly conceived. Sprague’s scientific text serves as an apt introduction to Phelps’s The Gates Ajar (1868), which, because it treats Civil War mourners rather than soldiers, traditionally has not been read as a Civil War novel. Though Sprague does not write about the Civil War at all, his essay illustrates a ubiquitous postbellum concern with the nature of reality and the body’s ability to discern it, a concern that war writing such as Phelps’s epitomized. According to Sprague, the physical sciences are based on the belief in a realm that dispels any apprehensions, a stable “Nature” of certainty and truth. In pursuing knowledge about the nature of the world around them, Sprague and other scientists merely seek to recover accurate feeling. It is fallible bodies that limit one’s ability to discern the fullness of the world. For example, Sprague contends that a rose “exists in nature as a physical structure, and its existence is evident to us through the various sensations it creates in different nerves of our bodies, and through them alone” (“We Feel” 744). He reveals thus the unnerving interstices between the outer world and inner perception, the insubstantial meeting of the “ethereal wavelets” emanating from the natural object and the “nervous sensation” of bodies through which solid Nature is mediated and (mis) translated.
Of course, such debates about the nature of reality and perception are not unique to the Civil War. Indeed, Sprague himself writes that he is intrigued by “one of the ancient philosophies [that] maintained that all Nature is but the phantasm of our senses” (“We Feel” 744). However, although he finds the spirit of this old dictum compelling, he does not find the specifics suited to his postwar world. Nature is not the “phantasm” for him; on the contrary, Sprague has faith that Nature is the reality. Rather, it is phantasmic bodies that make inaccurate seemingly stable perceptions of the world. Sprague translates the words of the old philosophy into the new science, maintaining, “We frequently make the mistake of endowing matter with attributes which it does not possess, and which are resident only in the impression communicated to us by forces emanating from it. And we can understand that there may be forces in nature as powerful as those which we perceive by our senses, but which are utterly unrecognized by them” (“We Feel” 744). Sprague explains that human bodies and minds conspire to create comforting corporeal fictions to account for a physical world that must always remain just out of reach. At best, we perceive the world as an “impression” on our bodies. In using this term, Sprague seems to invoke a sort of accuracy, for an impression can be a copy of the original. At the same time, he could be seen as auguring impressionism, which values the associative and evocative over the presumably realistic. Regardless of how (in) accurately the perceptible world is felt, Sprague maintains that there is a world of sensation that might be all around but which limited and mortal bodies are unable to discern.
Though published more than two years after the Southern surrender at Appomattox—and apparently situated many worlds away from war—Sprague’s article contends with the epistemological erosion ushered in by the long, demoralizing Civil War. Both soldiers and civilians had been asked to subsume individual, material, and bodily needs in the service of victory. And yet they were constantly faced with the grisly realities of dead, wounded, and suffering bodies; those who survived the war seem besieged by vulnerable, disruptive flesh (whether their own or loved ones’) and unnerving psychological deprivations. The insensibility that Sprague reports was associated as much with emotional traumas suffered far from the frontlines as it was with sensory impairment, pathological or not. Clearly the material realities of daily life had changed during the war, but so apparently had bodies themselves. Rather than fault the world around them for its inadequacies, writers and thinkers of the era sited disillusionment and sorrow in the already illusory human body. As we have seen, amputations and other serious injuries complicated the sufferers’ abilities to ground themselves in physical reality. This chapter explores how the emotional scars born by veterans and mourners alike similarly blunted their faculties. Unable to “feel” themselves, Civil War-era Americans lost the experiential boundaries of their individual identities. The end result was a country full of diseased individuals who were uneasy in their own skins.
Enter popular author and sometime correspondent of Dr. S. Weir Mitchell, Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, whose corporeal heaven was devised to rehabilitate disabled earthly bodies. Phelps, like Mitchell, has not been fully embraced by the American canon—indeed, each has been dismissed at one time or another as prosaic or conservative. Still, I believe that Phelps produced one of the most comprehensive and germane texts of the Civil War era in her attention to the profound and manifold sense of loss that the war evoked in those who survived. As I will explain, Phelps, like Mitchell, addresses the dissolution of human bodies, but she also focuses attention on those who were prostrated by the destruction of loved ones in the war. The Gates Ajar was phenomenally popular during the nineteenth century, remaining a best-seller for decades. In it Phelps traces the emotional sufferings of a woman who experiences the loss of her beloved brother as both corporeal and psychological disease. Phelps’s protagonist, Mary Cabot, feels as if the physical loss she has sustained during the war has caused her to lose her sense of individuality and selfhood; her psychological wounds are expressed through the deterioration and distortion of her own physical senses.
Indeed, Phelps’s imagery evokes nerve disease, extending the ailment’s reach beyond the confines of the Civil War hospital. Civil War survivors, both veterans and noncombatants, could thus be likened to Mitchell’s wartime patients, one of whom “walked sideways; there was one who could not smell; another was dumb from an explosion. In fact, every one had his own grotesquely painful peculiarity” (“Dedlow” 7). Mitchell describes patients who apparently suffer from neurological disorders, but their illnesses are also metaphoric for the distorted ways in which many postbellum Americans perceived their worlds. As Mitchell’s work demonstrated, the source of such pain was unlocatable, but Phelps’s novel insists that the disease’s origin is irrelevant. Whether one was disabled by shells or shock the symptoms of insensibility persisted and required ministration. Such sentiments clearly struck a chord with Phelps’s readers: The Gates Ajar garnered Phelps record sales and hundreds of grateful letters. Ultimately, Phelps’s work suggests that the staggering death toll and the number of critically injured prompted a reappraisal of the meaning of embodied existence for both the dead and the wounded survivors of the Civil War. Personal loss, religious disillusionment, and a growing skepticism about the national mission are experienced as and expressed not only through the amputated bodies of soldiers such as George Dedlow but also through the jangled nerves of Phelps’s grieving protagonist. Mary’s physical afflictions resist national efforts to heal the bodies that bear the psychosocial wounds of war.
Yet even as she reclaims Mary’s pain, Phelps demonstrates that the repression of individual desire and the self-sacrifice required by soldiers and civilians during the war produced a “vacant place” that could be recuperated only through the spiritual rehabilitation of distinctive bodies. Like Mitchell, Phelps recognizes that psychic healing is contingent upon physical integrity—though Phelps suggests that the rehabilitation of a dead loved one’s body may effect the living’s cure. Whereas Mitchell designs scientific remedies for his patients, Phelps offers a spiritual solution: the promise of a corporeal heaven. Thus Phelps discloses a new world to her readers, one where the ontological instability of her protagonist is defunct. Heavenly bodies are perfect versions of earthly forms, completely under the control of the individuals who inhabit them; in keeping with the logic of nerve injury, they also symbolize emotional well-being.
Although Phelps’s