Rehabilitating Bodies. Lisa A. Long

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

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

      The Corporeity of Heaven

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

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

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