Both the interest in Phelps as a prototypical feminist and the damaging consensus that The Gates Ajar is largely a religious tract have also stripped the novel of its historical context. The relatively few extended treatments of Gates situate it within the dominant religious trends of her time or within female-dominated consolation literature, largely circumventing the historical context in which she wrote. As Lori Duin Kelly reminds us, “It was as a religious writer that Phelps was best known to her contemporaries, and it is largely for her religious writing that Phelps is remembered at all today.”10 Some critics, perhaps viewing Phelps’s attention to religious orthodoxy as conservative and hoping to give her image a critical makeover, have steered clear of her theological entanglements or given only cursory treatment to The Gates Ajar, opting instead to study (and reprint) books in which she reveals herself as a “writer of books for women.”11 Phelps would consider such pronouncements surprising; in an often-quoted section of Chapters from a Life, an autobiography written in old age, she recalls how “religious papers waged war across that girl’s notions of the life to come, as if she had been an evil spirit let loose upon accepted theology for the destruction of the world” (118). Certainly the novel’s clear debt to the Spiritualist practices and beliefs sweeping midcentury middle-class homes did not set well with sanctioned theologians. I argue that Phelps’s novel shows that the “destruction of the world” was fait accompli; it was her creation of a rehabilitated heaven that was her most radical act.
To this end, The Gates Ajar offers not only sentimental consolation but also a rigorous exploration of the ontological systems stirred by the Civil War and its aftermath. Steeped in, as Barton Levy St. Armand phrases it, an “American Protestant ethic at its most neurasthenic,” Phelps responds to a lifeless, enervated faith with a visceral, re-embodied alternative.12 St. Armand’s reference to contemporary theology as neurasthenic is apt, for it allies Phelps’s grieving protagonist with Mitchell’s nerve-injured soldiers. It is not surprising that the symptoms of Mary’s grief mirror those of nerve-injured patients: Phelps’s mother and father apparently suffered from nervous conditions, and she describes herself to Mitchell on January 25, 1887, as “a ‘professional invalid’ in ‘good and regular standing for about half [of her] life.’” Read alongside Mitchell’s ground-breaking medical texts and fiction, Phelps’s work takes on new significance as part of a philosophical debate on the relation between the body and the individual at war. In her depiction of grief Phelps speaks to the difficult issues confronting Civil War doctors and their patients: locating the source of amorphous pain, assigning truth value to the invisible suffering, generating the authority to articulate one’s experience of these invisible phenomena, and devising effective treatments for the crippling ailments.
In her concentration on suffering, mourning, and the afterlife, Phelps is not, as one critic has suggested, conducting “exercises in necrophilia,” nor is she morbidly fixated upon the deaths of her relatives, as many of her biographers insist.13 The Gates Ajar is no more and no less macabre than Mitchell’s story, with its grisly amputations and tortured protagonist. Phelps uses the afterlife as a transitional state suited to her explorations of a culture in perpetual flux. The gates to heaven are not wide open but “ajar,” suggesting the unsettled situation of the period. Contemporary clergy too recognized the unrest, accusing Phelps of instigating the “overthrow” of “church and state and family” (Chapters 118). This charge notwithstanding, I contend that she is both responding to the cultural crisis precipitated by the war and creating one with her novel. Although The Gates Ajar may indeed have consoled a generation of believers who were devastated by the effects of the Civil War and unable to find comfort in traditional religion, its phenomenal popularity, not only in the United States, but also worldwide, attests to its larger therapeutic value. Some critics—most notably Nancy Schnog—have already assigned therapeutic significance to Phelps’s fictional ethos. Others have read its curative potential in narrowly personal terms—as “therapeutic self-indulgence” for Phelps as she struggled to come to grips with her mother’s death.14 Phelps and Mitchell are the first in a long line of American writers and thinkers who found that rehabilitating Civil War bodies was a means of expressing both the personal transformations and social revolutions of their changing culture.
The nature of wartime death is central to the Civil War’s signifying power. The massive casualty rates, previously unimaginable injury and dismemberment, and, ultimately, the lack of corpses to bury and mourn disrupted mourning rituals and prompted a reappraisal of the afterlife. The Gates Ajar clearly attends to a society in mourning. A staggering 623,000 Americans died in the Civil War (slightly fewer deaths than in all subsequent American wars combined). A half-million soldiers returned home physically wounded. At least 30,000 amputations were performed, generating grisly tales of the piles of arms and legs left outside hospitals and making amputees who remained dramatic reminders of the war’s physical carnage. Many of the corpses never made it home. Thousands of unknown soldiers were buried in the South, and the War Department estimated that at least 25,000 were never buried at all.15 All of these conditions disrupted a culture of death that emphasized the importance of tending the dying body, witnessing the moment of death, gathering keepsakes, and finally envisioning loved ones in heaven as they had appeared in life.
In many antebellum novels such as that other midcentury best-seller, Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852), the expiring body is celebrated and beautified by its death; family members gather around the angelic child, Little Eva, in order to glimpse the glories of heaven through her dying body. Material keepsakes gathered from the body were often an important part of mourning rituals; for example, hair that might be woven into watch-fobs, flower arrangements, and jewelry. There was also a midcentury vogue for memorializing the dead in photographs and paintings, as well as for displaying the dead body in glass-topped caskets. The embalming techniques perfected during the Civil War and the increasing skill of the newly appointed funeral directors, who would attend to the corpse cosmetically and compose its limbs in the most lifelike poses, allowed the corpse to “enact its own final genteel performance with bourgeois propriety,” as Karen Halttunen has observed. Finally, as Martha Pike points out, the hexagonal wooden coffins of antebellum America became ornately decorated rectangular caskets, lined with silk and customized with brass nameplates; such vessels were in keeping with the original meaning of casket as a repository of jewels and other valuables to be preserved.16 Thus, by midcentury Americans apparently found the dead body valuable in and of itself. What had once been an integral part of the individual—the mortal coil—came to represent the whole individual economy it had once housed. The dead body and/or its constituent parts became a synecdoche for the person in his/her former totality.
Yet Phelps’s novel studiously avoids the corpse, which is the silent, motivating center of the novel. Instead, her heroine Mary focuses on the sights and sounds that surround her only contact with Roy’s body: “He came back, and they brought him up the steps, and I listened to their feet,—so many feet; he used to come bounding in. They let me see him for a minute, and there was a funeral…. I did not notice nor think till we had left him out there in the cold and had come back” (Gates 4). Neither Roy’s death nor the status of his corpse is described. Roy’s body is perceived by Mary as a physical sensation in her own—the sound of feet on her stairwell. It is striking that the most popular consolation fiction of the nineteenth century displays none of the usual accoutrements of the contemporaneous death culture. For obvious reasons, postmortem images of soldiers would not have been comforting or, in many cases, even possible. The belief that death was “a sweet deliverance from life” served well the bereavement typology of suffering, angelic children gently fading away in illness. There was little sweetness or comfort to be found in the startlingly quick, violent deaths of grown men at war. Gary Wills’s brief but explicitly grotesque description of the “thousands of fermenting bodies, with gas-distended bellies, deliquescing in the July heat” or poking out from shallow graves after the Battle of Gettysburg dispels the carefully maintained mourning fictions of middle-class culture.17
Yet