Rehabilitating Bodies. Lisa A. Long

with a dead body that is mangled, diseased, or simply missing. Consolation rhetoric suggested that dying loved ones—though thin or pale—remained essentially the same as when they were healthy. There was comfort in the thought that God had taken them and that they would enter whole into heaven. But in a time when tens of thousands of family members, friends, and lovers had disappeared—had been absent for months and even years before their deaths—many mourners found no comfort in the thought of a disembodied soul floating about in heaven. In memorializing Roy’s physical being, Phelps attempts to achieve what Daniel Aaron has called “fictive solidity.”¹⁸ Mary remembers “the flash in his eyes,” his “pretty soft hair that [she] used to curl and kiss about [her] finger, his bounding step, his strong arms that folded [her] in and cared for [her]” (Gates 9). Phelps builds an “altar of the dead,” a rhetorical monument to Royal as she felt him in life. Yet she must still contend with the actual disintegration of dead soldiers’ bodies. Consequently, Aunt Winifred insists that “something of this body is preserved for the completion of another,” enough at least “to preserve identity as strictly as body can ever be said to preserve it” (Gates 116).

      Many of Phelps’s contemporaries were very literal-minded about the necessity of the body for the afterlife. In Louisa May Alcott’s 1863 Hospital Sketches, a young amputee humorously muses upon the “scramble for … arms and legs” on Judgment Day; he supposes, “my leg will have to tramp from Fredericksburg, my arm from here, and meet my body, wherever it may be.”¹⁹ Phelps, too, resorts to humor in her oblique acknowledgment of the difficulties of dismemberment. However, she displaces anxieties about the possibility of a Christian afterlife onto what was certainly considered in her time a foreign, barbaric Other. In admitting the difficulty of transferring one’s body to heaven after it has been mutilated, Phelps writes, “imagine for instance, the resurrection of two Hottentots, one of whom has happened to make a dinner of the other some fine day. A little complication there! Or picture the touching scene, when the devoted husband, King Mausolas, whose widow had him burned and ate the ashes, should feel moved to institute a search for his body!” (Gates 115). It is perhaps not too great a leap to read Phelps’s Hottentots as warring countrymen. Significantly, in the second scenario King Mausolas’s dead body has been consumed as part of his culture’s mourning rituals. It is his grieving widow who is compelled both to ingest his physical remains and then to relocate them. Such “barbaric” practices are not so different, Phelps subtly suggests, from those of her own culture, which required women to sacrifice their loved ones to a national cause; like Mausolas’s widow, Mary “feels moved” to search for her brother’s body.²⁰

      It is thus extremely important for Mary to be able to imagine her brother as embodied in heaven; otherwise he would become savage, unrecognizable, and unlocatable. Dead bodies are rehabilitated in The Gates Ajar in the sense that they are reclothed in heaven with ideal earthly forms. Winifred assures Mary and Phelps’s army of readers, “For ought we know, some invisible compound of an annihilated body may hover, by a divine decree, around the site of death till it is wanted,” thus ensuring the heavenly reconstitution of the earthly self (Gates 115). Bodily rehabilitation is even more necessary during times of war when precious human bodies are so vulnerable, so cheap. Yet Mary must not only imaginatively reconstitute Roy’s body, but she must also situate it in her geographic imagination. She supposes all of the people wandering around heaven must have “local habitations” and live “under the conditions of an organized society” (Gates 140).²¹ It is impossible, Phelps insists, to transcend the limits of the human imagination; even existence as a soul—the faith in some essential self that survives life on earth—needs the physical boundaries of the body in order for it to be articulated and have resonance in human minds.

      Phelps’s preoccupation with heavenly embodiment inevitably leads her to confront contemporaneous theological debates on heavenly existence. The Christian concept of the afterlife endlessly complicates the relationship between physical and spiritual existence.²² The idea of resurrection—the soul that does not die, the body that must—especially confounds many Christians, even the clergy, Phelps argues. Mary is devastated by her local minister’s account of heaven in an eagerly awaited sermon on the topic. According to Mr. Bland, “Heaven is an eternal state. Heaven is a state of holiness. Heaven is a state of happiness.” Bland goes on to list the “employments” of heaven, among them glorifying God and studying God’s infinite mind. Finally, he concludes, “I expect to be so overwhelmed by the glory of the presence of God, that I may be thousands of years before I shall think of my wife” (Gates 69–70). Although this is meant to be a comic moment, it also shows that the minister’s notions of heaven are just as constrained by the limits of human knowledge as the middle-class, embodied heaven Phelps eventually posits. Phelps helps her readers to see traditional notions of heaven anew: “Vague visions of floating about in the clouds, of balancing—with a white robe on, perhaps—in stiff rows about a throne, like the angels in the old pictures” are no more ridiculous than Winifred’s tidy cottages (Gates 117).

      Winifred argues that we will not live a “vague, lazy, half-alive disembodied existence,” as Mary had supposed (Gates 113). She uses the Resurrection as proof that the tendency of Revelation is to show that an embodied state is superior to a disembodied one. At one point she tallies the number of times the word “body” appears in descriptions of our heavenly state: “‘There are celestial bodies.’ ‘It is raised a spiritual body.’ ‘There is a spiritual body.’ ‘It is raised in incorruption.’ ‘It is raised in glory.’ ‘It is raised in power.’ Moses, too, when he came to the transfigured mount in glory, had as real a body as when he went into the lonely mount to die” (Gates 119). More than anything else, Christ’s ascension whole into heaven convinces Winifred of an embodied afterlife: “His death and resurrection stand forever the great prototype of ours,” she insists (Gates 121). Her references to Christ carry added weight in a culture that consistently figured fallen war heroes as Christ-figures sacrificing their lives in a holy cause. In an 1862 sermon, for example, Octavius Frothingham, a Boston minister, likened dying soldiers to Christ because their deaths, too, would regenerate society. In one of Walt Whitman’s best-known war poems, the speaker uncovers the face of a dead soldier, proclaiming, “Young man I think I know you—I think this face is the face of the Christ himself, / Dead and divine and brother of all, and here again he lies.”²³ It is no coincidence that the dead brother is “Royal,” and the grieving woman is named Mary—at once the mother and lover of Christ and the archetypal figure of female mourning. Yet it is not Christ as God that Winifred invokes, but Christ as man. In response to the concern that we shall “lose our personality in a vague ocean of ether” after death, Winifred explains: “He with his own wounded body, rose and ate and walked and talked. Is all memory of this life to be swept away?—He, arisen, has forgotten nothing. He waits to meet his disciples at the old, familiar places; as naturally as if he had never parted from them” (Gates 203). Winifred privileges Christ’s humanity and his earthly connections over his divinity. Thus Phelps challenges those patriotic Transcendentalists who, George Frederickson has shown, eagerly adapted their contemplative theories to the war effort. Whereas influential thinkers such as Ralph Waldo Emerson were heralding the divinity within all people, Phelps concentrates on the humanity that had been sorely tested during the war.²⁴

      Phelps goes still further in her indictment of these powerful cultural convictions. The Gates Ajar demonstrates that received socioreligious doctrine provided an utterly inadequate worldview in this time of war. Ultimately Phelps’s novel evolves into a carefully crafted theological argument for an interpretive strategy of the Bible that makes the afterlife material and, consequently, knowable. There is a pointed acknowledgment of the subjectivity of language and, more specifically, of biblical exegesis. Winifred complains, “No sooner do I find a pretty verse that is exactly what I want, than up hops a commentator, and says, this is n’t according to text, and means something entirely different” (Gates 90). Phelps strives to prevent such dialogue from degenerating into spiritual meaninglessness and to find something comforting and tangible in Christianity.²⁵ Aunt Winifred becomes the novel’s theological mouthpiece: her marriage to a minister and her own role as a missionary in Kansas give her theological authority,