Winifred locates “the mystery of the Bible … not so much in what it says, as in what it does not say” (Gates 93). In the gaps and silences, in the “dark corners” of theological sophistry lies the hope for reintegration and rehabilitation. Heaven is initially represented as the supreme abstraction; it is a blankness or silence to Mary. She lies in bed at night longing “for a touch, a sign, only something to break the silence into which he [Royal] has gone.” “Has everything stopped just here?” she wonders (Gates 21). Mary relies on corporeal sensation as proof of Roy’s existence beyond the gates; in a twist on traditional empiricism, accurate sensation becomes the means of assuring knowledge of invisible truths. Winifred is able not only to identify ideological and emotional vacuums but also to embody them, articulate them and fill them with the sensation for which Mary yearns. She creates what she calls “synonomes,” that is to say, heavenly experiences and items that are similar or equivalent to earthly pleasures. Though earthly and heavenly existences are not the same, the former signifies the latter, making it comprehensible. Winifred explains that she treats her young child Faith just as “the Bible treats us, by dealing in pictures of truth that she can understand.” She makes Mary’s neighbors “comprehend that [in heaven] their pianos and machinery may not be made of literal rosewood and steel … [but] whatever enjoyment any or all of them represent now, something will represent them” (Gates 186). Aunt Winifred thus boldly builds a material argument with no empirical evidence, insisting that in the Bible God has not given us “empty symbols,” but instead “a little fact” (Gates 78). Phelps’s corporeal heaven is not an empty promise, as the Civil War had proved to be for many grieving Americans, but a factual reality, a material reward befitting the material sacrifices required by those remaining on earth. Her heavenly “pictures” combat the photographs of Matthew Brady and Alexander Gardner, which were simultaneously circulating images of blasted landscapes and decomposing bodies throughout the country. As Alan Trachtenberg explains, photography allowed the culture to create “a collective image of the war as a sensible event,” “felt” even by those who remained far from the battlefield.26 The Civil War was the first modern occasion for such imagery. Phelps merely responds in kind with her palpable heaven.
Literal, tangible interpretation of abstract concepts is the hermeneutic program forwarded by Aunt Winifred throughout the book. Even the act of naming her child Faith, which Mary claims is an inappropriate moniker for such a “solid-bodied, twinkling little bairn .. with her pretty red cheeks, and such an appetite for supper,” heroically assigns physical being to an abstraction. In Winifred’s corporeal theology, conversion is achieved through physical contact. Her “little soft touch”—not her words—preaches most convincingly against Reverend Bland’s inchoate sermon and converts Mary to her way of thinking (Gates 71). When Winifred chides the local clergy for their inability to “tell picture from substance, a metaphor from its meaning,” she insists upon the material and historical base of knowledge, resisting the psychological and experiential restraints of religious orthodoxy (Gates 77). Winifred’s theology fosters individual authority, empowering the uneducated and disenfranchised to find spiritual answers in their lived experiences, rather than demanding their submission to incomprehensible, abstract explanations. Anne C. Rose argues that midcentury Victorian Americans still identified the Bible as an “essential point of reference,” finding not firm meaning there but “consoling allusions and personal uplift.” Phelps’s novel supports Rose’s contention, suggesting that postbellum Americans had necessarily become skilled readers not only of the Bible but of the texts of their own lives. The war seemingly enabled Phelps—and her whole generation—to make such claims to authority, to approach “reading” as a “strenuous, self-productive experience.”27 It was their proving ground.
Phelps’s insistence on Winifred as an “interpreter” of the afterlife, Winifred’s insistence that “the absent dead are very present with us,” and her usurpation of masculine authority, ally Phelps with the Spiritualist movement, which Anne Braude argues was ubiquitous during the middle of the nineteenth century. Not surprisingly, Spiritualism flourished during the Civil War period: planchettes (the triangular pieces that moved over Ouija boards) began to be mass-produced in the United States during the war, the first national convention of this eminently antiauthoritarian movement finally occurred in 1864, and women Spiritualists began to speak more frequently in public forums in the early 1860s. Mary’s spiritual crisis mirrors exactly those that Braude contends often provoked an interest in Spiritualism: “the desire for empirical evidence of the immortality of the soul; the rejection of Calvinism or evangelicalism in favor of a more liberal theology; and the desire to overcome bereavement through communication with departed loved ones.”28 Braude explains that, before the Civil War, few found science and religion incompatible. After all, the invisible mechanisms of electricity were as unbelievable to many as the invisible spirits that supposedly communicated to Spiritualist mediums. It is thus perfectly plausible that Mitchell, a trained scientist and man of medicine, can only imagine full therapeutic relief for his suffering protagonist in “The Case of George Dedlow.”
Most important, Spiritualist beliefs literalize the implicit foundation of both midcentury spiritual and medical therapeutics: healed bodies represent healed souls. As Braude writes, “While orthodox clergy portrayed the human soul as inevitably prone to sin, orthodox physicians portrayed the human body … as inherently prone to disease.”29 Leading Spiritualist Andrew Jackson Davis believed that bodily affliction reflected spiritual discord; healing bodies would restore spiritual health. Both Phelps and Mitchell speculate on this Spiritualist truism. George’s belief in his self-healing power and Winifred’s faith in a reconstituted heaven put bodies back together again, undiseased, unbroken; in doing so they ease distressed minds. Winifred’s spiritual and psychological ministrations “heal” Mary, Dr. Bland, and other sufferers in the novel, whereas George’s Spiritualist encounter enables him to continue living in his ravaged body. All find “comfort” in their “fancying,” as Schnog has shown; yet spiritual healing is located very particularly in bodily rehabilitation. In The Gates Ajar, Winifred’s Spiritualist-inflected rehabilitation “cures the rift between the living and the dead” felt both in Mary’s psyche and in her body.30
In part, such spiritual solutions combated the rhetoric used to marshal Northern enthusiasm for the war effort, a rhetoric that buried individual grief and denied the particularity of the slain soldiers. As many Civil War scholars have argued, religious and political leaders used “jingoistic Christianity” to drum up support for the Holy National Cause: “The onset of battle was God’s judgment on men who abandoned the Christian Sparta to feast on the fatted calf.”31 Leaders reverted to the rhetoric of the Puritan enterprise, in which New England was the “City on the Hill.” To endanger the nation that God had ordained with a special mission was to obstruct God’s purpose. Julia Ward Howe’s “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” is the most famous example of this rhetorical conjunction. Such sentiments were disseminated by everyone from local ministers to journalists to justify the soldiers’ self-sacrifice to the national project. One minister, presiding over a regimental farewell ceremony, assured listeners that “your country has called for your service and you are ready…. It is a holy and righteous cause in which you enlist.… God is with us.”32 Gail Hamilton’s 1863 essay “A Call to My Country-Women” clearly focuses such claims toward women. She exhorts her readers to “consecrate to a holy cause not only the incidentals of life, but life itself. Father, husband, child,—I do not say, Give them up to toil exposure, suffering, death, without a murmur;—that implies reluctance. I rather say, Urge them to the offering; fill them with sacred fury; fire them with irresistible desire; strengthen them to heroic will.”33
Certainly Mary could find no comfort in a sermon such as eminent theologian Horace Bushnell’s “Obligations to the Dead,” which absorbed the individual suffering of soldiers into a great “hecatomb offered for their and our great nation’s life.” The soldiers’ dead bodies strewn across the fields of