And, Phelps insists, the well-meaning condolences of personal acquaintances were equally injurious. In Chapters from a Life, she writes of spending between two and three years preparing for the novel by reading everything that had been written on mourning.36 Denying traditional rituals, she uses her knowledge to mount an explicit assault against them. In refusing to accept callers or to attend church, Mary shreds the delicate social scripts of consolation and bereavement to which antebellum culture subscribed. What is more, she aggressively denies the religio-national truths that existed to help the bereaved make sense of death. Immediately after Roy’s death, she is a self-described “Pagan” telling the church deacon who offers her the usual comfort, “God does not seem to me just now what he used to be.” Deacon Quirk replies that he is sorry to see her in such a “rebellious state of mind” (Gates 14–15). Yet Phelps’s imagery suggests that Mary’s resistance to contemporary consolation is much deeper than the passing rebellion of grief. Mary describes how Deacon Quirk looks at her “very much [as he would] a Mormon or a Hottentot, and I wondered whether he were going to excommunicate me on the spot” (Gates 16). The racial and cultural privilege assumed by “civilized,” white Christians such as Quirk, who condemn so-called Hottentots is clearly endangered by the barbaric war and by responses such as Mary’s. Mary is therefore figured as exotic and debased, separated from her community by her insolence and the public nature of her spiritual battles. Phelps’s only other reference to Hottentots occurs when Mary comments upon the difficulty of resurrection for people who make dinners of each other. The novel thus implies that the mourning rituals and religious orthodoxy forced upon Mary by her community threaten to devour her.
Mary’s allusion to herself as a Hottentot also allies her with disorderly bodies. Her illicit grief resurrects the dead soldiers, incorporating their silent pain and suffering. Her emotional anguish is spatialized and felt in the body: the telegram announcing Roy’s death “shut me up and walled me in,” Mary claims (Gates 4). The consolation system is then figured as a physical assault upon Mary’s person; it is not experienced as similar to the attacks Roy sustained in battle, where a solid blow provides the “relief of combat,” but as feminine, as “a hundred little needles piercing at us” (Gates 6). Ironically, this is exactly the sensation described by Mitchell’s neurasthenic soldiers, who complain of “prickling pain” along with “jagging, shooting, and darting pain.” Taken together, Phelps’s and Mitchell’s texts suggest that all who suffered doing the war were similarly afflicted. Just as Mitchell’s soldiers and Mitchell himself feel the world differently during and after the war, Mary’s visceral understanding of the familiar is altered. Like Mitchell’s hyperaesthetic patients, for whom touch is felt or interpreted as pain, Mary experiences the world as too much, as sensory overload.37 As she describes it, “The lazy winds are choking me. Their faint sweetness makes me sick.… I wish that little cricket, just waked from his winter’s nap, would not sit there on the sill and chirp at me” (Gates 30). The children’s voices outside “hurt [her] like knives,” conjuring up the instruments of amputation (Gates 2). Condolences are figured as probing and invasive, as surgery; Mary’s callers violently penetrate her being, reaching in to “turn her heart around and cut into it at pleasure” (Gates 7). Her inconsolable grief is not expressed appropriately through gentle weeping and lamentation; it threatens to obliterate and destroy her.
All that is left, Mary says, is the “vacant place” in her home—and in her psyche—where Roy used to be. As we saw, George Dedlow’s amputations symbolized this loss of individuality and integrity. Royal’s death prompts a similar crisis for Mary and results in a psychic amputation: a part of her has been metaphorically cut off and must be reconstituted in order for her to rediscover herself. In framing their losses as the decimation of their “corporeal families” (as George calls his limbs), both Mary and George indicate that their connection to community and self is disrupted by the war. Mary’s tenuous position as a self-described “old maid” makes her reliance upon Roy for identity even more acute. In a culture that valued women mainly as caregivers, Mary has lost one aspect of her existence in losing her brother. As Schnog observes, she is now “the sole inhabitant of a depopulated domestic realm.”38 Yet Mary’s connection to Roy is much deeper than is usual between siblings—so intense that she describes him as a double, as part of herself: “Why Roy was so much more to me than many brothers are to many sisters.… We have lived together so long, we two alone, since father died, that he had grown to me, heart of my heart, life of my life. It did not seem as if he could be taken, and I be left” (Gates 8). Thus Mary mourns not only Royal’s loss but also the loss of her self.
Essentially, Civil War-era protagonists yearn for a sense of authentic selfhood that would combat their mounting anxiety over their inability to feel and thereby define themselves. Three years after the publication of The Gates Ajar, Phelps wrote that religion consistently required of women a sacrifice that paralleled that required of soldiers: “to live for others; to make complete abnegation of themselves and to have no life but in their affect.” Such a notion of Christian duty, Phelps insists, is “the most insidious and most hopeless injury which society worked upon women … [a] perversion of the great Christian theory of self-sacrifice.”39 St. Armand, among others, argues that Roy’s death precipitates the loss of Mary’s religious faith and perhaps signals Phelps’s own doubts.40 I would counter, however, that Christianity is recuperated by the end of the novel. The Gates Ajar dramatizes not precisely a religious crisis but an ontological one; Americans understood themselves and their places in the world differently after the Civil War. Roy’s death removes all claims upon Mary’s continued self-abnegation and conveniently serves as a metaphor for the material and psychological changes of the war. Like George, Mary initially has very little self-consciousness, for she is flattered that Aunt Winifred “seems to love me, not in a proper kind of way because I happen to be her niece, but for my own sake. It surprises me to find how pleased I am that she should” (Gates 58). During the course of the novel Mary must discover her own self-worth; it is her own individual idiosyncrasies, and not just her capacity to fulfill feminine stereotypes, that confer value.
Aunt Winifred’s heaven is crucial in this effort. To Mary, its most appealing feature is that there will be no “fearful looking-for of separation” (Gates 81). Mary’s concern with separation signifies not only physical separation from her brother but a sort of self-alienation precipitated by the all-out ontological assault of the war. Mary Louise Kete’s notion of “sentimental collaboration” nuances Mary’s dissolution. Kete argues that the sentimental mode of midcentury mourning literature is “not interested in autonomy or liberation but in the restoration of constitutive bonds, which make subjectivity possible.”41 Thus Winifred’s heaven returns Mary to herself, so to speak, by returning Roy. What is most comforting is that Roy will be Mary’s “own again,—not only to look at standing up among the singers,—but close to me; somehow or other to be as near as—to be nearer than—he was here, really mine again!” (Gates 54). Mary’s intimacy with the heavenly Roy, her ownership of him, will enable her to become completely self-possessed. I don’t think that, in emphasizing Mary’s desire for possession, Phelps meant to invoke an exaggerated capitalism of the sort so caustically attacked by Mark Twain in his Extract from Captain Stormfield’s Visit to Heaven.42 Yet there is a sense that all of the things that people used to define themselves—possessions, relationships, desires, even fears—had been sacrificed or repressed in furtherance of the war effort.
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