Rehabilitating Bodies. Lisa A. Long

or as Mary phrases it, its “blankness” and formlessness. The exposure of an ethereal heaven is equated in Phelps’s ethos with raw nerves exposed to harsh winds. Again, her psychic pain is figured in the language of nerve damage. Thus the embodiment of heaven also expresses a desire for enclosure, which can be read as privacy. Yet it is not the enclosure of mourning rituals and consolation visits for which Mary longs; recall that she feels the house transformed into a prison after she receives the news of Roy’s death (Gates 2). Mary longs for spiritual habiliment (as Winifred phrases it, the “‘garment by the soul laid by’”) for its ability to shelter her and define her (Gates 114). Aunt Winifred is quite adamant on this point, providing the imaginative protection Mary seeks: “I would rather be annihilated than to spend eternity with heart laid bare,—the inner temple thrown open to be trampled on by every passing stranger” (Gates 79). Heaven will shelter the interior spaces of the soul; more important, it will maintain the illusion of individuality and coherence that both Mary and George so desperately crave.

      Mary is not completely passive in her journey toward self-discovery; it is not enough for her to merely await her passage to heaven. The Gates Ajar plumbs the “psychology” Phelps found so fascinating in her schoolgirl studies of theology (Chapters 69). Not only do readers learn to interpret the text of the Bible, but Phelps argues they must be able to interpret themselves within the psychosocial paradigms that emerged after the war. She insists on the need for self-analysis—a rigorous interrogation of authority and dissection of the religious and philosophical givens upon which midcentury Americans built their identities. Mary admires Winifred because she “has done what it takes a lifetime for some of us to do; what some of us go into eternity, leaving undone; what I am afraid I shall never do,—sounded her own nature. She knows the worst of herself, and faces it fairly” (Gates 95). Though this Calvinist-inflected self-examination is decidedly Puritanical, the alienation and self-denial practiced during the war create protomodern detachment from its spiritual implications. Phelps’s clinical protocol in examining the injured psyche is similar to that followed by Mitchell’s nerve-damaged patients. Like George, Mary too manufactures distance between herself and an alternate self, the youthful “Mamie.” “This poor, wicked little Mamie, why, I fall to pitying her as if she were some one else, and wish that some one would cry over her a little. I can’t cry” (Gates 20). Certainly Mary and George’s psychic fragmentation is a survival mechanism designed to excise unbearable pain. But Phelps also implies that the “sounding” of the dark depths of the soul that war and death forced will lead to self-knowledge.⁴³

      And yet, both authors suggest that earthly bodies continually subvert such efforts. Mary’s desire for corporeal enclosure and integration directly combats the psychological fragmentation Phelps and Mitchell ultimately treat. As we saw in Chapter 1, Mitchell’s real and fictional hospitals were populated by such broken individuals; even Mitchell himself inhabits the wounded bodies he ordinarily treats. Phelps outlines the end result of this incoherence in her “promiscuous theory of refraction”:

      We should be like a man walking down a room lined with mirrors, who sees himself reflected in all sizes, colors, shades, at all angles and in all proportions, according to the capacity of the mirror, till he seems no longer to belong to himself, but to be cut up into ellipses and octagons and prisms. How soon would he grow frantic in such companionship, and beg for a corner where he might hide and hush himself in the dark? (Gates 80)

      Sprague’s mirror had reflected back a facsimile image of the individual self. Like Alcott’s joking amputee and Mitchell’s harried protagonist, Mary insists that postbellum bodies are felt so incompletely that they are unrecognizable. Bodies are refracted by the movement from original to reflection and become fragmented and unreliable. Both Mitchell and Phelps suggest that Civil War survivors suffered from some sort of post-bellum psychological trauma akin to shell shock and post-traumatic stress disorder. Civil War nerve injury, I contend, defined a generation just as powerfully as its twentieth-century counterparts, characterizing postbellum Americans’ ways of knowing. According to Eric T. Dean Jr., though post-traumatic stress disorder was not a recognized disease after the Civil War, many disturbed veterans were diagnosed as suffering from “War Excitement” or “Exposure in the Army”—terms that formed part of the lexicon of nerve injury. Others suffered from “Nostalgia,” a “stark terror” of combat so strong it induced the sufferer to demand immediate evacuation from the battlefield.⁴⁴ Like the characters in Phelps’s novel, Nostalgics suffered from a sickness for home—the illusion of an antebellum home that can only be recuperated in heaven.

      In a culture that would soon find itself masterfully expanding through industrialization and imperialism, nerve injury represented the contemporaneous inward-turning of its citizens. Both Phelps and Mitchell dramatize how neurasthenic pain creates a narrow, self-involved world for its sufferers. As postwar America feverishly worked to temper the brutal reality of war, traumatized survivors turned inward, where the reality of war had been forced to reside. Phelps’s heaven publicly erases the traces of war from the soldiers’ reconstituted bodies; their wounds are borne instead by the bodies of survivors such as Mary and George. Thus Phelps insists that modern bodies express the displacement, alienation, and insensibility—the unstable subjectivities—of postbellum society.⁴⁵ Phelps and Mitchell do not seek to mend, obfuscate, or transform but rather to expose the “crisis of representation” Sweet feels characterizes postbellum depictions of war. War is not “unwritten” in these texts, as Daniel Aaron has notably argued; it is, rather, ubiquitous, inscribed on the nerve-injured bodies of the living waiting to be deciphered.