Like General Fox, many literary historians and critics also continue to search for the “missing bodies,” for the perfect and whole consolidation of texts that will complete the puzzle of the meaning of the Civil War. For example, though noting regional differences, early Civil War literary scholars tended to craft composite Civil War narratives, consolidating Northern and Southern accounts, war-era and historical fictions, in their ambitious reviews of the era’s literature. Heroic efforts such as Robert Lively’s Fiction Fights the Civil War (1957), Edmund Wilson’s Patriotic Gore (1962), and Aaron’s The Unwritten War (1973) treat the literature in toto. To a certain extent, the bulk of these studies derives from Americanists’ anxiety about the lackluster quality of the literature inspired by our greatest historical event.30 Their historicizing narratives fill up the space where emotional and historical truth are supposed to reside.
Recent literary critics have noticed the unstable bodies that undergird Civil War literature, and they focus on what I would call the rehabilitative strategies of many Civil War texts. Timothy Sweet, Kathleen Diffley, Elizabeth Young, and Gregory Eiselein, in particular, are attuned to wounded and improper bodies and the “disruptive Civil War moments” they engender. Read through the hermeneutic I lay out, they all engage in projects of rehabilitation, showing how the wounds of Civil War were purposefully exploited and/or recuperated through the rhetoric of the Civil War. These new critics fruitfully revise traditional literary genealogy; the addition of the narratives of women and African Americans, of commercial and magazine fiction, of photography and other media to the Civil War story has transformed the field.31 Yet most Civil War scholars still subscribe to the gap theory that motivates the historical project at large. The urge toward material accountability permeates scholarly study of the period, as we concentrate on amassing Civil War writings themselves, expanding the body of the Civil War, but not essentially altering the parameters by which we define its potency. Neither does recent historical scholarship substantially challenge the basic premises of (ac)countability and (un)writability that both energize and vex Civil War studies.
I argue that such has been the case because the Civil War emerges as both a content and a mode of signification, an organizing topic that entails the theoretical underpinnings of postbellum American history. The content of the Civil War has produced its own narrative practice, a form premised on a preference for conveyances of the real founded on bodily experiences that resist such form. As I have begun to demonstrate, transcriptions of physical and psychological traumas are neither verifiable nor wholly imagined—to return to Scarry, they reside in the realm of the mutable body. Firmly grounded in this corporeal (il) logic, the Civil War narratives I examine overwhelm traditional generic distinctions, particularly between fiction and history. Any contact with the Civil War can conveniently collapse the already tenuous distinctions between the two; the war’s sheer weight, the magnitude of its suffering, and the heft of its dead bodies press, condensing all representation into compact nuggets of history. Thus any text that treats the Civil War can become American history, even when it explicitly purports no such generic intention.32 For example, Louisa May Alcott’s Hospital Sketches has been praised by medical and Civil War historians as “perhaps the best account of what hospital life during at least one year of the war was really like,” despite the fact that she clearly fictionalizes her experience.33 In even more curious claims, many critics have dubbed Stephen Crane’s The Red Badge of Courage as best able to represent Civil War combat experience, even as they acknowledge that Crane was not alive during the sectional conflict. This last example seems most significant, for I would argue that it is Crane’s treatment of the Civil War—particularly, as I argue in Chapter 5, his delineation of war-era disease—that lends his fiction its semblance of truth. By the turn of the century, the war was firmly established as a grounding content, inviting considerations of textual facticity whether or not the text was determined to aspire to such standards.
Given this tendency, it is no surprise that Civil War writers themselves insist that their romanticized histories and autobiographical fictions deny quick categorization. Authors treated in this study, such as Alcott, De Forest, and Dr. S. Weir Mitchell, clearly fictionalize real-life experiences in their work; in her fictional Hospital Sketches, Alcott pleads that we believe “such a being as Nurse Periwinkle does exist … that these Sketches are not romance.”34 Yet the novella is derived from her avowedly nonfictional letters, and whole passages are transferred verbatim. Charlotte Forten, on the other hand, chose to publish her private writings—excerpts from her journals—in a public forum. Yet she too edited and shaped that version of real life when it appeared as “Life on the Sea Islands.” The late-century historians and memoirists also treated in this study surely employed similar strategies in their efforts to fashion coherent narratives from their thirty-year-old memories. In addition, the serials in which many of these accounts first became available to nineteenth-century readers did not distinguish among the genres, publishing them side by side without generic labels. Such circumstances led Mitchell’s anonymous short story “The Case of George Dedlow” to be read as fact by Atlantic Monthly subscribers. Sending money to the fictional “Stump Hospital” named in the story, Mitchell’s readers insisted that the trauma of war was literally unimaginable, even as those who struggled to articulate the conflict suggested that it was only imaginable.
The historicizing force of the Civil War, finally, registers the assumed opposition between theoretical and materialist enterprises. As Scarry notes, “The turn to history and the body [is] the attempt to restore the material world to literature.”35 I add that it is not just literature to which this stabilizing weight must be returned; the obsessive reiteration of the Civil War suggests materiality is required on a much larger scale. Thus it is not surprising that George Frederickson notes quickly and intriguingly in a footnote to his historiographical review of the scholarship of nineteenth-century American history, “The explicit use of postmodernist theory is still rare in Civil War historiography.”36 His comment subtly implies that there is an opposition between the material realities of the war—the details that engross most Civil War scholars—and theoretical entanglements with the event and its representation, which many argue diminishes the horrifying and heroic. Wars are, indeed, sobering events, and civil wars particularly so, for they reveal the self-destructive, illogical impulses inherent in national and individual bodies.
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