Rehabilitating Bodies. Lisa A. Long

and identities, producing a national morality forbidding any cavalier treatment of “the glorious dead.” Even before Abraham Lincoln consecrated the ground of warfare at Gettysburg Cemetery, the Civil War had become a sacred event. As Hayden White and other scholars have perceptively noted, there appears to be a “special class of events” that “must be viewed as manifesting only one story, as being emplottable in one way only, and as signifying one kind of meaning,”³⁷ The practice of making unimaginable slaughters such as the Civil War solely historical—merely factual—forecloses the possibility that those deaths had no definitive meaning or that meaning more generally is relative. I do not find the American Civil War any less representable than any other event in human history. However, events whose apocalyptic natures are limned by the sheer magnitude of dead and brutalized bodies are nothing to be theorized for some. In the case of the Civil War, such seemingly frivolous and ancillary explorations entail a turning away from the monumental and meticulous accounting project that has preoccupied scholars for decades, and in the breach, those facts and figures—those bodies—may slip out of our grasp. And so too will go the carefully maintained sense of stability, coherence, and knowledge built upon the foundation of the Civil War. Again, heightened patriotism is not unique to the Civil War. However, the Civil War is unique in the way in which its representations embody the tensions between simple morality and endless inquiry, between fact and fiction, between the known and the speculative that inform subsequent study of American health and history.

      The Civil War’s Bodies

      In embarking on this academic project, I find myself as subject to Civil War historicism as anyone else. However, my goal here is not necessarily to generate new knowledge about the Civil War, but rather to explore how the Civil War has become a lasting trope and to chart how that becoming is dictated by the vagaries of the human body. The three areas of interest I have delineated in this introduction do not lend themselves easily to linear arcs but are, rather, simultaneously at play in the texts I consider. Consequently, rather than mapping how one of the phenomena I have identified ended and the next began, I will explore how each of the following manifests itself in particular Civil War texts: the invisible ills that rock protagonists’ and writers’ worlds, the bodily rehabilitations that inform the production of disciplinary and cultural practices, and the incessant rewriting that seems to express the essential inexpressibility of those invisible ills.

      Arguably, these complexities make the American Civil War our most cherished cultural palimpsest; each resuscitation adds to its signifying power. Although I eschew cause-and-effect logic, I do believe that the way in which the war has been claimed and represented at particular historical moments (even as the war was still being fought) has much to say about the culture that produced the representation and about the staying power of the sectional conflict. Recent historians such as Jim Cullen notice also that the Civil War has been “rewritten (or refilmed, re-recorded, etc.) to reflect the concerns of different constituencies in U.S. society.”³⁸ Yet this process of historical revision has not been quite as arbitrary as such claims might suggest. The Civil War embodies a pliable, quintessentially American idiom of cultural disease; concurrently, it offers an imaginative space where Americans attempt to form rehabilitative strategies specific to contemporary needs.

      That the writers whose texts I have chosen to focus on are more often than not Northern in their sympathies is not the result of geographic design. Rather, it follows from the bodily rehabilitations I seek to delineate. Within the corporeal rhetoric of the national body deployed before and during the war era, Southern aggression and the way of life that had prompted it was a diseased part that needed to be cured or excised. Thus the South was figured as an infected appendage, whereas the North maintained the original national identity. As Abraham Lincoln wrote of his approach to the war, “I have sometimes used the illustration … of a man with a diseased limb, and his surgeon. So long as there is a chance of the patient’s restoration, the surgeon is solemnly bound to try to save both life and limb; but when the crisis comes, and the limb must be sacrificed as the only chance of saving the life, no honest man will hesitate.”³⁹ Thus, texts produced by Northern writers are more likely to register their disease as loss, though many Southern writers depicted their own pain at the violent dissolution of the American body politic.

      Ultimately, however, the South was restored to the North (a feat of reattachment unimaginable to doctors of the time) and by this logic the bodily integrity of the nation, though scarred, remained intact. In his renowned work on Northern intellectuals during the war, Frederickson reasons that because the North won the war, Northerners’ cultural remembrances of it, and subsequent historical events, take national precedence.⁴⁰ Yet the notion of “America” as a unified identity is always fictional, a figment of our geographical imaginations; “North” and “South” are equally vexed designations. This is not to discount the reality that regional affiliations held for individuals; after all, Southerners were willing to die to establish the idea of an autonomous South. However, even though most of the authors who appear in this book identify themselves as Unionists, the people who populate this project—and the concerns that absorb them—traverse and transcend regional boundaries, just as their bodies did.

      Similarly, the trope of the Civil War extends far beyond 1865. Though the war provides a convenient breaking point for literary and historical study of the nineteenth century, the bodily and textual diseases I identify should not be seen as transcending the times that preceded and followed them. Rather, the issues that crystallized most forcefully during the Civil War were undercurrents to nineteenth- and twentieth-century life that have come into focus at various historical moments. For example, Joan Burbick has argued cogently that as the American nation-state developed early in the nineteenth century, the “body of the individual citizen became the test case for the republic … the symbol of the very possibility of free human agency and human governance.”⁴¹ In the twentieth century, the 1929 stock market crash and subsequent deprivations of the Great Depression in the 1930s launched a renaissance of Civil War literature and scholarship, represented most notably by the craze for Gone with the Wind (1936) in both its novelistic and cinematic incarnations. This study is part of the most recent reclamation evidenced in the relatively recent popularity of texts such as Ken Burns’s PBS series The Civil War (1990) and Charles Frazier’s novel, Cold Mountain (1997). Though a comprehensive consideration of emergent postbellum representations of the war is far beyond the scope of one text, one need only recall the dead bodies strewn across the fields of Matthew Brady’s groundbreaking photographs or the artificially blackened rapist who leers out at us from D. W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation to see how the Civil War immediately insinuated itself into the fiber of modern American modes of representation.

      Although I remain grounded in war-era texts, I also aim more modestly to extend my explorations to the twentieth century. The bodily ills the Civil War expressed were most obviously troubling from 1861 to 1905, when the rehabilitative strategies that emerged were still unformed but also most vehement. Writers were especially prolific during two periods: the 1860s and a twenty-year period around the turn of the century (1885–1905). I have organized my chapters around these two periods—as distinct yet connected entities.⁴² The turn of the century also marks the senescence and deaths of the Civil War survivors who were adults during the conflict, depleting the actual bodies that marked the disturbing reality of the war. It is during this time that remaining Civil War veterans and their children returned unerringly to the Civil War. In their medical texts, fictions, histories, and memoirs, writers again and again used the trope of the Civil War to articulate their sense of the modern world taking root—a world, I contend, marked by the bodily ills, psychological drama, and civil discontent that had alternately plagued and energized Civil War America.

      Not surprisingly, the Civil War appealed to a wide variety of writers during this period. For example, the war continued to preoccupy wartime veterans such as S. Weir Mitchell and Susie King Taylor. Nonetheless, young, celebrated authors such as Stephen Crane and Paul Laurence Dunbar, who were born after the sectional conflict, also found in it a historical canvas conducive to the bodily dramas they wished to delineate. In some respects, the version of the Civil War that has occupied many twentieth-century writers and thinkers attributes the corporeal instabilities of the era to gender and racial confusion, consequently obfuscating the diversity of the Civil War of the previous century.