Chapter 1 begins with one man’s vexed efforts to establish authority through the Civil War. S. Weir Mitchell has become a pivotal figure in this study because his oeuvre so clearly illustrates the amorphous interstices that emerged as he attempted to firmly fix individual and professional meanings in rehabilitated bodies. A Civil War surgeon and later a famous neurologist, Mitchell was also a prolific novelist and poet consistently attentive to diseases that straddled physical and psychological realms—precisely the territory my project maps. Mitchell’s medical texts theorize the concept of Civil War “nerve injury”—a diagnosis that linked a variety of physical and emotional ills that defied organic detection. Mitchell saw such ailments as indivisible from the Civil War; as he wrote in his 1885 novel about the national crisis, In War Time, “What is true of disease, is true of war.”43 The Civil War remained an abiding area of literary and medical interest for Mitchell, providing the historical foundation and psychological tension for his fiction during the 1860s and again in the 1880s and 1890s. Its nerve-injured victims launched his medical career as the “rest cure” doctor and remained the subject of follow-up studies decades after the war. Finally, it was the persistence of “malingering”—the notion that patients might feign their invisible ills and that doctors may not be able to tell the difference—that challenged Mitchell’s faith in the coherence and stability of the body and in the scientific basis of his professional identity. At heart, Mitchell’s texts contend with his inability to know the ways of others’ diseases, and serve as the lens through which later chapters should be read.
Caused by a gunshot wound or an emotional blow, nerve injury was a pathological condition with outward causes but primarily interior consequences. Elizabeth Stuart Phelps’s best-seller, The Gates Ajar (1868), served a rehabilitative function for Americans dangerously debilitated by such war-time diseases. The alarming magnitude of illness, mutilation, and death sustained by the American citizenry during the war and the physical and psychological deprivations required even of those who did not serve on the front lines were partly responsible for the body consciousness ushered in during the war. Phelps’s novel works in tandem with Mitchell’s short story “The Case of George Dedlow,” demonstrating how Civil War survivors made sense of living bodies literally and figuratively decimated by the war. Phelps’s corporeal heaven promises the reconstitution of families and of selves dismembered by the carnage of war through the rehabilitation of mutilated, dead bodies. Such a solution acknowledges the surreality of earthly existence and the insufficiency of available rehabilitations by deferring stable embodiment to the afterlife.
Phelps’s heaven not only repairs bodies but also restores the personal idiosyncrasies of the dead. Thus her work marks the coalescence of a corporate-historical culture that required the repression of individual biases, attachments, and passions—the topic of Chapter 3. The powerful United States Sanitary Commission (USSC) was a government-sanctioned, philanthropic organization dedicated to monitoring and improving the public health of the army. In practice it wielded sanitary science, which posited that self-discipline—enforced by military law—would ensure the continued production of sound “material,” that is, soldiers for the army machine. Unsanitary disease was also described by the USSC as “soul-sickness,” or an illicit, pathological display of self. As Joel Pfister claims in his work on anthropologists and psychologists of emotional life, “Social regulations of self (which promote the idea of self as naturally in need of regulation) are social fabrications of self.”44 The Civil War is a critical moment during which this inveterate notion of American selfhood emerged. De Forest’s Miss Ravenel’s Conversion from Secession to Loyalty (1867) dramatizes the costs of this brand of self-surveillance, along with the sanitized citizen soldiers—what one USSC operative labels “unconscious missionaries”—the war produced. Rebecca Harding Davis’s novel of romance and war, Waiting for Verdict (1867), similarly charts the self-surveillance required of American citizens. Although many critics argue that romance plots such as those featured in De Forest’s and Davis’s fiction are ancillary to matters of war, I contend that they firmly focus our attentions on individual desire, self-formation, and sacrifice, those issues central to the rhetoric of soldiering. Finally, Davis’s extended treatment of African American characters—one, a nerve doctor practicing in Mitchell’s native Philadelphia—converges with the USSC’s postwar belief in the impossibility of ever curing the presumably unsanitary taint inherent in the bloodlines of the national family.
At the same time, ontological uncertainty and the perception of bodies in flux unmoored the physical bases of difference that were used to justify racism and sexism, or at least diverted national attention from them. Civil War texts portray not only the thousands of white soldiers who sustained life-altering injuries and the grief-stricken who survived them, but also African Americans who were property one day, citizens and soldiers the next, and single women whose severely circumscribed lives now extended to military hospitals and battlefields. These radical experiences convinced many of the possibility of future change. As social constructs that are always reliant upon embodied discourse—located, according to Robyn Wiegman, in a “pre-cultural realm where corporeal significations supposedly speak a truth which the body inherently means”—the strictures of gender and race were loosened by the prevalence of nerve injury, grief, and unsanitary disease, which compromised the stability of corporeal foundations.45 The preoccupation with essential, psychological matters produced a leveling effect that not only forced Americans to examine how they felt but also allowed many to explore cultural roles from which they were prohibited during the antebellum era.
For example, Civil War service was perceived by many whites and African Americans as the antidote to African Americans’ cultural disease—the presumed inferiority that marked and incapacitated the race. In Chapter 4 I turn to the diaries of Charlotte Forten and the newspaper correspondence of James Henry Gooding, two free African Americans who served the Union during the Civil War. Gooding embraced his service in the famous 54th Massachusetts Negro regiment, while Forten eagerly became a teacher in the South Carolina Sea Islands experiment. Both wrote at the pivotal moment of emancipation, when those who were considered constitutionally deficient legally became whole personages. As Americans adjusted to the transformation of African American bodies from capital to laborers in pursuit of capital, Forten and Gooding register their physical and mental well-being in economic terms. In both texts, racist commonplaces inform the meaning of Civil War rehabilitation. Gooding and Forten write that African Americans suffered the same injuries and losses as their white counterparts. However, they seldom dwell on the individual sufferings caused by the war, instead exploring the psychological wounds of racism as they were magnified by war service. White Civil War writers began with the premise of their racial integrity—a myth subsequently disproved by their experiences in the war. However, African American writers of the era related quite differently to dominant discourses of corporeality and disease. Civil War wounds could thus become the means of rehabilitation for Gooding’s regiment; in agitating for the same clothing, weapons, pay, and battlefield experiences as white troops, African American soldiers worked for the habiliments and injuries that would signal their “manhood” to the nation. In Forten’s case, her dangerous Civil War service initially ameliorates her persistent illnesses, which express her racial hurts and financial worries. Yet Gooding and Forten realized that the complicated web of biological and social sciences emerging at the moment of emancipation worked to reinscribe Civil War illnesses and deaths in familiar racist paradigms. African American Civil War service placed new emphasis on the meanings of African American corporeality, for Civil War-inflected wounds allowed for both discursive and political rehabilitation and for insistent belief in the disabilities of the race.
In particular, the