An Elaborate Pretense for the Major: Making Up the Face of the Postbellum Nation

An Elaborate Pretense for the Major: Making Up the Face of the Postbellum NationAuthor(s): CAROLYN HALLSource: Legacy, Vol. 22, No. 2 (2005), pp. 144-157Published by: University of Nebraska PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/25679549 .

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An Elaborate Pretense for the Major: Making Up the Face of the Postbellum Nation

CAROLYN HALL

University of Iowa

Passing as a story of romance between a dot

ing wife and her beloved war-hero husband, Constance Fenimore Woolson's novella For the

Major (1883) is also a tale of voluntary amnesia

stemming from a reluctance to face particular facts about the postbellum United States.

Though the novella speaks only sparingly of the

American Civil War, it addresses some of the scars left in its wake, particularly those involv

ing women's social position, racial passing, and a fear of the postwar new order. The novella's

Major and Madam Carroll are the figureheads of the North Carolina mountain town of Far

Edgerley, where much of Marion Carroll's time

and energy is spent helping her ailing husband

keep up appearances by hiding the effects of his

increasing dementia. While her efforts to spare the Major's feelings suggest love and devotion, the behavior simultaneously bespeaks a desire to maintain a life that is no longer true, a desire

the entire town shares and that causes the rest

of its residents, too, to take pains to maintain a

fictional vision of their lives. Through the vari ous narratives within For the Major, particu

larly those fueled by the main characters'

appearances, Woolson indicts her contempo raries for their own self-inflicted dementia as

LEGACY, VOL. 22, NO. 2, 2005, COPYRIGHT ? 2005 THE UNIVERSITY OF NEBRASKA PRESS, LINCOLN, NE

they allow the myth and romance of the past to

pass for the present.

By the time the novella appeared in print,

nearly two decades after the end of the Civil War,

conciliatory efforts between former sectional

enemies were affecting historical accounts of the

South and the war. Susan-Mary Grant asserts

that in the 1880s the war was elevated to "what

amounted to mystical status" as growing indus

trialism and immigration contributed to a ver

sion of patriotism that clamored for a return to

the nations original ideals while simultaneously

"deliberately avoid [ing] troubling questions raised by the war concerning American nation

ality and the African American or even the white

southern role in [the war]" (169,170). Respond

ing to the beginnings of such popular senti

ments, many northern publications, according to Frank Luther Mott, began endorsing or at

least incorporating sympathetic views of the

South not long after the war's end. By the late

1860s and early 1870s, Mott claims, they were

publishing attractive descriptions of the region (47-48), and by the 1880s what Gaines Foster has

called "the new journalistic homage to the

South" followed editors' instructions to "pro mote reconciliation" by "ignoring] or soft

pedal [ing] divisive issues" (69).

According to Lyndall Gordon, one such edi

tor, Joseph W. Harper, "ordered" Woolson, after



the publication of her short story "Old Gardis

ton" (1876), to refrain from writing in the future about "the subject of the war in connection with

the South" (156). Woolson responded, however,

by repressing rather than suppressing discus

sion of contemporary issues surrounding race,

gender, and postwar legacies. The case in point, For the Major, includes multiple character and

place names that resonate with the novella's

nineteenth-century readers because these appel lations recall significant names from the nation's

recent history. Through such connections to the

world outside of the novella and through the

characters' behavior within the story, Woolson's

economy of repression prompts a particularly close look at narrative strategies; it also posits a

way of understanding the postwar period. For

the Major reads as an allegory of the United States after the Civil War when it allowed recon

ciliation and so-called redemption to supplant and suppress legacies of war and Reconstruc

tion through a national tendency toward repres sion; Woolson here imitates and thus quietly indicts this national pattern.

The novella begins in 1868, three years after

Major Scarborough Carroll and his wife Mar

ion have settled with their young son Scar in the town of Far Edgerley. Though this new place sits merely six hundred feet farther up Chillawassee Mountain than the town of

Edgerley, as far as the former town is con

cerned, the distance may as well be six hundred

miles.1 The fewer-than-one thousand inhabi tants of Far Edgerley?whose very name

reflects not only their physical position but also their chosen figurative position?do not inter act with anyone from the other Edgerley, which, unlike the former, has factories, saw mills, and a stage line that eventually connects to the rail

way. In fact, Far Edgerley's residents are happy that "so far at least, the Spirit of Progress ha[s] not climbed Chillawassee Mountain" (Woolson

2). That they are grateful this progress has not come to them "so far" reveals an underlying fear that it will eventually, a feeling reflective of the

inhabitants' wish to halt time. Their lives seem

to have stopped progressing sometime before the 1860s, since for them the Crimean War,

which ended in 1856, is even "[t]oo modern" a

topic (77). The residents of Far Edgerley do not want to discuss current events, a desire in

which, as Woolson points out, they are not

alone because "[i]n 1868 there was a good deal of this polite oblivion south of the Potomac and

Cumberland" (86). As depicted by Woolson, a midwestern writer

for a New York magazine, this nostalgic south ern community's figurehead is Major Carroll. A

revered veteran Confederate soldier, the Major

belongs to a once-prominent family brought

financially low by the war. Particularly sym bolic of Far Edgerley's pretense of prewar exis tence are the Major's hair and moustache, "cut after the fashion affected by the senior officers

of the old army?the army before the war" (45), and even more so his apparent and increasing dementia. The Major can no longer concentrate

nor remember recent information long enough to read the newspaper or contemporary litera ture. He also becomes easily confused in every

day conversation, has trouble recalling names

and events, and cannot accurately measure the

passage of time. What better choice for Far

Edgerley's icon than this man who has come "to

pass the remainder of his days in ... the Past?

the only country left open to him" (23). The

Major has semiotically become the past as he

passes for a man he no longer is. He is the

townspeople's "legend, their escutcheon; so

long as they ha[ve] him they [feel] distin

guished themselves" (178). Thus, they maintain a genteel refusal to acknowledge the signs of his

failing health.

The first illustration of this community-wide preference for the illusion of wellness despite clear signs of deterioration appears in the open

ing scene. Marion greets her twenty-year-old

stepdaughter Sara, the only surviving child of the Major's previous marriage, who has just come to live in Far Edgerley after having spent

Carolyn Hall 145



the years during and immediately following the

Civil War with an uncle in the North. Before even showing Sara to her room, Madam Carroll announces that she intends to give a special

reception in honor of Saras arrival. As the two

discuss what Sara will wear, Marion explains that the dresses in Far Edgerley suffer from "a

superabundance of trimming" because the

townswomen must repeatedly make over the same old dresses for each new social occasion

(8). Though the ladies "[do] it well," they "remain conscious that [the dresses] are still the

same," especially since "the material is now

quite riddled with the old lines of needle-holes

where trimmings formerly ran" (9). In the next

chapter, Marion tells Sara another story of

deliberate inattention to the result of poor finances: Miss Dalley, another townswoman,

having lost her money in the war, now has to

dye cloth to support herself and her mother.

Consequently, she wears gloves at all times to

cover the stains on her hands, but everyone in

the town "pretend[s] not to notice" (53). The image that nothing has changed in Far

Edgerley is especially important at the Carrolls'

receptions, which recall a past of social leisure

and enough wealth to throw grand parties. The

townspeople need these gatherings because the Carrolls have become "the large figure One,

which, placed before these poor ciphers, imme

diately turns them into wealth" (13). This afflu ence and nobility of a romanticized past are

also signified through the "gentleman's car

riage" in which the Carrolls traverse the town

(3). Having belonged to another branch of the

Carroll family "in former days of opulence" (4), the carriage emits for Far Edgerley "an aroma

not actual (the actual being that of ancient

leather not unacquainted with decay), but figu rative?the aroma of an undoubted aristoc

racy" (3). Though the smell should signify for

Far Edgerley's inhabitants the decline of that

aristocracy, they have chosen to "smell" instead

what the carriage used to signify. The towns

people know perfectly well just what they have

lost in recent years, but they apparently refuse

to lose their dignity, too.

Madam Carroll herself fits in well with this

willfully regressive town. Though what the

community knows of Marion tells them that

she must be in her thirties, she actually appears to be even younger. As she eventually confesses

to her stepdaughter Sara, she assumed her

youthful facade when she met the Major over

thirteen years before the novel begins. Her first

husband, having shot another man, had taken

their young son Julian with him when he aban

doned Marion and their infant daughter Cecilia to flee the law. Believing that both he and the

boy had drowned, Marion tried for a decade to

make a life for herself and the sickly little girl (who died before Marion came to Far Edger

ley). Because she, like most women of the 1840s and 1850s, had few economic opportunities,

Marion experienced very hard times. Then she

met Major Carroll, who "saw in [her] a little

blue-eyed, golden-haired girl-mother, unac

quainted with the dark side of life" (158).

Having fallen in love with him and recognized in marriage her effective salvation, Marion

decided never to tell the Major about the cir

cumstances of her first husband's disappear ance, her subsequent hardship, or the existence of the older child. In fact, while the Major and

the rest of the inhabitants of Far Edgerley believe Marion to be no more than thirty-five, she is actually forty-eight years old. The reader discovers near the end of the novella that she has been upholding the misconceptions about

her age and experience for years by making her

self up through dress, mannerisms, hairstyle, and cosmetics.

While this revelation does not come until late

in the story, Woolson provides the reader with

many earlier clues that there is more to Marion

than her fellow Far Edgerley residents perceive. When Marion greets Sara in the first scene, the

narrator describes Sara as displaying "all the

signs of youth" (12), a depiction the narrator

uses to introduce the enigma of Marions age.

146 legacy: volume 22 no. 2, 2005



After calling Marion "the elder lady," the narra

tor poses the question, "But was she the elder?"

(9). Although on Marion "[n]o sign of age [is] visible," the narrator remarks that "an acute

observer" might notice that "[t]here [is] really

nothing of the actual woman to be seen" (9,11).

Wearing dresses with high collars, Marion

keeps the telltale neck and upper chest con

cealed; she covers her hands with sleeves that

are trimmed with lace and ruffles that extend

"almost to the knuckles" (11). Marion arranges her hair to conceal wrinkles at the corners of

her eyes by continuing to wear it in "that

demure old fashion which made of every lady's brow a modest triangle" (10). She also styles her

blond hair, which shows no sign of graying, in

long ringlets around her head and down her

back in an arrangement more appropriate to a

child of her time than to a grown woman. Mar

ion even wears a child's necklace of coral.

Further promoting the illusion of youth, the

adjective most often connected to Marion is

"little"?an equivocation because, though she

is physically small, little also suggests young. Guests at the Carroll receptions remark the

bloom in her cheeks, seeing her "unvarying

pink and white color" as indicative of youthful

vitality (156). Marion "look[s] more like a

school-girl playing at housekeeping" than a

grown woman (50), and her gown always has

"a youthful, almost childlike, aspect, yet at the same time a pretty quaintness" (9). The latter

description is attributable to the bright or

pastel-colored and generally light material of

her dresses, which are reminiscent of the senti

mental dress of the early Victorian era and a

stark contrast to the black dresses (whose color

suggests mourning, particularly in light of the

novella's setting) worn by the older women in

the town. When she dons her pale blue and

white clothing, Marion "puts Mary on," assum

ing, as Cheryl Torsney notes, the guise of the

Virgin Mary (Constance135), the ultimate inno

cent girl-mother because without original sin?and the perfect addition to a postwar

community that prefers the illusion of a prewar

vitality. Woolson's decision to depict such a postbel

lum town, one that wishes to remain arrested in a fictional antebellum moment, transcends the

representation of the simple desires to ignore the recent devastation of war and the subse

quent unpleasant reality of financial hardship. She responds, more significantly, to contempo

rary indications that, in imagining the identity of the postwar United States, many of its citi

zens?particularly its white male citizens? were selectively deleting what they saw as an

especially troubling element in the legacy of the

nation: slavery. In his analysis of the postbellum

proliferation of Civil War monuments to the common white soldier, Kirk Savage asserts that

after the war "[s]lavery constituted perhaps the

single most difficult challenge facing 'the peo

ple' as they struggled to build a democratic

memory of their collective past" (5). Conse

quently, in the years surrounding the publica tion of For the Major, according to Alice Fahs, "a new reconceptualization of the [Civil War] as primarily a military event rather than a larger social event involving entire societies both

north and south" emerged (314). During and

immediately following the war, white women

and black soldiers had been able to share in

what Fahs calls "the idea of sacrifice for the

nation," but in the 1880s "commentators and writers increasingly attached the idea of Civil

War sacrifice for the nation to white men only, thus gendering and racializing the memory of the war in a new way" (315).2 Woolson's For the

Major reflects and ultimately criticizes this

selective and deracinated recollection of Amer

ican national history. The novella's title is the first element of Wool

son's story to question whose narrative is finally told. Marion's given name is tellingly not re

vealed until more than halfway through the tale; until then she is known only as Madam Carroll.

She is by rights the novella's protagonist, but her

story and anyone else connected to it take

Carolyn Hall 147



second billing to the Major. Even if the novella's

title refers to Marion's eventual sacrifice of

reunion with her long-lost son?whom she

cannot acknowledge, even when he appears in

Far Edgerley, without revealing her true age and

past experience?the phrase still privileges the

relationship of that action to the Major. The title

suggests, therefore, that the Major's situation, rather than what Marion experiences, matters

most. Like the icon of the common white sol

dier, the Major and what his image represents for the inhabitants of postwar Far Edgerley

supersede other characters and their stories.

While commemorating the white soldier did

bespeak a wish to remember those who gave their lives for their respective causes, the prolif eration of versions of this particular commem

orative trope, almost to the exclusion of any other, also helped define the face of the postbel lum, reunited nation. As common-soldier mon

uments became the most popular image to

depict memories of the war, white women and

the freed people gradually faded from view.3

Reacting to this growing trend, Woolson

reminds readers of the non-white and non

male players involved in the dramas of the

United States, focusing first on the incongruity between the narrative told by Marion's body and the true narrative of her life. Marion's

facade of youth appears to support what Nina

Baym has called the "equation of female with

permanent child" (Woman s Fiction 17), thereby

reinforcing the selective conception of woman as dependent, yet this reading of Marion's body is inaccurate. She is ironically the one upon

whom the Major and the rest of the town are

dependent for the ultimate success of their pre tense. Torsney has noted Woolson's subversion

of the "sentimental ideals of womanhood"

(Constance 131), since Marion's power calls into

question the continuing legal dependency of

southern households on their patriarchal heads.4 As Torsney explains, "Littleness in

patriarchal terms has signaled youth, triviality, and powerlessness" (139); this little woman,

however, is the true head of her southern com

munity, making her body the site of both

oppression and resistance. Her gendered per formance is, then, a crafty parody of the senti

mental icon. The Major may be Far Edgerley's

figurehead, but without Marion's efforts, the

Major as the town desires to see him would cease to exist. Marion jumps into conversa

tions, attributing to the Major ideas he would

otherwise struggle to express, and she arranges his activities so that others can more easily avoid recognizing just how much he can no

longer do for himself. Her localized and fic

tional efforts may be generalized as actions that

undermine the notion that the nation is under

patriarchal control; her actions also remind the

reader of the crucial role women performed inside and outside the house in nineteenth

century America.

Marion's situation plays with the concept of

domestic power, as "domestic" means within the

nation as well as within the house.5 To Far

Edgerley, the made-up Madam Carroll is a

"domestic angel," precisely the phrase one of the

townsmen uses to refer to Marion (23). The

town's inhabitants rely on her to guard them

from the unwelcome truth of 1868?including the recent wartime devastation, loss of lives, and

change in locus of power?by signifying their

alternate and uncorrupted image of the present, fictive though it may be. Such a depiction of

feminine power is particularly significant in

light of the fact that certain postbellum white

male writers for the Atlantic Monthly, contem

poraries of Woolson, attributed Union victory to what Stephen Knadler has called "a macho

New England nationalism that had as its center

the hard, white body of male self-government and individualism" (84). By placing the power in

Marion's hands, then, Woolson is also rejecting the idea that the white male body is the only

body that matters in the American memory. Woolson furthers such commentary on the

difference between women's real participation in American society and their depicted or oth




erwise imagined participation by including the

names of two female writers involved in issues

of women's rights in England: L. E. L. and

Caroline Norton.6 The narrator mentions these women when referring to the Keepsakes of the

earlier nineteenth century whose illustrations of women Marion's looks recall?another inter

esting connection that links Madam Carroll to the role of protector, since the publishers of

these annuals saw themselves as moral

guardians.7 This repression also explains Wool

son's choice of The Saturday Review as the sin

gle source of Far Edgerley's news. As Martha

Vicinus has noted, the periodical was "violently anti-feminist throughout the [nineteenth]

century" (xii). Thus, Woolson highlights the

limited options for women, especially older

women, should they not succeed in their

nineteenth-century middle- and upper-class societal roles as wives and mothers. Even in the

novella's final scene, what could be seen as sim

ply a tender moment between Scarborough Carroll and his wife is also a necessity for Mar

ion. Since her first husband was not yet dead (as she had thought him to be) when she married

Major Carroll, she must now (re-)marry the

Major in order to give their son Scar and herself

legal claim to the Carroll name and estate.8

Woolson's criticism of post-Reconstruction

society is not limited to its treatment of women.

Written for a largely northern buying public, For the Major also responds to the growing popu

larity of neoplantation fiction that presented a

romanticized vision of the past and its institu

tions, one that selectively omitted racial prob lems?a reflection of a kind of blindness toward

increasing racial tensions, particularly in the

South as it emerged from Reconstruction. The

years surrounding the publication of For the

Major were rife with events that eroded the gains for African Americans since emancipation.

Through the Fifteenth Amendment, black men won the right to vote by law, but they were

already on the road to losing the right in prac tice by the time For the Major appeared. With

events like the compromise of Hayes's election as President and the Supreme Court's finding unconstitutional the 1875 Civil Rights Act, the

mid-i870s into the 1880s saw the focus of federal

involvement shift away from blacks in the

South. Though only Georgia and Mississippi

severely restricted African American voting in

the 1880 election, and black men voted in large numbers elsewhere, other states began punish

ing blacks for voting Republican. Such actions,

along with racially discriminatory policies like the black codes, indicated that Jim Crow was on

its way. In her travels Woolson would have wit

nessed firsthand the early days of this "redemp tion" of the "reconstructed" South.9

The nationwide return to a kind of "busi ness as usual" rendered precarious the gains

achieved by African Americans during Recon

struction. In such an atmosphere, racial passing was one way for an American of mixed race to

achieve a greater measure of security. With For

the Major, Woolson builds on the shared

rhetoric of antebellum feminist and abolition

ist literature. Recognizable by a female and/or black body, the nineteenth-century sexual or

racial other faced multiple similar circum

stances, not the least of which was the fight for

control of the body itself. In this bodily arena, Frantz Fanon asserts, miscegenation (an issue that is central to For the Major, as will be dis

cussed below) plays with what he calls the "epi dermal schema" of race (112). By hiding signs of age and playing up signs of youth, Marion has similarly altered her epidermal schema.

Through her pretense, she takes control of her own body and thereby gains her own much needed security. Should she reveal the truth

about her past to the Major, who takes obvious

pleasure in his perceived notion of her identity, Marion would risk losing her family, her home, and even her life, since she had found surviving on her own to be nearly impossible. Thus, in

addition to her self-proclaimed motive of love for the Major?a feeling the reader never finds real cause to doubt, maintaining Marion as an

Carolyn Hall 149



ever-sympathetic character?Marion adopts the patriarchal view of herself, becoming the

"girl-mother" Far Edgerley and the Major desire, for the economic and emotional benefits

afforded her by doing so.

Woolson's introduction of a "dark" body into

the very white community of Far Edgerley

aligns racial passing with Marion's passing as a

younger woman. As Nina Silber asserts, many

postbellum northerners eventually portrayed black Americans as "strangers and foreigners" (6). To Far Edgerley's inhabitants, Louis Du

pont is just such "a foreigner" (149). Actually Marion's long-lost son Julian, Dupont has come to the town ostensibly by chance but in

actuality to reunite with the mother he has

finally tracked down. Just as Marion has be

lieved Julian and his father to be long dead, so

Julian has believed Marion deceased until, after

his father's death, he finds evidence to the con

trary. His presence does suggest the inevitability of having to face the foreign in the rapidly

changing nation, but it more significantly asserts the undeniable physical existence of the

shared history and heritage of black and white

Americans. (Indeed, even Julian's chosen appel lation Dupont, which in French means "of the

bridge" or "from the bridge," suggests a con

nection of lives.) Since the passing body signi fies an identity that remains unspoken yet nonetheless existent, this stranger passing as

Dupont imbues his mother's passing with a

racialized significance.

Although most of Far Edgerley's inhabitants never learn of Dupont's true identity?he, too,

keeps his mother's secrets?they do know that he

hails from the West Indies, specifically Mar

tinique, a place Far Edgerley's residents describe as "principally inhabited by blacks" (149).10

While Woolson does not explicitly identify

Dupont's racial makeup, she does allude to it.

One of the lessons the Major teaches to his and

Marion's son, little Scar, involves spelling out the sentence "Good?blood?can?not?lie" (42)

?and how would blood lie if not by passing?

Dupont, with "his thin, brown face" (107), sings of Indian women and African slaves: "[H]e sat

there singing, with his large, bold dark eyes rov

ing about the room ... his slender dark fingers

touching the strings" (98). This description oper ates as a metonymy for the unelucidated racial

makeup, or at least irreducible otherness, of this

"foreign" body in the midst of Far Edgerley's domestic space. Frederick Owen, the town's rec

tor, believes Dupont to be "contaminating]" Far

Edgerley's "sweet, old-fashioned simplicity with

his dubious beauty, his dangerous character, and

his enchanting voice" (105), and both Sara and

Owen at first hold a "prejudice" against this man

of "unknown antecedents" (98).11 Sara considers

Dupont to be "a living impertinence" (98), re

flecting, along with Owen's comments about

Dupont's "knowledge of a different hue" (112), the supposedly scientific view of that time that

mixed blood was not so healthy as pure blood, that it was possible to taint the "purity" of the

"superior" white race. Early in the story, blood is

suggested, as well, by the garish red that Dupont wears: the ribbon on his guitar, his silk stockings with pocket handkerchief to match, the lining of

his umbrella, even the flower in his lapel. Since little Scar's features are described as "a

curious mixture of her delicate rose-tinted

prettiness and the bold outlines of [the Major]" (136-37), Dupont's dark features must be a

combination of Marion's fair complexion and his father's much darker coloring; in fact, Mar

ion remarks how much Dupont looks like his

father (192). Marion's unspoken past, then, is a

"dark" story that involves a suspect relationship because its racial makeup is left ambiguous.12 Woolson's choice to keep Dupont's ancestry a

mystery is particularly noteworthy in the con

text of the 1880s. In the burgeoning Jim Crow

environment of the later nineteenth century, a

character of unclear racial makeup reminds

readers of the unreliability of the visual cues on

which the hierarchy of a racially segregated

society depends. As Dupont and Marion illus

trate, accurately "reading" the body is not




always possible, a fact that undermined the

post-Reconstruction social hierarchy that priv

ileged the white soldier. The appearance of such an obscure character in the otherwise suppos

edly "whites only" world of Far Edgerley is thus

highly significant.

Furthering a racial subtext, the last name in

Julian's pseudonym may have led postbellum readers to recall a contemporary of Woolson's.

On November 7, 1861, Commodore Samuel

Francis Dupont sailed a fleet of Union ships into Port Royal Sound off the coast of South

Carolina, and within a day federal troops occu

pied the Sea Islands.13 When nearly all of the

white planters and settlers fled with a few of

their house slaves, they left behind most of their

property, including the rest of their slaves. Thus

began an experiment with liberation, ironically in a part of South Carolina previously domi

nated by some of the wealthiest and fiercest

defenders of slavery and secession. By the

spring of 1862, missionaries and other anti

slavery activists arrived to help these former

slaves and, in time, the many others who fled to

the islands later in the war. Although some of

the whites who eventually relocated to or oth

erwise became involved in the activity on the

Sea Islands did so for profit and were conse

quently relatively unconcerned with the fate of

the local black population, the islands became

what C. Vann Woodward has called a "proving ground for the freedmen" (xvi). Woolson's hav

ing Julian select for his alias the name Duponty therefore, would clearly resonate with a reader

ship that was not yet even one generation away from the Civil War.

While the reader is never explicitly told how

the Major's Carroll relatives earned their for mer wealth, their current home amid the "waste of old cotton fields" on one of the Sea Islands is

nonetheless significant (4): it recalls the loca

tion's association with slavery, secession, and what Willie Lee Rose has called a "Rehearsal for

Reconstruction." Following the war, many observers of industry on the islands repeatedly

cited the progress of the former slaves. One par

ticularly successful Port Royal plantation run

solely by blacks was, incidentally, named

Edgerly. Bought collectively in 1863 by the

African Americans who lived on the land,

Edgerly was made a success without any white assistance or intervention. Knowledge of this success was available to Woolson and her read ers because details about the plantation

appeared in a letter collection published in 1863 and in a testimony to its success published in

1866.14 Additionally suggestive of a subtext in For the Major involving freed people and the Sea Islands are the only church in Far Edgerley, St. John's, and Senator Ashley, the towns junior warden: their names recall the geographic boundaries of General Shermans Special Order

15, which designated the Sea Islands and the

strip of land (running thirty miles inland) between the Ashley and the St. John Rivers as

available to be divided into forty-acre parcels of land on which freed people could begin to sup

port themselves. Even Marion's former married name of Morris directs the reader's attention to this Sea Island subtext: the northernmost

island, located near where the Ashley River flows into the Atlantic, is called Morris Island.

Such allusions to areas identifiably associ

ated with slavery and emancipation suggest the

importance of geography to the novella's larger interpretation. Consequently, Far Edgerley's location in North Carolina invokes the complex loyalties that divided the residents of a state

perhaps never unequivocally Southern. Hesi tant to secede, North Carolina had more eco

nomic ties to northern industry than to the

Deep South, and the majority of voters in the i860 election cast their ballots for Unionist can

didates. The members of the state's general assembly were eighty-five percent slaveholders,

however, and the state eventually threw staunch

support behind the Confederacy. In fact, North Carolina "furnished far more than its share of

soldiers and disproportionate amounts of

money, food, equipment, and other needed

Carolyn Hall 151



commodities" (Escott 35).15 North Carolinians

who did not see battle themselves were affected

by incidents of violence on the local front from

raiders, deserters, and individual criminals.

Understandably, Paul D. Escott explains, North

Carolinians also "led the South in desertions

and signs of disaffection"; many, including the

governor, eventually advocated negotiations with Lincoln in an effort for peace (36). In spite of its reticence, then, Woolson's Far Edgerley could not have escaped the complicated power

struggles and tragic losses of the Civil War.

More specifically for Woolson's mountain set

ting, the western part of North Carolina was

neither the location of the large plantations nor

the seat of the state's greatest political power. Slaveholders in this region were mainly profes sional men who often farmed in addition to

their chosen careers.16 The relationship be

tween blacks and whites was also more relaxed

in the western region than in the rest of the

state, with slaves enjoying greater indepen dence and rarely being sold out of the area or

away from family members. In fact, the region in the 1850s still supported manumission when

it had become tantamount to sedition in the

eastern part of the state and much of the rest of

the South. Woolson's selection of this region in which

slavery was a less prevalent and, where it did

exist, a more lenient institution than elsewhere in the South bears significance in light of many

white Americans' postbellum "whitewashing" of their slave past. Far Edgerley's location in

postwar western North Carolina allows this

southern town to be an all-white community, but, although the stereotype of the region as

independent and cut off from modernization

agrees with the community's desires, its isolated

image was actually as much contrived as Far

Edgerley's view of its Major and of Marion's

facade of youth. In fact, according to Stephen Wallace Taylor, people dwelling in western

North Carolina following the Civil War gained a local reputation for "a living, creative, adap

tive culture" because the region offered little

opportunity simply to "live at home and get by" (12-13). Having traveled throughout this sec

tion of the country herself, Woolson would

have been well aware of the popular conflation

of the areas few true hermits and isolated ham

lets with the many towns no more isolated than

similar regions throughout the rest of the

South. Her portrayal of a community with aspi rations to remain arrested in time in the

depressed economy that lasted for years after

the war is, therefore, an ironic commentary on

the greater nation's similarly illusory attempts to rewind the clock of social progress and to

achieve national reconciliation without settling all the issues of the Civil Wars legacy.

The selective memory of the postbellum nation at large is echoed in the arrested life of

Far Edgerley, where no one talks of race, nor of

the source of the previous Carroll fortune, nor

of how it was lost. Such deliberately partial rec

ollection is what fueled the creation of the myth of the "Lost Cause," which, according to Alan T.

Nolan, "originated in Southern rationalizations of the war" before it "spread to the North and

became a national phenomenon." It was "sub

stituted [by many whites] for the history of the

war," becoming for many the account, accepted regardless of inaccuracies and blindness to some

very disturbing elements (12).17 While during the war Confederate culture unabashedly included slavery and its various defenses, the

postbellum South wanted to commemorate the

identity of the Confederacy and its heritage without recalling the now-embarrassing insti

tution that had so strongly influenced secession.

Since the North, too, possessed a similarly uncomfortable history that included the para doxical combination of the celebration of free

dom and the perpetuation and expanse of slav

ery, both sides of the Mason-Dixon line

eventually saw a postwar emergence of tenden

cies toward selective memory.

Reflecting such discretionary tendencies, Far

Edgerley chooses to see the Major as a kind of




monument to the gallant white soldier: arrested

in time, representative of admirable traits like

self-sacrifice and loyalty, and, with no mention

of how his family made its money on the Sea

Islands, void of what the community wants to

forget. When his mind is finally gone, the

inhabitants of Far Edgerley reminisce:

They went over all the history of his life:... his

high position and many friends in the old

army; his brilliant record in the later army,

their own army, vanquished, but still dear to

them, the army of the South; they told again the

story of his gallant ride round the enemy's forces in the Valley, of his charge up the hill at

Fredericksburg, his last brave defence of the

bridge on the way to Appomattox. .. . such a

devoted husband and father, so pure a patriot!

(182-83)

Recalling U.S. General Phillip Sheridan's "gal lant ride" in the Shenandoah Valley, U.S.

General George Meade's assault on Prospect Hill at Fredericksburg, and U.S. Brigadier Gen

eral Francis Barlow's rescue (from Confederate

flames) of High Bridge over the Appomattox River, this celebration of the gallant soldier

could appear on either side of the Mason

Dixon line with but a few changes regarding

allegiance.

Dupont, therefore, is an important counter

to this image. Like the Major, he is self

sacrificing and loyal: he keeps his mother's secret for her sake and never demands a part of her new life. He is not, however, a relic, and he

brings with his own body a reminder of the

racially mixed national face and indeterminate

racial heritage. Dupont consequently becomes a kind of symbolic reminder that, however iso

lated or selectively nostalgic some white Amer

icans wanted to be, the American "face" was

evolving. After slavery was abolished, black

bodies still existed. Emancipation and the war's end had terminated bondage, not blackness. As

memory?represented by monuments to war

in stone and on paper?gradually erased black

Americans or remembered them solely in

happy servitude, this narrative reminds its

reader that the blackness was still there. A battle along gender or color lines?like the

Civil War?is a domestic battle and, as Nancy Cott notes, both slavery and marriage were con

sidered by the law to be domestic relations. The

parallel between white women and people of color involved seeing similarities in "domina

tion and subordination?or more favorably, of

protection and dependence?based on assump

tions about inequalities between the parties involved" (63). Postbellum attempts to erase

black men (and women) and white women

from memories of the war paralleled attitudes that wished to bar blacks and white women

from postwar arenas of power. Since Marion

and Dupont are outside the traditional realm of

power?one is white but not male; the other, male but not white?their different types of

passing suggest a challenge to that positioning of power within the domestic space. In both cases the traditional familial head, the white

male, is no longer master. Emancipation had

threatened the white mans established hierar

chy; granting the vote carried out that threat.

Therein lay the "danger" of empowering women

in the same way. Marion's mastery over her own

body in this story inevitably echoes the black man's and woman's achievement, through the

abolition of slavery, of mastery over theirs. This apparent bodily control, however,

obscures the danger inherent in a refusal to

acknowledge a part of oneself. Just before he

dies, Dupont "passe[s] beyond the power of

speech" (144); like the rest of Far Edgerley, he is in a place where the truth is never spoken. Even

though Marion does not speak the truth about her past and even believes part of it to be long dead, it shows up anyway. While she is happy to see her son, who is a part of her, she is also anx

ious because his existence could upset her rather precarious situation. Marion is using her

makeup in part to mask a past that would jeop ardize her current pretense, so she does not

Carolyn Hall 153



publicly acknowledge it, which means she can

not welcome Dupont into her home. Since

mixed-race Americans are physical evidence of

black and white Americans' shared history, attempts to "erase" the blackness through liter

ature and law result in losing part of oneself, as

happens with Marion. To support his mother's

facade, Dupont moves on, succumbing to

whatever illness eventually kills him. Marion's

refusal to claim kinship, then, leads indirectly to

his death, a turn of events that suggests that

people of mixed blood in the United States

must somehow disappear from view in order

for the nation to maintain its selectively con

structed version of identity. Far from advocating such erasure, Woolson

describes in detail the pain this loss causes her

heroine. Just before Marion's "whole frame [is] shaken by her grief" over Julian's recent demise, she "stroke[s]... his dark hair" and quietly tells

his still body, "You meant no harm; none of it was your fault, Julian" (146). In the overt con

text of the story, some of these words have no

clear antecedents. In the context of a commen

tary on practices regarding racial others, how

ever, they poignantly place blame for such

painful loss on those white Americans who

would cause such a person of ambiguous racial

makeup to pass (in one way or another) out of

existence. In her discussion of Mark Twain's

Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Christine Mac

Leod cites "the essential complacency of post

Emancipation white America which . . . had

salved its collective conscience by 'freeing' its

slaves, but had no conception of or commit

ment to the sociology of freedom" as a strong motive for the author who remembers all too

well the rhetoric and expectations of emanci

pation and Reconstruction (9). Woolson wrote

For the Major for just such a postwar world

where leaders of the old South again wielded

power, reproducing the prejudiced system of

slavery in the guise of segregation and other

discriminatory practices like the black codes, while many white northerners turned a blind

eye. Since Marion is only a facsimile of the

innocent girl-mother, her passing, along with

the Major's and Dupont's, suggests that the

supposed "real thing" is what does not exist?

like the image of pure white, male American

identity. Such a narrowly defined conception of

Americans cannot exist on an ideological or

iconic scale. Rather, the various individual

members of American society, regardless of

one's chosen blinders, find a way to be recog nized.

Such recognition is the object of For the

Major's final scene. Major Scarborough Car

roll's eyesight, as well as most of his mind, is now gone. Years of voluntary blinders have cul

minated in actual blindness, and evidence of

the changing postbellum world has become

completely visible in his body?a scar that is now impossible to ignore. Moreover, his cloudy

eyes are upon his young son, the novella's other

Scar, thereby recalling the reader's attention to

the boy who "does not grow" (6). Scar is a "frail"

boy whose hair is described as "a halo" and who

is seen at one point in the story "sitting on a lit

tle tombstone in the sunshine" (40, 136)?

descriptions that indicate he may not be long for this world. He is the product of this union

between two illusions: a figure of the past and a

figure of perpetual innocence. Such manifesta

tions of self-imposed dementia have created an

heir who cannot live in the modern world.

Named after his father, a man whose body liter

ally bears the scars of the Civil War, little Scar

cannot thrive because his parents conceal the

true face of the world he inevitably must

inhabit.

What, then, is to become of people like these

in Far Edgerley who apparently choose stag

nancy and repression over growth and prog ress? While many of the town's residents exhibit

what Silber has called "Civil War amnesia" (4), two characters seem by the novella's end to

stand squarely in the present with eyes wide

open. Sara Carroll, a southern woman origi

nally, brings to Far Edgerley a considerably




more worldly view because she has spent nearly half of her life?more important, her most

grown-up years?in the North. She has a foot

in both sections of the postwar nation, enabling her to envision better than any of her Far Edger

ley neighbors a Reconstruction beyond their

immediate borders. Sara will likely marry Fred

erick Owen, the other character looking clearly forward, who, with her, no longer resents

Dupont by the end of the novella; they both

have accepted him because of his kinship to

Marion. Dupont is a part of the family, a rela

tionship that recalls the use in other novels?

like Rebecca Harding Davis's Waiting for the

Verdict and Lydia Maria Child's A Romance of the Republic?of miscegenation to incorporate black Americans into an image of national fam

ily. Furthermore, Sara and Owen's complicity in

the deathbed marriage ceremony between Mar

ion and the Major indicates their willingness to

accept the true nature of the past, a choice that, in combination with the final scene's occur

rence on Easter Sunday, suggests real possibil

ity. The novella, therefore, concludes with the

Major's declaration: "Yes, certainly I remember; little Scar" (208). His words direct the charac

ters' and reader's eyes to rest finally on Scar, sug

gesting that the time has come in the greater nation to drop all pretense and subsequently

recognize what the makeup of genteelly averted

eyes or selectively constructed identity has been

concealing. In this way, the nation could ack

nowledge its true face and consequently achieve

real reconstruction.

NOTES

1. Far Edgerley's location has long been believed to

be in the mountains of western North Carolina. The

description of the town, particularly in relation to the

railroad (as far west as it had come in 1868) and the

state capital, supports this assumption (Woolson

1-2). Black Mountain, one place named in the

novella, is a little west of Asheville, which Woolson

visited on her travels through the South. Many of the

other mountains and towns specifically named in the

novella are fictional locations, but they echo real sites.

"Chillawassee," for example, resembles Lake Hiwassee

in far western North Carolina and Chilhowee Moun

tain a little north thereof in eastern Tennessee.

2. See also Silber, particularly "Minstrels and

Mountaineers: The Whitewashed Road to Reunion,"

124-58.

3. For discussion of other post-Reconstruction

instances of public inattention to women and Amer

icans of color, see Foner 564-68.

4. See also Weir. For a more general discussion of

southern patriarchy, see Bardaglio 129-36.

5. Kaplan discusses these two different meanings of "domestic" and how they serve to illustrate the

permeability of the border between men's and

women's "separate spheres," particularly when deal

ing with the "foreign" body (184). Such a "foreign" element shows up in Far Edgerley in the form of

Louis Dupont, who is discussed in the second half of

this essay. For an explanation of the limitations of the

metaphor of separate spheres, see Davidson and

Hatcher, Introduction.

6. Letitia Elizabeth Landon (L. E. L.), one of the

first women writers to achieve financial indepen

dence, always punished her subservient female char

acters with negative consequences. Caroline Norton,

whose abusive, shiftless husband tried to keep her

from seeing their children, wrote several pamphlets

campaigning for women's right to the custody of

their own children, a goal achieved in Great Britain's Infant Custody Bill of 1839. After their divorce, Nor

ton's ex-husband went after her money, prompting

her to campaign to protect the property of divorced

or separated women; many of the rights she champi

oned were included in the Matrimonial Cause Bill

(1857) and the Married Woman's Property Bill (1870). 7. Keepsakes were annual publications printed on

high-class paper in an ornamental binding and

aimed primarily at middle-class women. Intended as

gift books, they included stories, poetry, and illustra

tions, often by well-known contemporary writers

and artists.

8. In a review of For the Major that appeared in the

August 9, 1883, issue of the Nation (reprinted in

Carolyn Hall 155



Torsney, Critical Essays), an anonymous reviewer

criticized Woolson for the novella's closing chapter.

The reviewer argues that the couple need not marry

again because Marion had truly believed herself to be a widow when she first married the Major and

because "no law of man would be satisfied by a cler

gyman's blessing given in a bed-chamber without

certificate and without witnesses" (39). The reviewer

may have underestimated the civic significance of

marriage as a source of social stability. Peter W.

Bardaglio discusses at length the ever-growing state

involvement in marriages as the institution increas

ingly came to represent an extension of society itself,

one rooted in law and supportive of "proper" moral

conduct.

9. For further discussion of the erosion of black civil rights in the post-Reconstruction South, see

Ayers 146-59, as well as Cohen's chapter 8, entitled

"Reinventing the Black Codes," which discusses how

what ended in Jim Crow during the 1890s really

began during Reconstruction. See also Bardaglio 37-78 and 214-28, for a discussion of how fairness to

blacks in southern courts was actually greater before

the war than after Reconstruction.

10. In spite of the rhetoric regarding freedom and

equality that pervaded France following the French

Revolution of 1789, the French colonies in the

Caribbean continued to practice slavery. Martinique

eventually abolished the institution in May 1848, fol

lowing slave revolts.

11. To Owen, Dupont perhaps also suggests cor

ruption, as one who comes from far more progres

sive?yet unknown?American locales, a kind of

confidence man, since his true lineage and business

in Far Edgerley never become public knowledge. Dupont might also represent the modernization of

the South that, according to Baym, was to some

southerners "the 'Northernization' of the South" and

thus was resisted (Feminism 195). 12. Several other clues suggest, without confirm

ing, Marion's involvement in an interracial relation

ship. She explains that she hails from the Southwest, where race mixing was always more common and

less prejudicial. Marion also explains that she was

once Baptist, the importance of which appears in the

date her first husband leaves her: 1844. That is the

year the Baptist church in the United States split over

the issue of slavery.

13. For a detailed account of what happened on the

Sea Islands during the war, see Rose and Schwalm.

Commodore Dupont was eventually relieved of his

command on July 6, the date Woolson gives for Louis

Dupont's arrival in Far Edgerley.

14. For further discussion of Edgerly, see A. B.

Plimpton's letter of August 8,1863, in Fourth Series of Extracts from Letters (Boston, 1863): 6; and the Penn

sylvania Freedmeris Bulletin and American Freed

many I (June 1866): 7-8.

15. In the end, as Barrett notes, "19,673 North Car

olina soldiers were killed in battle," a number

amounting to "more than one-fourth of all the Con

federate battle deaths and, moreover, 20,602 died of

disease. This total loss of 40,275 was greater than any

other Southern state" (29).

16. According to the i860 federal census, slaves

comprised less than fifteen percent of the population in all but three of the fifteen mountainous counties

in western-most North Carolina, and in ten of them,

less than ten percent. See Lefler and Newsome

447-48. These numbers and the following regional details are taken from Inscoe 59-114. For further

information about this region, see also Inscoe and

McKinney and Taylor.

17. For a thorough discussion of Lost Cause think

ing, see Gallagher and Nolan and Foster. For what

could be seen as the precursor to Lost Cause think

ing, see Faust.

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