Homeland Security - Writing the American Civil War

8/6/2019 Homeland Security - Writing the American Civil War

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Review: Homeland Security: Writing the American Civil WarAuthor(s): Elizabeth DuquetteSource: The Southern Literary Journal, Vol. 35, No. 1, Nineteenth Century Southern Writers(Fall, 2002), pp. 160-163Published by: University of North Carolina PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20078356 .

Accessed: 28/04/2011 22:53

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Homeland Security: Writingthe American CivilWarbyElizabeth Duquette

Disarming theNation: Women's Writing and theAmericanCivil War. By EHzabeth Young. Chicago: U ofChicago P, 1999. xvi +389 pp. $47.00.The Political Work ofNorthern Women Writers and theCivil War, 18JO-18/2. By Lyde CuUen Sizer. ChapelHill: U of North CaroHna P, 2000. 368 pp. $45.00.

Scholarship on Uterature of the American Civ? War has traditionaUy begun in the same place?with Walt Whitman. In SpecimenDays,Whitman claimed that "the realwar w?l never get in the books" and thispronouncement has seemed prophetic to themany critics who have subsequently deplored the absence of "good" writing about the war. Edmund W?son, in his monumental study Patriotic Gore, complains that theAmerican Civ? War can be said to have produced "a remarkable Uterature" only if one iswilHng to include "speeches and pamphlets, privateletters and diaries, personal memoirs and journaUstic reports." Locatinghis own experience within the context of two world wars and the tensionsof an uneasy nuclear peace, W?son is openly dismissive of most Uteraturewritten during times of conflict: "The unanimity of men atwar is Uke thatof a school of fish, which wiU swerve, simultaneously and apparentlywithout leadership, when the shadow of an enemy appears." Even wh?ehe tries to chaUenge W?son's contention by demonstrating the extent towhich the war "touched" and "engaged" writers of the time, DanielAaron nonetheless regretfuUy agrees in The Unwritten War that the Civ?War produced a "paucity of 'epics' and 'masterpieces.' "

Recently, however, Uterary scholars and historians have begun to interrogate the critical priorities Whitman's assertion has been used to justify.What is "the realwar," they have asked, and why is itnot representable? Is

? 2002 by the Southern Literary journal'and the University of North Carolina atChapel HiU Department of EngUsh. AU rights reserved.

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pubHc opinion as monoHthic as Wilson's reference to "men at war" suggests? In the past decade, scholars UkeNina S?ber, Kathleen Diffley andAnne Rose have used similar questions to chaUenge the standard interpretation of the Civ? War as a conflict between heroic white men. Two recent books on women's writing during the war materiaUy contribute tothis important work of redefinition. The contention shared by EHzabethYoung and Lyde CuUen Sizer is that far from being unwritten, the CivilWar was enormously narrated although the authors and texts have beensignificantly overlooked. Wars, they concur, dramatize the ways inwhichsocieties understand sexual difference and, as such, provide an exceUentopportunity for change, chaUenge and re-interpretation of traditionalgender roles, an opportunity women writers seized during the Civ? War.Indeed, accepting the assumption that war is primarily the business ofmen on the field of battle, they maintain, has prevented scholars from appreciating the ways inwomen, children and African Americans were included in the contemporary narration of the Civ? War, and subsequentlyexcluded from itsmemory.

Looking to popular writing from 1861 to 1865, it becomes clear that thehome front was considered to be critical for both Confederate and Unionpartisans. Once this basic fact is estabUshed ahost of questions arises:Whatwere the most effective ways of convincing women to encourage theirhusbands, sons and lovers to enHst in the army? How, as the death toUsmounted, could they to be adequately consoled for their personal losseswhile remaining committed to national goals? And, perhaps most importantly for theworks examined here, what active contributions could womenmake to the war effort? According to popular legend, Abraham Lincolnjokingly located the cause of the conflict with Harriet Beecher Stowe, asking, "Is this the Uttlewoman who made this great war?" Was itpossible forother women to wield sim?ar influence? If women worked outside thehome, spurred by either financial necessity or patriotic zeal, was such behavior, entirely improper according to antebeUum norms, appropriate totimes of national crisis? At the same time, thewar presented equaUy difficult questions about the status of African Americans. Popular Uterature ofthe Civ? War obHquely addresses the question that would dominate theReconstruction era:what was the proper place for the freed slave inAmericansociety? With differing priorities and presuppositions, Young and Sizer attempt to address these questions, displacing the war's mythic masculinityand recovering some of the impUcations of the home front.InDisarming the ation: Womens Writing andtheAmerican Civil War, EUzabeth Young explores the ways inwhich women's writing capitaUzed on


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i62 Southern Literaryjournalthe freedoms permitted by the Civil War to redefine their place inAmerican culture. "The Civil War, as a concentrated moment of social flux,"she observes, "catalyzed and authorized multiple modes of civil disobe

dience for women." Central to her argument is a consideration of the various ways inwhich the concept of "civ?ity" functioned in the nineteenthcentury. Explaining that the discourse of civ?ity was instrumental to theconstruction of a femininity predicated on restraint, repression, and rigorous self-scrutiny, Young charts the ways women writers exploited the"symboUc possibiHties of the Civil War" as both "historical ground andUterary figure." "If female civ?ity highUghted a contrast between civ? womenand rude men, then it equaUy depended upon, and in turn created, an internal spUt between female excess and restraint." Participation in the war

?as nurse, as mother, as domestic servant, and even as cross-dressingsoldier?provided the means and opportunity for women to reshape thelanguage of civ?ity to include amore engaged and active sense of theirproper sphere. Carefully foUowing the vectors of her argument, Young includes not only northern white women in her discussion, but African

American and southern women writers as weU. Indeed, because AfricanAmericans were "brutaUy excluded from the prerogatives of civ?ity," the

tensions she identifies in texts by white women are even more pronounced in those by black writers.Of particular note in this fine work isYoung's reading of Uncle Tom'sCabin, a significant contribution to scholarship on this now critical text inthe American canon. Claiming that "Uncle Tom's Cabin not only preparedfor Uteral sectional conflict but articulated more broadly defined forms of

'civ? wars,'"

Young situates the novel's tensions within cultural norms forwhite femininity. "Two related forms of internal fracture," she argues,"structure Stowe's novel and its reception in Civil War America: the psychic rebeUions within nineteenth-century white femininity and the unstable rhetoric of the mascuUne nation at war with itself." Young concentrates her analysis on the figure of Topsy, who she maintains functions asa "blackface projection of white femininity." Tracing the cultural connotations of the phrase "topsy-turvy" in the novel and itsmany stage adaptations, Young argues that Topsy embodied the dynamics of excess andrestraint crucial to the construction of conventions concerning genderand race weU into the post-beUum era.

Whereas Young's readings are exceUent when working with texts written before and during the war years, her conclusions become less compelling when she turns to works from later in the century. For example,the chapter on TheWoman inBattle by Loretta Velazquez examines the im


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pUcations of wartime cross-dressing for post-beUum gender formations.Wh?e the textual interpretations themselves provide several intriguing insights, the conclusions, especiaUy those emphasizing cultural anxietiesabout anal penetration, are inadequately justified by the materials marshaled to support them. In marked contrast, her work on Louisa May ?1cott and EHzabeth Keckley, the African American author of amemoirabout domestic service in the Lincoln White House, substantively contributes to the re-evaluation of domestic rhetoric and the raciaHzed construction of gender during the nineteenth century.The focus of The Political Work ofNorthern Women Writers and theCivilWar, 18y0-18/2 by Lyde CuUen Sizer ismuch narrower than that undertaken by Young, although she shares many of Young's basic assumptionsabout the role women played in interpreting, and manipulating, the CivilWar to achieve their poUtical goals. The "poUtical work" she identifies inthewritings of nine northern women is inconsistent in both message andgenre; neither purely radical nor purely conservative, their writings nonetheless reflect a "coUective longing for ameaningful place in the poUty."Defining her notion of "poUtical work" in terms of presenting "an alternative

historyand narrative of thewar" "written

throughamatrix of gen

der, class, and racial assumptions," Sizer maintains that the ideology ofseparate spheres was under sustained attack by the efforts of these womento rewrite their role inAmerican culture. CarefuUy tracing shifts in perception and presentation during thewar, Sizer notes theways inwhich the"rhetoric of unity" which characterized women's writing in the early yearsof war gives way to an emphasis on the suffering of the individual woman.

Throughout the book, Sizer remains attuned to the status of women'swork and theways inwhich itwas resisted by domestic ideology, asweU ashow class and race impacted the poUtical efforts undertaken by womenwriters. In many respects, Sizer's methodology works against the specificity and clarity of her argument. Wh?e her focus on the relevance of poUtical reform adds substantiaUy to her reading, her attempt to provide intellectual biographies of nine northern women writers, in addition tosketching social conventions and attitudes, renders much of the actualtextual and historical analysis superficial. In general, however, her work,combined with Young's, contributes significantly to our appreciation ofthe nineteenth century and the Uterature it produced.

Homeland Security - Writing the American Civil War

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