"Blood and Irony": Southern White Women's Narratives of the Civil War, 1861-1937 (review)

Sarah Gardner shows that, with the exception of Mary Chesnut's extensive wartime diaries and Margaret Mitchell's classic novel Gone with the Wind, Southern white women's narratives of the American Civil War written between 1861 and 1936 demonstrate the dynamic nature of Lost Cause ideology, which shifted and changed over this seventy-five-year period. The author sets herself three tasks: first, to "illustrate the transformative impact of the Civil War on southern women's historical imaginations"; second, to "demonstrate the continuing dialogue between interpreters and interpretations of the Civil War"; and third, to "elucidate the ways in which these women contributed to the creation of Lost Cause mythology" (2–3).

The war years provided the foundation for the myth, while the years of Reconstruction, which Gardner describes as a period of "psychic shock," was the period during which the "myth of the Lost Cause was most malleable" (7). Redemption saw a slew of conflicting and competing narratives that were eventually to become both a metanarrative in the South, and eventually the national narrative, largely as a result of the work of the United Daughters of the Confederacy (UDC). A final chapter examines the immediate backdrop to the publication of Margaret Mitchell's epic novel in 1936 and its lesser known counternarrative, Caroline Gordon's None Shall Look Back.

Gardner firmly locates the genesis of Lost Cause mythology in the Reconstruction years, although she argues that white Southern women's politics of reconciliation were vastly different from that of their male counterparts. Gardner provides an excellent critique of Gaines M. Foster's assertion that, by the end of Reconstruction, white Southerners were reconciled to reunion. According to Gardner, Foster ignores the cultural influence of female writers and their sentiments. Gardner's subjects largely eschewed reconciliatory tones, focusing instead on Southern distinctiveness and superiority by either glorifying the Confederacy or promoting the New South.

By the beginning of the twentieth century the market was saturated with white women's narratives to meet the equally voracious demand. This was also the period in which the United Daughters of the Confederacy came of age. It is especially intriguing to note that as the UDC provided these women with a powerful network, and a mandate to vindicate the South and to direct the production of historical textbooks, it simultaneously melded individual voices into one metanarrative. The collective power of this organization in many ways superceded independent thought and silenced competing voices. Although Chapter 4 is entitled "The Imperative of Historical Inquiry, 1895–1905," suggesting a focus on the UDC's influence on the production of historical textbooks, instead the centerpiece becomes Ellen Glasgow, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author, whom Gardner describes as "perhaps the harshest southern critic of the UDC's interpretation of southern history" (142). If indeed Glasgow did provide a counternarrative, it would have been interesting to know how the organization reacted to her work. In fact, despite the chapter title, we learn much more about Glasgow's work than the UDC's role in regulating historical inquiry. Unfortunately, Glasgow also neglects to incorporate some of the new literature that analyzes the powerful influences of this organization.

The title of the book, "Blood and Irony" comes from Glasgow's work as her prescription to a degenerating Southern culture. Glasgow called for "blood" to reinvigorate an area drained of creativity, and "irony" as an antidote to sentimentalism. But perhaps the greatest irony is that despite her critique of her homeland, Glasgow was never able to escape its powerful legacies. Although her novels portray a degeneration of Southern aristocracy into brutality, rather than a focus on emancipated blacks as the root of Southern problems, Glasgow nevertheless perpetuated an image of Southern slaveholders as "benevolent, paternalistic masters who genuinely cared for their slaves" (150). The power of this image surely reached its zenith in 1936 with the publication of Gone...