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The Southern Literary Journal 38.1 (2005) 147-150



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Southern Women Writers and the Civil War

Blood & Irony: Southern White Women's Narratives of the Civil War, 1861–1937. By Sarah E. Gardner. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 2004. x + 341 pp. $39.95.

In Blood & Irony: Southern White Women's Narratives of the Civil War, 1861-1937, Sarah E. Gardner has written a thorough, well-organized, and convincing study of southern women writers' contributions to the South's and the nation's understanding of the Civil War. Gardner takes her title from Ellen Glasgow's famous remark that southern culture needed "blood and irony": "The South needed blood because 'it had grown thin and pale: it was satisfied to exist on borrowed ideas; to copy instead of create. And irony is an indispensable ingredient of the critical vision; it is the safest antidote to sentimental decay.'" And Gardner shows us that the southern white women's narratives of the Civil War that she studies collectively supply these necessary ingredients. They provide blood not only through some narratives' focus on Civil War battles, but also, in the figurative sense that Glasgow uses the word, by refusing to exist on borrowed ideas and by creating their own version of history which eventually became the national version. Irony came later than blood, but Gardner shows us how the image of the war evolved through the critical vision of such writers as Glasgow, Evelyn Scott, and Caroline Gordon.

In her introduction, Gardner outlines three main tasks for her study. The first task, "to illustrate the transformative impact of the Civil War on southern women's historical imaginations," is accomplished admirably simply by surveying the volume of evidence provided by seventy years' worth of primary texts. In her first chapter, Gardner illustrates [End Page 147] how, for women such as Loula Kendall Rogers who lived through it, the war became the central focus of journals, diaries, and letters. Southern women also sought publication for their views of the war in memoirs and novels, one of the most popular novelists of the time being Augusta Jane Evans. But Gardner also demonstrates that the war continued to occupy the imaginations of southern women writers long after it ended. Chapters two and three focus on evolving images of the war in these same genres, with the addition of poetry and biography, written by southern women such as Cornelia Phillips Spencer, Cora Ives, Constance Cary Harrison, and Mary G. McClelland, during and after Reconstruction. Far from losing impetus, southern women writers' efforts to shape the history of the Civil War became more organized in the early twentieth century due to the efforts of the United Daughters of the Confederacy (UDC), as Gardner illustrates through such writers as Helen Dortch Longstreet and La Salle Corbell Pickett in chapters four and five. Finally, in chapter six, Gardner shows us the epitome of the Civil War narrative in Margaret Mitchell's Gone With the Wind (1936), and, in the epilogue, she shows this genre deconstructing itself in Caroline Gordon's novel None Shall Look Back (1937).

The second task Gardner sets for herself is to "demonstrate the continuing dialogue between interpreters and interpretations of the Civil War," suggesting an intertextuality among these narratives. In order to fully convince the reader of this "dialogue," Gardner would need to provide more evidence that southern women writers not only read one another's writing, but also responded to it, borrowing and revising ideas of their peers and predecessors, in their own work. Gardner does, however, thoroughly document the role of the UDC in encouraging and shaping women's narratives about the war. This organization encouraged historical research and writing and distributed to its chapters a circular that "offered the goals of proper 'considerations in historic study.'" The circular included such objectives as "vindication of the men of the South" and to "present in clear outline the Federative System of Government established by our fore-fathers," another form of vindication which aimed to prove that the war was fought over states' rights...

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