"The Comfort of My Fancying": Loss and Recuperation in The Gates Ajar

At the request of the author, we print an unedited version of this essay, which originally appeared in the Spring, 1993, issue (4g. t): 21-47. NANCY SCHNOG "The Comfort of My Fancying": Loss and Recuperation in The Gates Ajar ALTHOUGH A NOVEL LARGELY FORGOTTEN TODAY, The Gates Ajar holds a place in American literary histoty as ofone ofthe most popular books of the post-Civil War period.1 Published in 1868, the novel attracted more than 100,000 buyets in its first few years ofcirculation and continued to draw readers for at least thirty after its first reception . So successful was the novel that it spawned a number of imitations as well as an industry of 'Gates Ajar' items including a patent medicine, collai and tippet, floral arrangement, and cigar. Yet, while central to the popular imagination of its own time, the novel has repeatedly failed to earn the intellectual respect of ctitics, appalled by the philosophically debased nature of the novel's central trope, a material vision of aftetlife, scaled to the dimensions of middle-class life. Only recently has a handful of cultural histotians and feminist critics begun to reconsider the sources of this vision's once felt textual and cultural power. Written by the twenty yeat old author, Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, The Gates Ajar was openly concerned with addressing the suffering of women whose lives were irrevocably affected by the Civil War and its unprecedented human casualties. Cast in the form of a personal journal , the novel records the emotional and spiritual crisis that overwhelms the novel's twenty four year old protagonist, Mary, when she learns of her brother's death one week before the war's end. In the diary Arizona Quarterly Volume 49 Number 3 , Autumn 1993 Copyright © 1993 by Arizona Board of Regents ISSN 0004-161 1 28Nancy Schnog Phelps traces the stages of Mary's mourning and the failute of the available channels of sympathy—ministerial attention, religious sermons and doctrines, condolence rituals and community help—to obviate the majoi depression which besets hei with the news ofher brother's death. With the anival of Mary's Aunt Winifred and her child, Faith, the protagonist begins the process of emotional healing which had previously eluded her. As the novel's ideal condoler, Aunt Winifred, a widow, teaches Mary to internalize a theology built on the concept of a concrete heavenly home, where families and loved ones are eventually re-embodied and reunited, and where unlimited opportunities are open to all the redeemed, including divine access to concert halls, nature preserves, art galleries, intergalactic exploration and travel, as well as meetings with favoied poets and presidents. While this vision earned the scorn of Mark Twain, who called it "a mean little ten cent heaven about the size of Rhode Island, "2 it adeptly suits the needs of Phelps's protagonist. Through this revised picture of afteilife, Mary learns to overcome not only the disabling pain associated with her brother Royal's death but also to manage successfully her second major loss and the book's final event, the death of Aunt Winifred. While eliciting theological and literary condemnation in the nineteenth -century, Phelps's story has today evoked sharply divided accounts of the novel's deep emotional appeal to its contemporary readers. On the one hand, critics attribute the novel's magnetism to its soothing reassurances and psychological escapism; on the other, to its latent but serious political objectives. As supporters of the first view Helen Sootin Smith described the novel as "appealing nakedly to the wish-fulfilling thinking of its readers," while Ann Douglas, in an influential reading of the book, characterized Phelps's heavenly utopia as "a celestial retirement village" posited on "hopeful liteial-minded assurance."3 In contrast , recent feminist critics of the novel have located the novel's allure in its deepei textual structures and implicit social criticism. Christine Stansell, for instance, uncovered the book's "subtetranean currents of female rebellion" as well as "deep sense of sisterhood. "4 More recently, Carol Farley Kessler cast the novel's Utopian ideals as a political program or "a means of education for change."5 Synthesizing and extending both these interpretative...