"A Glorious Solution": Gender, Families, Relationships, and the Civil War Story

TIMOTHY MORRIS "A Glorious Solution": Gender, Families, Relationships, and the Civil War Story He had enlisted in a reckless temper, like—who can count how many other young men? to whom the war offered the quickest and most incisive road to a glorious solution of inglorious personal difficulties.2 The causes of the civil war are second only to the reasons for its outcome as a permanent problem for historians of the period . Even the recognition that a complex set of issues including slavery , economics, cultural differences, and political philosophies brought about the war fails to account for the war's peculiar intensity and divisiveness . For the individual human beings who fought the war or demanded that others fight it uncompromisingly, emotions rather than principles, self-interest, or other impersonal forces were what provoked the war's violence. Charles Royster has argued for the importance of these emotional motivations in The Destructive War (1991).' Royster, in a move rare among military historians, treats personal insecurities and emotional pain as forces stronger than nationalistic or materialistic motives. Kathleen Diffley (Where My Heart is Turning Ever, 1992) has recently argued that the cultural impact of Civil War fiction ranges far beyond representations of battle to include social and domestic institutions that are apparently only indirectly affected by the war.4 The present article is an attempt to read some of the representations of the emotional pain which led to military violence in five short stories Arizona Quarterly Volume 51, Number 1, Spring 1995 Copyright © 1995 by Arizona Board of Regents ISSN 0004-1610 Timothy Morris where people who lived through the war—especially women who lived through the war—conceived of, and constructed motivations for, warfare . These stories show individual men choosing to fight because they cannot deal with women. Insofar as a "typical" Civil War story can be abstracted from anthologies , criticism, and paradigmatic sources like Edmund Wilson's Patriotic Gore (1962) or Daniel Aaron's The Unwritten War (1973), that typical story is one of combat.5 It is by definition a male narrative. Women were excluded from combat then as now; even as this article is being written in 1993, rhetorical struggles are being waged over the appropriateness of admitting women into the male sphere of combat. As a story of the masculine realm, the combat story is one of mystery and mystique . The male privilege of expression entails silence about the most hallowed of male experiences, with combat as the most hallowed and mysterious of all. "The real war will never get into books," is the most often quoted way ofputting it. Walt Whitman's remark may be taken in a way that valorizes the experience of the soldiers he knew above that of the noncombatant writer he knew himself to be; or, it may be taken as an acknowledgment that the experience of combat leaves an empty place at the middle of all its verbal mediations, the place that men have seen but dare not describe. Above all, they dare not describe it in the mixed company of a Victorian teading audience. Women must not be admitted to the holy of holies. Civil Wat combat stories are therefore attempts at voicing the ineffable . Criticism of combat stories—even essentially deconstructive criticism , which has prevailed from Wilson to Royster—often searches for the "real" combat experience in classic stories. Critics see inferior fiction as glamorizing, melodramatizing, and sentimentalizing the war, and are often particularly wary of any political rhetoric which might cheapen the existential theme of men in battle. The acme of the genre is therefore the self-deconstructive war story, The Red Badge ofCourage, or "Chickamauga." These stories take the myths ofglorious combat and explode them by positing an even uglier, ever more brutal and inconceivably degrading reality which they ultimately and always defer beyond their own margins. The inexpressible horror of combat is still essentially the point of Michael Shaara's The Killer Angels (1974) or Royster's brilliant battle narratives in The Destructive War.6 Saying "I actually did not dare state the extreme horror," as John W. DeForest The Civil War Story63 did, is really just another way of saying "it was glorious."7...