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  • Mary Chesnut’s Civil War Epic
  • Catherine Clinton (bio)
Mary Chesnut’s Civil War Epic, by Julia A. Stern. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010. 330 pp. $45.00.

Julia A. Stern’s Mary Chesnut’s Civil War Epic is an imaginative blend of feminist biography, literary criticism, and cultural brio. Stern assumes that readers familiar with the Civil War are aware of Chesnut’s distinguished place within the American literary canon. The broad strokes of Chesnut’s life are emblematic, and her story is even more compelling with the Civil War sesquicentennial being celebrated in 2011. Born into a family of wealth and privilege in antebellum South Carolina, Mary Boykin married James Chesnut, Jr. at the age of seventeen. Her husband would go on to hold the Senate seat her father once occupied, and she would be engaged in politics and high society. The Chesnuts migrated between their Palmetto plantations and Washington, D. C., where Mary enjoyed her escapes from rural isolation. When the South seceded and a new capital was established in Richmond, Mary Chesnut found herself at the crossroads. She began to keep an account of daily life, faithfully recording her own idiosyncratic twist on events. Chesnut’s literary project has a very plastique quality, with layers of interpretive meaning built in to its fragmented autobiography. Is it a diary? Is it a memoir? Can we call it an autobiography? Is it a hybrid of all three? Is it also a direct response to Harriet Beecher Stowe—a writer Chesnut read and reread with mounting fury?

The strange career of this literary project and interpretations by successive generations is at the core of Stern’s lively monograph. The book is divided into complex and creative chapters, which imaginatively inter-weave the texture of Chesnut’s life with her writings. From feast to famine, from wafting magnolia to stench, Stern nearly matches her subject’s flair for the dramatic, shaping her own narrative with creative speculation. At times she lets her prose slip into interior monologues: “her account of that wound at the center of her project can be read as a figure for the ways in which autobiographical creation by definition cannot render images of its subject without also marring them” or “Chesnut’s use of the figure of the mask is freighted with literary meaning beyond what one might call anachronistically, its potentially Fanonesqe import” (pp. 67, 181).

Upon occasion Stern lets her imagination run away with itself, as when she repeatedly suggests that Chesnut appears “a fascinating antidote to the literature of the ‘Lost Cause,’ an epic instance of what cultural historians, post-Foucault, have come to call ‘countermemory’” (p. 144). However, more often she hits rather than misses: “the dynamic of looking the other in the face embodies a classic Hegelian moment of truth between slave-holder and bondsperson” (p. 170). (And indeed, she could have done even more with “face” and the honor issue, although her concentration on face and masks proves quite fascinating.) [End Page 177]

The texts that Chesnut produced are recast by Stern’s careful interrogations. Her creative glosses of the subtexts within Chesnut’s pages offer fascinating insights, as she claims Cassandra is the author’s alter ego. At times, Stern pushes the envelope too relentlessly. Her leap from Chesnut laughing at herself in the mirror to Hélène Cixous’s Laugh of the Medusa (1983) seems a stretch. Her romp through American literary influences from Hawthorne to Poe and the “carnival of death” teases out interesting ideas but perhaps reflects Stern’s reading more than Chesnut’s (p. 181). Stern additionally makes exaggerated claims: “Mary Chesnut remains unprecedented in the canon of post-Civil War Southern writers, standing virtually alone in explicitly not eliding the significance of slavery to the war’s causes and in rejecting sentimental explanations for the demise of her culture” (p. 142). She repeatedly champions Chesnut as an “anti-Sentimentalist,” which may ring more true within literary circles than it does among historians. Stern lapses into fairly sentimental descriptions of the descendants of “Chesnut freed people” who “continue to journey to Mulberry [Chesnut’s plantation] and worship there” (p. 217).

Stern...

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