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5 Courage and Cowardice: Facing Death in Bierce’s Early Civil War Writings What like a bullet can undeceive! —Herman Melville consideration of what is known of Bierce’s life in the years immediately following his decision to leave home at the age of fifteen indicates that he, like Henry Stevens in “One of Twins,” persisted in searching for parental role models that could validate his sense of self and help repair damage to his ego development. His continued inability to find emotional stability or a purpose to which he could devote himself arguably led him to enlist when the Civil War began and made him particularly vulnerable to the trauma to which he was exposed over the ensuing four years. It is important to contemplate significant facts about Bierce’s life immediately before and during the war, placing those facts in psychological, historical, and cultural context to develop a base from which to study his writings of the early Civil War period. Such an approach makes it possible to discern what these writings reveal not only about Bierce’s own experiences and attitudes in facing death but also about those of other Civil War soldiers as they moved from innocence to knowledge in their first tests of heroism on the battlefield. Whether Bierce ran away from home in 1857 or moved from the family farm into nearby Warsaw with his parents’ consent is not known, although the latter circumstance seems more likely.1 Regardless, however, the move opened new vistas and opportunities for an isolated youth with no strong ties to family or friends. By taking a job as a printer’s devil for the Northern Indianian, an abolitionist newspaper established in 1856, Bierce not only began laying the foundation for his future career as a journalist, but he also came under the influence of Courage and Cowardice 54 radical political activists, who doubtlessly stimulated his later commitment to the Union cause when the Civil War erupted. At the same time, in keeping with the theory that a history of unsatisfactory attachments can elicit a search for substitute attachments, he unconsciously sought new parental figures to provide the emotional support he failed to find, or at least to recognize, in his own parents.2 Upon his arrival in Warsaw, Bierce first fell under the authority of Reuben Williams, the editor of the Northern Indianian. A staunch Republican, Williams had established this newspaper with G. W. Fairbrother to counter the Democratic press as political opinion regarding slavery became increasingly polarized nationwide. Williams, who was widely respected in the community, served as Bierce’s mentor in his apprenticeship on the newspaper, and he also became a surrogate father when the youth moved into his home and began eating with the Williams family. Although Bierce worked for Williams for approximately two years, the relationship seems to have ended poorly with Bierce’s abrupt resignation when the editor falsely accused him of theft. According to Paul Fatout, who gleaned this account from an interview with Reuben Williams’s son, L. H. Williams, Bierce “was soon cleared of the charge, [but] his fierce pride would not tolerate the insult, and he left in a huff” (33). This reaction speaks obviously to Bierce’s lack of maturity, but it also shows the hostile, aggressive, antisocial pattern typical of an avoidant response to attachment insecurity. Even while he was officially living under Williams’s roof, Bierce evidently tested familial constraints in his search for emotional security and parental love. His long-time friend and publisher Walter Neale asserts that the writer told him of being about fifteen years of age when he met “[h]is first mistress, who was well past seventy” herself. Bierce, who claimed to have lived with this woman “surreptitiously,” characterized the relationship as both passionate and sexually intimate (129–30). Such an attachment may seem incredible; however, as Fatout observes, “it is consistent with his lifelong search for a combination of romantic and maternal love” (32). This relationship, which clearly existed in Bierce’s fantasy, if not in reality, confirms his continued inability to resolve his sense of maternal deprivation. It also strongly supports the view that his own life experiences underlie the trauma that he associates with the sexualized mother-son relationship in stories such as “The Death of Halpin Frayser,” “The Eyes of the Panther,” and “One of Twins.” Unwilling to return home to his parents when he lost his job at the newspaper , Bierce moved to Akron to live...

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