Southern Women Novelists and the Civil War: Trauma and Collective Memory in the American Literary Tradition since 1861

Chapter 1: Augusta Jane Evans’s Macaria; or, Altars of Sacrifice

Chapter 1 Augusta Jane Evans’s MACARIA; OR, ALTARS OF SACRIFICE I am an earnest and most uncompromising Secessionist. —Augusta Jane Evans1 Augusta Jane Evans was the foremost woman novelist of the South during the last half of the nineteenth century, reportedly earning more than $100,000 from her novels.2 She, nevertheless, experienced both wealth and poverty in her childhood. The eldest child of an aristocratic southern family, Evans was born in Columbus, Georgia, in 1835. Her early years of carefree affluence ended, however, with the financial reverses of her father, Matthew Ryan Evans, in the early 1840s. When bankruptcy resulted, the foreclosed mortgage on Sherwood Hall, the family estate, included assets of 143 acres of land, the family house, slave quarters, barns, and 36 slaves. Even before its foreclosure, Sherwood Hall was popularly referred to as “Matt’s Folly” because the construction of the elaborate house, which Matt Evans had built for his new bride, raised questions in the townspeople’s minds about its owner’s finances and ultimately contributed to his financial failure.3 The family keenly felt the loss of social standing that accompanied their economic adversity. As a result of her father’s disgrace, Evans was even denied an inheritance from “[h]er aunt, Mrs. Seaborne Jones, who owned one of the largest plantations in Georgia” (Moss 8). Although he relocated his family, first to a “modest plantation house” in Oswitchee, Alabama, and then to the Texas frontier in 1845, before settling permanently in Mobile, Alabama, in 1849, Matt Evans was never able to recover his financial security (Fidler 20). In an effort to help provide for her family, 12 Novels from the Civil War Period Evans, at the age of fifteen, began writing her first novel—secretly, lest her parents disapprove of her involvement with a genre that, despite its phenomenal popularity, was still considered morally controversial by conservative readers .4 Years later, after amassing her own independent fortune and marrying a wealthy southern railroad executive, Evans remained marked by her memories of impoverishment and the accompanying loss of social privilege.5 According to her biographer William Perry Fidler, she steadfastly “refused to invest her money in any firm which accepted mortgages on private dwellings,” and she “always carried a hundred dollars on her person” to ensure her ability to provide for herself in case of an emergency (20). In their presentation of life in southern society, Evans’s novels reflect the sensitivity to class issues that she learned from her own family’s experience with economic insecurity, as well as the tensions between her professed traditional beliefs about southern womanhood and the record of her successful career as a professional writer.6 As a strong advocate for the intellectual abilities of women, Evans depicts serious-minded heroines who struggle to balance their mission to serve society meaningfully with an understanding of the proper sphere in which their influence can be asserted. As a conservative Christian and “proConfederate sympathizer, Evans distrusted New England feminists’ attacks on the existing social structure. Yet, while trying to defend parts of the restrictive social system, she identified hypocritical assumptions to a growing group of women during the last part of the nineteenth century.” In this way, “Evans provided women with inspiration to fight overt sex discrimination with language and attitudes seemingly in conformity with the existing system” (Alder 77). As a result, it is no wonder that feminist critics disagree about how we should read and interpret these novels.7 Although it still conforms to the conventions of the sentimental domestic novel, the final half of Evans’s third novel, Macaria; or, Altars of Sacrifice, which was published in 1864, uses the exigent circumstances created by the Civil War to argue for a broadening of women’s sphere of action. Dissatisfied with the minor role that women were able to play in the building of the Confederacy, Evans wrote on 4 August 1862 to Confederate General P. G. T. Beauregard, with whom she corresponded regularly during the war. In this letter, she states, “I have consoled myself with the reflection that, after all, woman’s sphere of influence might be like Pascals’ [sic], ‘one of which the centre is everywhere, the circumference nowhere’; and though debarred from the ‘tented field,’ the cause of our beloved, struggling Confederacy may yet be advanced through the agency of its’ [sic] daughters” (Southern Woman 42). In Macaria, Evans ad- 13...