In Joy and In Sorrow: Women, Family, and Marriage in the Victorian South, 1830-1890 (review)

264CIVIL WAR HISTORY Federal authority over Confederate territory was morally the same as the later invasion of Sioux Indian lands. For illustrations of the correct negative attitude toward the war the author relies heavily upon Melville's Battle Pieces, but the shifting moods and frequent ambiguity of these poems make them difficult, even hostile, witnesses. (Many will agree with Robert Penn Warren that Battle Pieces reveals no stable political position.) Nevertheless, the literary-critical method employed here is highly flexible, and even in cases where Melville admittedly displayed a stance of "aesthetic distance" which might well be seen as a "simple affirmation of the war," we are told that such detachment "critically handled . . . is not without value in the perception of ideological structures" (186, emphasis added). Ordinary readers may be excused for taking such language as a sign that pretty much anything goes, and this impression will not be dispelled by the examples of "handling" which follow immediately after. So sensitive, in fact, is the author to the least hint of incorrect thinking that he is not above chiding Melville himself when he catches the poet daring to ascribe "manliness" to the portrait of a Union officer without at the same time "envisioning an alignment of masculinity with pacifism" (170). By so vigorously repelling any representation of the war that departs from an immediate emphasis upon the killing this book cleaves to a reductionism that would by extension dismiss the whole history of mankind's efforts to make continued life bearable through cultural constructs of meaning. If neither poets nor photographers succeeded in conferring nobility on what happened at Ball's Bluff and Antietam, then perhaps the participants themselves are where we should look for evidence that men of intelligence and sensibility could indeed submit themselves to that slaughter for ideal ends. One might begin with the letters of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. Fred Somkin Cornell University In Joy and In Sorrow: Women, Family, and Marriage in the Victorian South, 1830-1890. Edited by Carol Bleser. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991. Pp. xxviii, 330. $24.95.) All but one of the papers in this volume were delivered at the Fort Hill conference on "Women, Family, and Marriage in the Victorian South" held at Clemson University in April 1989. Carol Bleser deserves much credit for bringing together such a collection of finely crafted essays that also manage to form a reasonably cohesive book. Despite the title, there is much more sorrow than joy in the lives of the Southerners chronicled in this volume. Although the authors as a whole present Southern men as either moral monsters, blind fools, or at best diffident BOOK REVIEWS265 family members, there is a welcome and gritty realism in most of the essays along with some ironic humor. Several essays take a traditional, narrative approach to the study of social history. Wylma Wates's description of marriages in the Izard family sheds light on the problems and attitudes of many other aristocratic South Carolina families. Likewise Virginia Burr's essay on Ella Gertrude Clanton Thomas and Sarah Wiggins's piece on Josiah Gorgas largely let their subjects speak for themselves with a minimum of analysis. Even Carol Bleser and Frederick Heath's previously published essay on Virginia and Clement Clay is mostly a fascinating family saga despite their provocative conclusion that the Civil War fundamentally altered the dynamics of many Southern marriages. Elizabeth Fox-Genovese considers Sarah Gayle of Alabama as an archetype for the study of the Southern household and its impact on women. As in her important book Within the Plantation Household, she argues persuasively that family was the primary source of female identity. Yet she also maintains the importance of religious models for behavior and notes how Southerners quarantined their society from the "virus of radical individualism" (19). Despite some attention to Southern distinctiveness, many readers will wonder how Southern women's connection to their family's past, their enjoyment of the present, fear of death, and replication of their mothers' lives makes these women that much different from women living in the still predominantly rural and Protestant free states. Eugene Genovese also focuses on the slaveholding household in exploring the ideology...