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  • An Elaborate Pretense for the Major:Making Up the Face of the Postbellum Nation
  • Carolyn Hall

Passing as a story of romance between a doting wife and her beloved war-hero husband, Constance Fenimore Woolson's novella For the Major (1883) is also a tale of voluntary amnesia stemming from a reluctance to face particular facts about the postbellum United States. Though the novella speaks only sparingly of the American Civil War, it addresses some of the scars left in its wake, particularly those involving women's social position, racial passing, and a fear of the postwar new order. The novella's Major and Madam Carroll are the figureheads of the North Carolina mountain town of Far Edgerley, where much of Marion Carroll's time and energy is spent helping her ailing husband keep up appearances by hiding the effects of his increasing dementia. While her efforts to spare the Major's feelings suggest love and devotion, the behavior simultaneously bespeaks a desire to maintain a life that is no longer true, a desire the entire town shares and that causes the rest of its residents, too, to take pains to maintain a fictional vision of their lives. Through the various narratives within For the Major, particularly those fueled by the main characters' appearances, Woolson indicts her contemporaries for their own self-inflicted dementia as they allow the myth and romance of the past to pass for the present.

By the time the novella appeared in print, nearly two decades after the end of the Civil War, conciliatory efforts between former sectional enemies were affecting historical accounts of the South and the war. Susan-Mary Grant asserts that in the 1880s the war was elevated to "what amounted to mystical status" as growing industrialism and immigration contributed to a version of patriotism that clamored for a return to the nation's original ideals while simultaneously "deliberately avoid[ing] troubling questions raised by the war concerning American nationality and the African American or even the white southern role in [the war]" (169, 170). Responding to the beginnings of such popular sentiments, many northern publications, according to Frank Luther Mott, began endorsing or at least incorporating sympathetic views of the South not long after the war's end. By the late 1860s and early 1870s, Mott claims, they were publishing attractive descriptions of the region (47–48), and by the 1880s what Gaines Foster has called "the new journalistic homage to the South" followed editors' instructions to "promote reconciliation" by "ignor[ing] or soft-pedal[ing] divisive issues" (69).

According to Lyndall Gordon, one such editor, Joseph W. Harper, "ordered" Woolson, after [End Page 144] the publication of her short story "Old Gardiston" (1876), to refrain from writing in the future about "the subject of the war in connection with the South" (156). Woolson responded, however, by repressing rather than suppressing discussion of contemporary issues surrounding race, gender, and postwar legacies. The case in point, For the Major, includes multiple character and place names that resonate with the novella's nineteenth-century readers because these appellations recall significant names from the nation's recent history. Through such connections to the world outside of the novella and through the characters' behavior within the story, Woolson's economy of repression prompts a particularly close look at narrative strategies; it also posits a way of understanding the postwar period. For the Major reads as an allegory of the United States after the Civil War when it allowed reconciliation and so-called redemption to supplant and suppress legacies of war and Reconstruction through a national tendency toward repression; Woolson here imitates and thus quietly indicts this national pattern.

The novella begins in 1868, three years after Major Scarborough Carroll and his wife Marion have settled with their young son Scar in the town of Far Edgerley. Though this new place sits merely six hundred feet farther up Chillawassee Mountain than the town of Edgerley, as far as the former town is concerned, the distance may as well be six hundred miles.1 The fewer-than-one thousand inhabitants of Far Edgerley—whose very name reflects not only their physical position but also their chosen figurative position...

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