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  • Rebecca Harding Davis's Stories of the Civil War Era: Selected Writings from the Borderlands
  • Nancy Strow Sheley
Rebecca Harding Davis's Stories of the Civil War Era: Selected Writings from the Borderlands. Edited by Sharon M. Harris and Robin L. Cadwallader. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2010. xi + 319 pp. $69.95/$24.95 paper.

The ten short stories written between 1860 and 1877 and collected in Rebecca Harding Davis's Stories of the Civil War Era: Selected Writings from the Borderlands reflect a time when the author was exposed daily to reminders of the horrors of war, which she describes in her memoirs, Bits of Gossip, in 1904. For many years Davis witnessed the scenes in West Virginia, a borderland where she observed that war evoked malignant personal hatreds, brutish men, outraged women, degenerate patriots, and thieves. As she explains, "War may be an armed angel with a mission, but she has the personal habits of the slums" (34). Knowing the stories' historical and geographical contexts, readers might expect Davis's tales to be more descriptive of physical devastation. Although the stories are loosely connected by time, the conflicts are personal and societal. They take place on family farms and backwoods roads, expressing themes such as the hopelessness of destroyed lives and loss of family, ravages of capitalistic greed, moral dilemmas of slavery, and challenges of change in a society longing for a mystic and mythic past. As co-editor Sharon M. Harris noted previously in Rebecca Harding Davis and American Realism, Davis is a conduit between romanticism and realism, "contributing to the development of this movement [realism] for more than thirty years before" it was defined (6).

Three stories exemplify Davis's complex views of war and its aftermath and some of the layered themes she affiliated with it. "In the Market" explores [End Page 154] the stymied lives of three aging sisters who face the marriage market with few options: to marry someone—anyone—of some means in order to improve a woman's station in life, to marry for love but remain in poverty, or not to marry at all and to feel family and public condemnation. Fortunately, one sister develops a successful herb business, acquires property, attracts a worthy husband, and continues to gain admiration for her business acumen. Davis concludes with a moral about the war, which "has made thousands of women helpless and penniless": "They cannot all teach nor sew, nor become shop-girls; and they and their children must live" (303). Women must take the initiative to escape the prison of their lives, ignore the threat that working will unsex them, and open the door to opportunities that await those who are willing to take risks and struggle.

Capitalism underlies many of Davis's stories, and correctly so. The economies of both North and South depended on the slave trade; the definition of work was the core of debate in public and private worlds. "Blind Tom," based on facts, tells of a young slave who was able to replicate on the piano any music he heard. His master, amazed at Tom's talents and recognizing that he could be used to make money, sets up performances and challenges to test his slave's precocious abilities. The two travel to many points in the South, although Davis acknowledges that Blind Tom would have been a spectacle in the North as well; she subtly emphasizes that he is legally a slave only in the southern states but that the residue of slavery also exists in the North. Davis comments on ongoing elements of slavery as she calls Tom a "caged" spirit and reminds her audience that in the readers' kitchens and back alleys are also caged forms, unable to speak for themselves, who could be set free—if it pleased their masters to do so (94).

Davis critiques capitalism in an unexpected way in "The Harmonists." Concerning this story, the editors explain, "Having given readers a view of the worst life has to offer in the social injustices perpetrated on blacks and white women, Davis offers something more promising in 'The Harmonists' . . . : utopia" (xxxi). Yet there seems to be nothing promising...

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