Disarming the Nation: Women's Writing and the American Civil War (review)

Disarming the Nation: Women's Writing and the American Civil War. By Elizabeth Young. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999. 389 pp. $47.00/$18.00 paper.

Nineteenth-century American women's writing has finally received the attention it deserves. Recent anthologies by critics such as Paula Bennett, Karen Kilcup, and Janet Gray have recovered and reprinted a body of once popular but long neglected nineteenth-century women's writing. Other critics, including Karen Sanchez-Eppler, Marianne Noble, and Shirley Samuels, have subjected this recovered writing to rigorous critical scrutiny and applied recent modes of theoretical analysis. In Disarming the Nation: Women's Writing and the American Civil War, Elizabeth Young makes an important contribution to this ongoing debate in a way that is sure to redefine how we examine issues of gender, race, and sexuality in American Civil War fiction.

Young argues that in addressing the Civil War women writers fully exploited the symbolic possibilities of the phrase "civil wars," using it as a figure for internal rebellions, conflicts, and fractures within the nation, genteel culture, and even themselves. In her sophisticated rhetorical analysis, metaphors--such as the house divided, the body politic, and the regional romance--point to the fictional basis upon which the politics of national strife worked itself out. Young analyzes the way novels such as Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852), Louisa May Alcott's Hospital Sketches (1863), Elizabeth Keckley's Behind the Scenes (1866), and Frances Harper's Iola Leroy; or, Shadows Uplifted (1892) and Minnie's Sacrifice (1869) allegorically reconstruct the Civil War. She concludes that gender is central to the construction of nationhood. This new gender framework shifts books such as Uncle Tom's Cabin and Gone With the Wind to a central place in the literary canon. Women's Civil War writing therefore presents a valuable opportunity to theorize the conceptual interdependence of gender, race, sexuality, and region. In particular, sexuality is an unstable, ever-shifting force. Lesbian possibilities and fantasies of male homosexuality surface, disrupting the power hierarchies upon which society is built.

Combining literary analysis, cultural history, and feminist theory, Disarming the Nation foregrounds struggles in Civil War fiction between and among women--and their war against the constraints of genteel life. In each chapter, Young lucidly and accessibly explains how women challenged the prescriptions of their social lives and reconstructed Civil War history. For example, Young extends the recent feminist criticism of Uncle Tom's Cabin that centers on the redemptive possibilities of feminization to argue that Topsy represents an inversion of white femininity. More than any other character, Topsy becomes a representation of unruliness: she is "a blackface projection of white femininity in which inversion is at once utopian fantasy and demonized grotesque" (30). Like Jane Tompkins, who effaces the distinctions used to separate literary from non-literary works, Young points to the importance of Topsy as a cultural symbol; Topsy's image reappears in a number of plays, ballads, and political cartoons. Young's readings are not only superb and historically accurate; she also goes beyond simply recapitulating arguments about the triumph of domestic feminism and scrutinizes gender relations in the context of culture.

Gender relations are central to Young's argument. Among the books she reads, Alcott's Hospital Sketches locates homoerotic masculinity within a framework of femininity. While men come under the influence of women and accept the disciplinary mode of self-mastery, women take on increasingly central roles in the body politic. However, women's authority comes from deploying conventionally feminine behavior. Turning to examples of cross-dressing in the histories and memoirs of little-known female Civil War soldiers like Loreta Velasquez, Young reveals that cross-dressing was a prominent desire among white confederate women struggling to escape gender constraints.

The most speculative and perhaps groundbreaking argument concerns Margaret Mitchell's Gone With the Wind (1936). Young examines Mitchell's correspondence, revealing her interest in...