Blood and Irony: Southern White Women's Narratives of the Civil War, 1861–1937, and: Rehabilitating Bodies: Health, History, and the American Civil War (review)

Both of these books cover troubled historical ground. Lisa A. Long's study of the convergence of medical and historical discourses in postbellum America charts the seismic project of recovering corporeality, or "rehabilitating" it, in the wake of the Civil War. Sarah E. Gardner's work reconfigures a body of writing by white Southern women who contested the national memory of the Confederacy well into the twentieth century. Long situates her discussion of Northern postwar texts in a literary and cultural studies framework; Gardner's study of Southern texts is essentially historical. Contesting Daniel Aaron's formulation that the war remained "unwritten," both of these authors prove that it is "rewritten and rewritten and rewritten" (Long 6).

Rehabilitating Bodies proceeds from the notion that the war is a "metaphoric site of rehabilitation" and a powerful "historicizing trope" for diverse writers, including physicians, biographers, historians, and novelists (12, 15). In seven chapters that emphasize the linkages between corporeality and historical representation, Long assembles an array of texts whose aim was to make visible and comprehensible the disappeared bodies of war, literally to re-member the national body and redeem it from postwar instability. An analysis of neurologist S. Weir Mitchell's and Elizabeth Stuart Phelps's fiction in chapters one and two ("Doctors' Bodies" and "Dead Bodies") explores the idea that bodily stability resides only in the afterlife. Long shrewdly notes that Mitchell projected his own neurasthenic malaise onto fictional characters like George Dedlow and Dr. Ezra Wendell, pathologizing the condition as a reification of war itself. Similarly, in a timely rereading of Phelps's Gates trilogy, Long argues that mourning rituals subject survivors to psychic dismemberment, which can be cured "through imaginatively regaining control of their ['nerve-injured'] bodies" (79, 80).

These are not the only chapters in which Long considers understudied postwar texts. To provide context for the Sanitary Commission's labor of cleansing military bodies, she turns to Rebecca Harding Davis's Waiting for the Verdict and J. W. De Forest's Miss Ravenel's Conversion, whose characters become surrogates for the enemy within, or gendered and racialized personifications of bodily impurity. In addition to chapters that describe the physical manifestations of battle sickness in Crane, Bierce, and Dunbar ("Soldiers' Bodies") and maternal healing in Alcott, Livermore, and Susie King Taylor ("Nursing Bodies"), Long offers correctives to conventional readings of James Gooding's and Charlotte Forten's narratives. In perhaps her most insightful reading, Long challenges the long-held view of freeborn Forten as an elite and pampered lady-wannabe who indulges in psychosomatic illnesses. Long recounts Forten's economic woes and describes her work with freedmen at Port Royal as paradoxically liberating her from social marginalization while compelling her to internalize a cultural disgust of the black body.

A final chapter on "African American Scholars and the Discipline of History" relates how historians such as George Washington Williams and Joseph T. Wilson rescued black veterans from fin-de-siècle oblivion only to resuscitate their exploitation as "mechanized resources that are passed from an agricultural to a military machine" (233). In a concluding meditation about the popularity of war reenactments, Long observes that despite the belief of participants that they approach ever nearer to the war's material reality by performing as nineteenth-century bodies, they are instead demonstrating how the substance of war is continually circumvented and reinvented to recast the iron of social inequity. If anyone needs proof, Long bids us to consider the absence of African American bodies from the reenactors' stage.

Blood and Irony does Southern history a great service by systematically organizing the constellation of works about the Confederate years. Gardner's synthesis of...