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

Recently I had occasion to visit Barnesville, Georgia, a small town about fifty-five miles south of Atlanta. A resident proudly pointed out to me one of Barnesville's few tourist attractions: a home owned by an actor who played one of the Tarleton twins in the movie version of Margaret Mitchell's Gone with the Wind. My guide added, as an afterthought, that "some people in this town are still fighting the Civil War." Embedded in my guide's narrative was the internal division between the mythic memory of the Old South, embodied in the house, and the present reality of history for those Southerners who remain bitter over the outcome of the war. Elizabeth Young's Disarming the Nation: Women's Writing and the American Civil War argues that the War itself has always been a multivalent cultural symbol that stands for contradictory constructions of race, gender, and civility (17). Although the bulk of her excellent study comprises texts by nineteenth-century women, she includes twentieth-century representations of the War, including Mitchell's novel. Young's readings of Northern, Southern, white and African-American authors illustrate how cultural typologies and literary tropes slide almost imperceptibly from one meaning to another. Second only to the War itself as metaphor is Young's use of the popular Topsy doll, which could in a moment be made black from white, and vice versa. Disarming the Nation goes far toward making us understand the subtle movements that make for topsy-turviness.

Young discusses texts familiar to literary scholars generally (Uncle Tom's Cabin [1852], now the sine qua non of any study dealing with nineteenth-century writing by American women), to specialists in American and African-American writing (Harper's Iola Leroy [1892]), and to those interested in visual culture (Civil War-era political cartoons and a tongue-in-cheek Vanity Fair spread that subverts race and gender in Gone with the Wind). In turning from the fictional to the autobiographical to the visual and back again, Young makes a persuasive case for how the most divisive war in the nation's history divided not only politically, regionally, and ideologically, but also symbolically.

Disarming the Nation begins with a discussion of the traditional bias within American literary studies in favor of old canonical favorites such as Crane's The Red Badge of Courage (1895) (8-10). Young goes on to establish the centrality of women's texts in Civil War literature. Like Jane Tompkins in Sensational Designs: The Cultural Work of American Fiction, 1790-1860 (1985), she makes the claim that literature contributes importantly to the way Americans see themselves (6). Specifically, women's writing about the Civil War reveals how gender, race, and sexuality are internally divided axes (17). The six chapters following feature brilliant readings of Harriet Beecher Stowe, Louisa May Alcott, Frances Harper, Elizabeth Keckley, Loreta Velasquez, and Margaret Mitchell. These readings, which evince a deep awareness of historical and literary contexts, do indeed show how mutable these categories are, and that they represent the recombinant blueprint of a war that itself codes domestic and public concerns in complicated ways.

Chapter 1, like subsequent chapters, begins with a specific historical moment, widens the contextual focus, and moves on to a reading of the literary text(s). Young recounts the familiar story of Lincoln's meeting with Harriet Beecher Stowe, and his reputed claim that her novel served as a catalyst for war. She then discusses the meeting between Lincoln and Sojourner Truth in 1864 (a meeting that almost did not take place) in order to show the relationship between race and power. As Young writes, Truth "struggled against the closed door of a presidential house that was symbolically as well as literally white" (28). The familiar metaphor of the War as a house divided is itself made multivalent here, standing...