Scars to Prove It: The Civil War Soldier and American Fiction (review)

Perhaps my favorite Civil War book is a 1904 regimental history of the 148th Pennsylvania that was written by my great-great uncle, Thomas Meyer. During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, hundreds of Civil War veterans revisited the war as they wrote memoirs and regimental histories. Until now, this genre has been neglected by literary critics. The two most significant studies of Civil War literature have been Edmund Wilson’s Patriotic Gore (1962), and Daniel Aaron’s The Unwritten War (1973). Wilson ignores veterans’ writing altogether, and Aaron quickly dismisses it as sentimental and denies that it had any influence on Stephen Crane. Craig Warren corrects this gap in literary history by examining seven novels published between 1895 and 2006 and examining how they have “embraced, celebrated, resisted, and rejected” veterans’ writings (5). He convincingly argues that “the success and value of these works owe a great deal to the literary efforts of an earlier group of American writers—the soldiers who fought the Civil War and who later recorded in print their experiences and interpretations” (8).

Beginning with Crane’s The Red Badge of Courage (1895), Warren shows how the outpouring of memoirs by veterans created an obstacle for writers, like him, who did not serve in the war. By writing about the experience of battle from a non-veteran point of view, Crane created a more inclusive experience of the war and allowed readers to vicariously experience the realities of the battlefield. Chapter 2 compares Margaret Mitchell’s Gone With the Wind (1936) to Caroline Gordon’s None Shall Look Back (1937), arguing that both novelists used soldiers’ and women’s memoirs of the war as they attempted to expand the concept of “veteran” to include women’s involvement in the war. Chapter 3 shows that William Faulkner’s use of civilian narrators in Absalom, Absalom! (1936) and The Unvanquished (1938) deflects attention from the battlefield experience of the Confederate veterans in order to focus on the potential for social change created by the war. In his chapter on Michael Shaara’s The Killer Angels (1974), Warren places the novel in the contexts of the Lost Cause, reconciliation ideology, and revisionist interpretations of Lee and Longstreet. He sees Shaara’s central theme as the conflict between American democracy and Old World aristocracy, and he argues that Shaara’s revival of veterans’ interpretations of the war (for example, the significance of Chamberlain) have influenced subsequent popular and academic histories of the war (as well as the Gettysburg battlefield itself, as evidenced by the National Park Service’s changes to the presentation of the fighting on Little Round Top). The final chapter shows how contemporary novels such as Howard Bahr’s The Judas Field (2006) use twentieth-century soldiers’ memoirs to reinterpret the Civil War.

Warren’s selection of texts is excellent, and his readings of the novels engage with the central literary issues of each text as well as recent discussions of Civil War memory. He does an especially good job of integrating biographical and historical context into his readings of the novels. For example, he notes that when Faulkner was asked what elements of the southern tradition he would wish his grandson to inherit, he replied, “He can have a Confederate battle flag if he wants it but he shouldn’t take it too seriously” (90). This sets up Warren’s argument that Faulkner demythologized the southern past in his effort to spur southern society to move forward. Scars to Prove It is a first-rate piece of scholarship that will be interesting to literary critics as well as academic and amateur Civil War historians.