Southern Women Novelists and the Civil War: Trauma and Collective Memory in the American Literary Tradition since 1861 by Sharon Talley (review)

Sharon Talley’s intriguing study begins with the observation that the American Civil War was the “most traumatic event” in the nation’s history (ix). Talley asks what that meant both for those who lived through the war and for their descendants, who must negotiate the enduring legacies of unhealed wounds. As Talley explains, trauma theorists typically study “the personal lives of individuals” who have experienced profound “psychic and physical responses to traumatic events” that, in turn, create a crisis of meaning (ix). Talley, however, seeks to uncover the collective effects of trauma experienced by southern women from the Civil War era to the present day. One way to bring that distress to light, she argues, is to examine southern women’s fiction about the war.

Yet everyone’s trauma is not the same. For most southern white women of the war generation, Confederate defeat signaled the cataclysmic event, rupturing their understanding of the world and their place in it. For African American women in the South, institutionalized slavery engendered trauma that, by the war’s end, had been inherited by the millions of descendants of slavery’s first generations. For them, the fall of the Confederacy signaled not defeat but liberation. Yet the reunited nation’s abandonment of newly freed people perpetuated slavery’s trauma for succeeding generations, a reality ignored by southern white women novelists for more than a century. “Because slavery and the war were intertwined traumatic events in the nation’s history, Americans must confront them ‘repeatedly, obsessively, necessarily, whether they like it or not,’” Tallen explains, quoting journalist Michael Schudson (xii). “The narratives that result do not have to agree,” she continues, “but they cannot create a past that omits or ignores the events themselves” (xii). Her study, then, traces the ways southern women novelists of the Civil War have come to confront the nation’s most traumatic episode. By the post–World War II era, Talley’s book suggests, southern women novelists were more willing to displace Confederate defeat as the singular traumatic experience and engage more fully the trauma wrought by slavery.

Talley limits her study to Civil War novelists because it allows her to provide additional biographical details about her subjects and to offer a “more in-depth consideration of their writings” (xiii). Moreover, she contends, it allows her to probe more deeply the “interrelationships” among her subjects by highlighting their texts’ “shared concerns, ambivalences, contradictions, and inconsistencies” (xiii). Her author/text-at-the-center approach certainly has its advantages. We learn a great deal about the ways autobiography and history influence authorial choice. From the wartime destruction experienced by Mary Noailles Murfree’s family to Margaret Walker’s personal struggle to ensure that her great-grandmother’s story was told, Talley demonstrates how the distinction between private and public was often irrelevant for these authors. Too, we learn a great deal about the novelists’ craft, especially from those writers who were forthright about the ways they set out to pen their narratives. And we learn a great deal about production, dissemination, and, in some cases, critical reception, especially of those novels published in the post–World War I era. In some cases, Talley illuminates how the dominant narrative was perpetuated by an encouraging book industry, such as with Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind. At other times, she highlights the controversies surrounding highly publicized counternarratives, such as Alice Randall’s The Wind Done Gone and Josephine Humphries’ Nowhere Else on Earth, but always revealing how text and context informed one another. Finally, and no mean feat, Talley offers skilled and perceptive close readings, so we learn a great deal about the texts themselves. Here, Talley’s greatest ally is her empathy. She is often critical, as she is with Kaye Gibbons’s On the Occasion of My Last Afternoon...