“Gorgeous Crime”: The Art of Violence in Women’s Civil War Poetry

“No writer has shown such a power of reporting in musical words those most gorgeous sights with which nature and art allure, dazzle, and intoxicate the eye. The lustre of gems, of silks, of velvets, of flowers, of water, air, and fire glows through her pages with a gleam that never was on sea or land. It is the power of Ruskin used by an elfin imagination reveling at will.” The Ruskinian elfin imagination belonged to Harriet Prescott Spofford, and it was at play in this particular case in Sir Rohan’s Ghost (1860), lauded by F. A. March in a book introducing German readers to American literary trends.¹ Sensuous gorgeousness was Spofford’s hallmark in the Civil War era; Dorri Beam’s recent study treats extensively what she calls this “highly wrought” style, largely associated with women writers of the period.²

Contemporary reviewers either loved or hated the trend, and a prominent hater was the young Henry James, who was already working out his ideas about realism. In an 1865 review of Spofford’s novel Azarian (1864), James condemns the style at length: “What manner of writing is it which lends itself so frankly to aberrations of taste? It is that literary fashion which, to speak historically, was brought into our literature by Tennyson’s poetry. The best name for it, as a literary style, is the ideal descriptive style …. The style in question reposes not so much upon the observation of the objects of external nature as the projection of one’s fancy upon them.” Though focusing on the travesties of Spofford’s style, James extends his criticism to a group of writers he dubs the “Azarian school.” The other practitioner he names is Rose Terry Cooke, but he makes it clear that there are many others, and that a pernicious literary force is on the loose: “In reading the books of the Azarian school,—for alas! There is a school—we have often devoutly wished that some legal penalty were attached to the use of description. We have sighed for a novel with a dramatis personae of disembodied spirits.” What reviewers reacted strongly to in this kind of writing—which extended to poetry as well—was the way imagination unleashed itself upon the environment, refusing to subordinate itself to empirical observation: it offered the experience of “a gleam that was never on land or sea.” The word-painting—of colors, textures, luxuriously excessive scenes in equally ornate language—took precedence over “observation of the objects of external nature.” The projections of the writers upon the world, according to James, overpowered things, people, and the spirits they embodied. The materiality of language itself—“this thick impasto of words and images”—became writing’s central focus, obscuring the actual subject.³

Prominent from the 1840s onwards, this ornate form of writing was highly popular in the 1860s, raising the question of whether it bore any relation to the Civil War, even though its themes were usually remote from that conflict. Beam, for example, identifies the style as a means of generating “alternative models of gendered self and desire.” This “aesthetic experience of sensual language” offers “a mode of pleasure and way of being that is not rooted in gendered anatomy.”⁴ While Beam, Paula Bennett, and Christopher Looby have related the style to the politics of sexual desire, writers associated with the so-called Azarian school also wrote poems about the war in “sensual language” elaborated into a “highly wrought” style.⁵ Critics have noted the way Emily Dickinson’s war poems, for example, sometimes bring beauty and violence together in jarring configurations. In “They dropped like flakes – ” (F545A), for example, one of her most frequently analyzed war poems, she likens dying men to falling flakes, stars, and rose petals.⁶ The distance between the horrifying tenor and the distinctively beautiful vehicle raises the question of how to bridge the gap. Should we, as Faith Barrett has suggested, understand the poem, which “insists on the loveliness of its own metaphors,” as a way of naturalizing and...