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  • Aberration of Mind: Suicide and Suffering in the Civil War–Era South by Diane Miller Sommerville
  • Joy M. Giguere (bio)
Aberration of Mind: Suicide and Suffering in the Civil War–Era South. By Diane Miller Sommerville. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2018. Pp. xiv, 429. $34.95 paper)

While attitudes toward suicide vary between cultures and religions, since the Middle Ages Christian societies have regarded the act as wholly taboo. Self-murder, as it was understood, was an affront to God and a mortal sin that resulted in eternal damnation. Suicides were to be treated by society as anathema, their bodies forbidden from receiving traditional burial in consecrated ground since their soul had no chance for resurrection and heavenly salvation. Such conceptions remained consistent across time, space, and denominational lines; through the first half of the nineteenth century, American Protestant ministers and Catholic priests equally denounced self-murder as abhorrent. As Diane Miller Sommerville examines in her meticulously researched study, Aberration of Mind: Suicide and Suffering in the Civil War–Era South, the trauma wrought by the Civil War and Reconstruction fundamentally altered how southerners in particular—men and women, white and black—viewed suicide.

Because the war was fought primarily on southern soil, resulting in the loss of personal property, the devastation of the landscape, and compromised quality of life for civilians, and because white southerners ultimately lost the war, white and black southerners experienced suffering, trauma, mental instability, and suicidal behaviors far more than their northern counterparts. The universal suffering experienced by southerners, albeit in different forms depending upon factors of race and gender, ultimately led to a secularization of popular attitudes toward suicide and thus removed centuries of stigma attached to the action. In addressing this hitherto largely unexplored topic, [End Page 221] Sommerville's work is a significant contribution to what will hopefully be a growing body of scholarship examining mental illness and suicide.

Despite her assertions that southern record-keeping about mental illness, suicide, and death more generally during the Civil War era was poor, Sommerville's effective use of an impressive array of sources is evident throughout her text and accompanying one hundred pages of notes. By examining newspaper reports, journal entries, correspondence, reminiscences recorded from the WPA Slave Narratives, suicide notes, and, of course, records from the South's mental asylums, Sommerville considers the war itself as a causative factor that either led to self-destructive behaviors or exacerbated pre-existing mental conditions that resulted in suicidal actions. Recognizing that suffering—a seemingly intangible concept—varied for different populations according to their race, gender, and situation during and after the war, Sommerville organizes her text into eight chapters arranged chronologically and thematically in three parts.

Chapters one and two comprise Part One and focus on Confederate men and women during the Civil War. In these chapters, she examines how the Civil War challenged years of engrained patterns of gendered behavior and expectations, and that while many white men and women rose to the challenge, it is important to acknowledge that plenty buckled under the new pressures they faced. For Confederate soldiers and officers, southern notions of masculinity and courage meant showing fear was taboo; as a result, many men opted for suicide rather than show fear in battle, or worse, run away and be labeled a coward. For southern women, the absence of male heads of household suddenly placed the burden of traditionally masculine responsibilities—management of plantations, for example—on top of the already overwhelming task of childrearing and maintaining their households. These new stresses resulted in many women engaging in suicidal behaviors, including expressing death wishes, engaging in self-harm, and committing self-murder. In a number of cases, women who experienced extreme bouts of mental instability, either caused or exacerbated by the war, were institutionalized.

Part Two shifts to an examination of suffering and suicide among African Americans in slavery and freedom. In chapter three, Sommerville makes what is arguably her most profound yet also self-evident argument—that, contrary to years of historical scholarship claiming that slave suicide was an extreme form of resistance to the institution itself and revenge against white masters, it was...

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