Aberration of Mind: Suicide and Suffering in the Civil War–Era South by Diane Miller Sommerville (review)

Diane Miller Sommerville’s Aberration of Mind: Suicide and Suffering in the Civil War–Era South examines the ways suicide was both practiced and received in the U.S. South during the decades before and after the Civil War. It is a remarkable work that helps us understand not only the shifting nature of American ideas about suicide but also the wartime conditions that provided context for those ideas, as well as the ways that race and gender helped determine them. Sommerville’s research makes liberal use of case studies as well as diaries, letters, newspaper accounts, coroner’s reports, and military and asylum records in order to examine individual motives for suicide attempts and to determine how society reacted to such attempts. Acknowledging the paucity of source material that gives a complete picture of individual thinking on suicide, Sommerville argues that an examination of the assigned motives for suicide that can be found in the documents can still reveal much about how both individuals and society approached the practice. In her research on these assigned motives, she is able to piece together how wartime suffering affected southerners’ thoughts concerning suicide, with a particular focus on the ways understandings of race and gender interacted with those thoughts.

The organization of the book is both chronological and topical, with each chapter delving into the experiences of a specific group during a specific period of time. The first two chapters analyze the wartime experiences of Confederate white men and women and how the pressures of and challenges to gender norms contributed to suffering and thoughts about suicide during those years. The next two chapters discuss suicide, first among enslaved southerners during wartime, and then among freedmen and freedwomen in the South after emancipation. In these chapters, Sommerville addresses not only the psychological struggles of black southerners themselves but also the ways white stereotypes about this population affected understandings of black suffering. Next, Sommerville moves to the postwar experiences of white southerners, with one chapter on veterans’ experiences, another on masculinity and financial ruin, and a third on women in the postwar world. She ends with an overview of the concepts of suicide and suffering during the nineteenth century.

Sommerville’s work imparts several important arguments. First, she makes a strong case that the Civil War precipitated a shift in the way suicide was viewed by southerners. There was less judgment of the person who committed suicide as sinful and a greater understanding that the suffering brought on by war contributed to such acts. The war thus helped open the door to environmental explanations for psychological distress. Second, her work emphasizes the ways that the war destabilized notions of gender among men and women, white and black, which added new stresses that sometimes led to suicidal thoughts and actions. Third, Sommerville demonstrates that, although black southerners experienced their own particular brand of suffering during the war and its aftermath, racism caused most white southerners to dismiss black men and women’s suffering and to overlook psychological trauma among the black population to a disgraceful degree. Aberration of Mind is a worthy contribution to the scholarship on the experiences of ordinary citizens during the Civil War era and to the literature on the trauma of war.