Notes
Notes Introduction 1. In 1877, Bierce collaborated with his friends William A. Rudolfson and Thomas A. Harcouth to write The Dance of Death under the joint pseudonym of William Herman. 2. C. Hartley Grattan, Bitter Bierce: A Mystery of American Letters (1929); Franklin Walker, Ambrose Bierce: The Wickedest Man in San Francisco (1941); Paul Fatout, Ambrose Bierce: The Devil’s Lexicographer (1951); Roy Morris, Jr., Ambrose Bierce: Alone in Bad Company (1995). 3. Although the publication date of Tales of Soldiers and Civilians is 1891, it was not actually released until 1892. M. E. Grenander was the first to recognize this discrepancy in her essay “Ambrose Bierce and In the Midst of Life.” In the Midst of Life is the title that Bierce gave to the revised and expanded edition of Tales of Soldiers and Civilians that he published in 1898. 4. See especially Russell Duncan and David J. Klooster, eds., Phantoms of a BloodStained Period: The Complete Civil War Writings of Ambrose Bierce (2002); Robert L. Gale, An Ambrose Bierce Companion (2001); and three works edited by S. T. Joshi and David E. Schultz: Ambrose Bierce: An Annotated Bibliography of Primary Sources (1999); A Much Misunderstood Man: Selected Letters of Ambrose Bierce (2003); and A Sole Survivor: Bits of Autobiography (1998). In addition, Joshi, Lawrence I. Berkove, and Schultz have recently published a three-volume scholarly edition of Bierce’s short fiction, The Short Fiction of Ambrose Bierce: A Comprehensive Edition (2006). 5. Most notable of these readings are Grenander’s interpretation of “The Death of Halpin Frayser” (Ambrose Bierce 106–14), James G. Powers’s “Freud and Farquhar: An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge?’” and Peter Stoicheff’s “‘Something Uncanny’: The Dream Structure in Ambrose Bierce’s ‘An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge.’” For the first study of Bierce’s “The Death of Halpin Frayser” from a post-Freudian perspective, see Allan Lloyd Smith, “Can Such Things Be?: Ambrose Bierce, the ‘Dead Mother,’ and Other American Traumas,” which was published in 2004. 6. Even insightful critics and scholars sometimes fail to recognize the importance of responsible biography in the case of Bierce, whose writings have tended to be shorted in the press for sensationalism. For instance, in A Prescription for Adversity: The Moral Art Notes to Pages xviii–6 136 of Ambrose Bierce, Berkove overreacts to this tendency by sweepingly dismissing the relevance of all psychoanalytic approaches to Bierce or his works, claiming that they encourage readers to see the author as “psychologically disordered” and his writings as “evidence of his warped personality” (141). While Berkove’s frustration is perhaps understandable , this position is indefensible. 7. This position was inspired by Shoshana Felman’s argument about Edgar Allan Poe in “On Reading Poetry: Reflections on the Limits and Possibilities of Psychoanalytic Approaches.” Chapter 1 1. See especially Rank, Beyond Psychology; Rollo May, The Meaning of Anxiety; Robert Jay Lifton, The Broken Connection: On Death and the Continuity of Life; and Norman O. Brown, Life against Death: The Psychoanalytical Meaning of History. 2. It should be noted that Becker usually fails to include female referents in his writings. Unless specifically noted otherwise, however, the applicability of his argument to females as well as males should be inferred. 3. Freud first used the term “Oedipus complex” in 1910 in “A Special Type of Object Choice by Men.” 4. For a more extreme interpretation of the development of death anxiety in children , see Joseph C. Rheingold, The Mother, Anxiety, and Death: The Catastrophic Death Complex. Rheingold argues that fear of annihilation is not part of the child’s natural experience but rather is engendered by maternal deprivation. 5. For related information on childhood death in Puritan America, see David E. Stannard, The Puritan Way of Death: A Study in Religion, Culture, and Social Change, as well as Margaret M. Coffin, Death in America: The History and Folklore of Customs and Superstitions of Early Medicine, Funerals, Burials, and Mourning. 6. See especially Margaret S. Mahler, Fred Pine, and Anni Bergman, The Psychological Birth of the Human Infant. 7. See John Bowlby, Separation: Anxiety and Anger. 8. See George Buelow, Mark McClain, and Irene McIntosh, “A New Measure for an Important Construct: The Attachment and Object Relations Inventory”; Lynne Murray, “Intersubjectivity, Object Relations Theory, and Empirical Evidence from the MotherInfant Interactions”; and Rebecca Smith Behrends and Sidney Jules Blatt, “Internalization and Psychological Development throughout the Life Cycle.” 9. Carey McWilliams first discovered this epitaph and suggests that it was written by Bierce in...
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