Review: Homeland Security: Writing the American Civil War

Author(s): Elizabeth Duquette

Source: The Southern Literary Journal, Vol. 35, No. 1, Nineteenth Century Southern Writers
(Fall, 2002), pp. 160-163
Published by: University of North Carolina Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20078356 .
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 Homeland Security: Writing
the American Civil War

byElizabeth Duquette

Disarming theNation: Women's Writing and theAmerican

Civil War. By EHzabeth Young. Chicago: U of
Chicago P, 1999. xvi +389 pp. $47.00.
The Political Work ofNorthern Women Writers and the
Civil War, 18JO-18/2. By Lyde CuUen Sizer. Chapel
Hill: U of North CaroHna P, 2000. 368 pp. $45.00.

Scholarship on Uterature of the American Civ? War has tradi

tionaUy begun in the same place?with Walt Whitman. In SpecimenDays,
Whitman claimed that "the real war w?l never get in the books" and this
pronouncement has seemed prophetic to the many critics who have sub
sequently deplored the absence of "good" writing about the war. Ed
mund W?son, in his monumental study Patriotic Gore, complains that the
American Civ? War can be said to have produced "a remarkable Utera
ture" only if one is wilHng to include "speeches and pamphlets, private
letters and diaries, personal memoirs and journaUstic reports." Locating
his own experience within the context of two world wars and the tensions
of an uneasy nuclear peace, W?son is openly dismissive of most Uterature
written during times of conflict: "The unanimity of men atwar is Uke that
of a school of fish, which wiU swerve, simultaneously and apparently
without leadership, when the shadow of an enemy appears." Even wh?e
he tries to chaUenge W?son's contention by demonstrating the extent to
which the war "touched" and "engaged" writers of the time, Daniel
Aaron nonetheless regretfuUy agrees in The Unwritten War "
that the Civ?
War produced a "paucity of 'epics' and 'masterpieces.'
Recently, however, Uterary scholars and historians have begun to inter
rogate the critical priorities Whitman's assertion has been used to justify.
What is "the real war," they have asked, and why is it not representable? Is

2002 the University of North Carolina at

? by the Southern Literary journal'and
HiU Department of EngUsh. AU rights reserved.
Chapel

16O
 Review \6\

as monoHthic as Wilson's reference to "men at war"

pubHc opinion sug

gests? In the past decade, scholars Uke Nina S?ber, Kathleen Diffley and
Anne Rose have used similar questions to chaUenge the standard inter
a
pretation of the Civ? War as conflict between heroic white men. Two re
cent books on women's writing during the war materiaUy contribute to
this important work of redefinition. The contention shared by EHzabeth
Young and Lyde CuUen Sizer is that far from being unwritten, the Civil
War was enormously narrated although the authors and texts have been
significantly overlooked. Wars, they concur, dramatize the ways in which
societies understand sexual difference and, as such, provide an exceUent
opportunity for change, chaUenge and re-interpretation of traditional
an women writers seized
gender roles, opportunity during the Civ? War.
Indeed, accepting the assumption that war is primarily the business of
men on the field of battle, they maintain, has
prevented scholars from ap
preciating the ways in women, children and African Americans were in
cluded in the contemporary narration of the Civ? War, and subsequently
excluded from itsmemory.
Looking to popular writing from 1861 to 1865, it becomes clear that the
home front was considered to be critical for both Confederate and Union
partisans. Once this basic fact is estabUshed a host of questions arises:What
were the most effective ways of convincing women to encourage their
husbands, sons and lovers to enHst in the army? How, as the death toUs
mounted, could they to be adequately consoled for their personal losses
while remaining committed to national goals? And, perhaps most impor
tantly for the works examined here, what active contributions could women
make to the war effort? According to popular legend, Abraham Lincoln

jokingly located the cause of the conflict with Harriet Beecher Stowe, ask
ing, "Is this the Uttle woman who made this great war?" Was it possible for
other women to wield
sim?ar influence? If women worked outside the
home, spurred by either financial necessity or patriotic zeal, was such be
havior, entirely improper according to antebeUum norms, appropriate to
times of national crisis? At the same time, the war presented equaUy diffi
cult questions about the status of African Americans. Popular Uterature of
the Civ? War obHquely addresses the question that would dominate the Re
construction era:what was the proper place for the freed slave inAmerican

society? With differing priorities and presuppositions, Young and Sizer at

tempt to address these questions, displacing the war's mythic masculinity
and recovering some of the impUcations of the home front.
InDisarming theNation: Womens Writing andtheAmerican Civil War, EUz
abeth Young explores the ways inwhich women's writing capitaUzed on
 i62 Southern Literaryjournal

the freedoms permitted by the Civil War to redefine their place inAmer
ican culture. "The Civil War, as a concentrated moment of social flux,"
she observes, "catalyzed and authorized multiple modes of civil disobe
dience for women." Central to her argument is a consideration of the var

ious ways the concept of "civ?ity" functioned in the nineteenth

inwhich
century. Explaining that the discourse of civ?ity was instrumental to the
construction of a femininity predicated on restraint, repression, and rig
orous charts the ways women writers the
self-scrutiny, Young exploited
as both "historical ground and
of the Civil War"
"symboUc possibiHties
Uterary figure." "If female civ?ity highUghted a contrast between civ? women
and rude men, then it equaUy depended upon, and in turn created, an in
ternal spUt between female excess and restraint." Participation in the war
?as nurse, as mother, as domestic servant, and even as
cross-dressing

soldier?provided the means

and opportunity for women to
reshape the
of to include a more engaged and active sense of their
language civ?ity
proper sphere. Carefully foUowing the vectors of her argument, Young in
cludes not only northern white women in her discussion, but African
American and southern women writers as weU. Indeed, because African

Americans were "brutaUy excluded from the prerogatives of civ?ity," the

in texts women are even more
tensions she identifies by white pro
nounced in those by black writers.
Of particular note in this fine work isYoung's reading of Uncle Tom's
Cabin, a significant contribution to scholarship on this now critical text in
the American canon. Claiming that "Uncle Tom's Cabin not only prepared
for Uteral sectional conflict but articulated more broadly defined forms of
"
'civ? wars,' situates the novel's tensions within cultural norms for
Young
white "Two related forms of internal fracture," she argues,
femininity.
"structure Stowe's novel and its reception in Civil War America: the psy
chic rebeUions within nineteenth-century femininity white and the unsta
ble rhetoric of the mascuUne nation at war with itself." Young concen
trates her analysis on the figure of Topsy, who she maintains functions as
a "blackface projection of white femininity." Tracing the cultural conno
tations of the phrase "topsy-turvy" in the novel and itsmany stage adap
tations, Young argues that Topsy embodied the dynamics of excess and
restraint crucial to the construction of conventions concerning gender
and race weU into the era.
post-beUum
Whereas are exceUent when with texts writ
Young's readings working
ten before and the war her conclusions become less com
during years,
turns to works from later in the century. For example,
pelling when she
the chapter on The Woman inBattle by Loretta Velazquez examines the im
 Review 163

pUcations of wartime cross-dressing for post-beUum gender formations.

Wh?e the textual interpretations themselves provide several intriguing in

sights, the conclusions, especiaUy those emphasizing cultural anxieties

about anal penetration, are inadequately justified by the materials mar
shaled to support them. In marked contrast, her work on Louisa May ?1
cott and EHzabeth Keckley, the African American author of a memoir
about domestic service in the Lincoln White House, substantively con
tributes to the re-evaluation of domestic rhetoric and the raciaHzed con

struction of gender during the nineteenth century.

The focus of The Political Work ofNorthern Women Writers and theCivil
War, 18y0-18/2 by Lyde CuUen Sizer is much narrower than that under
taken by Young, although she shares many of Young's basic assumptions
about the role women played in interpreting, and manipulating, the Civil
War to achieve their poUtical goals. The "poUtical work" she identifies in
the writings of nine northern women is inconsistent in both message and
genre; neither purely radical nor purely conservative, their writings none
a
theless reflect a "coUective longing for meaningful place in the poUty."
Defining her notion of "poUtical work" in terms of presenting "an alter
native history and narrative of the war" "written through amatrix of gen
der, class, and racial assumptions," Sizer maintains that the ideology of
separate spheres was under sustained attack by the efforts of these women
to rewrite their role in American culture. CarefuUy tracing shifts in per
ception and presentation during the war, Sizer notes the ways inwhich the
"rhetoric of unity" which characterized women's writing in the early years
of war gives way to an emphasis on the suffering of the individual woman.
the book, Sizer remains attuned to the status of women's
Throughout
work and the ways inwhich itwas resisted by domestic ideology, as weU as
how class and race impacted the poUtical efforts undertaken by women
writers. In many respects, Sizer's works the
methodology against speci

ficity and clarity of her argument. Wh?e her focus on the relevance of po
Utical reform adds substantiaUy to her reading, her attempt to provide in
tellectual biographies of nine northern women writers, in addition to

sketching social conventions and attitudes, renders much of the actual

textual and historical analysis superficial. In general, however, her work,
combined with Young's, contributes significantly to our appreciation of
the nineteenth century and the Uterature it produced.