Disarming the Nation: Women's Writing and the American Civil War - Review

African American Review, Summer, 2001 by Nina Baym

Elizabeth Young. Disarming the Nation: Women's Writing and the American Civil War. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1999. 405 pp. $47.00 cloth/$18.00 paper.

The title of this book misleads, because (to paraphrase the author) Disarming the Nation is neither complete survey of American women's Civil War writing nor a comprehensive study of their historical novels on the topic. Rather, it considers selected texts that illuminate "key themes in women's literary relation to the Civil War." Literary here means 'non-literal'; the "key themes" are sexual. The writers analyzed employ the civil war trope to "represent internal rebellions, conflicts, and fractures," most of them involving struggles between the disciplinary force of civility and a countering radical carnivalesque. More often than not, the term Civil War appears in scare quotes that identify it as a metaphor.

Not far beneath this book's extraordinarily sophisticated surface lurks a romanticism reminiscent of the 1960s, celebrating the polymorphous perverse and imaging that making love--really making love--might put a terminus to making war. For Young, civility leads either to lock-step conformity or malign distortions of suppressed desires that often take the form of (white, female) racism and heterosexism. The book will thus be especially congenial to those who think true sexual liberation might be sufficient to solve the nation's race and gender problems. Those who think otherwise may still find much to admire and ponder in this elegantly written, richly researched, eclectic cultural study.

After a summary introduction, Young takes up in rough chronological order: Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin; Louisa May Alcott's Hospital Sketches, Little Women, and Little Men; Elizabeth Keckley's Behind the Scenes; or, Thirty Years a Slave, and Four Years in the White House (supposedly the memoirs of an African American dressmaker who worked for Mary Todd Lincoln); Loreta Janeta Velazquez's The Women in Battle (supposedly the memoirs of a white, cross-dressing Confederate soldier); Frances E. W. Harper's Iola Leroy; and Margaret Mitchell's Gone With the Wind. Each chapter considers a remarkable range of supplementary and complementary texts, including many by male writers, locating the chosen works in a dense cultural web. The analysis always manifests critical topicality, strong powers of synthesis, and acute close-reading skills. The book is an all-around impressive performance.

The chapter on Uncle Tom's Cabin (a Civil War novel only in retrospect, as Young forthrightly grants) deals with Topsy (the book's main character also only in retrospect, as stage versions of the novel make her the target of racist humor). According to Young, Topsy is the projection of Stowe's own repressed unruliness onto a despised "other" who is then disciplined into civility by Stowe's alter ego, Miss Ophelia. The chapter on Alcott follows two figures--the wounded soldier and the competent nurse--as they become symbols of feminized male and masculinized female. The situation where men are tamed and instructed by women, according to Young, represents Alcott's ideal republic, in which the man is disarmed and the woman "armed" by her wisdom but also disabled by the unfortunate civility with which that wisdom is hopelessly entangled.

The Keckley chapter takes a risk in accepting Keckley's authorship, for Behind the Scenes may have been ghostwritten by a white man. Young argues that Keckley wages "covert civil war" against Mary Todd Lincoln, turning this very white woman into a paradigmatic figure of uncontrolled excess like Topsy and thus striking back against (redress is Young's seamstress pun) white women's denigration of black women. Loreta Velazquez's story was also possibly ghostwritten by a white man from the North. Since Velazquez's account often strains credibility, Young's insistence that it is "stagnant" to worry about empirical truth, and productive to "embrace rather than repudiate the label of fiction for this text" is odd. For, if she aims to study the fantasy content of work by women writers, no text by any man can serve her purpose. But this narrative of cross-dressing affords Young a fine opportunity to unpack a work which, albeit often inadvertently (the term echoes through the chapter), dismantles the masculinist prete nsions and gender rigidities of the Old South and undermines the ideology of the Lost Cause (or tries to undermine it) early on.

The focus of Disarming the Nation on white racist fantasies does not easily accommodate Frances E. W. Harper's work. The analysis of Iola Leroy is perfunctory, and the relevant chapter veers quickly to Thomas Dixon's The Clansman and D. W. Griffith's The Birth of a Nation. As much as Young respects Harper's attempts to forge a politically aware black female consciousness, she regrets Harper's apparent capitulation in Iola Leroy to the ideology of civility that she thinks has especially victimized African American women.

The chapter on Gone With the Wind, the book's longest, attempts to recuperate this pro-Southern and frankly racist novel by reading Ashley Wilkes as Margaret Mitchell's true view of Southern manhood--emasculated and effete--, Scarlett O'Hara as a masculinized woman, and Rhett Butler as a cautiously darkened ("brown" not "black") and therefore sexualized male. "The ironic implication of her pro-Confederate fantasy is that white southern masculinity is so exhausted that it requires rebuilding from an outside source. Between Rhett and Scarlett, the best Confederate men" in the book are "respectively, brown and female."