SOURCE: Long, Lisa A. “‘The Corporeity of Heaven’: Rehabilitating the Civil War Body in The Gates Ajar.” American Literature 69, no. 4 (December 1997): 781-811.

[In the following essay, Long contends that Elizabeth Stuart Phelps's 1868 novel The Gates Ajar offers an early symbolic analysis of “the inadequacy of traditional belief systems” in the post-Civil War era.]

In July 1866 a remarkable short story appeared in the Atlantic Monthly.¹ The anonymous author, young Army surgeon S. Weir Mitchell, would later attain fame—and infamy—as the inventor and implementor of the “Rest Cure” for turn-of-the-century neurasthenics. During the Civil War, however, Mitchell's attentions were turned toward nerve injuries.² In his story, “The Case of George Dedlow,” we imaginatively enter the mind of one of Mitchell's patients—an army surgeon who has lost over eighty percent of his body mass through the amputation of all of his limbs. The understandably despondent George is brought to a spiritual medium by a fellow patient who belongs to the “New Church.” George's companion assures him that nothing ever dies, that “in space, no doubt, exist all forms of matter, merely in finer, more ethereal being. You can't suppose a naked soul moving about without bodily garment”; George responds, “the thing should be susceptible of some form of proof to our present senses” (“Dedlow,” 9). Unable to “feel” himself and suffering from a waning sense of selfhood, George experiences the return of his legs at the seance, achieving a spiritual embodiment that allows him to feel like himself again: “Suddenly I felt a strange return of my self-consciousness. I was re-individuated, so to speak” (“Dedlow,” 11).

Mitchell's contemporary, Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, produced a seemingly disparate but surprisingly resonant response to the unprecedented carnage of the 1860s. Mitchell's story is concerned with spiritual embodiment and individual integrity—precisely the issues that occupy Phelps's wildly popular novel, The Gates Ajar (1868). Their thematic convergence is providential. Though unacquainted in the 1860s, twenty years later Mitchell and Phelps struck up a lively, albeit short-lived correspondence revolving around their separate efforts to write the “Great Medical Novel” (Mitchell's In War Time [1884] and Phelps's Doctor Zay [1882]), the intricacies of treating “the human body and soul,” and nerve disease—in this case, Phelps's chronic illness.³ In “Dedlow” and The Gates Ajar—the first significant publications for their respective authors—these common interests already appear. Searching for comfort at a sermon on the nature of heaven, the protagonist of The Gates Ajar, Mary Cabot, who lost her beloved brother only days before his release from four years in the Union army, finds only “glittering generalities, cold commonplaces, vagueness, unreality, a God and a future at which [she] sat and shivered.”⁴ She longs for the tangible and specific, for a heavenly future that reflects and validates rather than repudiates earthly lives.⁵ The specter of a bodiless existence is horrifying to Mary, just as it is to George Dedlow and the patients on whom Mitchell patterned him. Luckily, Mary's Aunt Winifred Forceythe arrives to draw vivid and comforting pictures of Mary's brother Royal going about his business in heaven in an earthly, physical manner. Winifred audaciously suggests that the idiosyncratic potential and material wishes of each individual are fully realized in what has been traditionally taken to be the most spiritual of places. Although Winifred acknowledges that Roy will be an angel, she adds, “he is not any less Roy for that,—not any less your own real Roy, who will love you and wait for you and be very glad to see you, as he used to love and wait and be glad when you came home from a journey on a cold winter's night” (53).

Phelps's and Mitchell's works suggest that the Civil War's staggering death toll and the number of critically injured prompted a reappraisal of the meaning of embodied existence, both for the dead and for wounded survivors. Personal loss, religious disillusionment, and a growing skepticism about the national mission are experienced as and expressed through the amputated body of George Dedlow and the jangled nerves of Phelps's grieving protagonist. Their physical afflictions resist national efforts to erase the bodies that bear the psycho-social wounds of war. Both authors argue that the repression of individual desire and the self-sacrifice required of soldiers and civilians during the Civil War produced a “vacant place” that can be recuperated only through the spiritual “rehabilitation” of distinctive bodies. Such sentiments clearly struck a chord with readers. Mitchell's “case study” elicited generous contributions to George Dedlow in care of the fictional “Stump Hospital,” while Phelps's novel garnered her record sales and hundreds of grateful letters.

The Civil War's significance to Mitchell is unmistakable: he is considered the preeminent Civil War doctor, and his war fiction deals unambiguously with military men.⁶ The war that raged as she composed The Gates Ajar also had a lasting impact on Phelps; her final short story, “Comrades” (1911), dramatizes the Memorial Day observances of an aged Civil War veteran and his truest and strongest “comrade,” his wife “Peter.”⁷ And yet The Gates Ajar has not been read as a novel of and about the Civil War. Traditionally, Civil War scholarship has been largely concerned with the physical actions of male combatants and the material minutiae of warfare. Virtually all Gates scholarship reinforces this view of the Civil War. Many critics find that instead of dealing explicitly with war Phelps deflects “military into social history.” Ann Douglas contends that Mary Cabot is able to accept the consequences of war only by denying its reality.⁸ Phelps's own admission that she wrote the novel to comfort “the bereaved wife, mother, sister, and widowed girl … whom the war trampled down” apparently supports such claims.⁹ Phelps's critical disassociation from the Civil War signals a more general, ahistorical response to the work of nineteenth-century American women writers, of which writing during the war era is a particular example. As Jane E. Schultz suggests, the perception that “only men make, fight, and matter in wars” has resulted in the invisibility of women who did participate in the war. I would add that it has also masked women writers' contributions to Civil War-era debates, leaving those aspects of their texts “invisible” to subsequent critics. Until recently, those who had recognized or anthologized Civil War-era literature by women clustered their works together, limiting them to home-front concerns and labeling their diverse responses the “women's view.”¹⁰

Both the interest in Phelps as a prototypical feminist and the damaging consensus that The Gates Ajar is largely a religious tract have stripped the novel of its historical context. The relatively few extended treatments of Gates situate it within the ahistorical traditions of “sentimental religion” or female-dominated consolation literature. As Lori Duin Kelly reminds us, “it was as a religious writer that Phelps was best known to her contemporaries, and it is largely for her religious writing that Phelps is remembered at all today.”¹¹ Some critics, perhaps viewing Phelps's attention to religious orthodoxy as conservative and hoping to give her image a critical make-over, have steered clear of her theological entanglements or have given only cursory treatment to The Gates Ajar, opting instead to study (and reprint) books in which she reveals herself as a “writer of books for women.”¹² Phelps would consider such pronouncements surprising; in an often-quoted section of Chapters from a Life, an autobiography written in old age, she recalls how “religious papers waged war across that girl's notions of the life to come, as if she had been an evil spirit let loose upon accepted theology for the destruction of the world.”¹³ Certainly the novel's clear debt to the Spiritualist practices and beliefs sweeping midcentury middle-class homes did not sit well with sanctioned theologians.

I argue here that The Gates Ajar offers not only sentimental consolation but also a rigorous exploration of the ontological systems unraveling during the Civil War and its aftermath. Steeped, as Barton Levy St. Armand phrases it, in an “American Protestant ethic at its most neurasthenic,” Phelps responds to a lifeless, enervated faith with a visceral, re-embodied alternative.¹⁴ St. Armand's reference to contemporary theology as “neurasthenic” is apt, for it allies Phelps's grieving protagonist with Mitchell's nerve-injured soldiers. Mitchell's medical texts present “nerve injuries” as both an etiology and a powerful cultural trope—one that would gain further significance as the century wore on. It is not surprising that the symptoms of Mary Cabot's grief mirror those of nerve-injured patients. Not only did Phelps's mother and father apparently suffer from nervous conditions, but she describes herself to Mitchell as “a ‘professional invalid’ in ‘good and regular standing for about half [of her] life.’”¹⁵ For both Mitchell and Phelps, nerve injuries became the perfect vehicle for literal and metaphoric discussions of the physical and psychological “wounds” of war. Nerve injuries are chronic and invisible. They flame up and subside at will. Most important, they foreground the tenuous distinction between “feeling” like oneself and enduring a growing sense of alienation from one's injured body or one's altered sense of self during war. Read alongside Mitchell's ground-breaking medical texts and fiction, Phelps's work takes on new significance as part of a philosophical debate on the relation between the body and the individual at war. In her depiction of grief, Phelps speaks to the difficult issues confronting Civil War doctors and their patients: locating the source of amorphous pain, assigning truth value to invisible suffering, generating the authority to articulate one's experience of these invisible phenomena, and devising effective treatments for the crippling ailments.

In her concentration on suffering, mourning, and the afterlife, Phelps is not, as one critic has suggested, conducting “exercises in necrophilia”; nor is she morbidly fixated on the deaths of her relatives, as many of her biographers insist.¹⁶The Gates Ajar is no more and no less macabre than Mitchell's story, with its grisly amputations and tortured protagonist. Rather, Phelps uses the afterlife as a transitional state suited to her exploration of a culture in flux.¹⁷ The gates to heaven are not wide open but “ajar,” suggesting the unsettled situation of the period. Contemporary clergy, too, recognized the unrest, accusing Phelps of instigating the “overthrow” of “church and state and family.”¹⁸ This charge notwithstanding, I contend that she is responding to the cultural crisis precipitated by the war—not creating one with her novel. Though The Gates Ajar may indeed have consoled a generation of believers devastated by the effects of the Civil War and unable to find comfort in traditional religion, its phenomenal popularity, not only in the U.S., where it was a best-seller for decades, but also worldwide, attests to its larger therapeutic value. Other critics—most notably Nancy Schnog—have already assigned therapeutic significance to Phelps's fictional ethos. Others have read its curative potential in narrowly personal terms—as “therapeutic self-indulgence” for Phelps as she struggled to come to grips with her mother's death.¹⁹ Rehabilitating Civil War bodies becomes a means both of expressing the inadequacy of traditional belief systems (religious, social, medical) and exploring the ontology of postbellum America. Phelps and Mitchell are the first in a long line of American writers and thinkers who found in the Civil War a trope capable of expressing both the personal transformations and social revolutions of their changing culture. Their seminal representations of the Civil War, crafted even before the war had ended, continue to inform contemporary discussions of that war.

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The nature of wartime death is central to the Civil War's signifying power. The massive casualty rates, previously unimaginable injuries and dismemberment, and, ultimately, the lack of corpses to bury and mourn disrupted grieving rituals and prompted a reappraisal of the afterlife. The Gates Ajar clearly attends to a society in mourning. A staggering 623,000 Americans died in the Civil War (more than in almost all subsequent American wars combined). A half million soldiers returned home physically wounded. At least 30,000 amputations were performed, generating grisly tales of the piles of arms and legs left outside hospitals and leaving amputees as dramatic reminders of the war's carnage. Many of the corpses never made it home. Thousands of unknown soldiers were buried in the South, and the War Department estimated that at least 25,000 were never buried at all.²⁰ All these conditions disrupted a culture of death that emphasized the importance of tending the dying body, witnessing the moment of death, gathering keepsakes, and envisioning loved ones in heaven as they had appeared in life.

In many antebellum novels, such as that other midcentury bestseller, Uncle Tom's Cabin, the expiring body is celebrated and beautified by its death; family members gather around the angelic Little Eva in order to glimpse the glories of heaven through her dying corpse. Material keepsakes gathered from the body were often an important part of mourning rituals, for example, hair which might be woven into watch-fobs, flower arrangements, and jewelry. There was also a midcentury vogue for memorializing the dead in photographs and paintings, as well as for displaying the dead body in glass-topped caskets. The embalming techniques perfected during the Civil War and the increasing skill of the newly appointed funeral directors, who would attend to the corpse cosmetically and compose its limbs in the most lifelike poses, allowed the corpse to “enact its own final genteel performance with bourgeois propriety,” as Karen Halttunen has observed.²¹ Finally, as Martha Pike points out, the hexagonal wooden coffins of antebellum America became ornately decorated rectangular “caskets,” lined with silk and customized with brass nameplates; such vessels were in keeping with the original meaning of “casket” as a repository of jewels and other valuables to be preserved.²² By midcentury Americans apparently found the dead body valuable in and of itself.

Yet Phelps's novel studiously avoids the corpse that is the silent, motivating center of the novel. Instead, her heroine Mary focuses on the sights and sounds that surround her only contact with Roy's body: “He came back, and they brought him up the steps, and I listened to their feet,—so many feet; he used to come bounding in. They let me see him for a minute, and there was a funeral. … I did not notice nor think till we had left him out there in the cold and had come back” (4). Neither Roy's death nor the condition of his corpse is described. It is striking that the most popular consolation fiction of the nineteenth century displays none of the usual accoutrements of the contemporaneous death culture. For obvious reasons, postmortem images of soldiers would not have been comforting or, in many cases, even possible. The belief that death was “a sweet deliverance from life” served well the bereavement typology of suffering, angelic children gently fading away in illness. There was little sweetness or comfort to be found in the startlingly quick, violent deaths of grown men at war. Gary Wills's brief but grotesquely explicit description of the “thousands of fermenting bodies, with gas-distended bellies, deliquescing in the July heat” or poking out of shallow graves after the Battle of Gettysburg dispels the carefully maintained mourning fictions of middle-class culture.²³

Yet Phelps does not simply deny the physical difficulties of war-time death. She writes circumspectly of the dead, attempting to assuage the anguish of readers who might be doubly afflicted by a dead body that is mangled, diseased, or simply missing. Consolation rhetoric suggested that dying loved ones—though thin or pale—remained essentially the same as when they were healthy. There was comfort in the thought that God had taken them and that they would enter whole into heaven. But in a time when tens of thousands of family members, friends, and lovers had “disappeared”—had been absent for months or even years before their deaths—many mourners found no comfort in the thought of a disembodied “soul” floating about in heaven. In memorializing Roy's physical being, Phelps attempts to achieve what Daniel Aaron has called “fictive solidity.”²⁴ Mary remembers “the flash in his eyes,” his “pretty soft hair that [she] used to curl and kiss about [her] finger, his bounding step, his strong arms that folded [her] in and cared for [her]” (9). Phelps builds an “altar of the dead,” a rhetorical monument to Royal as he was in life. Yet she must still contend with the actual disintegration of dead soldiers' bodies. Consequently, Aunt Winifred insists that “something of this body is preserved for the completion of another,” enough, at least, “to preserve identity as strictly as body can ever be said to preserve it” (116, emphasis in original).

Phelps and her contemporaries are very literal-minded about the necessity of the body for the afterlife. In Louisa May Alcott's 1863 Hospital Sketches, a young amputee humorously muses upon the “scramble for … arms and legs” on Judgment Day; he supposes, “my leg will have to tramp from Fredericksburg, my arm from here, and meet my body, wherever it may be.”²⁵ Phelps, too, resorts to humor in her oblique acknowledgment of the difficulties of dismemberment. However, she displaces anxieties about the possibility of a Christian afterlife onto what was certainly considered in her time a foreign, barbaric Other. In admitting the difficulty of transferring one's body to heaven after it has been mutilated, Phelps writes, “imagine for instance, the resurrection of two Hottentots, one of whom has happened to make a dinner of the other some fine day. A little complication there! Or picture the touching scene, when the devoted husband, King Mausolas, whose widow had him burned and ate the ashes, should feel moved to institute a search for his body!” (115). It is perhaps not too great a leap to read Phelps's Hottentots as her warring countrymen. Significantly, in the second scenario King Mausolas's dead body has been consumed as part of his culture's mourning rituals. It is his grieving widow who is both compelled to destroy his physical remains and then to relocate them. Such “barbaric” practices are not so different, Phelps subtly suggests, from those of her own culture, which requires women to sacrifice their loved ones to a national cause; like Mausolas's widow, Mary “feels moved” to search for her brother's body.²⁶

It is thus extremely important for Mary to be able to imagine her brother as embodied in heaven; otherwise he would become savage, unrecognizable, and unlocatable. Dead bodies are “rehabilitated” in The Gates Ajar in the sense that they are “re-clothed” in heaven in ideal earthly forms. Winifred assures Mary and Phelps's army of readers, “for ought we know, some invisible compound of an annihilated body may hover, by a divine decree, around the site of death till it is wanted,” thus ensuring the heavenly reconstitution of the earthly self (115). Bodily rehabilitation is even more necessary in times of war, when precious human bodies are so vulnerable, so cheap. Mary must not only imaginatively reconstitute Roy's body but also situate it in her geographic imagination. She supposes all the people wandering around heaven must have “local habitations” and live “under the conditions of an organized society” (140).²⁷ It is impossible, Phelps insists, to transcend the limits of the human imagination; even existence as a soul—the faith in some essential self that survives life on earth—needs the physical boundaries of the body in order to be articulated and have resonance in human minds.

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Phelps's preoccupation with heavenly embodiment inevitably leads her to confront contemporaneous theological debates on heavenly existence. The Christian concept of the afterlife endlessly complicates the relationship between physical and spiritual existence. The idea of resurrection—the soul that does not die, the body that must—especially confounds many Christians, even the clergy, Phelps argues. Mary is devastated by her local minister's account of heaven in an eagerly awaited sermon on the topic. According to Mr. Bland, “Heaven is an eternal state. Heaven is a state of holiness. Heaven is a state of happiness.” Bland goes on to list the “employments” of heaven, among them glorifying God and studying God's infinite mind. Finally, he concludes, “I expect to be so overwhelmed by the glory of the presence of God, that I may be thousands of years before I shall think of my wife” (69-70). While this is meant to be a comic moment, it also shows that the minister's notions of heaven are just as constrained and constructed by the limits of human knowledge as the embodied “middle-class” heaven Phelps eventually posits. Phelps helps her readers to see traditional notions of heaven anew: “Vague visions of floating about in the clouds, of balancing—with a white robe on, perhaps—in stiff rows about a throne, like the angels in the old pictures” are no more ridiculous than Winifred's tidy cottages (117).

Winifred argues that we will not live a “vague, lazy, half-alive disembodied existence,” as Mary had supposed (113). She uses the Resurrection as proof that the tendency of Revelation is to show that an embodied state is superior to a disembodied one. At one point she literally tallies the number of times the word “body” appears in descriptions of our heavenly state:

“‘There are celestial bodies.’ ‘It is raised a spiritual body.’ ‘There is a spiritual body.’ ‘It is raised in incorruption.’ ‘It is raised in glory.’ ‘It is raised in power.’ Moses, too, when he came to the transfigured mount in glory, had as real a body as when he went into the lonely mount to die.”

(119)

More than anything else, Christ's ascendance whole into heaven convinces Winifred of an embodied afterlife: “His death and resurrection stand forever the great prototype of ours” (121). Her references to Christ carry added weight in a culture that consistently represented fallen war heroes as Christ-like figures sacrificing their lives in a holy cause. In an 1862 sermon, for example, Octavius Frothingham, a Boston minister, likened dying soldiers to Christ because their deaths, too, would regenerate society.²⁸ In one of Walt Whitman's best-known war poems, the speaker uncovers the face of a dead soldier, proclaiming, “Young man I think I know you—I think this face is the face of the Christ himself, / Dead and divine and brother of all, and here again he lies.”²⁹ It is no coincidence that the dead brother is “Royal,” while the grieving woman is named Mary—at once the mother and lover of Christ and the archetypal figure of female mourning. Yet it is not Christ as God that Winifred invokes but Christ as man. In response to the concern that after death we shall “lose our personality in a vague ocean of ether,” Winifred explains: “He with his own wounded body, rose and ate and walked and talked. Is all memory of this life to be swept away?—He, arisen, has forgotten nothing. He waits to meet his disciples at the old, familiar places; as naturally as if he had never parted from them” (203). Winifred privileges Christ's humanity and earthly connections over his divinity. Phelps thus challenges those patriotic Transcendentalists who, as George Frederickson has shown, eagerly adapted their contemplative theories to the war effort.³⁰ While influential thinkers like Emerson were heralding the divinity within all people, Phelps concentrates on the humanity that had been sorely tested by the war.

Phelps goes still further in her indictment of these powerful cultural convictions. The Gates Ajar demonstrates that received socio-religious doctrine provided an utterly inadequate worldview in this time of war. Ultimately Phelps's novel evolves into a carefully crafted argument for the literal interpretation of the Bible. There is a pointed acknowledgment of the subjectivity of language and, more specifically, of biblical exegesis. Winifred complains, “no sooner do I find a pretty verse that is exactly what I want, than up hops a commentator, and says, this isn't according to text, and means something entirely different” (90). To prevent such dialogue from degenerating into spiritual meaninglessness and to find something comforting and tangible in Christianity, Phelps assumes the privilege of interpretation.³¹ Aunt Winifred becomes the novel's theological mouthpiece: her marriage to a minister and her own role as a missionary in Kansas give her theological authority, while her firsthand experience of the death of her husband makes her a credible representative of mourning. And her battle with physical frailty in the breast cancer that takes her life gives her the conventional foreknowledge of heaven so often bestowed upon the ill and dying. Winifred's vision of the afterlife is comforting to all the characters in the book. When his wife is fatally burned, even the misguided Mr. Bland is faced with the inadequacies of his faith and turns to Winifred for guidance.

Winifred locates “the mystery of the Bible … not so much in what it says, as in what it does not say” (93). In the gaps and silences, in the “dark corners” of theological sophistry, lies the hope for reintegration and rehabilitation. Heaven is initially represented as the supreme abstraction; it is a blankness or silence to Mary. She lies in bed at night longing “for a touch, a sign, only something to break the silence into which he [Royal] has gone.” “Has everything stopped just here?” she wonders (21). Winifred is able not only to identify ideological and emotional vacuums but also to embody them, articulate them, fill them with the sensation for which Mary yearns. She creates what she calls “synonomes,” that is to say, heavenly versions of earthly experiences and pleasures. Winifred explains that she treats her young child Faith just as “the Bible treats us, by dealing in pictures of truth that she can understand.” Winifred makes Mary's neighbors “comprehend that [in heaven] their pianos and machinery may not be made of literal rosewood and steel … [but] whatever enjoyment any or all of them represent now, something will represent them” (186). Aunt Winifred thus boldly builds a material argument with no empirical evidence, insisting that in the Bible God has given us not “empty symbols” but “a little fact” (78). Phelps's embodied heaven is not an empty promise, as the Civil War had proved to be for most Americans, but a reality, a material reward befitting the material sacrifices required of those remaining on earth. Her heavenly “pictures” combat the photographs of Matthew Brady and Alexander Gardner, which were circulating images of blasted landscapes and decomposing bodies throughout the country at this time. As Alan Trachtenberg explains, photography allowed the culture to create “a collective image of the war as a sensible event,” “felt” even by those who remained far from the battlefield.³² The Civil War was the first modern occasion for such imagery. Phelps merely responds in kind with her palpable heaven.

Literal, tangible interpretation of abstract concepts is the hermeneutic program forwarded by Aunt Winifred throughout. Even calling her child Faith, a name Mary claims is inappropriate for a “solid-bodied, twinkling little bairn … with her pretty red cheeks, and such an appetite for supper,” assigns physical being to an abstraction. In Winifred's corporeal theology, conversion is achieved through physical contact. Her “little soft touch”—not her words—preaches most convincingly against Reverend Bland's inchoate sermon and converts Mary to her way of thinking (71). When Winifred chides the local clergy for their inability to “tell picture from substance, a metaphor from its meaning,” she insists upon the material and historical base of knowledge, resisting the psychological and experiential restraints of religious orthodoxy (77). Winifred's theology fosters individual authority, empowering the uneducated and disenfranchised to find spiritual answers in their lived experiences rather than demanding their submission to incomprehensible, abstract explanations. Anne C. Rose argues that midcentury Victorian Americans still regarded the Bible as an “essential point of reference,” finding there not firm meaning but “consoling allusions and personal uplift.”³³ Phelps's novel supports Rose's contention, suggesting that postbellum Americans had necessarily become skilled “readers” not only of the Bible but of the texts of their own lives. The war seemingly enabled Phelps—and her whole generation—to make such claims to authority, to approach “reading” as a “strenuous, self-productive experience.”³⁴ It was their proving ground.³⁵

Phelps's insistence on Winifred as an “Interpreter” of the afterlife, Winifred's insistence that “the absent dead are very present with us,” and Winifred's usurpation of masculine authority ally Phelps with the Spiritualist movement, which Anne Braude argues was widespread during the middle of the nineteenth century. Not surprisingly, Spiritualism flourished during the Civil War: planchettes (early Ouija boards) began to be mass-produced in the U.S. during the war; the first national convention of this eminently anti-authoritarian movement occurred in 1864; and women Spiritualists began to speak more frequently in public forums in the early 1860s. Mary's spiritual crisis mirrors exactly those that Braude contends often provoked an interest in Spiritualism: “the desire for empirical evidence of the immortality of the soul; the rejection of Calvinism or evangelicalism in favor of a more liberal theology; and the desire to overcome bereavement through communication with departed loved ones.”³⁶ Braude explains that before the Civil War few found science and religion incompatible. After all, the invisible mechanisms of electricity were as unbelievable to many as the invisible spirits that supposedly communicated through Spiritualist mediums. It is thus perfectly plausible that Dr. Mitchell, a trained scientist and man of medicine, can only imagine full therapeutic relief for his suffering protagonist. Though an outspoken skeptic of Spiritualism, Mitchell has a medium, not a doctor, reunite George with the “lost members of [his] corporeal family”—his limbs (“Dedlow,” 11).³⁷ Empirically based physical treatments are ineffective in his fiction.

Most important, Spiritualist beliefs literalize the implicit foundation of both midcentury spiritual and medical therapeutics: healed bodies represent healed souls. As Braude writes, “While orthodox clergy portrayed the human soul as inevitably prone to sin, orthodox physicians portrayed the human body … as inherently prone to disease.”³⁸ Leading Spiritualist Andrew Jackson Davis believed that bodily affliction reflected spiritual discord; healing bodies would hence restore spiritual health. Both Phelps and Mitchell speculate on this Spiritualist truism. George Dedlow's belief in his self-healing power and Winifred's faith in a reconstituted heaven make bodies whole again, undiseased and unbroken; in so doing they ease distressed minds. Winifred's spiritual and psychological ministrations “heal” Mary, Dr. Bland, and other sufferers, while George's Spiritualist encounter enables him to continue living in his ravaged body. All find “comfort” in their “fancying,” as Schnog has shown; yet spiritual healing is located very particularly in bodily rehabilitation. In The Gates Ajar, Winifred's Spiritualist-inflected rehabilitation “cures the rift between the living and the dead” felt both in Mary's psyche and in her body.³⁹

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In part, such spiritual solutions combat the rhetoric used to marshal Northern enthusiasm for the war effort, a rhetoric that buried individual grief and denied the particularity of the slain soldiers. As many Civil War scholars have argued, religious and political leaders used “jingoistic Christianity” to drum up support for the Holy National Cause: “the onset of battle was God's judgment on men who abandoned the Christian Sparta to feast on the fatted calf.”⁴⁰ Leaders reverted to the rhetoric of the Puritan enterprise, in which New England was the City on the Hill. To endanger the nation that God had entrusted with a special mission was to obstruct God's purpose. Julia Ward Howe's “The Battle Hymn of the Republic,” the Northern anthem, is the most famous example of this rhetorical conjunction. Such sentiments were disseminated by everyone from local ministers to journalists to justify the soldiers' self-sacrifice. One minister, presiding over a regimental farewell ceremony, assured listeners that “your country has called for your service and you are ready. … It is a holy and righteous cause in which you enlist. … God is with us.”⁴¹ Gail Hamilton's 1863 essay, “A Call to My Country-Women,” clearly focuses such claims towards women. She exhorts her readers to “[c]onsecrate to a holy cause not only the incidentals of life, but life itself. Father, husband, child,—I do not say, Give them up to toil, exposure, suffering, death, without a murmur;—that implies reluctance. I rather say, Urge them to the offering; fill them with sacred fury; fire them with irresistible desire; strengthen them to heroic will.”⁴²

Certainly Mary could find no comfort in a sermon such as eminent theologian Horace Bushnell's “Obligations to the Dead,” which absorbed the individual suffering of soldiers into a great “hecatomb offered for their and our great nation's life.” The soldiers' dead bodies strewn across the fields of battle are metaphorized by Bushnell as the “spent ammunition of war,” “the price and purchase-money of our triumph.”⁴³ Lincoln's widely publicized Gettysburg Address is perhaps the most egregious example of the erasure of Civil War bodies. Gary Wills argues that in this speech, trumpeted by most scholars as the pinnacle of rhetorical delicacy, Lincoln transfigures the “tragedy of macerated bodies” into the “product” of the democratic experiment.⁴⁴ In all these cases, as Timothy Sweet has pointed out, “the system of the body politic recuperates wounding and death in war by omitting any description of them and focusing on ideology.”⁴⁵ The impersonal and disembodied national narrative of wartime death provided no consolation. And, Phelps insists, the well-meaning condolences of personal acquaintances were equally injurious. In Chapters from a Life, she writes of spending between two and three years preparing for the novel by reading everything that had been written on mourning.⁴⁶ Denying traditional rituals, she uses her knowledge to mount an explicit assault against them. In refusing to accept callers or to attend church, Mary shreds the delicate antebellum social scripts of consolation and bereavement. What is more, she aggressively denies the religio-national truths intended to help the bereaved make sense of death. Immediately after Roy's death Mary is a self-described “Pagan,” telling the church Deacon who offers her the usual comfort, “God does not seem to me just now what he used to be.” Deacon Quirk replies that he is sorry to see her in such a “rebellious state of mind” (14-15). Yet Phelps's imagery suggests that Mary's resistance to contemporary consolation is much deeper than the passing rebellion of grief. Mary describes how Deacon Quirk looks at her “very much [as he would] a Mormon or a Hottentot, and I wondered whether he were going to excommunicate me on the spot” (16). The racial and cultural privilege assumed by “civilized” white Christians like Quirk, who condemn so-called Hottentots, is endangered by the barbaric war and by responses such as Mary's. Mary is therefore figured as exotic and debased, separated from her community by her insolence and the public nature of her spiritual battles. Phelps's only other reference to Hottentots occurs when Mary comments upon the difficulty of resurrection for people who make dinners of each other. The novel thus implies that the mourning rituals and religious orthodoxy forced upon Mary threaten to devour her.

Quirk's allusion to Mary as a Hottentot also allies her with disorderly bodies. Mary's illicit grief resurrects the dead soldiers, incorporating their silent pain and suffering. Her emotional pain is spatialized and “felt” in the body: the telegram announcing Roy's death “shut me up and walled me in,” Mary claims (4). The consolation system is then figured as a physical assault upon Mary's person; it is not experienced as similar to the attacks Roy sustained in battle, where a solid blow provides the “relief of combat,” but as feminine, as “a hundred little needles piercing at us” (6). Ironically, this is exactly the sensation described by Mitchell's neurasthenic soldiers, who complain of “prickling pain” along with “jagging, shooting, and darting pain.” Taken together, Phelps's and Mitchell's fictions suggest that all who suffered during the war are similarly afflicted. Just as Mitchell's soldiers and Mitchell himself “feel” the world differently after the war, Mary's visceral understanding of the familiar is altered. Like Mitchell's hyperaesthetic patients, to whom “touch is felt or interpreted as pain,”⁴⁷ Mary experiences the world as too much, as sensory overload. As she describes it, “the lazy winds are choking me. Their faint sweetness makes me sick. … I wish that little cricket, just waked from his winter's nap, would not sit there on the sill and chirp at me” (30). The children's voices outside “hurt [her] like knives,” conjuring up the instruments of amputation (2). Condolences are figured as probing and invasive, as surgery; Mary's callers violently penetrate her being, reaching in to “turn her heart around and cut into it at pleasure” (7). Her grief is not expressed appropriately through gentle weeping and lamentation; it threatens to obliterate and destroy her.

All that is left, Mary says, is the “vacant place” in her home—and in her psyche—where Roy used to be. George Dedlow's amputations symbolize the soldier's loss of individuality and integrity; as he phrases it, “I found to my horror that at times I was less conscious of my own existence, than used to be the case. I felt like asking some one constantly if I were really George Dedlow or not” (“Dedlow,” 8). Royal's death prompts a similar crisis for Mary and results in a psychic amputation. A part of her has been metaphorically cut off and must be reconstituted for her to rediscover herself. In framing their losses as the decimation of their “corporeal families” (as George calls his limbs), both Mary and George indicate that their connection to community and self is disrupted by the war. Mary's tenuous position as a self-described “old maid” makes her reliance upon Roy for identity even more acute. In a culture that valued women mainly as caregivers, Mary has lost one aspect of her existence in losing her brother. As Schnog observes, she is now “the sole inhabitant of a depopulated domestic realm.”⁴⁸ Yet Mary's connection to Roy is much deeper than is usual between siblings—so intense that she describes him as a double: “why Roy was so much more to me than many brothers are to many sisters. … [W]e have lived together so long, we two alone, since father died, that he had grown to me, heart of my heart, life of my life. It did not seem as if he could be taken, and I be left” (8). Thus Mary mourns the loss not only of Royal but of herself.

.....

Essentially, Civil War-era protagonists yearn for a sense of singular, authentic selfhood that will combat their mounting anxiety over their inability to “feel” and thereby define themselves. Three years after the publication of The Gates Ajar, Phelps wrote that religion consistently required of women a sacrifice parallel to that required of soldiers: “to live for others; to make complete abnegation of themselves and to have no life but in their affect.” Such a notion of Christian duty, Phelps insists, is “the most insidious and most hopeless injury which society worked upon women … [a] perversion of the great Christian theory of self-sacrifice.”⁴⁹ St. Armand, among others, argues that Roy's death precipitates the loss of Mary's religious faith and perhaps signals Phelps's own doubts.⁵⁰ I would counter, however, that Christianity is recuperated by the end of the novel. The Gates Ajar dramatizes not so much a religious crisis as an ontological one. Americans understood themselves and their places in the world differently after the Civil War. Roy's death removes all claims upon Mary's continued self-abnegation and conveniently serves as a metaphor for all of the material and psychological changes of the war. Like George, Mary initially has very little self-consciousness; she is flattered that Aunt Winifred “seems to love me, not in a proper kind of way because I happen to be her niece, but for my own sake. It surprises me to find how pleased I am that she should” (58). During the course of the novel Mary must discover her self-worth; it is her individual idiosyncrasies, not just her capacity to fulfill feminine stereotypes, that confer value.

Aunt Winifred's heaven is crucial in this self-discovery. To Mary its most appealing feature is that there will be no “fearful looking-for of separation” (81). Mary's concern with separation signifies not only physical separation from her brother but a sort of self-alienation precipitated by the all-out ontological assault of the war. Winifred's heaven returns Mary to herself, so to speak, by returning Roy. What is most comforting is that Roy will be Mary's “own again,—not only to look at standing up among the singers,—but close to me; somehow or other to be as near as—to be nearer than—he was here, really mine again!” (54). Mary's intimacy with the heavenly Roy, her ownership of him, will enable her to become completely self-possessed. I don't think that in emphasizing Mary's desire for possession Phelps meant to invoke an exaggerated capitalism of the sort so caustically attacked by Mark Twain in his Extract from Captain Stormfield's Visit to Heaven.⁵¹ Yet there is a sense that all of the things which people used to define themselves—possessions, relationships, desires, even fears—had been sacrificed or repressed in furtherance of the war effort.

Most alarming, Phelps argues, has been the loss of privacy. Deacon Quirk preaches that in heaven “disguise and even concealment, will be unknown. The soul will have no interest to conceal, no thoughts to disguise. A window will be opened in every breast, and show to every eye the rich and beautiful furniture within!” (71). The most frightening part of traditional heaven is its nakedness or, as Mary phrases it, its “blankness” and formlessness. In Phelps's ethos, the exposure of traditional heaven is equated with raw nerves exposed to harsh winds. Again, her psychic pain is figured in the language of nerve damage. Thus the embodiment of heaven also expresses a desire for enclosure, which can be read as a yearning for privacy. Yet it is not the enclosure of mourning rituals and consolation visits for which Mary longs; recall that she feels the house transformed into a prison after she learns of Roy's death (2). Mary longs for spiritual habiliment (as Winifred phrases it, the “‘garment by the soul laid by’”) for its ability to shelter and define her (114).⁵² Aunt Winifred is adamant on this point, providing the imaginative protection Mary seeks: “I would rather be annihilated than to spend eternity with heart laid bare,—the inner temple thrown open to be trampled on by every passing stranger” (79). Heaven will shelter the interior spaces of the soul; more important, it will maintain the illusion of individuality and coherence that both Mary and George Dedlow so desperately crave.

Mary is not completely passive in her journey toward self-discovery; it is not enough merely to await one's passage to heaven, Phelps suggests. The Gates Ajar plumbs the “psychology” Phelps found so fascinating in her school-girl studies of theology.⁵³ Not only do we learn to interpret the Bible, but Phelps argues that we must all be able to interpret ourselves within the psycho-social paradigms emerging after the war. She insists on the need for self-analysis—a rigorous interrogation of authority and a dissection of the religious and philosophical givens upon which midcentury Americans built their identities. Mary admires Winifred because Winifred “has done what it takes a lifetime for some of us to do; what some of us go into eternity, leaving undone; what I am afraid I shall never do,—sounded her own nature. She knows the worst of herself, and faces it fairly” (95). Though this Calvinist-inflected self-examination is decidedly Puritanical, the alienation and self-denial practiced during the war create a protomodern detachment from its spiritual implications. Phelps's clinical protocol in examining the injured psyche is similar to that followed by Mitchell's nerve-damaged patients. George is able to detach himself from his body, to look at his hand hanging loosely from his shattered arm and remark, “the hand might as well have been that of a dead man”; he then proceeds to describe a thorough examination during which he determines the extent of his nerve injury (“Dedlow,” 2). After the amputation of his damaged limb, George looks calmly across the room at his amputated arm and comments, “there is the pain, and here I am. How queer!” (“Dedlow,” 3).⁵⁴ Mary, too, manufactures distance between herself and an alternate self, the youthful “Mamie”: “This poor, wicked little Mamie, why, I fall to pitying her as if she were some one else, and wish that some one would cry over her a little. I can't cry” (20). Certainly Mary and George's psychic fragmentation is a survival mechanism designed to excise unbearable pain. Phelps also implies that the “sounding” of the dark depths of the soul forced by war and death will lead to self-knowledge.⁵⁵

And yet, both authors suggest, our earthly bodies continually subvert such efforts. Mary's desire for corporeal enclosure and integration directly combats the psychological fragmentation Phelps and Mitchell ultimately treat. George Dedlow's fictional Stump Hospital is populated by such broken individuals: “one man walked sideways; there was one who could not smell; another was dumb from an explosion” (“Dedlow,” 7). Although Mitchell describes patients who clearly suffer from neurological disorders, their illnesses are also metaphors for the distorted ways in which Civil War survivors perceive their worlds. They can no longer situate themselves sensually, no longer “feel” themselves. Such experiences transcend fiction. George Dedlow is, after all, not only a nerve-injured patient; he is also an army surgeon, like Mitchell himself. In his fiction Mitchell inhabits the wounded bodies he ordinarily treats; he is the amputated veteran, the diminished self. Phelps outlines the end result of this fragmentation in her “promiscuous theory of refraction”:

We should be like a man walking down a room lined with mirrors, who sees himself reflected in all sizes, colors, shades, at all angles and in all proportions, according to the capacity of the mirror, till he seems no longer to belong to himself, but to be cut up into ellipses and octagons and prisms. How soon would he grow frantic in such companionship, and beg for a corner where he might hide and hush himself in the dark?

(80)

Like Alcott's joking amputee and Mitchell's harried George Dedlow, Phelps insists that postwar bodies are displaced, fragmented, felt in such distorted ways that they become unrecognizable. Both Mitchell and Phelps suggest that Civil War survivors suffered a postbellum trauma akin to shell shock and post-traumatic stress disorder.⁵⁶ Civil War nerve injury, I contend, defined a generation just as powerfully as its twentieth-century counterparts, shaping postbellum Americans' ways of knowing. According to Eric T. Dean Jr., though post-traumatic stress disorder was not a recognized disease after the Civil War, many disturbed veterans were diagnosed as suffering from “War Excitement” or “Exposure in the Army”—terms that formed part of the lexicon of nerve injury. Others suffered from “Nostalgia,” a “stark terror” of combat so strong it induced the sufferer to demand immediate evacuation from the battlefield.⁵⁷ Like the characters in Phelps's novel, Nostalgics suffered from a sickness for home—an antebellum home that can only be recuperated in heaven.

In a culture that would soon find itself masterfully expanding through industrialization and imperialism, nerve injury represents the contemporaneous inward-turning of its citizens. It is a destructive and uncontrollable disease; both Phelps and Mitchell dramatize how neurasthenic pain creates a narrow, self-involved world for its sufferers. As postwar America feverishly worked to deny the brutal reality of war, traumatized survivors turned inward, where the reality of war had been forced to reside. Phelps's heaven publicly erases the traces of war from the soldiers' reconstituted bodies; their wounds are borne instead by the bodies of survivors like Mary and George. Phelps insists that modern bodies express the displacement, alienation, and insensibility—the unstable subjectivities—of postbellum society.⁵⁸ Phelps and Mitchell seek not to mend, obfuscate, or transform, but rather to expose the “crisis of representation” Sweet feels characterizes postbellum depictions of war. War is not “unwritten” in these texts, as Daniel Aaron has so famously argued; it is inscribed on the nerve-injured bodies of the living waiting to be deciphered.

.....

While repeatedly asked to repress the body during the Civil War, to subsume individual desire, Northerners were constantly faced with the body in all its vulnerability: the nervous body, the grief-riven body, the mutilated body, the dead body. Both Phelps and Mitchell attempt to resolve this dilemma with spiritual rehabilitation. In Phelps's heaven we will be not only embodied but clothed in a superior version of ourselves. “There is to come a mysterious change, equivalent, perhaps, to a re-embodiment,” Winifred insists, “when our capacities for action will be greatly improved” (114). The new bodies will be “vastly convenient, undoubtedly, with powers of which there is no dreaming. Perhaps they will be so one with the soul that to will will be to do,—hindrance out of the question” (124). Bodies will become mere manifestations of individual will, neither diseased nor constrained by social mores. In Phelps's heaven individuals regain control of themselves through imaginatively regaining control of their bodies.⁵⁹

And yet Civil War survivors must continue to live on earth. In an odd move, Phelps insists that heaven has become the “reality,” the “substance,” while life on earth is the “shadow,” “the dream” (194). Ultimately life will be most “life-like” in heaven; postbellum America is, then, a surreal shadow of its lofty ideal. Phelps's novel suggests, and Mitchell's story concurs, that life on earth is insubstantial, felt incompletely and thus only partially embodied. If heaven is reality, Mary's life is characterized by the surreal, self-haunted “weightlessness” T. J. Jackson Lears finds in urban life several decades later.⁶⁰ Even before the full-blown development of industrialism, Phelps and Mitchell demonstrate that the Civil War showed Americans the fragility of human life, exposing faith in individual significance as a sham. Belief in purposeful, individual agency withers during the war; confidence in the recuperative ability of national rhetoric and the verity of religious truths also wanes. As Phelps would later write to Mitchell about her own unstable health, “I suffer more from the future even than from the present” (18 November 1887). The postbellum future of a similarly diseased, prostrated culture seemed to promise little in the way of individual relief.

The carnage of the Civil War and its effect on all Americans became a trope expressing the irony and detachment associated with a modern sensibility. Thus The Gates Ajar should be read not only in conjunction with Uncle Tom's Cabin and Agnes and the Key to Her Little Coffin but also with Stephen Crane's The Red Badge of Courage (1895) and Ambrose Bierce's Tales of Soldiers and Civilians (1892). Comparing Mary's rebellion with Henry Fleming's psychological permutations and Winifred's heaven with Bierce's spectral landscapes reveals The Gates Ajar's shadows and depths, and its resonance with the fiction of the modern period. It is not surprising that turn-of-the-century writers ranging from Crane and Bierce to Paul Laurence Dunbar and Frances Ellen Watkins Harper revisit the Civil War for subject matter. The war lent itself particularly well to representations of dramatic cultural upheaval and probing explorations of embodiment and self-consciousness—those hallmarks of modern society and identity. In her 1887 exchanges with Mitchell, Phelps writes that it is high time “we reminded each other of what all but soldiers and mourners forget” (25 November 1887), for the experiences of George Dedlow and Mary Cabot were entirely pertinent to the daily experiences of turn-of-the-century Americans. Even today we are drawn to the Civil War for the cogency with which it encompasses issues demanding our current national attention. “What a pity that all pretty dreams have to be analyzed,” Mary Cabot presciently remarks (105). In 1868 Phelps deftly foregrounded the gap between abstract social systems and beliefs and the physical and emotional realities of life in America that crystallized during the Civil War.

Notes

1. Anonymous, “The Case of George Dedlow,” Atlantic Monthly, July 1866, 1-11; reprinted in S. Weir Mitchell, The Autobiography of a Quack and The Case of George Dedlow (New York: The Century Co., 1900) and The Autobiography of a Quack and Other Short Stories (New York: The Century Co., 1915). Subsequent references to this story are cited parenthetically in the text as “Dedlow.” Mitchell explains the origin of the story thus: “A friend came in one evening and in our talk said, ‘How much of a man would have to be lost in order that he would lose any portion of his sense of individuality?’ This odd remark haunted me, and after he left I sat up most of the night manufacturing my first story, ‘The Case of George Dedlow, related by himself.’ In this tale my man had lost all four limbs.” Submitted to the Atlantic Monthly by Mitchell's friends without his knowledge, “The Case of George Dedlow” was chosen as the lead story in the very next issue. To his surprise, Mitchell “received about three months afterwards a proof and a welcome cheque for Eighty-five Dollars—my first literary earnings” ([The Medical Department in the Civil War]: Address before Physicians' Club, Chicago, IL, 1913 Feb. 25, 33. Ms. 2/0241-93, Box 17, S. Weir Mitchell Papers, The Library of the College of Physicians, Philadelphia). Notable among the few scholarly treatments of this story is Debra Journet's “Phantom Limbs and ‘Body-Ego’: S. Weir Mitchell's ‘George Dedlow,’” Mosaic 23 (winter 1990): 87-99.

2. I contend elsewhere that it was during the Civil War that the elements of the rest cure were developed for the treatment of Civil War soldiers suffering from nerve injuries. It was in a medical text called Gunshot Wounds and Other Injuries of the Nerves (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott & Co., 1864) that Mitchell and his co-authors, George R. Morehouse and William W. Keen, began to order “tonics, porter and liberal diet” for their patients, along with “shampooing [that is, massage] and passive movement vigorously carried out” and electrical stimulus. We also see here the doctors' increasing resolve to carry out painful treatments despite the soldiers' “prayers and protestations” (25).

3. Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, letter to S. Weir Mitchell, November 1887, ms. 2/0241-03, Box 9, S. Weir Mitchell Papers. All subsequent letters between Phelps and Mitchell referred to in this essay are in this collection. Phelps began their correspondence with a letter praising Mitchell's novel In War Time. She often mentions her many illnesses, which range from her “chief disease,” insomnia and its consequent nervousness, to more general “frailties” such as a sprained back and laryngitis. Apparently Mitchell offered her a prescription for her insomnia that she politely declined by expressing her commitment to homeopathy (3 February 1887). The letters end about a year after they began, when Phelps and Mitchell disagreed about the skill of women doctors, the true character of female invalids, and the efficacy of her beloved homeopathic remedies.

4. Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, The Gates Ajar (Boston: Fields, Osgood & Co., 1868), 73. All subsequent references to the novel are taken from this edition and are cited parenthetically in the text by page number only.

5. Phelps's father, the eminent theologian Austin Phelps, had published his own influential notion of heaven, envisioning a place where we are freed from our bodies and rewarded with “an augmented intensity of mental powers” (quoted in Lori Duin Kelly, The Life and Works of Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, Victorian Feminist Writer [Troy, N.Y.: Whitson, 1983], 30). In The Gates Ajar, his daughter inverts her father's teaching, redefining such freedom as oppressive. Susan Curtis writes of the importance of Austin to Elizabeth's work and life, contending “[he] was everything and nothing to her. He was the primary object of her deepest affection, and yet she seems to have regarded his authority over her rather skeptically.” Curtis argues that it was Austin's coldness and his ineffectiveness as a father that ultimately led Elizabeth to forge a social gospel theology in opposition to the more paternal religious models of her father's generation; see Curtis, A Consuming Faith: The Social Gospel and Modern American Culture (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1991), 93.

6. The important scientific and personal discoveries of the Civil War were never to leave Mitchell; they pervade his subsequent medical work, fiction, and life. His medical work during the war not only inspired Mitchell's most innovative treatments, it also invaded his fiction, providing the historical backdrop and psychological tension for many of his novels, including In War Time (1884) and Roland Blake (1885). His war experience so infused Mitchell's psyche that in his deathbed delirium he imagined himself back in the army's nerve hospital; his last words were orders for the treatment of long-dead Civil War soldiers. His medical work was so truly revolutionary that Gunshot Wounds (1864) has been dubbed the major nineteenth-century treatise on nerve damage, a core medical text that remained the definitive work on the topic for a generation. The volume passed through many editions and was even translated into French for use in the Paris Hospitals during World War I.

7. Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, “Comrades,” in Civil War Women, ed. Frank McSherry Jr., Charles G. Waugh, and Martin Greenberg (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1988), 142-57. The story was published posthumously in Harper's New Monthly Magazine, August 1911. The eighty-one-year-old Reuben Oaks had taken to calling his wife Peter because her given name, Patience, did not fit the “youth and vigor” of the woman (143). Phelps writes women into Civil War history in this short story, for it is Peter's strength that enables her husband to fulfill his Memorial Day duties at the cemetery. She is a “veteran” of the war, just as surely as her husband.

8. Ann Douglas, The Feminization of American Culture (New York: Doubleday, 1977), 188.

9. Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, Chapters from a Life (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin and Company, 1896), 97-98.

10. Jane E. Schultz, “The Inhospitable Hospital: Gender and Professionalism in Civil War Medicine,” Signs (winter 1992): 363-92. Some early influential works on Civil War literature—such as Robert Lively's Fiction Fights the Civil War (Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1957) and Daniel Aaron's The Unwritten War: American Writers and the Civil War (London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1973)—mention women writers only tangentially and largely unfavorably. Mary Boykin Chesnut's diary is the most commonly cited work by a woman author; however, even she, Aaron contends, tends “to view the War on the home-front as a woman and to take women's side in a man-dominated world” (253). The important anthology Civil War Women does reprint many significant war-related stories by women; however, the editors of the volume also circumscribe female writers, explaining that “someone packs the knapsacks of those warriors and bids them goodbye. Someone turns back to mundane labors, to the day-to-day responsibilities of a life that has suddenly, drastically changed. Someone runs the small farms and businesses that feed the hyperactive economics of war-time. Someone rears the next generation, and answers its questions about the killing of this one” (7). Recent work, most notably Kathleen Diffley's Where My Heart is Turning Ever: Civil War Stories and Constitutional Reform, 1861-1876 (Athens: Univ. of Georgia Press, 1992), has begun to explore the ways in which matters of race, political section, and gender influenced various authors' tellings of the Civil War. Shira Wolosky recontextualizes Emily Dickinson's war-era work in Emily Dickinson: A Voice of War (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1984). Elizabeth Young's work focuses specifically on the diversity of women's war experience; see, for example, “Warring Fictions: Iola Leroy and the Color of Gender,” American Literature 64 (June 1992): 273-97, and “A Wound of One's Own: Louisa May Alcott's Fiction,” American Quarterly 48 (September 1996): 439-74. Such efforts have been crucial in revealing women writers' engagement with the Civil War. My own work has been inspired by these and similar arguments, as I build upon the notion that women writers “feminize” or “domesticate” war narratives.

11. Kelly, Life and Work of Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, 12. For examples of scholarship that situates Phelps's work within the sentimental tradition, see Ann Douglas, Feminization of American Culture; Christine Stansell, “Elizabeth Stuart Phelps: A Study in Female Rebellion,” Massachusetts Review 13 (winter-spring 1972): 239-56; and Barton Levi St. Armand, “Dickinson, Phelps, and the Image of Heaven,” in Emily Dickinson and Her Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1984). Nancy Schnog, in “‘The Comfort of My Fancying’: Loss and Recuperation in The Gates Ajar,” Arizona Quarterly 49 (spring 1993): 21-24, sees Phelps's novel in terms of the nineteenth-century mourning rituals typically assigned to women.

12. Carol Farley Kessler places the novel squarely within a protofeminist tradition, labeling Phelps's Gates novels “political actions” that provided her mostly female readers with a feminist consciousness; see Kessler, “The Heavenly Utopia of Elizabeth Stuart Phelps,” Women and Utopia: Critical Interpretations, ed. Marleen Barr and Nicholas D. Smith (New York: University Presses of America, 1983), 94. Note, too, the recent critical edition of The Story of Avis, ed. Carol Farley Kessler (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers Univ. Press, 1992). I'm not arguing that the new edition of The Story of Avis is unwarranted or unimportant; certainly it is a significant contribution to the study of nineteenth-century American women writers. Neither do I deny Phelps's importance as an early feminist. Rather, I am claiming The Gates Ajar warrants similar attention.

13. Phelps, Chapters from a Life, 118.

14. St. Armand, “Dickinson, Phelps, and the Image of Heaven,” 118.

15. Phelps, letter to S. Weir Mitchell, 25 January 1997.

16. See, for example, Douglas, Feminization of American Culture, 200. For a psycho-biography of Phelps, see also Carol Farley Kessler, Elizabeth Stuart Phelps (Boston: Twayne, 1982), and Stansell, “Elizabeth Stuart Phelps: A Study in Female Rebellion.”

17. As Anne C. Rose reminds us, “long restricted by Christian values and by the pious phrasing of domestic ideology, women who sought intellectual and emotional space were obliged to contend with religion deliberately” (Victorian America and the Civil War [Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1992], 33).

18. Phelps, Chapters From a Life, 118.

19. See Schnog, “‘The Comfort of My Fancying,’” and Douglas, Feminization of American Culture, 205.

20. Phillip Shaw Paludan, “A People's Contest”: The Union and Civil War, 1861-1865 (New York: Harper & Row, 1988), 316, 325, 366.

21. Karen Halttunen, Confidence Men and Painted Women: A Study of Middle-Class Culture in America, 1830-70 (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1982), 172.

22. Martha Pike, “In Memory Of: Artifacts Relating to Mourning in Nineteenth-Century America,” in Rituals and Ceremonies in Popular Culture, ed. Ray B. Browne (Bowling Green, Ohio: Bowling Green Univ. Popular Press, 1980), 296-316. Pike also quotes from the most popular bereavement narrative of the midcentury, Nehemiah Adams's Agnes and the Key to Her Little Coffin (Boston: S. K. Whipple & Co., 1857), where Adams reveals in loving detail the splendor of his dead daughter's casket.

23. Gary Wills, Lincoln at Gettysburg (New York: Touchstone, 1992), 20. Wills sketches the horrific conditions of the corpses found after the Battle of Gettysburg thus: “The debris was mainly a matter of rotting horseflesh and manflesh. … Even after most bodies were lightly blanketed, the scene was repellent. A nurse shuddered at the all-too-visible ‘rise and swell of human bodies’ in these furrows war had plowed. … Soon these uneasy graves were being rifled by relatives looking for their dead—reburying other bodies they turned up, even more hastily than had the first disposal crews” (20-21).

24. Daniel Aaron, “The Etiquette of Grief: A Literary Generation's Response to Death,” in Prospects: An Annual of American Cultural Studies, ed. Jack Salzman, vol. 4 (New York: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1979), 197-213.

25. Louisa May Alcott, Hospital Sketches, in Alternative Alcott, ed. Elaine Showalter (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers Univ. Press, 1988), 3-73.

26. The word “mausoleum” derives from the tomb Mausolas's queen had built for him at Halicarnassus about 350 B.C. It was one of the seven wonders of the ancient world. One could read Phelps's novel as a cultural mausoleum, as a place that memorializes the dead while providing a site for mourning survivors to locate their grief.

27. Phelps's vision of domestic felicity may also be seen as a remote yet recognizable permutation of Kathleen Diffley's “Old Homestead” narrative. According to Diffley, “Old Homestead stories relied on guaranteeing that no change would topple household gods. Instead, such stories answered the generic question ‘Will we survive?’ by promising continuity, safety, and ultimately restoration” (Where My Heart is Turning Ever, 5).

28. Paludan, “A People's Contest,” 363.

29. Walt Whitman, “A Sight in Camp in the Daybreak Gray and Dim,” in The Portable Walt Whitman, ed. Mark Van Doren (New York: Penguin Books, 1977), 225. Timothy Sweet also explores the implications of Christian typology in Traces of War: Poetry, Photography, and the Crisis of the Union (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1990), 24-27.

30. George M. Frederickson, The Inner Civil War: Northern Intellectuals and the Crisis of the Union (New York: Harper & Row, 1965).

31. Curtis contends that Phelps “sanitized death, elevated life, and properly distanced the paternal Almighty from his skeptical children, all in such a way that middle-class Protestant children could escape the stifling confines of a paternal culture that denied them purpose, direction, and faith to order their lives” (A Consuming Faith, 94). While Curtis sees Phelps's rebellion as responding directly to the oppressive influence of her distant and exacting father, I believe that Phelps engages the philosophical underpinnings of contemporaneous theological study more deeply and probingly.

32. Alan Trachtenberg, “Albums of War: On Reading Civil War Photographs,” in The New American Studies: Essays from “Representations,” ed. Philip Fisher (Berkeley and Los Angeles: Univ. of California Press, 1991), 287-318. For further discussions of Civil War photography, see also Sweet, Traces of War.

33. Rose, Victorian America, 17.

34. Sweet, Traces of War, 55.

35. The war was a particularly significant experience for women writers; Phelps's contemporaries (Louisa May Alcott, Charlotte Forten, and others) seem similarly authorized by their war experiences to claim the interpretation of the war for themselves. I argue elsewhere that the war continued to be an authorizing trope for white women and African Americans in particular through the end of the century.

36. Ann Braude, Radical Spirits: Spiritualism and Women's Rights in Nineteenth-Century America (Boston: Beacon Press, 1989), 165. Phelps also spends a great deal of time delineating the compelling nature of Winifred's physical presence. Braude notes that Spiritualists often cited the overwhelming beauty and charisma of the young female mediums as important factors in convincing new converts of the movement's validity.

37. Mitchell's description of his one meeting with a clairvoyant named Mrs. Piper, arranged by William James, is quite telling in this regard. He writes in his unpublished autobiography, “She was a good-looking woman of about 35 & as we sat down, she took my hand while Mr. James made notes at the table. She stretched herself out, began to quiver, face muscles twitched, & she appeared to have a mild hysterical spasm the reality of little doubt. … This interview lasted for two hours & absolutely not one thing came of it. It was a babble of utter nonsense” (Unpublished autobiography of S. Weir Mitchell, 59, Ms. 2/0241-93, Box 16, S. Weir Mitchell Papers). Mitchell later finds it quite amusing that “spiritualist journals seized on” George Dedlow's ending as “new proof of the verity of their belief.” “Imagine that!” he chuckles ([The medical department in the Civil War], 34).

38. Braude, Radical Spirits, 143. However, both doctors and clergy agreed that the inherently diseased souls of women, daughters of Eve, and their frail female reproductive organs prevented them from venturing into public realms without male supervision. Winifred's diseased breast does illustrate the physical frailty associated with “female organs” and in some measure vitiates her power.

39. Ironically, when Spiritualists began to enact the reembodiment, seances fell apart. In the 1870s mediums introduced “materializations,” during which they typically withdrew into a cabinet or small room from which embodied spirits then appeared. According to Braude, most often the mediums impersonated the deceased loved one. After several exposures, such exhibitions ceased (Radical Spirits, 145, 176, 181).

40. Paludan, “A People's Contest,” 374, 342. The seminal work on this topic is James H. Moorhead's American Apocalypse: Yankee Protestants and the Civil War (1860-1869) (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1978). Moorhead argues that the millennial impulse, which is an integral part of the American consciousness, was brought to the fore during the war period. However, the lofty expectations raised by such rhetoric left postbellum Americans feeling bereft. Rose, too, addresses the spiritual renewal motivating a wartime fervor akin to antebellum revivalism (Victorian America, 63).

41. Paludan, “A People's Contest,” 349.

42. Gail Hamilton [Mary Abigail Dodge], “A Call to My Country-Women,” Atlantic Monthly, March 1863, 346. According to Carol Kessler, Hamilton was the idol of Phelps's youth (Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, 77).

43. Horace Bushnell, “Obligations to the Dead,” in The American Evangelicals, 1800-1900: An Anthology, ed. William G. McLoughlin (Gloucester, Mass.: Peter Smith, 1976), 142-43.

44. Wills, Lincoln at Gettysburg, 37. Lincoln does not mourn individual soldiers. The cemetery he dedicates is the euphemistic “final resting place” of the uncounted “brave men” who fought there. He does not attend to the grief of family members: “Our fathers” are the country's founders, not the soldiers' parents, while mothers are not mentioned. Rather, Lincoln consecrates the continuation of total war on the graves of nameless, faceless corpses.

45. Sweet, Traces of War, 14. See also Kathy Newman, “Wound and Wounding in the American Civil War: A Visual History,” Yale Journal of Criticism 6 (fall 1993): 63-86. Newman shows us how the medical photographs taken by Civil War surgeon Reed B. Bontecou “contain the horror of war” within their gilt-edged frames through “romantic softness,” eroticization, and the aestheticization of pain.

46. In Confidence Men and Painted Women, Karen Halttunen shows how midcentury deaths provided opportunities for loved ones to perform a socially acceptable self through displays of bereavement and sympathy. She goes on to explain that cultural anxiety about the sincerity of emotion eventually led to rigid and increasingly complex mourning rituals. The war period, however, disrupted Americans' ability to execute these rituals and thus perform themselves. Condolence calls, visitations, the laying out of the dead—all were traditionally conducted at a leisurely pace and often began before a person had died. Wartime shortages of fabrics and other goods made it difficult to obtain the outer signifiers of mourning. Deep mourning was an extended period that severely curtailed the activities of the bereaved, especially of women, who were not allowed to leave home except to attend church during the first month of mourning.

47. Mitchell, Gunshot Wounds, 59, 95. Mitchell links this hyperaesthesia directly to hysterical tendencies in his patients: “The temper changes and grows irritable, the face becomes anxious and has a look of weariness and suffering … at last the patient grows hysterical, if we may use the only term which covers the facts. He walks carefully, carries the limb tenderly with the sound hand, is tremulous, nervous, and has all kinds of expedients for lessening his pain” (Gunshot Wounds, 103). Though Phelps makes no reference to the diagnosis of hysteria that would plague educated, rebellious, middle-class women like herself later in the century, her text's resonance with Mitchell's medical work suggests that nerve injury was a convenient way of expressing postbellum trauma. Phelps's hyperbolic description is akin to the writings of Daniel Aaron's “veterans of grief”—Henry James and Henry Adams—whom Aaron describes as attaching their emotional battles to the martial project in which they did not participate (“The Etiquette of Grief,” 204).

48. Schnog, “‘The Comfort of My Fancying,’” 29.

49. Phelps, quoted in Kelly, Life and Work of Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, 60.

50. St. Armand, “Dickinson, Phelps, and the Image of Heaven,” 124.

51. See Mark Twain, Extract from Captain Stormfield's Visit to Heaven (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1909). In Chapters from a Life, Phelps laments that although it was not women's lot to “offer life to the teeth of shot and shell, they ‘gave their happiness instead’” (74). As Kessler argues, Phelps's utopian vision of heaven recuperates emotional over technical power, encouraging self-fulfillment (“The Heavenly Utopia,” 21).

52. Halttunen suggests that widows' weeds literally enclosed them in death: “consumers were cautioned to select ‘a dead, solid color,’ all treated to assume a ‘dull, matte surface’” (Confidence Men and Painted Women, 136). There was to be no luster, no attention drawn to the mourning women, nor reflection from them.

53. Phelps, Chapters From a Life, 69.

54. Mitchell reports that his “real” patients had similar reactions to their injuries. They “have a natural curiosity as to the condition of the wounded part, and are apt almost immediately to handle it, and try to move it” (Gunshot Wounds, 20).

55. Certainly Halttunen's observation that the “mourner had almost entirely upstaged the dearly departed for the lead role in the sentimental drama of death” holds true for this novel (Confidence Men and Painted Women, 127). Neal Tolchin explains the “double-bind” of Victorian mourning, the desire to “prolong mourning and to control and limit the expression of grief's conflicts,” in Mourning, Gender, and Creativity in the Art of Herman Melville (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1988), 162.

56. Mitchell's detailed descriptions of his patients indicates that he knew full well that “something” happened to a soldier on the battlefield; however, medical wisdom of the time argued that physiological or somatic symptoms would provide the clues to neurotic phenomena. See Ernest Earnest, S. Weir Mitchell: Novelist and Physician (Philadelphia: Univ. of Pennsylvania Press, 1950).

57. Eric T. Dean Jr., “‘We Will All be Lost and Destroyed’: Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder and the Civil War,” Civil War History 37 (June 1991): 138-53. For another argument for Civil War combat fatigue, see Herbert Hendin and Ann Pollinger Haas, “Posttraumatic Stress Disorders in Veterans of Early American Wars,” Psychohistory Review 12 (spring 1984): 25-30.

58. Jay Martin has argued provocatively that Phelps responds to the disjunction between her age's growing materialism and its fascination with spiritualism by providing readers with a concrete version of the unconscious in her heaven, a “spatial … ‘great good place’; that its activities were continuous, that its truths were superior to those of experience, its operations much more swift and intricate than those of the reasoning mind” (“Ghostly Rentals, Ghostly Purchases: Haunted Imaginations in James, Twain, and Bellamy,” in The Haunted Dusk: American Supernatural Fiction, 1820-1920, ed. Howard Kerr, John W. Crowley, and Charles L. Crow [Athens: Univ. of Georgia Press, 1983], 126). Martin argues that this heaven presents the “sunnier side” of human nature, insisting that writers of this period, including Phelps, were unable to write a fiction of the “self-haunted self” in which the “spiritual, the uncanny, the mythical, the ghostlike, the haunted, and the hallucinatory” are allowed to “fracture the consciousness along innumerable planes” (126). Phelps's heaven, however, manufactures and responds to that haunted self. It is inextricable from earthly existence, an uncanny, parallel universe where loved ones await the passing of their family members in order to make their mirror image of earth complete. As the end of the novel illustrates, Mary is ever betwixt and between the two realms, continually pulled both by the promises of life in heaven and the necessities of life on earth.

59. As St. Armand contends, Phelps does not abandon heaven, but replaces it with a more modern and sensible version (“Dickinson, Phelps, and the Image of Heaven,” 131). Phelps's heaven is indeed the most “sensible,” for it is there that postbellum Americans will regain their senses and be able to feel themselves again.

60. See T. J. Jackson Lears, No Place of Grace: Antimodernism and the Transformation of American Culture, 1880-1920 (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1981), 33.