***********************Original message**********************************
Date: Mon, 18 Oct 1993 18:42:03 -0700
From: Elizabeth Hildegard Pisares <elizp@soda.berkeley.edu>
Subject: RE: Crying Men on 'Gettysburg'
To: FINLAY_J%SPCVXA.BITNET@cmsa.Berkeley.EDU
That (male) Civil War generals would sob in "real" life and not just in
a Hollywood movie sounds believable, if my vague recollections of antebellum
American society/culture serve me correctly. Death and its accompanying
sentiments were en vogue amongst antebellum folk on a scale that continues
to weird-out my stoic late-20th century sensibilities: Boston, MA residents
taking dinner guests out to Mount Auburn Cemetary to contemplate Nature and
the world beyond, Emerson exhuming his son's (and wife's ?) corpses, Emily
Dickinson writing "I'd rather keep it when its (that is, her lover) dead,"
Lincoln breaking out abruptly into tears, intermittently, after his son's
death... Though I've neither read accounts of generals crying before battle
nor seen _Gettysburg_, the scene you describe sounds historically accurate.
For more on death, melancholic sentiments, etc., in 19th c. America, Garry
Wills's _Lincoln and Gettysburg_ and Ann Douglas' _The Feminization of
American Culture_ both have chapters on the topic.
Just my $0.02,
liz pisares
elizp@soda.berkeley.edu
University of California, Berkeley--English Department