Allison M. Johnson. The Scars We Carve: Bodies and Wounds in Civil War Print Culture. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2019. 224 pp. $45.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-8071-7037-3.
Reviewed by Eric Walls (Johnston Community College)
Published on Jhistory (June, 2021)
Commissioned by Robert A. Rabe
Most scholars of the American Civil War agree that the conflict can be described as the first “modern war,” with casualty numbers that proportionally exceeded previous conflicts in history considerably thanks to advances in military technology that surged far ahead of tactics and strategies to accommodate those advances, as well as medical science’s ability to respond and treat the massive damage those technologies inflicted upon human bodies. This reality, coupled with concurrent advances in print technology, distribution, communication, journalism, and photography, vividly brought the horrors of the war into the homes of Americans, North and South, and forced all to contend with and account for the physical repercussions of this new, modern form of warfare. It is reasonably safe to assume that the descriptions and images of the physical costs of war that proliferated throughout the conflict profoundly affected both the psyches of many Americans and the culture of a nation torn asunder by internecine warfare. In The Scars We Carve: Bodies and Wounds in Civil War Print Culture, San Jose State University assistant professor of literature Allison M. Johnson examines the ways in which Americans internalized, reflected upon, and processed their attempts to come to terms with the physical costs of modern warfare and how those reflections helped to alter the sociopolitical paradigm of the country itself.
Johnson’s work attempts to illustrate the ways that Civil War-era print culture—both professional and amateur—portrayed and politicized the “disruptive bodies” that emerged from the conflict (p. 2). The phrase disruptive bodies can be read in two ways, referring, first, to the actual disruptive nature of the wounds suffered by combatants, altering their ability to make their way in the world, and second, to the ways those wounded bodies reflected the broader disruptions the war wrought within American society, culture, and politics. Although Johnson certainly addresses the former throughout her work, it is the latter that is the most significant according to her interpretation. Johnson unequivocally asserts, “the nation was remade by the war and bodies—white and black, male and female, soldier and noncombatant—were crucial in this remaking.” “Changed human forms,” she continues, “in turn argued for or augured transformed or adjusted political and social subjectivities.” Such transformations and adjustments indicated “a breakdown of gendered and racial binaries … further complicating already debated conceptions of a representative American body” (p. 2). Johnson defines her work as “an examination of how Americans, whether northern or southern, authorial or amateur, interacted with and represented the physical effects of war to create a literary record permeated by corporeality, suffering, and human forms that embody reconfigurations of citizenship, personhood, and the nation” (p. 3).The literary record she examines includes primarily political cartoons and images in newspapers and journals, poetry (both professional and amateur) that explores the emotional, psychological, and physical toll of the war on both soldiers and civilians, and stories and testimonials (both fictionalized and nonfiction, professional and amateur) of the war and its effect on the home front. The varied body of work Johnson examines provides ample ground for interpretive exploration, some more successful than others.
Johnson examines this phenomenon of disruptive bodies through four different lenses in The Scars We Carve, each corresponding to a chapter. Each chapter could serve as a standalone essay as each has a well-defined thesis and conclusion, but collectively they form a body (no pun intended) of work that seeks to illustrate, with varying degrees of success, how perceptions of bodies—both real and imagined, physical and incorporeal—helped to transform Americans’ understandings of their society in the wake of such a brutal and emotionally charged conflict. The first chapter, “Columbia’s Sisters and Daughters,” takes a gendered approach to the question of “disruptive bodies” and addresses the roles of women’s bodies—real and personified—in both the rhetoric and reality of the war. Here Johnson invokes the varied usage of the rhetorical symbolism of the goddess Columbia, and her many avatars, as the personification of the nation, essentially feminizing the state itself. This feminization of the state made the rhetorical connection that “sexuality and nationalism were closely intertwined—to defend the nation-state was to shelter female bodies from rapacious enemies and to retain the purity and structural integrity of national borders and codes of law” (p. 14). “Bodies” in this sense represented both the real bodies of American women subjected to the violence of war—physical and psychological—and the symbolic “body” of the state itself, also subjected—physically and rhetorically—to such violence. Both Union and Confederate wartime propaganda utilized such constructs to justify the war and its moral underpinnings based on the ideals of such concepts as republican motherhood that emerged after the American Revolution and connected women, real and personified, to the well-being of the state itself. In a nineteenth-century American society with fairly rigid gender norms and values, such symbolism inherently activated men’s sense of their roles as guardians and protectors of the home and of the country and called into question the very manhood of those men reluctant to participate and place their own bodies on the line. Likewise, and in some ways contrarily, women’s participation in the war and the war effort as wives, mothers, fundraisers, nurses, and, in some cases, soldiers reinforced such rhetoric, and “active personifications” like Columbia “drew attention to women’s real contributions and participation” (p. 15). Utilizing mostly illustrations and political cartoons from such sources as Harper’s Weekly and other contemporary publications, Johnson ably constructs a complicated narrative that reveals the various ways female bodies figured in wartime propaganda and rhetoric on both sides of the conflict, fueling the war effort while simultaneously reinforcing and challenging accepted gender norms.
Chapter 2, “The Bones of the Black Man,” examines the concept of “disruptive bodies” through the lens of race. Johnson highlights the effects of the war on black bodies, the use of words and images of wounded black soldiers and the abuse of the enslaved in the press, and how those effects and that usage played a substantial role in how African Americans were perceived by and incorporated into the body politic during and after the conflict. Johnson argues that the use of images and descriptions of wounded African American soldiers in particular “exhibit[s] a transactional and transformative process by which the bodily sacrifice of black soldiers is a down payment on lasting freedom and enfranchisement” (p. 58). The wartime rhetoric and propaganda of the Union, “located the justification for African American manhood and citizenship in the bodies and blood of black soldiers” (pp. 58-59). This argument is in line with much of the existing scholarship around African American participation in the war and its sociopolitical effects, particularly the work of such Civil War and Reconstruction-era scholars as James McPherson (see The Negro's Civil War: How American Blacks Felt and Acted during the War for the Union [2003]) and Eric Foner (see Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution, 1863-1877 [2005] and Give Me Liberty!: An American History [6th ed., 2020]). Johnson, however, adds a new and deeper layer by analyzing the contemporary literature, specifically looking for the ways in which disfigured and reconfigured black bodies were presented to the American public and the rhetoric and symbolism those presentations invoked and evoked.
Chapter 3, “The Left Armed Corps,” provides a much more narrow analysis than the previous two chapters, focusing on one very specific manifestation of Civil War-era “disruptive bodies”: amputees. Given the state of medical science at the time, amputation of injured limbs was an extremely common practice that left thousands of soldiers visibly disfigured—a lasting testament to their bodily sacrifice. Johnson illuminates the little-explored phenomenon of penmanship contests, initiated and managed by newspaper editor and former Union hospital volunteer William Oland Bourne, that catered to veterans who had lost their right arm in the war, and how those veterans used those contests to empower themselves and prove “that left-armed men could successfully reintegrate into American society and the increasingly industrial workforce.” Contestants “presented their newly abled left arms as proof of their resilience as well as the difficulties of adjustment” (p. 91). These men’s writings “mourned their loss but also recognized the significance of their sacrifice,” even though “their faith in the cause was small comfort for personal pain or the difficulty they had putting themselves back together in a society that labeled them crippled and incomplete” (p. 92). “The result,” Johnson argues, “is a literary record that emphasizes pain and corporeal degradation while simultaneously reimagining embodied masculinity and able-bodiedness” (p. 94).
The final chapter, “Spirit Wounds and Invisible Bullets,” examines the relationships among battlefield trauma, the new technology of the telegraph and its effects on journalism, and the trauma suffered by soldiers’ loved ones, especially women, on the home front. The telegraph indeed played a crucial role in how American received and perceived the news of the war. As Johnson eloquently puts it, “heartstrings and telegraph wires connect the front to the home, tangling the two” (p. 121). Thanks to the rapid increase in communications, “a nation at war became a nation of interconnected lines by which death and wounding traveled with telegraphic speed” (p. 122). The telegraph provided “a direct (though at times imperfect) link between the home and the battlefield and became the vehicles by which the wounds of soldiers are transferred onto the bodies of women at home” (p. 128). These women experienced vivid and palpable physical effects, sometimes long-lasting, from reading about the death or maiming of their loved ones. “Reading war news,” claims Johnson, “is an embodied act that has embodied results” (p. 132).
Johnson’s overarching argument over the course of these four loosely connected essays is delivered with varying degrees of success. Make no mistake, this work is very much grounded in the field of literary analysis and, as such, is even more prone to subjective interpretation than a more historical approach. That is not to say the book is without merit—far from it—but the analysis must be read with a critical eye. In some respects, especially in chapters 2 and 3, Johnson’s focus on the embodied nature of wartime trauma and its sociocultural effects is well grounded and the associations are easily discerned. In other aspects, especially chapter 1 and chapter 4, Johnson often seems to be stretching a little far in asserting her claims. “Columbia’s Sisters and Daughters” stakes its arguments on the feminized embodiment of the nation itself, as well as the role that women’s “bodies” played in the conflict. Although the connections Johnson makes to the “embodied” nature of this gendered phenomenon are discernable, they are a bit amorphous and often feel a little forced. In many places in this chapter, it is indeed gender itself—specifically the allegorical feminization of the state—that takes precedence over the more physical concept of “bodies.” Sections like “Schoolmarm and Seamstress” explore how the literature of the period portrayed the feminized state (Columbia) as a mother figure that “watched in dismay as her children fought and divided into sections” (p. 21). This is a fair and reasonable interpretation of the allegory of a feminized state, but Johnson then stretches that interpretation by invoking the image of Columbia's “intact body,” which “evinced the relationship common to all Americans and the nation's vulnerability to division and fragmentation” (p. 21). The questions that loom here include why and how an image of a dismembered female body be utilized. Was Columbia ever actually portrayed, figuratively or literally, as a dismembered body? Why would a female body be more prone to “division and fragmentation” than a male body? Does the allegory of a personified state break down once it is dismembered yet both halves continue to function? It seems here that Johnson is inserting the conceptual female body a bit too forcefully in order to maintain a consistency between her subarguments and thesis. Her arguments often work much better when gender itself, and not women’s “bodies,” is the focus.
A similar critique can be leveled at the fourth chapter. While there is no question that learning of a loved one’s death or maiming often had palpable physical effects on women at the home front, it was the psychological effects, much more than the physical, that were the most profound and long-lasting. To argue that soldiers’ wounds were “transferred” directly onto the bodies of women at home is a figurative stretch that seems to defy credulity, at least to a certain extent. Johnson actually makes another, more reasonable, meaningful, and better supported argument in this chapter. She argues that the notion of Civil War-era literature as a distinctly “feminized” sphere, as is generally accepted among most historians and literary analysts, is mistaken. The war literature of the period—professional and amateur, fact and fiction—was “written by, marketed to, and read by women and men, and exhibit[s] generic and thematic similarities, thus creating a war literature that is simultaneously male and female, private and public” (p. 123). This is a much more significant revelation than her concept of “telegraphic wounding” and deserves more exploration (pp. 127-135). Here, as in chapter 1, Johnson seems to downplay the more provocative conclusions about gender in this period in favor of the overarching “disruptive bodies” narrative. Chapters 1 and 4, especially, feel as though Johnson inserted that narrative, a bit clumsily in places, into already complete works in order to maintain the overall theme. Such insertions only obscure the more historically meaningful conclusions that her work illuminates regarding gender.
Overall, The Scars We Carve provides some revealing insights into the minds of men and women of the Civil War era and how literature and journalism facilitated an emotional, spiritual, psychological, cultural, political, and yes, physical reckoning of the war. Johnson’s work shines the brightest when she focuses on a more historical line of inquiry, while she sometimes loses the plot when she ventures in a more literary analytical direction. A strict literary analysis often reveals more about the writer’s bias and preconceptions than it does about the subjects under study and can reflect ahistorical and anachronistic assumptions about the minds and motives of the subjects that often obfuscate, and needlessly complicate, more than they reveal. That said, The Scars We Carve, if nothing else, provokes much thought and lays the foundation for additional study, especially with regard to the gendered aspects of Civil War-era literature and journalism, and for that reason deserves a place in the canon of Civil War-era studies.
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Citation:
Eric Walls. Review of Johnson, Allison M., The Scars We Carve: Bodies and Wounds in Civil War Print Culture.
Jhistory, H-Net Reviews.
June, 2021.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=56171
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