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Review
| To Live and Die: Collected Stories of the Civil War, 1861–1876, ed. Kathleen Diffley. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2002. Paperback ed., 2004. 428 pages. $22.95, paper.
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| Kathleen Diffley returns in this book to the material that she analyzed so capably in Where My Heart Is Turning Ever: Civil War Stories and Constitutional Reform, 18611876 (1992), a densely written but cleverly arranged monograph that described three major genres of magazine fiction about the Civil War, reprinted an important example of each genre, and offered close readings of the three featured stories. In To Live and Die, Diffley presents thirty-one stories as a sample of the popular understanding of the Civil War. Her introduction, which sketches the magazine world of the period and hints at her principles of selection, calls the collection an "inadvertent novel" (p. 3) comparable to the "inadvertent epic" that Leslie Fiedler found growing out of Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin into Thomas Dixon's The Clansman, Margaret Mitchell's Gone With the Wind, and Alex Haley's Roots. |
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The invocation of Fieldler's The Inadvertent Epic (1979) is more appropriate than the mere adaptation of a felicitous phrase. To be sure, Diffley's chain is in some ways quite different. Unlike the bestsellers whose authors responded in part to previous works in the sequence, these magazine stories did not win fame or independent influence, though critics have recently taken an interest in at least two of the pieces, Louisa May Alcott's "The Brothers" and Silas Weir Mitchell's "The Case of George Dedlow." Driven primarily by the conventions of the magazine business, Diffley's "novel" is in some ways more inadvertent than Fiedler's "epic." The stories are divided into five chapters covering each of the years from 1861 through 1865, with a Bleeding Kansas prelude and a Reconstruction aftermath, and they move through the landmark events of the war, but Diffley does not seek to show how the treatment of common concerns shifted with political and social developments. She has put the stories in an order determined by the flow of the war they describe rather than their dates of publication. The table of contents conveniently provides the information necessary to read the stories in the order in which they appeared, a useful exercise that demonstrates the trends explored in Diffley's previous book, in Alice Fahs's The Imagined Civil War: Popular Literature of the North and South, 1861–1865 (2001), and in Lyde Sizer's The Political Work of Northern Women Writers and the Civil War, 1850–1872 (2000). Diffley's main concern here, however, is with the range of variations on her central motif, the war as a "daily emergency" for American homes (p. 1). Like Fiedler, Diffley roots this theme in Uncle Tom's Cabin as a vision of domestic reform of the house divided. The prelude, Henry King's "The Cabin at Pharaoh's Ford" directly refers to Stowe's legacy in a tale of a minister who shepherds thirty-one runaway slaves to freedom, one for every state in the Union, before he is martyred and his cabin is burned. The destruction of the home and the repressive order the minister maintains in it while pursuing his mission foreshadow tensions that appear in different forms in many of the other narratives. A few stories depict home as a base of mobilization, but most focus on invasions or distensions of the household, often in borderland settings that highlight the permeability of wartime boundaries. Domestic order is challenged by trauma, adventure, and ironic humor. But the collection also reflects on hopes for the consolidation of a new postwar home, most notably in the aftermath. Mark Twain's "A True Story, Repeated Word for Word As I Heard It," one of the stories featured in Diffley's previous book, traced the echoes of Stowe in Twain's account of a mother and son divided by slavery and reunited by the war. |
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To Live and Die offers a superb teaching resource for high school or college courses in history and literature. The largely obscure stories provide a chance to discover the popular imagination of the Civil War era with relatively little mediation from complex authorial intentions or canonical prestige. Media-saturated students should appreciate the ways in which powerful cultural narratives—in this case the plot framed by Uncle Tom's Cabin— shape responses to public events and establish systems for their own modification. At the same time, as Elizabeth Young has shown in Disarming the Nation: Women's Writing and the American Civil War (1999), that the story of the Civil War has been a vital medium for reconfiguring ideas about gender and domestic relations, a point reinforced by the recent success of the novel and film versions of Charles Frazier's Cold Mountain. Kathleen Diffley's brilliantly designed collection creates a stimulating opportunity to examine this process in the midst of the crisis. |
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| University of South Carolina |
Thomas J. Brown |
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