American Quarterly

“War was men’s business, not ladies’,” remarks Margaret Mitchell’s narrator in Gone With the Wind. ¹ Critical accounts of the fiction of the American Civil War have honored this division, constructing a literary genealogy of the war that foregrounds male accounts of soldiers in battle. ² Yet as the source for this quotation itself suggests, the Civil War has long been intimately linked with women’s fiction. Women have written hundreds of Civil War novels, and many of the most popular novels of the war are by women, from Augusta Jane Evans’ Macaria (1864)—a work considered so incendiary in its support of the Confederacy that it was burned by Northern soldiers—through Mitchell’s own novel, undoubtedly the most well-known twentieth-century account of the war. Moreover, popular mythology of the war has been intertwined with women’s fiction from the start, most famously when Lincoln allegedly greeted Harriet Beecher Stowe, “So you’re the little woman who wrote the book that made this great war.” From Stowe to Mitchell, novels by women frame the literary genealogy of the Civil War so powerfully as to dominate popular, if not scholarly, understanding of the war. Rather than legitimating a lineage of male cultural agents—both soldiers and writers—the Civil War novel was feminized from the start by the figure of the female author.

In this essay, I argue that women writers feminized Civil War fiction not only by their presence in the literary marketplace, but also through [End Page 439] their self-conscious use of the theme of feminization within their fictional plots. Women’s Civil War fiction symbolically reimagines the relation between women and nationhood—or, more specifically, between the disorderly body of the woman author and the diseased body politic of the country at war. This nexus of disrupted and disruptive bodies emerges most clearly in the work of Louisa May Alcott (1832–1888), a writer whose life and career were profoundly shaped, metaphorically as well as literally, by the Civil War and its aftermath. Interpreted in the context of the Civil War, Alcott’s work offers important insights into nineteenth-century constructions of femininity, masculinity, authorship, war, and nationhood.

In Alcott’s writing, I will argue, both individual and national bodies undergo feminization, a process that begins with what might seem to be the most literal index of the maleness of war: the wounded body of the male soldier. First appearing in Alcott’s fictionalized account of her nursing experiences, Hospital Sketches (1863), the suffering soldier is marked by and praised for his proximity to femininity. In this text, moreover, Alcott offers not one but two Civil War figures who blur conventional gender designations. Even as she valorizes the injured soldier for his feminine characteristics, she also relocates the traits of masculinity within the figure of the female nurse.

This permeable boundary between masculinity and femininity has a dual significance in Alcott’s fiction and, in turn, in the larger nineteenth-century culture her work illuminates. First, read in conjunction with Alcott’s journals and letters, Hospital Sketches aligns the masculinized nurse with the author herself, offering a commentary upon her own battles against gender propriety. In Alcott’s internal “civil wars,” the Civil War functions symbolically to reveal and realign the faultlines of femininity in Victorian America. Throughout Hospital Sketches, the vocabulary of carnivalesque gender confusion—specifically, a “topsy-turvy” relation to white heterosexual femininity—represents an embattled form of access to masculine agency. Through the figure of the masculinized Civil War nurse, Alcott turns the female psyche into a site of metaphoric inversion and insurrection.

Second, interpreted in the context of political rhetoric about the body politic, Alcott’s writing intervenes in contemporary constructions of nationhood. In Hospital Sketches and later in Little Women, the figure of the feminized Civil War soldier serves as a point of departure for the allegorical representation of a body politic disciplined and led by [End Page 440] women. In contrast to pejorative models of feminization that foreground its negative impact on men, I will suggest that feminization here comprises...