This review that is circulating on H-Net may also be interesting to
Va-Hist subscribers in light of the recent animated discussion about
Reconstruction, which was really about after Reconstruction, which was
done with, at least in Virginia, by 1870.

Please respect the letter and spirit of the copyright notice at the end
of the review.

Brent Tarter
The Library of Virginia
[log in to unmask]

Visit the Library of Virginia's web site at http://www.lva.lib.va.us 

-----Original Message-----
From: H-NET List for the Southern Association for Women Historians
[mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Jennifer McDaid
Sent: Thursday, November 16, 2006 9:00 AM
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Subject: RVW: Lewis on Gardner, _Blood and Irony_

Crosspost, H-CivWar

H-NET BOOK REVIEW

Published by [log in to unmask] (September, 2006)

Sarah E. Gardner. _Blood and Irony: Southern White Women's Narratives of
the Civil War, 1861-1937_. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina
Press, 2004. x + 341 pp. Illustrations, notes, bibliography, index.
$39.95 (cloth), ISBN 0-8078-2818-1.

Reviewed for H-CivWar by Charlene Boyer Lewis, Department of History,
Kalamazoo College.

Setting the Stage for Scarlett O'Hara

Before Margaret Mitchell's _Gone with the Wind_ (1936) shaped the
national memory of the Civil War in the 1930s, thousands of southern
white women regarded themselves as the preservers of the truth about the
Confederacy, the war, and ultimate defeat. Through their writings, as
Sarah Gardner argues, these women sought to structure the way their
region and, indeed, the nation would remember the valiant efforts of
white southerners to protect their rights and way of life. From the
beginning of the war until the early decades of the twentieth century,
they fiercely challenged the dominant northern interpretations of the
origins and meanings of the war and Confederate defeat. Since "southern
white women did not entrust even their own menfolk with the telling of
war" (p. 4), they used their own writings to help define post-war
southern identity and construct the myth of the Lost Cause. Gardner has
examined a vast number and wide range of these women's
writings--fiction, diaries, biographies, letters, educational texts,
histories, and, especially, the papers of the United Daughters of the
Confederacy--to chronicle the ways in which southern white women's
narratives of the Civil War changed and influenced their society from
1861 through 1937. One of the merits of this book is that it includes
major writers, such as Augusta Evans and Ellen Glasgow, minor writers,
such as Mary Johnston and Helen Dortch Longstreet, as well as women who
kept diaries or wrote memoirs intended only for family members.

Soon after the first shot was fired, some female writers of the
Confederacy "transgressed the boundaries of domestic fiction" and
entered the traditionally male arena of political and military writing
by attacking northern policies and crafting fictional narratives not
only with heroines and love interests, but also with camp and battle
scenes in order to rally support for the Cause (p. 33). When compared
with those who would come later, these Confederate writers were the
lucky ones. "Unburdened by defeat," they "could imagine a future for the
independent southern nation" (p. 36). When the shooting stopped, later
writers, engulfed by loss, would have to struggle with the challenge of
incorporating defeat into their southern identity. Gardner argues that
the first postwar generation of women who put pen to paper met the
challenge by writing more about "the romance of sectionalism" than about
the romance of reunion (p. 54). Thus began the myth of the Lost Cause.
The "virtues of slavery, the evils of abolitionism, the grandeur of
southern plantations, the heroism of southern leaders, the wickedness of
the northern army, and the pain of defeat" all started to take shape in
these women's narratives--both fictional and non-fictional (pp. 55-56).
Stories of southern belles refusing northern officers or ultimately
dying if they did marry them became a regular theme, more common than
the theme of a happy (re)union.

Women writing after Reconstruction struggled with conflicting images of
the South and either turned back toward a romanticized past or forward
toward a promising future--anything but focusing on their painful
present. As the meanings of the Civil War were increasingly being
debated in the public arena, southern white female writers penned epic
tales that, Gardner concludes, cast "the Confederates as the
protagonists, transformed humiliating defeat into justified warfare, and
fought to control the establishment of 'historical truth'" (p. 76). No
group of women did this better than the United Daughters of the
Confederacy (UDC)--a main focus of this book. The UDC firmly believed
that its members had a "divinely commanded imperative" to "tell the
'true' story of the Civil War" (p. 117). Of course, this was a truth
that romanticized and celebrated the past and rested on the idea that
the Confederacy had fought to protect its liberties from a North that
sought to take them away. The UDC drafted guidelines concerning content
and presentation to instruct members how to write about the war. It also
created a textbook committee to help control what southern children read
about the war. In the end, the UDC "forcibly demonstrated that southern
women possessed a great deal of cultural power by encouraging its
members to wield their pens" (p. 128).

After the turn of the twentieth century, the southern story of the war
gradually became the national story, culminating with Mitchell's _Gone
with the Wind_. The literary market readily published the works of
southern white women, whose "consciousnesses," Gardner argues, were
"still consumed" with the Civil War (p. 180). The UDC continued to hold
tremendous influence over the historical memory of the war and women
continued to write stories infused with Lost Cause mythology. The
"'women's side of the war,'" Gardner contends, remained important to the
"public discourse on the war" (p. 181). The popularity of Mary Chesnut's
_Diary from Dixie_, published in 1905, is an outstanding testament to
this point.

One of Gardner's most important contributions is her analysis of the
impact of World War I on southern women's narratives. That war created
not only a renewed focus on the Civil War, but also a new way to view
the war. Many southern female writers came to see the Civil War as more
of a national tragedy and less a glorification of the Confederacy.
Margaret Mitchell's "ability to transform a southern story of the Civil
War into a national story" allowed her to succeed "where generations of
southern white women authors had failed" (p. 234). While her story of
Scarlett O'Hara's struggles drew on the familiar elements of the Lost
Cause from earlier women's writings, she shaped it into a national story
by adding elements that could appeal to those outside of the South as
well. Scarlett came not from an old cavalier family, but a recently
immigrated one. And, as Gardner stresses, Mitchell "strip[ped] the Old
South of its 'peculiar institution,' substituting racism for slavery,"
which, in that era, meant a "story that the nation could embrace" (p.
236). _Gone with the Wind_ was such a success because it "offered a
nostalgic depiction of the Old South but did not advocate its return"
(p. 239). In fact, Scarlett's fulfillment came in an industrialized New
South, not an agricultural Old South.

Gardner's research is impressive. Her analysis of the patterns in
southern white women's writings and what they reveal about their views
of the war and the meanings of southern identity is persuasive. But in
her quest to show so many of the women (who desired to contribute their
voices) and to examine all of the gradual changes in content, style, and
presentation in the writings, the book is dragged down by an excess of
examples and becomes repetitive in a number of places. There are just
too many lengthy plot summaries of too many almost-identical narratives.
Furthermore, the changes from period to period are often so subtle,
sometimes almost negligible, that parts of the book could easily have
been condensed. Briefer summaries and tighter comparisons and contrasts
among the writers would have made the book stronger as well as more
readable.

Ultimately, this book has more literary than historical appeal. For
those interested in the lives and roles of white women in the postbellum
South and their historical significance, this work is not as useful as
other scholarly studies in the field. I would not assign it for either
southern or women's history courses. More valuable, though not covering
as long a period of time, is Jane Turner Censer's _The Reconstruction of
White Southern Womanhood, 1865-1895_ (2003). But those who are
interested in the literature produced by Reconstruction-era and New
South white women or in the construction of the myth of the Lost Cause
should certainly read _Blood and Irony: Southern White Women's
Narratives of the Civil War, 1861-1937_.


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