Facing America Iconography and the Civil War

by Samuels, Shirley

• ISBN13: 9780195128970
• ISBN10: 0195128974
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2004-03-25
• Publisher: Oxford University Press

Summary

Facing America: Iconography and the Civil War investigates and explains the changing face of America during the Civil War. To conjure a face for the nation, author Shirley Samuels also explores the body of the nation imagined both physically and metaphorically, arguing that the Civil War marksa dramatic shift from identifying the American nation as feminine to identifying it as masculine. Expressions of such a change appear in the allegorical configurations of nineteenth-century American novels, poetry, cartoons, and political rhetoric. Because of the visibility of war's assaults on themale body, masculine vulnerability became such a dominant facet of national life that it practically obliterated the visibility of other vulnerable bodies. The simultaneous advent of photography and the Civil War in the nineteenth century may be as influential as the conjoined rise of the novel andthe middle class in the eighteenth century. Both advents herald a changed understanding of how a transformative media can promote new cultural and national identities. Bodies immobilized because of war's practices of wounding and death are also bodies made static for the camera's gaze. The look ofshock on the faces of soldiers photographed in order to display their wounds emphasizes the new technology of war literally embodied in the impact of new imploding bullets on vulnerable flesh. Such images mark both the context for and a counterpoint to the "look" of Walt Whitman as he bends oversoldiers in their hospital beds. They also provide a way to interpret the languishing male heroes of novels such as August Evans's Macaria (1864), a southern elegy for the sundering of the nation. This book crucially shows how visual iconography affects the shift in postbellum gendered andracialized identifications of the nation.

Author Biography

Shirley Samuels is Professor of English at Cornell University.

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations	xi
Introduction	3	(1)
The Four Continents	3	(3)
Looking into the Archive	6	(3)
My Grandmother's Hand	9	(2)
The Currency of America	11	(5)
Facing West	16	(25)
Land Claims	16	(3)
The Muse of History	19	(5)
Men on the Run	24	(6)
Women Who Fight	30	(5)
Haunted Houses	35	(6)
Miscegenated America	41	(17)
Monstrous Birth	41	(5)
The President's Dream	46	(4)
Buying Philadelphia	50	(4)
Twins	54	(4)
The Face of the Nation	58	(23)
``The Youngster's Face''	59	(3)
The Surgeon's Eye	62	(8)
``Weird Copies of Carnage''	70	(6)
Repetition	76	(3)
Body Poses	79	(2)
Women at War	81	(18)
She-Devils	81	(3)
Domestic Violence	84	(3)
The War at Home	87	(3)
``The Dear Old Flag Is Bound To Grow and Increase''	90	(4)
The Condition of the Mother	94	(5)
Lincoln's Body	99	(19)
``The Long and Bony Body Is Now Hard and Stiff''	99	(4)
``The Lilac with Mastering Odor''	103	(3)
``Control Your Grief''	106	(2)
``The Naked Fact Itself''	108	(3)
``Turned Red in the Blood''	111	(3)
``The Nation and the Race''	114	(4)
EPILOGUE	118	(13)
Men of Our Times	118	(3)
``Only Out of Sight''	121	(4)
Contraband	125	(2)
Columbia	127	(4)
Notes	131	(28)
Bibliography	159	(20)
Index	179