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UMI A Bell & Howell Infonnation Company 300 North Zed) Road, Ann Aibor MI 48106-1346 USA 313/761-4700 800/521-0600 THE CREATION OF HISTORY AND MYTH IN MARY BOYKIN MILLER CHESNUT’S CIVIL WAR NARRATIVE DISSERTATION Presented in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate School of The Ohio State University By Kendra Lynne McDonald, B.A., M.A. ***** The Ohio State University 1996 Dissertation Committee; Approved by Dr. Thomas Woodson, Adviser Dr. Anne Bower Adviser Dr. Lisa Klein Department of English UMI Number: 9710620 Copyright 1996 by McDonald, Kendra Lynne All rights reserved. UMI Microform 9710620 Copyright 1997, by UMI Company. All rights reserved. This microform edition is protected against unauthorized copying under Title 17, United States Code. UMI 300 North Zeeb Road Ann Arbor, MI 48103 Copyright by Kendra Lynne McDonald 1996 ABSTRACT The Civil War narrative of Mary Boykin Miller Chesnut interprets the events of this American crisis and shows readers what the war meant to white Southerners. At the same time, the text poses questions about what it means to be a woman during wartime and a woman writing history. Since C. Vann Woodward published his edition, titled Marv Chesnut's Civil War, the text has been accepted as a consciously constructed history of the Confederacy (particularly the South Carolinian aristocracy) that uses as its filter Chesnut’s own experiences and the experiences of her friends and family. Chesnut’s narrative records facts relating both to political events and personal experiences, fashions stories based upon rumors and the lives of her friends, and details major and minor undercurrents of the mores of the mid-nineteenth century South, all the while providing a self-conscious meta-narrative commentary on her words and ideas. Chesnut’s goal was to publish her text, and it was the plan of placing her words before post-war white Southerners, whose experiences during Reconstruction had made them nostalgic, that guided her transformation of the wartime diaries into a narrative whose richness and complexity makes it unique among Civil War writings. By utilizing the form of a diary for her history, Chesnut re-enacts the war for her readers, subjecting them to the vagaries of rumor. A critical reading of Chesnut’s literary construction of history in her record of the Confederacy reveals her ambivalence in the narrative toward the twin ideological pillars that supported the white Southern way of life and which made war with the North inevitable: the notion of aristocratic honor that Southerners employed in order to define themselves (not Northerners) as the natural inheritors of both American independence and European culture, and the issues of slavery and states’ rights that were the results of the Southern brand of independence. Chesnut’s interpretation of the politics of the Confederacy transforms several actual people (Jefferson and Varina Davis, John Bell Hood, and Sally Buchanan Preston) into heroic and symbolic literary characters through whom Chesnut offered a redemptive and compassionate interpretation of the Civil War. Ill Dedicated to my family and friends IV ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I wish to thank Thomas Woodson, my adviser, and Lisa Klein and Anne Bower for their intellectual assistance and encouragement. VITA November 23,1965 .................................... Bom—Bowling Green, Ohio 1987..............................................................B.A. English, Kenyon College 1989-1995 ....................................................Graduate Teaching Associate, The Ohio State University 1992.............................................................. M.A. English, The Ohio State University FIELD OF STUDY Major Field: English VI TABLE OF CONTENTS Abstract ...................................................................................................................................ii Dedication............................................................................................................................. iv Acknowledgments ................................................................................................................ v Vita........................................................................................................................................vi Chapters; 1. Introduction.....................................................................................................................1 2. Mary Chesnut’s Life.................................................................................................... 24 3. Remembering the Southern Gentleman......................................................................44 4. The South’ s Peculiar Institution..................................................................................89 5. Heroes and Symbols: Jefferson and Varina Davis, and “Buck and the Wounded Knight” ................................................................. 170 6. Conclusion.................................................................................................................. 236 Works Cited .......................................................................................................................246 Works Consulted.............................................................................................................. 250 Vll CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION The literature of war has customarily been seen as the province of male authors: those viewed as most involved militarily or politically in a war become those who hold the authority to speak and write of it. Accordingly, military memoirs, written by and about combatants ranking from private to general or political figures ranging from small-town mayor to president, have come to fill the shelves of war libraries. Tucked between these chronicles of battle, though, are a handful of books written by women who question definitions of what it means to be involved in a war and to take part in a war effort. These first-hand accounts of war experiences demonstrate that although women have historically been denied direct access to the battlefield and to the council room, they nevertheless have played a vital role in a society at war. During the American Civil War, Southern and Northern women sustained their society by organizing and administering hospitals, nursing the wounded on and off the battlefield, supervising the production of food for soldiers and civilians, maintaining family farms or plantations, and coordinating what amounted to a cottage industry of sewing-circles to clothe the army. In the South, the work of women helped the Confederacy, an alliance of rural and agricultural states, withstand the onslaught of the heavily industrialized Union as long as possible. One of the most revealing and fascinating accounts of the Civil War was written by a South Carolina woman named Mary Boykin Miller Chesnut. This narrative, published in C. Vann Woodward’s edition as Marv Chesnut's Civil War, is written in diary form. Rather than serving as an autobiographical account of her life, however, the text is a consciously constructed history of the Confederacy (particularly the South Carolinian aristocracy) and of Mary’s own life and of the lives of her friends and family during the Civil War. Mary Chesnut’s narrative records facts relating both to political events and to personal experiences, fashions stories based upon rumors and the lives of her friends, and details major and minor undercurrents of the mores of the mid-nineteenth century South, all the while providing a self-conscious meta-narrative commentary on her words and ideas. In this dissertation, I propose to examine critically Mary Chesnut’s literary construction of history and mythology in her record of the Confederacy. In Chapters 3 and 4 ,1 shall investigate Mary Chesnut’s ambivalence in the narrative toward the twin ideological pillars that supported the Southern way of life and which made a war with the North inevitable. These two pillars are, first, the notion of aristocratic honor that Southerners employed in order to define themselves (and not Northerners) as the natural inheritors of both American