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Sarah Piatt and the Politics of Mourning By Lucy Elizabeth Frank A thesis submitted in partial requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in English University of Warwick, Department of English and Comparative Literary Studies January 2003 Table of Contents Acknowledgements and Declaration .................................................................... .i Summary ............................................................................................................... ii A Note on the Text. .............................................................................................. iii Epigraph ................................................................................................................ i \. Introduction: Sarah Piatt and Genteel Poetics .................................................. 1 1.1. Biography and Publishing History ................................................................... 3 1.2. Shapes of a Soul: Piatt and the Genteel Aesthetic ........................................... 14 1.3. Piatt's Hauntology and the Politics ofMourning ............................................. 34 Chapter One: 'Being Only Out of Sight': Elizabeth Stuart Phelps and the Problem of Mourning in Postbell~m America .................................................... 50 2.1. 'A Material Miasma': Grief and the Failure of Consolation ............................. 50 2.2. 'Bought with a Price': The Economy of Divine Love ...................................... 78 2.3. 'Think of God and Heaven': Consolation and Disciplinary Intimacy .............. 86 2.4. 'Salvation, Communion, Reconciliation': Transforming the Social Context of Death ............................................................................................................ 99 Chapter Two: Mourning and Memorialisation in Piatt's War Poetry ........... 108 3.1:The Grave-yard Sun': Melancholic Remembrance and the Southern Cause .............................................................................................................. 108 3.2. Suturing the Nation: Whitman and Stowe's Poetry ofRedemption .............. 135 3.3.'1 Want the Old War Back Again': Piatt and the Poetics of Public Memory .. 149 Chapter Three: 'The Slave of Slavery': Race and Reconstruction ... .............. 168 4.1. Southern Women and Race: Sarah Piatt and Mary Chestnut.. ........................ 168 4.2. A Child's Party: Inheriting Mastery ................................................................ 176 4.3. 'The Slave of Slavery': The Black Princess .................................................... 187 4.4. Iron Chains and Glad Songs: Over In Kentucky ............................................. 200 4.5.The Old Slave Music: Piatfs Language of Mourning for the South .............. 210 Conclusion: Entertaining the Dead .................................................................... 227 Appendix 1 ............................................................................................................ 231 Appendix 2 ..................................... :...................................................................... 251 Bibliography ......................................................................................................... 253 1 Acknowledgements I would like to thank Karen O'Brien and Jeffrey Steele who have supervised this project. Their critical commentary and scholarly suggestions have proved absolutely invaluable. I wish to thank the British Academy and the University of Warwick for the grants that made this project possible. I am also grateful to the University of Wisconsin, Madison for a one-year research fellowship. I am indebted to Paula Bernat Bennett for her supportiveness and her generosity in allowing me to have access to her archive of Piatt material, in particular her transcriptions of Piatt's correspondance and the contemporary reviews of Piatt's work. I am also very grateful for the assistance of Angie Warye and Jimmy Harless lat the Piatt Castles Archive in Ohio. I would like to thank John Fletcher and Catherine Bates for their support. Many thallks are also due to Martin Coe, Edward Harcourt, Kirsten Jameson, Lisa Long, Jane Poyner, Rosvita Rauch, Jane Rickard, Natasha Rogers, James Sedgwick, Roger Starling, Jennifer Terry, Susan Varney and Laura Vroomen for their friendship, encouragement and helpful scholarly advice. Most of all, I wish to thank Nicholas Ray for his unwavering support, his insightful critical comments and for being an inspiration to me, always. Thanks also to Harley, Patricia and David Frank for their financial support and for their love and patience. This thesis is dedicated to Constance Mary Clay-Thomas, 1909-2003, in loving memory. Declaration I declare that this thesis is all my own work. It neither incorporates work from another degree nor from published material. It has not been previously submitted to another university. .. 11 , Summary' The American poet Sarah Piatt (1836-1919) addresses crucial dilemmas of modem identity, in particular the traumatic effects of war, the complexities of racial relationships and the unsettling dynamics of urban life. Although a respected poet in her day, Piatt's work disappeared after her death from the canon of American literature, and it is only in the last five years that scholars have begun to realise the importance of her poetry and to assess its depth and scope. This thesis contributes to the process of assessing the significance of Piatf s work, and contextualises her in relation to a number of other nineteenth-century American writers, including Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, Walt Whitman, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Mary Chestnut and Frederick Douglass. I focus on the rift between Piatt's Southern plantation childhood and her married life in the industrial North, and upon how the Civil War created irreconcilable conflicts and divided loyalties in her life, which are played out in her writing. I emphasise the Civil War as a moment of personal and cultural trauma, which inaugurates what I term Piatfs 'politics of mourning'. I explore her politics of mourning in relation to psychoanalytic theory. While Freud sought to rid mourning of its ambivalence and interminability, and to displace these onto melancholia, Piatt's writing blurs the boundary between them. Instead of dispensing with mourning too quickly, too easily, Piatt recognises that one cannot avoid being haunted by the past and by the dead. She engages in a dialogue with the past and explores how the desire of the dead continues to be played out by the living. In contrast to Northern writers like Phelps, Stowe and Whitman, who seek to heal the nation by appealing to the idea of sacrifice, and the pastoral, in order to console the bereaved and envisage a redeemed body politic, Piatt turns away from consolation. Instead, she takes mourning in a direction that leads towards an exploration of the uncanny, the ghost-like and the hallucinatory. She explores the stifling effects of mourning in the South, and the way in which the North buried the unpleasant realities of the war, in the process of memorialising it. Piatt remained deeply emotionally invested in the South, yet she was also very critical of the Confederate Cause, and in her work she repeatedly interrogates her own investment in an idealised version of the antebellum South. I examine the ways in which Piatt scrutinises Southern discourses of race and slavery. I focus in particular on how she seeks to articulate a language of mourning for the South while also repeatedly exposing, and destabilising Southern fictions of mastery. III A Note on the Text The text for all the poems cited is taken from Paula Bernat Bennett's selected edition of Piatt's work, Palace-Burner: The Selected Poetry a/Sarah Piatt (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2001), with the exception of 'Oh, Singer at my Window'. which is taken from an unpublished manuscript in the Ohio Historical Society Archive. Bennett takes as her copy text first versions of poems printed in magazines and periodicals, where available. Appendix I contains the original magazine versions of all the poems by Sarah Piatt that have been cited at any length in the thesis, with indications of subsequent variants. Appendix II contains a complete list of Piatt's volumes of verse, vvith publication dates. The letters written by Sarah and John James Piatt are extant in manuscript form in a number of different archives, which are listed in the footnote to each letter. I am grateful to Paula Bernat Bennett for access to her transcriptions of the letters. 1\ Epigraph Oh, Singer at my Window. To a Bird that Sang in the early Dawn, under my Window by the Sea-Shore. Oh, Singer at my Window, in the deep Leafloneliness, singing the dead cn('ake.' Touched by your song, 1 will arise and shake The mortal from me. Heavy and blind 11'ith sleep, The living lie. Backwards to them 111 creep, Oh, Singer at my window, for J'ollr sake, To kiss the dearest mouth on earth awake (With lifted eyes that shall forget to weep) And kiss the dearest mouth