The War and Literature

IV 1861 - Confederate attacked on Fort Sumter, the opening shots of the Civil War (1862-65)

One reason is that few major American writers saw the Civil War firsthand. Emerson was in Concord during most of the war, "knitting socks and mittens for soldiers," as he wrote to his son, and "writing patriotic lectures." Thoreau, who had been a fervent abolitionist, died in 1862, and Hawthorne died two years later. Emily Dickinson seems almost to have missed the war altogether; from her peaceful room in Amherst, Massachusetts, the carnage must have seemed very far away. Of the younger generation, William Dean Howells, Henry James, and Henry Adams were abroad.

But more importantly, the literary form most appropriate for handling such strong material—the realistic novel—had not yet been fully developed in the United States. War, with its life-and-death struggles, its defeats and victories, its indifference to the fate of individuals, would for later fiction writers be a subject of central importance. But for writers of the 1860's, war was more appropriate for poetry or pamphlets.

Modern readers think that one by-product of a war is a literary account of it, largely in the form of novels by young men who had survived the war. Modern writers like Ernest Hemingway went to war intending to return with the material for novels. This was not the case with the Civil War because traditional literary forms and sensibility could not easily deal with such material. There was no place for "the real war" in the fiction of the time. The traditional romantic novel of and high adventure simply could not accept the horrifying details of the Civil War.

To those who lived through it, the war was a great tragedy. But for later writers, war confirmed a view of the world that saw all existence as a battle with an indifferent and often hostile environment. Thus, the great novel of the Civil War, The Red Badge of Courage, had to wait to be written by a man who was not born until six years after the war had ended: Stephen Crane.

One of the most enduring subjects for prose fiction has always been the exploits of larger-than-life heroes. Born of the chivalric romance, the romantic novel presents the ordinary readers with lives lived at an idealistic level.

In America, the great fiction writers of the mid-nineteenth century, Poe, Hawthorne, and Melville, shared an aversion to realism. These writers used romance not simply to entertain readers, but to reveal truths that would be hidden in a realistic story that limited itself to what actually could happen.

However, after the Civil War, a new generation of writers came of age. They were known as realists, writers who looked at "local manners" very closely and who aimed at a "very minute fidelity" to the common course of ordinary life. Their subjects were drawn from the slums of the rapidly growing cities, from the factories that were replacing farmlands. Their characters might include shop girls, poor factory workers, corrupt politicians, even prostitutes. But realism was not solely an American movement. In fact, it was well entrenched in Europe by the time it began to develop widely in the United States.

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