Miscegenated America: The Civil War

Abstract

This essay enacts the stresses of what it tries to explicate: competing identities for the American nation between the revolution and the Civil War. Such competitions draw on racial and sexual embodiments even at moments when the text or institution under discussion-such as the Declaration of Independence or the Bank of the United States-appears removed from race or sex or body. If one is tempted to perform the sort of that Mark Twain describes as his act of pulling Those Extraordinary Twins from Pudd'nhead Wilson (Clemens 119), I want instead to trace the competing identities within this composite body as it moves toward an uncertain gestation. Twain's fantasy of a literary Caesarean in his novel of a Civil War within both reveals and covers for the centrality of monstrous birth in his project of imagining race. That is, it reveals-literally opens-a woman's body and yet covers that body in its deflection onto the text brought forth. The unsteadiness of whether a woman is even visible in the imagination of birth might invoke Roxy's near invisibility in Pudd'nhead Wilson. This is a familiar deflection: in the period of the earlier republic that Twain's later projects so uncomfortably recapitulate, the figuring of Columbia as a maternal emblem of the republic paradoxically suggests the invisibility of domesticity and housekeeping to conceptions of the republic as a house. In unsteady relation to the image of Columbia as a national mother, to ask who shall have access to the national home and to ask who shall have access to this