Reading Reconstruction: Sherwood Bonner and the Literature of the Post-Civil War South by Kathryn B. McKee

Abstract

Reviewed by: Reading Reconstruction: Sherwood Bonner and the Literature of the Post-Civil War South by Kathryn B. McKee Elizabeth Boyle Kathryn B. McKee. Reading Reconstruction: Sherwood Bonner and the Literature of the Post-Civil War South. Louisiana State UP, 2019. ix + 354 pp. Over the last decade, critical interest in the literature of the post-Civil War and Reconstruction eras has grown considerably. Tracy O'Neill, Sharon D. Kennedy-Nolle, and Brook Thomas have all published substantial monographs that investigate how the literature of the second half of the nineteenth century responded to the nation's recent past in attempts to define its social, political, and economic futures. Kathryn B. McKee's important new book Reading Reconstruction: Sherwood Bonner and the Literature of the Post-Civil War South contributes to this critical conversation by highlighting the role southern women writers, particularly Sherwood Bonner, played in defining regional and national identities during and after Reconstruction. Bonner's writing, McKee asserts, constitutes "a jumbled response to a jumbled period in American life, her own life an often convoluted set of impulses, decisions, and circumstances that likewise depend upon the indeterminacy of her historical moment" (3). Through a careful synthesis of literary evidence, historical and biographical details, and archival materials, McKee sheds light on Bonner's individual contributions to Reconstruction-era literary culture and positions Bonner within a network of postbellum authors whose works grapple with the "generalized unsteadiness in postbellum American life" (5). Each of Reading Reconstruction's five chapters (excluding its introduction and epilogue) attends to the ways Bonner used a specific literary genre to address a particular facet of Reconstruction-era US life and her identity as a southern woman of letters. Woven throughout McKee's analysis are helpful references to and anecdotes about the other postbellum Americans with whom Bonner interacted, including Mark Twain, Kate Chopin, George Washington Cable, Louisa May Alcott, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and Joel Chandler Harris, to name a few. This is an ambitious undertaking, [End Page 571] but McKee performs it admirably. The introduction to Reading Reconstruction, for instance, covers an impressive catalog of criticism on Reconstruction-era literature and synthesizes it seamlessly, creating a comprehensive yet navigable account of existing critical discourse. McKee argues convincingly the manifold ways that examining Bonner's writing can enable scholars of American literature to expand, complicate, and hone their understanding of Reconstruction-era political, social, and literary cultures. And in her epilogue, McKee details her own experiences with recovering Bonner's writing (and the afterlife of her texts), providing readers with helpful insights into how they too might approach similar recovery endeavors. Following an introduction that clearly outlines the challenges and importance of studying post-Civil War southern letters, chapter 1 discusses how the history of the postbellum South, Bonner's lived experiences in the South, and Bonner's fictionalized South overlap and diverge in her writing. Details about Bonner's upbringing and early life in the South enliven the broader national narrative McKee sketches, in turn enhancing a sweeping landscape view of postbellum southern literature with localized details related to the specific regional context Bonner experienced. McKee concludes her first chapter by discussing Bonner's "A Volcanic Interlude," a story that depicts the illegitimate offspring born out of miscegenation. McKee, citing direct parallels to Cable's Old Creole Days and The Grandissimes as well as Kate Chopin's "Désirée's Baby," attributes the power of Bonner's story to its poignant critique of "the havoc men can wreak in the lives of women around them and … the silly lives women are taught to lead" (54–55). With the nuance that comes to define Reading Reconstruction, McKee also notes that this particular story, in which "mixing blood leads to mixing gender identity" (55), evidences "an anxious deepening of the postwar world's blurry boundaries." Chapter 2 builds on the previous chapter's discussion of Bonner's interactions within postbellum sociopolitical landscapes by treating Bonner's domestic travel letters and the role her northern experiences played in shaping her identity as Sherwood Bonner. As McKee demonstrates through her careful analysis of Bonner's writing for the Memphis Avalanche, Bonner's domestic travel writing...