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 Katherine Brackett Reading Reconstruction: Sherwood Bonner and the Literature of the Post–Civil War South. By Kathryn B. McKee. Southern Literary Studies. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2019. Pp. xiv, 354. $49.95, ISBN 978-0-8071-6995-7.) In recent years, historians and literary critics alike have broadened our understanding of southern literary culture and, in particular, have countered narratives characterizing the South as a region without a literary culture until the [End Page 190] twentieth century. Kathryn B. McKee’s Reading Reconstruction: Sherwood Bonner and the Literature of the Post–Civil War South offers an insightful and thorough examination of author Sherwood Bonner. Bonner, an elite white woman, wrote in the midst of Reconstruction, using humor to reveal cracks in the racial and gender expectations of her society and uncovering the “darker undersides” of a region frequently romanticized in popular fiction of the day (p. 2). McKee weaves Bonner’s writing into Reconstruction-era conversations about the meaning of region, women’s roles in a defeated South, and the future of race relations in a region constructed almost entirely on white supremacy. Contrary to other writers of the period, McKee contends, Bonner offered a vision of the “‘South’ not yet fixed in either regional self-fashioning or in the national imaginary” (pp. 11–12). Agency, white womanhood, and regional exceptionalism all function in unexpected ways in Bonner’s writing, McKee argues, which makes the author relevant to more modern discussions of race, place, gender, and class, as well as the effect of all four on identity. Reading Reconstruction’s chapters are organized largely according to the writing analyzed in them, but they also follow a chronological structure that allows McKee to discuss events in Bonner’s life and their impact on her writing. Chapter 1 focuses on Bonner’s experiences in postwar Holly Springs, Mississippi, her hometown and model for the fictional Hollywell. McKee synopsizes recent Reconstruction scholarship and argues that Bonner’s writing provides unique “insight into the postwar world precisely because she . . . never lived beyond it,” since she died of breast cancer in 1883 (p. 24). The remainder of the chapter compares Bonner’s work with that of Elizabeth Avery Meriwether, Bonner’s “friend and feminist ally” (p. 19). Chapters 2 and 3 find Bonner first in Boston, Massachusetts, and then in Europe, and they describe her literary production from both locales as well as how her southern identity remained “laced throughout” her writing (p. 16). Setting aside her familial responsibilities (and thus convention), Bonner inserted herself into the lively Boston literary scene. While in New England during the 1870s, Bonner published domestic travel letters in the Memphis Avalanche, offering an unusual instance of a southerner writing from the North rather than the reverse. While abroad in Europe, Bonner wrote travel letters and, for the first time, “found herself able to confront the Civil War with a distance and clarity that closer proximity had, paradoxically, made impossible” (p. 116). In Europe, Bonner began to think of herself as an American rather than a southerner and recognized “her own incompatibility with the models of womanhood available to a white southerner” (p. 117). McKee reconstructs Bonner’s travels and relationships and connects Bonner’s wartime short story, “From ’60 to ’65” (1876), to her own experiences and frustration with reconciliation narratives and proscribed gender roles in postwar society. Chapter 4 focuses on Bonner’s novel Like unto Like (1878) and compares it with the reconciliation novels in abundance by the late 1870s and early 1880s. McKee argues that the disjointed narrative “reflects Bonner’s struggle to tell a cohesive story about a fractured world in the process of redefining the relations of black to white, of region to nation” (p. 177). Ultimately, McKee argues, the novel functions as “a reconciliation novel that offers no reconciliation” (p. 177). [End Page 191] Finally, chapter 5 considers Bonner’s short fiction published in the early 1880s. In these works, Bonner “undermines the patriarchy at the same time that she telegraphs a faith in white supremacy” (p. 238). McKee uses Dialect Tales...