Reconstructive Realism: Satire in Miss Ravenel's Conversion from Secession to Loyalty

Abstract

Winner of Best Graduate Student Paper Award at 2006 American Culture Association Conference ... I never forgot that my main duty should consist in educating entire population around me to settle their differences by civil law; in other words, I considered myself an instrument of reconstruction. -John W. De Forest, Union Officer (29) Already a promising author when he was commissioned as Captain of Twelfth Connecticut Volunteers, John W. De Forest turned a writerly eye on war he began fighting in 1862. Then, after Appomattox, De Forest moved to South Carolina in 1866 to serve as a subassistant commissioner for Freedman's Bureau, giving him rare insight into, as well as an active role in, Reconstruction. He recorded his experiences both in and after war in a series of articles for Harper's New Monthly Magazine (and published in book form posthumously as A Volunteer's Adventures and A Union Officer in Reconstruction). De Forest's nonfiction accounts of his service constituted much of raw material for Miss Ravenel's Conversion from secession to Loyalty, his attempt at The Great American Novel (a term he would coin in 1868). De Forest, in his dual role of author and officer, is an important cultural-historical figure whose life and work highlight potential connections between political and aesthetic attempts at rebuilding Union. Because initial ideas for Reconstruction were speculative visions of a new nationhood, articulations of these ideas-even though they derived from military or political viewpoints-can themselves be considered imaginative works. Conversely, De Forest's Miss Ravenel, as an imaginative work about Civil War and Reconstruction, in a sense enacts practical politics through literary means. As we will see, De Forest's literary agenda is also a political agenda: national unification through satire. In short, politics of De Forest's aesthetic Reconstruction and aesthetics of his efforts at onthe-ground political Reconstruction collapse distance between aesthetic products and realworld politics. De Forest uses satiric realism in an aesthetic attempt to implement a conciliatory Reconstruction as imagined and expressed by his Commanderin-Chief, Abraham Lincoln. Throughout Miss Ravenel, De Forest relies on satire to reveal distance between reality and idealistic presentations of it, to aesthetically undermine what he sees as limited, socially conservative worldview of popular sentimental novels. De Forest fears that sentimental fiction's privileging of private sphere encourages provincialism and insularity, and as a result endangers what he sees as ultimate goal of postbellum art and politics: political and moral reconstruction of national Union. Through satire of sentimental novels and notions, as well as of provincial characters and feminine, domestic institutions, De Forest in Miss Ravenel purports to neutralize their political power. In their stead he imagines a Union based on trust in public institutions of a national scope, a vision of American life and literature consistent with views of Reconstruction that President Lincoln expressed before he was assassinated. Like Lincoln, De Forest-in both his war novel and his memoirs from his days in Freedman's Bureau-advocates Reconstruction through legislation that stresses the law of solidarity and fact that the perfect prosperity of whole depends on prosperity of all parts (Union Officer 198). Miss Ravenel and Satire as Realism Miss Ravenel's marriage plot-designed, like that of many Civil War-era novels, to signify an end to animosities between North and Southwas in some ways quite familiar to readers of Civil War romances, as postbellum reconciliation romance was a popular genre in years after war. Such romances, according to critic Gregory S. Jackson, elided sectional differences by staging elaborate plots in which love, sorrow, and grief-induced insanity transcended (or obscured) racial and cultural difference, interregional animosity, sectional ideology, and ultimately even internecine conflict (284). …