There Are No Good Deaths in War: Rebecca Harding Davis's "John Lamar" and the White Feminist Foundations of U.S. Antiwar Literature

Abstract

Studies of (anti)war literature continue to devalue Rebecca Harding Davis's contributions to the genre. This essay reaffirms Davis's status as a foundational writer of U.S. antiwar literature whose exposure to emergent guerilla conflict in the borderlands of western Virginia made her critical of northern and southern attempts to reconcile the Civil War's carnage with martial codes of conduct and domestic narratives of mourning. Reibsome argues that Davis's 1862 short story "John Lamar" employs a multivalent Good Death/Bad Death rhetoric to convey the horror of unconventional warfare and to force readers to contemplate the irreconcilable differences between Confederate and emancipatory war aims. Combining contemporary criticism and new historical research, Reibsome problematizes the story's reconciliationist conclusion, suggesting that Davis's familial participation in slavery distorted her perception of race, as evidenced by her penchant for incorporating racist tropes and caricatures in her writing.