Jackson's Life Research Articles

Uncertain Borders: Race, Sex, and Civilization in The Last of the Mohicans

����� .place of the Indian in the American consciousness during the Age of Jackson. This was above all else a period of headlong westward expansion involving wars and treaties that resulted in the dispossession of the original dwellers on the land. had not mattered so much, Rogin observes, since the colonial settlements. They would never matter so much again. We need be reminded of the preeminent national concern with Indians during this period because our historians failed, Rogin charges, to place Indians at the center of Jackson's life. They have interpreted the Age of Jackson from every perspective but Indian destruction, the one from which it actually developed historically.1 The great popularity ofThe Last of the Mohicans argues quite emphatically in support ofRogin's position. Indian wars figured prominently in the national self-image of the time that Cooper first acted on the impulse become a writer. By the mid-1820s, when he conceived and wrote his best-seller, major developments in Federal Indian Removal Policy were regularly in the public eye. There can be little doubt that Cooper was keenly aware of these ominous signs. The title and dominant thematics ofThe Last ofthe Mohicans are the surest kind ofevidence that he was alert and responsive the gathering swell of legislation

Private Demons: The Life of Shirley Jackson , and: Ellen Glasgow's Reasonable Doubts: A Collection of Her Writings (review)

Reviewed by: Private Demons: The Life of Shirley Jackson, and: Ellen Glasgow's Reasonable Doubts: A Collection of Her Writings Nancy Walker Judy Oppenheimer . Private Demons: The Life of Shirley Jackson. New York: Putnam, 1988. 304 pp. $19.95. Julius Rowan Raper , ed. Ellen Glasgow's Reasonable Doubts: A Collection of Her Writings. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 1988. 262 pp. $30.00. The opportunity to know more about two of America's most intriguing women writers of the twentieth century is richly—though differently—afforded by these two recent books. Oppenheimer's Private Demons is the first full-length biography of the author best-known for her short story "The Lottery," and Raper's is a collection of previously uncollected nonfiction and one short story written by Glasgow between 1895 and 1941, the most productive decades of the novelist's career. The differences between these two books derive from more than genre, however: Oppenheimer, a journalist, has invested herself in the frequently painful life of Shirley Jackson, attempting with considerable success to understand her subject's unhappy childhood, her deeply committed though tumultuous marriage to critic Stanley Edgar Hyman, and the mystical turns of mind that led Jackson to write such works as The Haunting of Hill House and "The Lottery." Raper, on the other hand, is so detached a scholar of Glasgow's work that despite the usefulness of his collection, the sexism of his introductory remarks and the intrusive over-documentation of the text threaten to obscure Glasgow's own work. Private Demons successfully revises the only other extended account of Shirley Jackson's life: Hyman's introduction to The Magic of Shirley Jackson (1966), a paean of praise that belies the fact that at the time he wrote it, two years after Jackson's death at the age of 48, he was married to the much-younger woman he married immediately after her death. Jackson and Hyman had a relationship that would now be termed a codependency; their mutual reliance on alcohol, food, cigarettes—and, in Jackson's case, stimulants and tranquilizers—left scars on their four children, about whom Jackson wrote so amusingly in Life Among the Savages and Raising Demons. Interviews with Jackson's children, along with letters she wrote to the parents from whom she professed to be estranged after she—an overweight, unattractive adolescent—rejected their upper-middle-class values, are important sources for this biography, and Oppenheimer uses them well, bringing a journalist's trained objectivity to bear on essentially subjective material. [End Page 290] Oppenheimer describes the circumstances surrounding the composition of "The Lottery" as a combination of Jackson's mystical proclivities and the stark reality of her position as an "odd" faculty wife in Bennington, Vermont, where Hyman taught at Bennington College. The vitriolic response of readers when the story was published in The New Yorker in 1948 indicated a fictional power at odds with the lack of control over her personal habits that led to Jackson's early death. Oppenheimer convincingly presents Jackson as an unusual combination of what would today be called "supermom" and committed career woman: a fierce defender of her children, an unflagging hostess, and a writer who became increasingly reclusive—even agoraphobic—as staid Bennington came to seem the enemy to her often unorthodox habits and views. Private Demons is readable, almost novelistic. One wishes, however, that dates were provided more frequently in the text; because the reader is seldom located in time, it is, for example, shocking to realize that Jackson died while her children were still adolescents. Still, this is a compelling analysis of a woman who wrote some of the most humorous and most haunting fiction of the mid-twentieth century. Ellen Glasgow's Reasonable Doubts, in contrast, nearly sinks under the weight of its scholarly apparatus, much of which betrays the editor's intent to make Glasgow an interesting female artifact rather than an important American writer, although there is no doubt that Raper, author of two previous books on Glasgow (Without Shelter: The Early Career of Ellen Glasgow and From the Sunken Garden: The Fiction of Ellen Glasgow, 1916 to 1945) speaks with authority. In the Preface and other...

Kate: The Journal of a Confederate Nurse (review)

316civil war history his own set of values), who could take his wife to task for calling their newborn babe "cherub," or who could disrupt an army post by publicly charging his commanding officer with unauthorized hanky-panky involving a servant girl? Not until I had read this book did I fully realize just how unattractive a person Stonewall really was. Mr. Chambers necessarily covers a good bit of familiar ground. The story of the industrious orphan boy who plodded his way through West Point, of the promising young junior officer in the Mexican War, of the pedestrian professor at the Virginia Military Institute, and of the spectacularly successful Confederate commander is one that is already generally known. It is the author's contention that the thirty-nine years of Jackson's life divide naturally into two periods: the first thirty-seven and the last two. He believes that the character traits which made for greatness in the field were already fully developed when that officer marched away to war in 1861. The maps are excellent; they make it relatively easy to follow the author's narrative. A mild complaint might be lodged against the decision to place all the notes in the back of the second volume, though this is admittedly a minor criticism of a major work. Otis A. Singletary The University of Texas Kate: The Journal of a Confederate Nurse. Edited by Richard Barksdale Harwell. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press. 1959. Pp. xx, 321. $6.00.) copies of Kate cumming's diary published in 1866 have come to rest primarily in various rare book collections, known only to serious students of the Civil War. However, Richard Harwell's edition of this work, Kate: The Journal of a Confederate Nurse, brings the informative, meticulously kept record to all who have an interest in the period. It is an eyewitness account of the war, and more particularly, of the inner workings of the hospital service, as described by a discerning, intelligent woman who gave three years of her life to nursing the sick and wounded. The Scottish-born, Alabama-bred Kate Cumming was, as Mr. Harwell so aptly characterizes her, "a lady." Indeed, she was in so many ways a typical Victorian lady, despite the fact that she dared to enter a heretofore masculine profession, that of an army nurse. She was in her late twenties or early thirties (there is some doubt as to her exact age, which may make her typical of her sex) when she decided to offer her services to the Confederacy over the protests of her family. In April, 1862, she reported for duty in Okolona, Mississippi, in time to nurse the Shiloh casualties, and from that time until the end of the war she served in hospitals attached to the Army of Tennessee in Mississippi, Tennessee, and Georgia. Wherever the hospitals moved, Miss Cumming moved with them, proving herself more adjustable to the nomadic life than did many of her colleagues, male or female. Her days were filled with problems and heart-rending experiences, but seldom did she complain, for they were but a part of the job she had Book Reviews317 undertaken to do. Daily irritations, privations, hardships, and inconveniences did not overwhelm and defeat Kate Cumming as they did many of her contemporaries. Miss Cumming was not an effervescent person, and her diary does not abound with sparkling chit-chat which characterizes many similar accounts. Hers is not filled with idle gossip and trivialities, or with petty and malicious comments. Rather, it is the record of a serious-minded woman who kept busy attending to the tasks assigned her. When she inserted a current rumor in the record, it was briefly stated and usually dismissed with an air of indifference. She was determined and dedicated, and much of the time she was stolid and stoical to an almost annoying degree, but she was also efficient, business-like, selfless, and courageous. She graciously rendered any service she thought necessary, and she could be cook or confidante, seamstress or supervisor, fugitive or forager as circumstances demanded. Amid it all, she seldom gave vent to her emotions, but the one thing that did...