Abstract
The American Civil War has been a popular topic for young-adult writers for years, with new books now being written from young women’s perspectives. In this paper, I will examine the gender ideologies that infiltrate contemporary Civil War books for young adults. I will examine four recent young-adult Civil-War novels: G. Clifton Wisler’s Mr. Lincoln’s Drummer (1995); Maureen Stack Sappéy’s Letters from Vinnie (1999); Jim Murphy’s The Journal of James Edmond Pease: A Civil War Union Soldier (1998); and Karen Hesse’s A Light in the Storm: The Civil War Diary of Amelia Martin (1999). I will argue that in these books young women are often shown to be disengaged and apolitical, while their male counterparts use language in powerful and political ways, even despite the historical record.
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Notes
Some books about the Civil War are from earlier (such as Patricia Beatty’s I Want My Sunday, Stranger! [1977], Turn Homeward, Hannalee [1984], Charley Skedaddle [1987]), but a majority of Civil-War books have been published since 1990, including Karen Weinberg’s Window of Time (1991); John Donahue’s An Island Far from Home (1995); Susan Beth Pfeffer’s Devil’s Den (1998); Joan Lowery Nixon’s A Dangerous Promise (1994) and Keeping Secrets (1995); Susan Campbell Bartoletti’s No Man’s Land: A Young Soldier’s Story (1999); Mary Pope Osborne’s Civil War on Sunday (2000); Margaret McMullan’s Hear the Wind Blow (2003); and Ann Rinaldi’s Sarah’s Ground (2004), among others.
Such books about African-American experience include: Ruby C. Tolliver’s Muddy Banks (1986), James Lincoln Collier and Christopher Collier’s With Every Drop of Blood (1994), Sandra Forrester’s Sound the Jubilee (1995), Andrea Davis Pinkney’s Silent Thunder: A Civil War Story (1999); Mary Downing Hahn’s Promises to the Dead (2000); and Margaret McMullan’s How I Found the Strong (2004). Many of these focus on the slavery experience as it bisected the war; more needs to be written on actual African-American combatants. With Every Drop of Blood is a notable exception.
Other Civil War books in the Dear America series include When Will This Cruel War Be Over? by Barry Denenberg (1996) and My Brother’s Keeper by Mary Pope Osborne (2000); The American Diaries series includes Amelina Carrett: Bayou Grand Coeur, Louisiana, 1853; Maddie Retta Lauren, Sandersville, Georgia, CSA, 1864 (2000); and Emma Eileen Grove, Mississippi, 1865 all by Kathleen Duey.
Ken Burns’ Civil War documentary featured diary excerpts from two men just barely out of the YA category: Elisha Rhodes, 19, from Rhode Island, and Sam Watkins, 21, of Tennessee. Indeed, many soldiers were young, and maybe it is time to investigate their stories as YA stories. Yet, most books look for “the man” and not “the boy” in Civil-War recording. For instance, The Civil War Chronicle, Ed. J. Matthew Gallman (Crown Publishers, 2000) relies solely on authentic voices from the era to tell the history of the Civil War but few of the inclusions are identified as young adults.
In the Epilogue of James’ diary, Murphy discusses one “William Kittler” briefly included in the story, who turned out to be a woman, Gabrina Sales, who “had cut her hair short and joined the army in the same patriotic fervor that had gripped most of the men and boys” (pp. 150–151). But that is all that Murphy or any of the Dear America series books say about such women.
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Clapp-Itnyre, A. Battle on the Gender Homefront: Depictions of the American Civil War in Contemporary Young-Adult Literature. Child Lit Educ 38, 153–161 (2007). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10583-006-9020-6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10583-006-9020-6