Definite Indeterminacy: Blindness in the Civil War Imagery of Ambrose Bierce and Winslow Homer

Abstract

The wound around his eye] has been constantly open, suppurating and discharging ever since … with loss of strength and increasing blindness in the left eye which is very weak & he is less & less able each year to do any manual labor or care for himself. 1 Applying in 1882 for an increase to his Civil War pension, Private James M. Greenleaf, who received his facial wound at the Battle of Fredericksburg in 1862, attempted to convince the government that his eye-unhealed and rapidly losing its sight-was so debilitating as to prevent him from earning a living through gainful employment. To the above statement in his pension application, Greenleaf added an "affidavit signed by 24 acquaintances stating that his wound was worse than the loss of an arm or a leg." 2 Though Greenleaf also complained of pain in his hip, it was the wound to his face, with its leaking pus, that made him "totally & permanently helpless," as the government surgeon wrote on examining him in 1907. 3 The claim that Greenleaf's partial blindness incapacitated him more than the amputation of a limb stands out in a narrative-one of pathos, to be sure, given how frequently his applications were rejected by the government-that was all too common throughout the post-Civil War era. I take Greenleaf's story not as a representative case of the logistical problems faced by veterans of the Civil War but rather as a signpost to a larger cultural narrative that emerged as a response to war trauma in the years following the conflict: that of blindness.Two eyewitnesses to the war, author Ambrose Bierce and artist Winslow Homer, used different artistic media to come to terms with the trauma of the war. I argue that instead of being mere "realists," as they are often described, they used metaphors of blindness or compromised vision in their literary and artistic works. 4 Bierce and Homer deploy these strategies of incomplete representation as a commentary on the futility of using traditional forms of representation to depict the unprecedented horrors of mechanized warfare. Though working in different media, both men questioned how one might begin to represent such a conflict. After examining the ways that both Bierce and Homer developed theories of truth and vision, this essay will examine different modes of "blindness" that they presented in their representations of the war. These modes range from the paradoxical narrowing of vision created by technologies specifically designed to enhance natural sight, the moral and literal blindness of participating in a military engagement, and, finally, the ways that their war experiences caused both Homer and Bierce to question their own self-knowledge and clarity of vision.