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

Abstract

Novels and magazines are filled nowadays with stories of gallant boys and noble old men from every free and every slave State dying for the cause they loved. We all like to think that great national convulsion was caused by an outbreak of pure patriotism, of chivalry, of self-sacrifice in both South and North.Measurably that is true. But there were phases of the long struggle familiar enough to us then which never have been painted for posterity. There were, for instance, regiments on both sides which had been wholly recruited from the jails and penitentiaries. This class of soldiery raged like wild beasts through the mountains of the border States. They burned, they murdered men, women, and children, they cut out the tongues of the old men who would not answer their questions." -Rebecca Harding Davis 1In hIs 2009 nonfIctIon account of the Iraq War, The Good Soldiers, David Finkel shares the story of Corporal Duncan Crookston, a nineteen-yearold infantryman who loses both legs, an arm, a hand, a nose, both ears, and his eyelids when an improvised explosive device (IED) pierces his vehicle and sets him on fire. In the months following the attack, the military transfers Crookston to the Brooke Army Medical Center in San Antonio, Texas, where he languishes with fever, tissue infection, and organ failure before dying on January 25, 2008. That day Crookston's mother, Lee, emails family and friends the tragic news, writing: "It is the closest thing to a 'good death' one could ask for a young man who fought so long and hard, only to have the limits of his body betray him." 2 Lee never explains what she means by a "good death," nor does Finkel, in part because he understands the scene's poignancy stems from a mother's struggle to situate her son's gruesome, premature wartime death within popular domestic narratives of mourning, but also because he, like Lee, assumes two things: (1) it is evident what a "good death" entails; and(2) soldiers rarely, if ever, experience good deaths-the best they can [44.224.250.200] Project MUSE (2024-06-28 05:46 GMT)