Julia Nitz, Belles and Poets: Intertextuality in the Civil War Diaries of White Southern Women (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 2020), 281 pp.

White Southern women diarists of the Civil War era were sufficiently well educated in finishing schools and women’s colleges to have become literate, opinionated, partisan, critical, and curious readers of both canonical texts and contemporary non-fiction and fiction. Their sense of self-actualization through incisive writing, a republican duty even—and particularly so—in a world of gendered “separate spheres” in the mid-nineteenth-century United States, was strongly developed. As they recognized that their diaries were not truly private but would eventually serve the purposes of family history, they wrote to an imagined audience. If, in consequence, they censored themselves and habitually cancelled or erased intimate, impetuous, or self-doubting passages, they nonetheless had recourse to a rhetorical strategy heretofore underappreciated: the literary quotation and allusion that, smartly borrowed and contextually adjusted, would stand in for the diarist’s own emotional state and unequivocally deliver its message. Whether they recognized their supposed intellectual kinship to Shakespeare’s Lear or to Tennyson’s Mariana, whether they found solace in Thackeray or in Fanny Fern, in Byron or Longfellow or Laurence Sterne, these women inhabited and negotiated a world of literary allusions that would make many an English major of today blush with the recognition of ignorance. Whether they survived the Civil War in privilege or in utter deprivation, how they mourned their men lost to a Lost Cause, or how their initial political tolerance hardened into post-war convictions that were channeled into the Daughters of the Confederacy—all this is the subject of Julia Nitz’s deeply-researched, historically grounded, and highly readable study, Belles and Poets.

Behind the memorable title and its descriptive subtitle, “Intertextuality in the Civil War Diaries of White Southern Women,” we find example after well-documented example of astounding literacy. The belles in question could not be more different from Scarlett O’Hara—“large numbers of books always depressed her” (Mitchell ch. 6)—who is nonplussed when Ashley Wilkes comments on Rhett Butler: “He looks like one of the Borgias. […] Scarlett thought quickly but could remember no family in the County or Atlanta or Savannah by that name” (Mitchell ch. 6). Nitz’s diarists, by contrast, habitually drew suggestive analogies between their own situations and fictional characters: Judith McGuire used Walter Scott to gently ironize the “marriage craze” of Southern men who convinced themselves that they were romantic heroes who could not get to the battlefield fast enough. Kate Stone, displaced from Louisiana, mocked her new Texas neighbors as illiterate boors. Mary Chesnut, via her reading of Thomas Carlyle, aligns wealthy Southern planters with French aristocrats wiped out by the Jacobins, while Sarah Morgan sees Yankees as so many Oliver Cromwells who usurp Southern aristocracy. Nitz shows that Southern women claimed the high moral ground and even embraced religious martyrdom in their literary projections, thereby effectively displacing in their minds the ostensible political and economic reasons for the war; namely, states’ rights and the continuation of slavery. Indeed, Ella Gertrude Thomas, like many Southern women of her time, expresses misgivings about slavery largely because it sexually corrupts White men and results in untold suffering for innocent mixed-race children, thus nullifying the Southern matron’s declared obligation of ensuring moral blamelessness in her separate domestic sphere. The fate of enslaved Black women, meanwhile, was of little or no interest to these plantation wives. Rather, saturated in the religious indoctrination of her time and place, Ella G. Thomas, convinced of slavery’s biblically sanctioned correctness, is willing to accept the war’s outcome as God’s final judgment on slavery and accordingly has a fundamental crisis of faith: if the war is lost and if slavery is wrong, then the Bible is wrong, and every certainty is upended.

The absurdity of such views, fed by unshakeable racism, is obvious from our standpoint, but the utter vilification of Yankees, and of Abraham Lincoln in particular, and the intransigent inability to compromise reminds this reader, at least, of the rigid trenches between political camps in today’s United States. Seemingly incompatible discourses and the ensuing dehumanization of the “other” are not just the province of our age alone. Nitz’s Chapter Four, “Literary Explorations of Slavery Ideology,” is thus among the most sophisticated sections of the book and invites productive comparisons with the recent, pathbreaking study by Stephanie E. Jones-Rogers, They Were Her Property: White Women as Slave Owners in the American South (2019). Owing to its subject matter and sources, Nitz’s Belles and Poets naturally cannot deliver fresh insight into the minds of the enslaved who toiled for the White women, but a remarkable lesson about perception, reality, and the reliance on “alternate facts,” as Kellyanne Conway infamously called them, is hidden just beneath the surface. Slaveowners’ education as such clearly provides no effective inoculation against willful ignorance, against the willing adoption of inherited racist supremacy, or even against the terrible lessons imparted by the opportunity to witness contemporary political events: Sherman’s March to the Sea did not change the women diarists’ views on slavery, just as the Night of Broken Glass did not dissuade fellow travelers away from the Nazi movement, just as January 6 did not shock the Republican political establishment back into common sense. These historical catastrophes are not parallel, and perhaps not even comparable, and the human suffering associated with each must never be equivocated, but their shared lesson about education’s impotence in the face of structural inequities and willful ignorance seems clear enough.

In terms of literary and historical scholarship, Nitz’s scrupulous archival study of extant manuscripts has allowed her to identify precisely those excisions from the published versions of the diaries of White Southern women in which the literary engagements are most visible. These sections now finally receive the attention they deserve for the strategic use that the diarists make of them. The reception history of the published versions had often been marred by the elimination of the very passages that reveal unguarded sentiment and sympathetic longing. Well-intentioned but ignorant family members and editors tended to exercise the kind of censorship that might make Emily Dickinson nod in resigned recognition. But now, in Chapter Five, “Literary Role Models: Antiheroines and Woman Warriors,” Nitz takes us right into the rebellious thoughts of her diarists; that is, the moments in which they long for self-identification with intelligent, self-possessed, contrarian women who make their way regardless of the cost: Cleopatra, Desdemona, Joan of Arc, Maggie Tulliver, or Spenser’s Una. These are the heroines our Southern diarists, cognizant of their narrow social bounds even within their material privilege, are eager to emulate.

Nitz’s study admirably brings to light the continuing relevance of imagined worlds, skillfully constructed moral dilemmas, and the available potential of clear and deliberate self-articulation of women as tools for our deeper appreciation of history’s contingencies. Drawing on Drew Gilpin Faust’s and Elizabeth Fox-Genovese’s important historical studies of Civil War women and on older, established analyses, Nitz yet positions herself unambiguously: “This study does not align itself with J. W. Cash’s idea of the South as a ‘fairly definite mental pattern’ […]. It understands the ‘southern mind’ as shared dominant attitudes and ideologies at particular historical moments” (222, n. 36). In what must be a quirk of contemporary publishing practices, LSU Press has supplied an extremely useful “appendix,” that at other times would have been published with the printed book itself, only online (cf. “Belles and Poets Appendix”). This twenty-page, tabular overview of all the literary texts consulted by the diarists—and by Nitz—together with attributions of their national origins, gender of authors, and textual genres should definitely be consulted together with the otherwise useful index and with the bibliography of primary sources. Nitz’s methodology places her Southern diarists in challenging contrapositions to Genette, Barthes, or Kristeva. Belles and Poets has lasting relevance both for the highly readable prose of its individual chapters and for the encyclopedic qualities of its apparatus of references.

Thomas Austenfeld (University of Fribourg)