ABSTRACT
In Augustin Daly’s The Legend of Norwood (1867) – a stage adaptation of Henry Ward Beecher’s serialized stories (and later, a novel) about an idyllic New England village – the heroines appear in Act III during the Battle of Gettysburg, surrounded by war detritus and ministering to the wounded. The stage directions call for a “disordered fi eld, illuminated in a ghastly manner” by moonlight, with cannons, wagon parts, and “dead horses” littered on the fi eld. 1 Rose is in love with the heroic Norwood boy, and Alice is smitten with a Confederate soldier whom she met before the war. Explaining her reasoning for putting herself in harm’s way, Rose calls her commitment the “spirit of devotion. . . . Woman must have something to work for, to live for, to suffer for.” 2 As shells rain upon the camp, one of the male characters commands the women to take cover: “Darnation, you women folks has no business to be here anyhow.” Rose asks why the soldiers are there then – the exasperated soldier retorts, “It’s their business to be there to fi ght; that’s their place.” Rose counters, “It is our business to relieve the wounded, who fall fi ghting for you and me.” 3 As a shell with a lit fuse rolls onto the scene, within a foot of a grieving Alice hovering over the body of her fallen Southern paramour, Rose takes it upon herself to lob the shell away from the wounded. It is clear that Rose does indeed have “business” to tend to on the battlefi eld. Although Daly’s play was not a hit – one reviewer said the theatrical adaptation of Beecher’s stories was “very much like making a poem out of Appleton’s ‘Railway Guide’” – his rendering of women’s involvement in the war on the commercial stage is an early entry in the construction of gender, history, and memories on the US stage in the postwar years and leading up to the turn of the century. 4
Rose’s heroics were clearly sensationalized for the stage, but Northern and Southern women did insert themselves into the war in a variety of ways. Some Northern women hoped to parlay their involvement in the war effort via various organizations (such as the US Sanitary Commission) into political advancement later. After the surrender at Appomattox, women on both sides were crucial to the memorialization and burial efforts. Several historians have established the centrality of women to the South in particular, not only as mourners but also as advocates for memorials, publications, charity benefi ts, and education that promoted the Lost Cause. 5
Little has been made, however, of the work done by women and the characters they portrayed in plays set during the war on the American stage. The appearance of women in amateur plays – especially those staged by or for the Grand Army of the Republic Union veterans’ organization – and in war melodramas in the commercial theater reveal the contested position of women as political agents in war memories. Although the featuring of women on stage challenged notions of acceptable gender behavior, the performances of female involvement in the war reveal a more ambiguous narrative. The spaces of war memories temporarily inhabited by women on the amateur and commercial US stage were embedded with hegemonic narratives that denied women any real political agency in the war or in the construction of war memories. Ironically, as women became more central to the war memories presented for mass consumption on the commercial stage, the political agency of women as participants in the war itself was actually diminished.
