ABSTRACT
This chapter analyzes the afterlife in Elizabeth Stuart Phelps’s novels, The Gates Ajar and its two sequels, Beyond the Gates and The Gates Between, as constructs specifically designed to support the process of mourning in a time of unprecedented loss. While feminist, materialist, and psychoanalytic studies have done much to situate these novels as a site of resistance and refuge from postwar patriarchy, Phelps’ unique theoretical approach to questions of finitude have often been overlooked. Yet when we compare the manifesto-like forcefulness of Phelps’ essays about the “dilemma of immortality” with the dialogues and settings of her novels, a powerful literary-theological critique of the cultural politics of consolation begins to take shape. Through Phelps’ subtle analysis of secular teleologies of finitude, she illuminates the predicament of endless mourning that beset postwar women at a time when extant symbolic practices had proven inadequate to deal with the scale and circumstances of Civil War death.
In response to this dilemma, Phelps’ novels conceive an afterlife that functions like a religious conception, except that the paradoxes of infinite life that prove obstacles to faith are accommodated by fiction as explorations of the “future life” of mourning. With her reinvention of the hereafter, Phelps thereby not only assists survivors in finding a symbolic means of inheriting their losses and articulating their right to compensation for their sacrifices, but also creates a space for a future that would promote feminist desires and potentials, rather than a life of interminable grieving.
