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in my Mind,” #937, in Complete Poems of Dickinson; Wolosky, Emily Dickinson, p. xv. See also David T. Porter, Dickinson: The Modern Idiom (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1981), pp. 39, 98, 120. On Amy Lowell’s judgment that Dickinson was a uniquely “modern” voice in nineteenth-century American poetry, see S. Foster Damon, Amy Lowell: A Chronicle (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1935), p. 295. Historian Michael O’Brien has argued that Mary Chesnut’s Civil War diary, refashioned in the 1880s but unpublished during her lifetime, reflects these same modernistic tendencies. A South Carolina aristocrat who survived on wit and irony as she watched her world disintegrate around her, Chesnut has been well known since the appearance of bowdlerized versions of her writings early in the twentieth century. At last in 1981 historian C. Vann Woodward published a carefully edited version of the 1880s manuscript that recognized it as a literary construction—and reconstruction—not a series of daily jottings from the midst of war. Chesnut’s effort might be seen to have much in common with those of Bierce, Melville, and Dickinson. Chesnut eschews narrative for voices and fragments, reflecting in her chosen form the substance of her own disbelief—in God, in science, in her society, in herself. O’Brien connects her with Virginia Woolf, suggesting a continuum of doubt and dislocation from an American war to a European conflagration a half century later. Michael O’Brien, “The Flight Down the Middle Walk: Mary Chesnut and the Forms of Observance,” in Anne Goodwyn Jones and Susan V. Donaldson, eds., Haunted Bodies: Gender and Southern Texts (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1997), pp. 109–31.

81. Oliver Wendell Holmes, Occasional Speeches, comp. Mark DeWolfe Howe (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1962), p. 82; Reuben Allen Pierson in Thomas W. Cutrer and T. Michael Parrish, eds., Brothers in Gray: Civil War Letters of the Pierson Family (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1997), p. 101; James P. Suiter quoted in Earl Hess, Union Soldier in Battle, p. 20; Daniel M. Holt, A Surgeon’s Civil War: Letters and Diaries of Daniel M. Holt, M.D., ed. James M. Greiner, Janet L. Coryell, and James R. Smither (Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 1994), p. 100; John O. Casler, Four Years in the Stonewall Brigade (1906; rpt. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2005), p. 37.

82. Cordelia Harvey, letter from Memphis dated December 6, 1862, published in Wisconsin Daily State Journal, December 30, 1862, Cordelia Harvey Papers, WHS, online at www.uwosh.edu/archives/civilwar/women/harvey/harvey6.htm; Kate Cumming, Journal of a Confederate Nurse, ed. Richard Barksdale Harwell (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1959), p. 15. See the almost identical remark by northern nurse Cornelia Hancock in Hancock, South After Gettysburg, ed. Henrietta Stratton Jaquette (New York: T. Y. Crowell, 1956), p. 7. On the unspeakability of suffering, see Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985). Paul Fussell writes of the incommunicability of World War I and the failure of language it generated in The Great War and Modern Memory (New York: Oxford University Press, 1975), p. 139, as does Jay Winter, Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning: The Great War in European Cultural History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), p. 5. Thomas Leonard writes of the Civil War that “in some ways the most important legacy…was silence.” Thomas C. Leonard, Above the Battle: War Making in America from Appomattox to Versailles (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978), p. 25. See also Allyson Booth, Postcards from the Trenches: Negotiating the Space Between Modernism and the First World War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), pp. 52, 62.

83. David T. Hedrick and Gordon Barry Davis Jr., eds., I’m Surrounded by Methodists: Diary of John H. W. Stuckenberg, Chaplain of the 145th Pennsylvania Volunteer Infantry (Gettysburg, Pa.: Thomas Publications, 1995), p. 44.

CHAPTER 7. ACCOUNTING

1. Horace