| This study theorizes the heroic body as the keynote in a masculine sacrificial continuum. This continuum, as it applies to the American citizen soldier, has sustained many paradoxical dichotomies in American masculinity. Though I focus on volunteer soldiers of the American Civil War, the continuum is an ancient patriarchal structure: over many thousands of years, it has represented, in fundamentally similar ways, fathers, brothers, and sons, as embodying, protecting, and presiding over Western social, political, religious, and military institutions. I examine Civil War soldiers, then, as relics not only of the nineteenth century, but also of this ancient continuum.; The sacrificial continuum, I argue, helped to create a reserve identity that was an important part of the subjectivity of nineteenth-century American men. This latent identity was in many ways at odds with an American economic, social, and political ideology that celebrated the freedom and autonomy of the individual, and also the white male as an inherently superior human category, and therefore the only true citizen.; My outline of the continuum, in Chapter 1, relies on Sigmund Freud's Totem and Taboo: Some Points of Agreement between the Mental Lives of Savages and Neurotics. Freud's theory of the origin of patriarchy and of the cultural importance of the sacrificial father, or "hero-victim," enables me to consider sacrificial masculinity as arising from communal ambivalence towards violence. In Chapter 2, I explore the parallels between sacrificial masculinity and traditional femininity in the context of Walt Whitman's experience as a volunteer nurse in Washington war hospitals. The duality of American masculinity, I argue in Chapter 3, both reflects and facilitates the speed and strength with which Americans mobilize for war, both in general, and with especial regard to the great numbers that fought in the Civil War. Chapter 4 explores, in The Red Badge of Courage, Henry Fleming's perplexing desire to see his own dead body. It examines this desire in relation to Fleming's confused rage when he realizes that his community has required him, a white male, to submit to the antithetical role of the hero-victim. |
