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Article Excerpt
NOSTALGIA, AS A FORM OF MEMORY, IS AN INTEGRAL PART OF OUR everyday world; its presence is indisputable. But like memory, nostalgia is an evasive concept of often-ambiguous meanings. Perhaps we should begin by asking: What exactly is nostalgia? Or maybe the first question really should be: What exactly was nostalgia? Are we nostalgic for people, places, specific points in time, or simply the past as precedent? Questions of this sort invite historical study, but they have, at best, aroused only limited interest. Such a stance is curious given that a detailed examination of nostalgia could advance understanding of the history of memory and the ways individuals have used historical material to define and understand themselves, issues that have been the vanguard of recent research in southern history.
With its Greek roots--nostos (a longing to return home) and algos (pain)--nostalgia sounds so familiar to us that we may forget that it is a relatively new word. It was used first by the Swiss doctor Johannes Hofer, who in 1688 described a lethal malady among Swiss mercenaries serving abroad. Desperate to return home, the soldiers became apathetic and weak, lost both sleep and their appetites, and then, crestfallen, died. The "emotional upheaval" of serving abroad was "related to the workings of memory" and was reckoned to be "'a disorder of the imagination."' In effect, the stricken Swiss opted out of the seventeenth century by screening out the world around them. By the nineteenth century, however, nostalgia began to shed its medical connotations and became less a bodily and more a psychological condition. (2) It also went from being a treatable illness to a terminal condition of the mind, its new meaning suggestive of a long-ago but half-remembered time as opposed to a yearning to return to a specific place. (3)
Moreover, the nostalgically remembered past stood against me present and thus invited comparison. The former was made into a spectacle that was beautiful, bearing little or no relation to the ugly latter. In effect, nostalgia makes the past feel "safe from the unexpected and the untoward"--in other words, making it so very unlike the present. (4) Rather than remembering precisely what was, we tend to make the past comprehensible in relation to the present conditions of the here and now. "Memory is the great organizer of consciousness," writes Susanne K. Langer. Memories of people, scenes, and events that were previously vague or conflicted metamorphose into obvious and consistent recollections. Memory, continues Langer, "simplifies and composes our perceptions...." (5) Essentially memory may operate to alter the past we have known and experienced into an imagined past that is a stranger to us and nothing more than a might-have-been.
For a brief theoretical formulation on this point of view we might turn to the sociologist Fred Davis. In Yearning for Yesterday: A Sociology of Nostalgia, Davis argues that nostalgia is unlike other types of recollection because of the "'special' past" that it envelops. Happy memories are placed on a pedestal whereas unhappy memories are knocked off theirs, and we think hard before picking them up, dusting them down, and putting them back again. This has, according to Davis, an insidious effect because the diversity of the past is thus suppressed. However, although nostalgia draws its strength from the past, it is unmistakably a product of the present. (6) Nostalgia, contends Davis, always appears against the backdrop of "massive identity dislocations," in periods of "'rude transitions rendered by history," in times of fear in the face of electrifying change, and at those transitional points in life when anxiety or, as Svetlana Boym calls it, a "hypochondria of the heart," is felt. (7)
Any "untoward historic events" that tear into the fabric of a society, disrupt its taken-for-granted attitudes and practices, and cut short the very "lungs of culture" in which "people ... breathe the air of significance" place that society's connection with its history under pressure. (8) Confronted with these "explosive upheavals," we are "driven like tumbleweed before the buffeting winds of change and upheaval." (9) Hence, the desire "to preserve [a] thread of continuity is ... crucial.... [E]verything contradictory threatens to undermine what has been so patiently built up." Nostalgia looks to alleviate this condition by exploiting "the past ... in specially reconstructed ways." In doing so, nostalgia "cultivate[s]" an "appreciative" stance toward "former selves," it "acts to restore ... a sense of sociohistoric continuity," and it allows "time for ... change to be assimilated," restoring confidence and imparting meaningful links with the past. (10) In other words, nostalgia sweetens history with sentiment, its iconography of praise is constant, and it is accustomed to remember more romantically than historically.
Taking my cue from Davis's emphasis and a recent essay by Peter Fritzsche, this essay will argue that nostalgia occurs most forcibly after a profound split in remembered events and experiences. (11) To frame my argument. I will concentrate largely on that "remarkable literature" of postbellum memoirs and on the use of autobiographical writing as a kind of trip down memory lane, literary strategies that reveal a potent change in elite white southern consciousness after the Civil War. (12) By acknowledging the fundamental reality of difference--of instability and discontinuity in their experience--white southern elites posited themselves in a constant state of flux. Indeed, continuity itself had become unintelligible in a postwar world that was deemed permanently out of sorts. It was, however, the very impurities of memory--its fallibility, its fragility, and its proclivity for mythmaking--that proved, paradoxically, to be redemptive by permitting the literary assertion of a nostalgic continuity back to an amaranthine Old South and by allowing southern memoirists to use that setting to form their own individual and collective sense of identity in a new era. (13)
Well-known figures such as Susan Dabney Smedes, James Battle Avirett, Virginia Clay-Clopton, and several other elite white southerners flooded the literary market with autobiographical literature in which they recorded memories of prewar plenty through wartime privation to postwar ruin. Early memoirs were usually written as keepsakes for family members and were published privately. However, by the turn of the twentieth century, plantation reminiscences had assumed regional, national, and even international popularity. (14) Nostalgic pages of flowery prose revealed a lavish Old South of immense wealth, self-sufficiency, honor, hospitality, happy master-slave relations, and, incredibly, the scents and sounds of innocent plantation upbringings remembered in old age. Nostalgia was so compelling in this regard because the wholeness of a blissful antebellum past was denied to the wretched postbellum present. "In other words," writes Fritzsche, "nostalgia constitutes what it cannot possess and defines itself by its inability to approach its subject, a paradox that is the essence of nostalgia's melancholia." Although memories of the Old South were treasured and its passing lamented, there was no hope that it was retrievable in any tangible sense--except through nostalgic recollection. "Dead and yet to memory dear," mourned James B. Avirett. "But the heart in the old life," he continued, "shall never fade away." (15) Echoing Avirett's vision of a Peter Pan South, one that was forever young, Georgian Edward J. Thomas took comfort in the fact that "the home plantation ... will always have a warm place in my memory." Thomas pined for yesterday: "As time passes how vividly is reflected from Memory's mirror the stirring events of those historic years," he wrote. However illusory Thomas's plantation experience actually was, it was latched onto and nostalgically recalled in memory. The far-reaching process of devastation wrought by the Civil War served only to cruelly emphasize an ever-widening chasm between the past and present. (16)
The summer of 1865 was the South's moment of fundamental historical disjuncture. Thrust into an alien, unpredictable world, southerners felt a loss of historical continuity--a loss of sameness and wholeness--as the price of defeat. (17) Only through an awareness of this discontinuity of experience, in which past and present were conspicuous by their differences, could nostalgia express itself. A profound sense of discontinuity beleaguered Mary Boykin Chesnut's world. According to a biographer, she told a story predominantly "of grief, anguish, pessimism, and anxiety." Mary spent the last three months of the war "as a refugee ... in makeshift quarters first at Lincolnton, North Carolina, then at Chester, South Carolina." Together with her husband James, she returned to the family plantation, Mulberry, in May 1865 only to discover the estate pillaged, with the mills, gins, and cotton all burned, the house a vacant shell, the furniture smashed, all of the doors and many of the windows broken, and the family's books, papers, and letters blown about the road for miles. Reconciling in her mind the circumstances of the world in which she now lived, Mary wrote her friend Virginia Clay, "there are nights here with the moonlight cold & ghastly, & the whippoorwills, & the screech owls alone disturbing the silence when I could tear my hair & cry aloud for all that is past & gone." (18)
To be sure, one should not gainsay the cataclysmic impact of the Civil War on southern perceptions of historical continuity. Experiences were often recalled in highly personal terms that served to emphasize, if emphasis was needed, the individual effects of malevolent historical forces. (19) History, in effect, was regarded as a complete disaster. (20) Elizabeth Pendleton Hardin of Kentucky expressed "hope [that] I may never again love anything as I loved the cause that is lost." Leaving Eatonton, Georgia, to return to Kentucky in early June 1865, Hardin and her family shouted "Hurrah for Jeff Davis and the Southern Confederacy" as they waved good-bye to their Georgian friends. "We had been there two years and a hall, watching with unfaltering hope our struggle for independence and life," wrote Hardin in her diary, "and now that our hopes had all come to naught, we returned to our homes with sad hearts, feeling we had left the brightest part of our lives behind us." (21)
Indeed, what set apart postwar southern society, as Suzanne Nash notes about post-revolutionary France in ways that resonate with the nineteenth-century South, was that southerners viewed the region in terms of "what it ha[d] lost" as well as "in terms of the solidity of its foundations." (22) In this light, writing a memoir clearly meant not just recalling individual lives but also re-evaluating what those lives had meant in wider contexts. Although a thick air of haughtiness and self-importance tends to surround these memoirs and reminiscences, they nevertheless returned their authors to the vibrant days of the Old South while simultaneously recognizing that the lives being described would have been completely different in the absence of the war. Something immense had happened: the passing of a cherished civilization and the passing of the certainty of what it meant to be southern. "Who am I?" is, after all, one of our most emotional expressions of identity.
Again and again, southern elites articulated the unprecedented force of events between 1861 and 1865. "[I]t was a time of great anxiety and pressure upon us all," noted John Jones, a Georgia planter, in a letter to his sister. "[A]ll that we were seemed to be passing away," he remarked. Condemned to brood over her reversal of fortune and reflect on "what if" questions, Sarah Lois Wadley felt she now inhabited a life devoid of meaning. "[I] woke this morning very sorrowful," she wrote unhappily in November 1865, "to find that my vivid dreams were only dreams of the past which can never return." (23) But dreams die hard; we hold on to them in our hands long after they have turned to dust. "The props that held society up are broken," wrote Eliza Frances Andrews in her War-Time Journal of a Georgia Girl. She constantly reiterated: "Everything is in a state of disorganization and tumult.... We are in a transition state from war to subjugation, and it is far worse than was the transition from peace to war. The suspense and anxiety in which we live are terrible." (24)
Few have provided a more evocative portrayal of the aftermath of the Civil War than Mary Jones, the widow of a prominent Presbyterian minister of Liberty County, Georgia. As the former plantation matriarch pondered the ruined grandeur of the family plantation, Montevideo, she was filled with ominous forebodings regarding an uncertain future. Jones contrasted the plantation she had known with the plantation Montevideo had become. "The pall of death is ... over our once cheerful and happy home," she mourned. "Not a living creature stirs in garden or yard, on the plain or in the grove. Nature wears a funereal aspect ... a requiem to departed days." (25) In those distressing days, alone and recovering from the ordeal of a Union raid, Jones sought solace in recalling a happier past to defy time's destroyer. "Memory's buried stones lie all exhumed before my eye," she lamented. She found consolation only in the great trees that survived. "These living memorials remain, but the hands that placed them there are moldering where 'no work nor device is found.' ... The servants that used so faithfully and pleasantly to wait around us are (many of them) dead or scattered or sadly and willfully changed. All things are altered." (26)
What is most evident in Jones's memory upon her return to Montevideo is a nostalgia not only for a particular time and place but also for a particular kind of memory, one that would allow her to re-establish a sense of continuity with a discontinuous past. It was just insofar that these memories were forever fenced off that they beckoned so emotively and so forcefully to her contemporary self. It was not insignificant, then, that she treasured her memories; they spoke powerfully to her for a sorrow that was profound, chronic, and all but unbearably distressing. The South had breathed its last fearing the worst: Eden had become Hell.
"All things are altered" could well serve as the signature phrase of the postwar South. "To me it seems as if I had been in two worlds, and two existences," sighed E. Spann Hammond, "the old and the new, and to those knowing only the latter, the old will appear almost like mythology and romance, so thorough has been the upheaval and obliteration of the methods and surroundings of the past." (27) Like Hammond, Virginian Sara A. Pryor expressed, behind fears of historical displacement after the war, a haunting nostalgia that drove deep into the mists of a vanished world....
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