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sophia_sol) wrote2015-06-05 01:23 pm
sophia_sol) wrote2015-06-05 01:23 pm
A Confederate Girl's Diary, by Sarah Morgan Dawson
This book is a real diary written by a young woman between 1862-1865 (with most of the entries being in 1862-3), talking about her experiences in the US Civil War. Sarah kept her diary as a place to write all the thoughts and feelings that it wouldn't be appropriate for her as a lady to ever speak out loud. And it is fascinating.
Oh, it can get kind of tedious at times - a certain amount of repetition of sentiment, some occasional unclarity that makes it hard to follow exact events, and a huge cast of characters it can be hard to keep straight and who she doesn't always bother to properly introduce/explain. But overall Sarah writes very well, and as a look into the thoughts of a Southern girl living through the war, it is very compelling.
As a Canadian, I don't know a huge amount about the US Civil War. I mean, I knew it happened, and more or less when, and that one of the things it was about was the abolition of slavery, and a few other details, but not a whole lot more.
And of course one of the things one gets from only knowing about the Civil War from popular culture is that you rather get the impression of the North as the "good guys". I knew that was an oversimplification of the truth, but reading a book like this is a good reminder of just how much so. Sarah spends a fair amount of time reporting cruel and awful things that Yankee soldiers do, and decrying their behaviour quite rightfully.
On the other hand, she also spends a LOT of energy being concerned about people staying in their proper social role, whether that's class or gender or race. She's just as scornful of people who behave in a way that's beneath their role as those who have aspirations above it. The class and race stuff don't have a lot of interesting play in the diary (it's pretty much what you'd expect), but gender does. More than once she bursts out with a desire to have been a man so that she could DO THINGS. At one point she even attempts to crossdress, but she can't even make herself put male clothes on because of the degree of horror that dressing outside of her gendered social role creates in her. She's so horrified she can barely look at the clothes she's set out, much less try them on! It's pretty fascinating, especially given how much fiction about crossdressing women I've read in my life. I'd never really considered before the degree of discomfort/disgust that a person brought up in a very rigid society might feel at the thought.
One part of the gendered expectations that made me really upset was Sarah's degree of shame and humiliation over her poor education. Somewhere in book three she spends an evening talking with a man whom she greatly admires because of how much he knows, and one of the things he tells her is that women and men have the same mental capabilities, the only difference is in education. And the only formal education Sarah ever received was less than a year in which she learned basic mathematics. And her mother taught her to read. Everything else she knows is self-taught, and instead of being angry that she wasn't given more opportunity, she feels terribly guilty for having not applied herself better. And yet near the beginning of the diary Sarah outlines what a normal day looks like for her (before war disordered what "normal" meant), and she spends hours every day studying! She's not a layabout, and she cares about her education, and she tries so hard, and yet the cultural expectations and lack of opportunities she experienced because of her gender mean that she feels nothing but inadequate. Oh Sarah :(
The events of the book are interesting as well. Sarah and her family are residents of Baton Rouge, and approximately half the diary, I think, is taken up with them living in Baton Rouge in constant fear of Yankee attack, time after time of fleeing and coming back, fleeing and coming back, packing to go, not having time to pack to go, keeping a "running bag" always ready, and so forth. It got to the point where I regularly got confused about where they were and whether they'd left Baton Rouge for good or not.
But eventually they do leave Baton Rouge for good; they spend some time in a variety of places and end up in Linwood for a while, and have a comfortable time there for a while, but eventually leave and go to New Orleans (in the Union, gasp shock horror!) because there's no food or lodging or medical services available any longer in the Confederacy, and the oldest brother of the family lives in New Orleans.
After they've reached New Orleans, Sarah writes less and less often. And it's clear that over the course of the diary she rather loses her good spirits. From the beginning she's obviously a person who generally just can't help be cheerful most of the time, even if there are hard things happening (and there are - she loses a brother shortly before the beginning of the diary). But by the end of the diary she's sadder and more bitter and more willing to think ill of other people, and she doesn't have that irrepressible cheer coming back up.
Over the course of the war she loses: her home, nearly all her possessions, two more of her brothers, her hope, and her feeling of being free. And all of that takes a toll on a person. I had grown to like Sarah quite a lot over the course of her diary, despite some of her extremely frustrating opinions. And to see things end like that for her was hard. Of course, she did go on to have a long and full life after this! But the reader doesn't get to see that, and the diary ends on a fairly despairing note.
Oh, it can get kind of tedious at times - a certain amount of repetition of sentiment, some occasional unclarity that makes it hard to follow exact events, and a huge cast of characters it can be hard to keep straight and who she doesn't always bother to properly introduce/explain. But overall Sarah writes very well, and as a look into the thoughts of a Southern girl living through the war, it is very compelling.
As a Canadian, I don't know a huge amount about the US Civil War. I mean, I knew it happened, and more or less when, and that one of the things it was about was the abolition of slavery, and a few other details, but not a whole lot more.
And of course one of the things one gets from only knowing about the Civil War from popular culture is that you rather get the impression of the North as the "good guys". I knew that was an oversimplification of the truth, but reading a book like this is a good reminder of just how much so. Sarah spends a fair amount of time reporting cruel and awful things that Yankee soldiers do, and decrying their behaviour quite rightfully.
On the other hand, she also spends a LOT of energy being concerned about people staying in their proper social role, whether that's class or gender or race. She's just as scornful of people who behave in a way that's beneath their role as those who have aspirations above it. The class and race stuff don't have a lot of interesting play in the diary (it's pretty much what you'd expect), but gender does. More than once she bursts out with a desire to have been a man so that she could DO THINGS. At one point she even attempts to crossdress, but she can't even make herself put male clothes on because of the degree of horror that dressing outside of her gendered social role creates in her. She's so horrified she can barely look at the clothes she's set out, much less try them on! It's pretty fascinating, especially given how much fiction about crossdressing women I've read in my life. I'd never really considered before the degree of discomfort/disgust that a person brought up in a very rigid society might feel at the thought.
One part of the gendered expectations that made me really upset was Sarah's degree of shame and humiliation over her poor education. Somewhere in book three she spends an evening talking with a man whom she greatly admires because of how much he knows, and one of the things he tells her is that women and men have the same mental capabilities, the only difference is in education. And the only formal education Sarah ever received was less than a year in which she learned basic mathematics. And her mother taught her to read. Everything else she knows is self-taught, and instead of being angry that she wasn't given more opportunity, she feels terribly guilty for having not applied herself better. And yet near the beginning of the diary Sarah outlines what a normal day looks like for her (before war disordered what "normal" meant), and she spends hours every day studying! She's not a layabout, and she cares about her education, and she tries so hard, and yet the cultural expectations and lack of opportunities she experienced because of her gender mean that she feels nothing but inadequate. Oh Sarah :(
The events of the book are interesting as well. Sarah and her family are residents of Baton Rouge, and approximately half the diary, I think, is taken up with them living in Baton Rouge in constant fear of Yankee attack, time after time of fleeing and coming back, fleeing and coming back, packing to go, not having time to pack to go, keeping a "running bag" always ready, and so forth. It got to the point where I regularly got confused about where they were and whether they'd left Baton Rouge for good or not.
But eventually they do leave Baton Rouge for good; they spend some time in a variety of places and end up in Linwood for a while, and have a comfortable time there for a while, but eventually leave and go to New Orleans (in the Union, gasp shock horror!) because there's no food or lodging or medical services available any longer in the Confederacy, and the oldest brother of the family lives in New Orleans.
After they've reached New Orleans, Sarah writes less and less often. And it's clear that over the course of the diary she rather loses her good spirits. From the beginning she's obviously a person who generally just can't help be cheerful most of the time, even if there are hard things happening (and there are - she loses a brother shortly before the beginning of the diary). But by the end of the diary she's sadder and more bitter and more willing to think ill of other people, and she doesn't have that irrepressible cheer coming back up.
Over the course of the war she loses: her home, nearly all her possessions, two more of her brothers, her hope, and her feeling of being free. And all of that takes a toll on a person. I had grown to like Sarah quite a lot over the course of her diary, despite some of her extremely frustrating opinions. And to see things end like that for her was hard. Of course, she did go on to have a long and full life after this! But the reader doesn't get to see that, and the diary ends on a fairly despairing note.
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A rec for you: this is fiction, not an actual epistolary exchange, but one Civil War novel I really enjoyed (because it did what you're talking about here, giving a more nuanced view of the conflict rather than just "good guys and bad guys") was Homeland by Barbara Hambly. It's about two women who are friends and pen pals, one in the North and one in the South, who continue writing letters to each other (that they aren't able to send, and store up in case they see each other again) throughout the war. I think it did a good job of getting into the positive and negative aspects of both societies -- you see the racism and classism of the South, of course, and the Southern heroine's obliviousness to them, but there's also a ton of prejudice, deprivation and misery in the North, and the Northern heroine spends a lot of time feeling trapped on her little farm -- she lives in rural Maine -- where she has no one to talk to but a handful of uneducated neighbors, and envies her more cosmopolitan friend in the South.
Like I said, it's fiction, but Hambly is a historian and researches her historical fiction thoroughly, and I really enjoyed it.
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And thanks for the rec! That sounds like a really interesting book and I have put it on my to-read list.
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So I processed this vid as being about the current state of women in fandom, the roles female characters have in the canons we care about. (The vidder seemed to think it was saying something about fannish conversations about those characters, too, but I didn't pick up on much there. Maybe I would if I watched it a few more times.) Anyway, given that context, I felt like the focus on f/f romantic relationships at the end was saying see how far we've come, see the canonical queer female stories we have now. Historically there's been this huge problem in all kinds of fiction where female characters only matter insofar as they affect the lives of the male characters the stories are actually about; obviously the prevalence of complex f/f romantic relationships isn't the only indication that this might be changing in our cultural consciousness, but it is one indication, and I think it's a good visual one for vidding. Thoughts?
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That is a perspective on the vid that never would have occurred to me. I had read the vidder's statements as meaning it was reflecting their own changing perspective on how they want to talk about female characters, not about a wider fandom discussion, which of course influenced how I read the vid. My interpretation was more or less that putting the f/f section at the end of the vid, the climax of the piece, was indicating that romance was the height of everything the vidder could wish for out of female characters.
I like your interpretation of what the f/f stuff at the end means, about celebrating how far canons had come in terms of queer lady representation.
I'm not so sure about your ending point though. I mean, yes, f/f kissing and so forth a good visual representation of female characters getting their own complex lives that are not about dudes, but I can certainly think of good visual representation of those complex lives that are not about romance too; so making it about romance was still a choice that was made that says something more than just what there was good footage for imo.