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Section 4: The Home Front

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Discussion Questions

  1. In what respects is Henry James’s “The Story of a Year” a work of realism? What does it suggest about the relation between reality and imagination, or between the world’s reality and the whole private sphere of life?
  2. What kind of “cultural work” does Kate Chopin’s “A Wizard from Gettysburg” seem to undertake? What psychological or social needs does it seem to address?
  3. Describe Nathaniel Hawthorne’s tone or attitude in “Chiefly about War-Matters.” In what sense is it appropriate for the subject matter, and in what sense ineffective?
  4. Hamlin Garland’s “The Return of a Private” doesn’t seem organized around any particular conflict involving the characters, and it seems to give us a forward-looking, optimistic ending. So how can we understand its particular tension? What larger conflicts or problems does it register?
  5. How does the final paragraph of Harold Frederic’s “The War Widow” change the meaning of the story? What if the narrative had ended with the previous paragraph instead?
  6. In “Cicely’s Dream,” Charles Chesnutt writes that the main character’s dream was “one of the kind that go by contraries.” That may be true, but it seems insufficient to describe the real purpose of the story. Therefore, how should we understand the larger point of the narrative? What does Chesnutt seem to have intended to accomplish with it?
  7. How should we understand the larger significance of the marriage between Richard Deane and Hetty in Elizabeth Stuart’s “The Bend”?

Selected Bibliography

Cashin, Joan E., ed. The War Was You and Me: Civilians in the American Civil War. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002.

Cimbala, Paul A., and Randall M. Miller, eds. Union Soldiers and the Northern Home Front: Wartime Experiences, Postwar Adjustments. New York: Fordham University Press, 2002.

Clinton, Catherine, and Nina Silber, eds. Divided Houses: Gender and the Civil War. New York: Oxford University Press, 1992.

—Battle Scars: Gender and Sexuality in the American Civil War. New York: Oxford University Press, 2006.

Drago, Edmund L. Confederate Phoenix: Rebel Children and Their Families in South Carolina. New York: Fordham University Press, 2008.

Faust, Drew Gilpin. Mothers of Invention: Women of the Slaveholding South in the American Civil War. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996.

Gallman, J. Matthew. Northerners at War: Reflections on the Civil War Home Front. Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 2010.

Giesberg, Judith A. Civil War Sisterhood: The U.S. Sanitary Commission and Women's Politics in Transition. Boston: Northeastern University Press, 2000.

—Army at Home: Women and the Civil War on the Northern Home Front. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009.

Jabour, Anya. Scarlett’s Sisters: Young Women in the Old South. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007.

—. Topsy-Turvy: How the Civil War Turned the World Upside Down for Southern Children. Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2010.

Leonard, Elizabeth D. Yankee Women: Gender Battles in the Civil War. New York: W. W. Norton, 1994.

Lowry, Thomas P. Confederate Heroines: 120 Southern Women Convicted by Union Military Justice. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2006.

Marten, James. The Children’s Civil War. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998.

—. Civil War America: Voices from the Home Front. New York: Fordham University Press, 2007.

—. ed. Children and Youth During the Civil War Era. New York: New York University Press, 2012.

Mobley, Joe A. Weary of War: Life on the Confederate Home Front. Westport, Conn: Praeger, 2008.

Ott, Victoria E. Confederate Daughters: Coming of Age During the Civil War. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2008.

Rable, George C. Civil Wars: Women and the Crisis of Southern Nationalism. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1989.

Rhoades, Nancy L., Lucy E. Bailey, and Edwin L. Lybarger. Wanted–Correspondence: Women’s Letters to a Union Soldier. Athens: Ohio University Press, 2009.

Richards, Samuel P., and Wendy H. Venet. Sam Richards’s Civil War Diary: A Chronicle of the Atlanta Home Front. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2009.

Robertson, James I., and Neil Kagan. The Untold Civil War: Exploring the Human Side of War. Washington, D.C: National Geographic, 2011.

Scott, Sean A. A Visitation of God: Northern Civilians Interpret the Civil War. New York: Oxford University Press, 2011.

Vinovskis, Maris, ed. Toward a Social History of the American Civil War: Exploratory Essays. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990.

Volo, Dorothy Denneen, and James M. Volo. Daily Life in Civil War America. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1998.

Weber, Jennifer L. Copperheads: The Rise and Fall of Lincoln’s Opponents in the North. New York: Oxford University Press, 2008.

Werner, Emmy. Reluctant Witnesses: Children’s Voices from the Civil War. New York: Basic Books, 1998.

Whites, LeeAnn, and Alecia P. Long, eds. Occupied Women: Gender, Military Occupation, and the American Civil War. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2009.