American Dolorologies by Strick Simon

Author:Strick, Simon
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: State University of New York Press
Published: 2014-03-14T16:00:00+00:00

Figure 4.5. Brave Defenders of Our Country, photographed by John Carbuth. Albumen carte de visite (1863). Source: The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, Missouri. Gift of 20 Hallmark Cards, Inc., 2005.27.260. Photo: Thomas Palmer.

This presentation of the white body in pain however is not only allegorical. Its highly staged and theatrical setting equate a reenactment of a stock scene of war. This reenactment or recreation of the wounding is crucial to the ideological function of the image. It is obvious that the wound is fully healed, so the original scene of bodily disruption and care has occurred some time ago. Staging a performance that recreates this initial wounding, complete with the dramatized display of pain on the amputee’s face, indicates that these white men have “moved through” the trauma; they have mastered the pain. This ideological construction of masculinity that masters pain through repetition has been analyzed by Kaja Silverman in her groundbreaking book Male Subjectivity at the Margins: “Mastery … results when those same experiences are actively repeated—when they are linguistically rather than affectively reprised” (1992, 59). White pain in this picture is thus not “felt with” the man himself; his reprisal creates less a visceral affect than a structured, theatrical, and allegorical transformation of pain and wounding into national sacrifice. Repeating and signifying trauma in a theatrical, representational setup, white pain is able to escape a pathologizing reading. Bodily trauma is inserted into an affective and symbolically calculated tableau to reinstall national integrity and nationalist resolve. In contrast to The Scourged Back, where the black body appears simultaneously marked and unaffected by the scars, white pain enables a sentimental syntax that both fetishizes the shocking presence of the wound, and constructs the traumatized white male body as capable of controlling its meaning. The most striking difference between the abolitionist photographs of traumatized black bodies and this sentimental tableau of traumatized whiteness is thus the unity of ideological message and the bodies portrayed: while GORDON and PETER are circumscribed as self-displaying racial objects of the white gaze (which constructs a meaning of pain unavailable to black subjects), the white figures are the self-performing national subjects of the photograph’s narration. Though white masculinity may thus be traumatized, hurt, or disabled, it does not get stuck in that trauma, but rather moves on to perform its own self-presentation. The three white soldiers here specifically figure as an allegory of the nation, and present the lost leg as nationally meaningful sacrifice. Viewing The Scourged Back and Carbutt’s set piece side by side, the photographic articulation of an American dolorology becomes obvious: this visual discourse separates racial pain and national pain, and aligns the bodily suffering of black and white male bodies in a hierarchy of national significance for postwar America.

The abolitionist images invested in racial trauma not only competed with these propagandistic efforts to instill national sentiment. Especially in the later war years and after, Civil War veterans seized on this visual tradition of national martyrdom to compensate for small or nonexistent veterans’ pensions.

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