Study Questions for Part Three

1. Search the periodical literature of the nineteenth century for articles on masculinity, femininity, and their variants. You might try working with the Making of America electronic database, which should help facilitate your search for these terms. If your library has nineteenth-century periodicals in their holdings (e.g., Godey's Ladies Book, Harper's, Atlantic Monthly, etc.), spend some time perusing them. Though these periodicals are not as easily searchable as those on a database, there is no better way to attain a sense of nineteenth-century material culture in all its multiplicity. For example, consider J.D. Bell's "Manliness" which appeared in the July 1859 issue of the Ladies' Repository.

2.

The war reunited the nation, but left many soldiers, families, and communities in pieces. The image to the left comes from the Medical and Surgical History of the War of the Rebellion (1861-65), a twelve-volume compendium of the war's toll on the bodies of Americans. How might these injuries have altered post-bellum conceptions of masculinity? What roles were available for these injured men at war's end? How did their injuries have a correlative impact upon conceptions of femininity? As interesting as the answers to these questions may be, a starting place might be to think about what kind of evidence would be required to answer them. What kind of data (e.g., texts, images, statistics, etc.) would be needed?

3. Whitman published the Calamus cluster of poems in 1860-1 edition of Leaves of Grass. How do his representations of relations between men in this cluster compare with those that appear in Drum-Taps? Remember that the two clusters span the Civil War.