"Deep in the wilderness grim": Reading trauma through landscape in the post-civil war works of Herman Melville, Walt Whitman, and Winslow Homer
Thompson, Carl W.
MetadataShow full item record
In the wake of the Civil War, the nation struggled to contend with the devastation inflicted upon life and land. Young veterans returned home, changed by their experience of the war, and civilians began the arduous work of reclaiming the shattered countryside. At the same time, artists recognized the changes in the young men--their experience of trauma--and attempted to describe what they saw. I contend in this thesis that, lacking a vocabulary for approaching trauma, Herman Melville, Walt Whitman, and Winslow Homer utilized the language of landscape and wilderness--for Northerners, concepts laden with notions of control and chaos at the time of the Civil War--to express the effects of trauma on the returning veterans. This thesis aims to broaden the discourse surrounding trauma, a subject which theorists have demonstrated resists representation. By utilizing and expanding upon Dominick LaCapra's concept of empathic unsettlement, I demonstrate how these artists approach an approximate understanding of trauma through the available vocabulary of landscape, working through the subject in painting and poetry.